The Mandelbear's Musings

Jacob Robbins; NIH Scientist Known for Thyroid Research (From The Washington Post, May 16, 2008.)

Jacob Robbins first set foot on the eighth floor of the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health in 1954. Claiming one of only two working labs available to him in the year-old hospital, he immediately launched what would become groundbreaking work on the function of the thyroid and the treatment of thyroid cancer, particularly cancer caused by exposure to radioactivity.

On May 12, Dr. Robbins died of cardiac arrest -- at the Clinical Center, not far from where his NIH work had begun 54 years earlier. He was 85.

"He died surrounded by the work he treasured," said Griffin P. Rodgers, director of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, or NIDDK.

I'll miss him.

An actual tesseract is best described as a four dimensional cube...and is kind of confusing. So, in memory of L'Engle, we met up with Physicist David Morgan who took a little time out of his day to talk tesseracts with the BPP. Put your measley three-dimensional brains to work on this (Via Boing Boing)

So it seems that Jerry Falwell died this morning. Far be it from me to speak ill of the dead.

But if the afterlife he so fervently believed in really exists, I hope he has taken up residence in the appropriate section of it.

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.

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