December 11, 1844: Nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, is used as a dental anesthetic for the first time.
English chemist Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, first synthesized nitrous oxide in 1775. Priestley, however, was content with having “discovered an air five or six times as good as common air.”
He did not experiment with inhalation, however, so did nothing toward developing its practical and recreational uses.
Nitrous oxide, along with chloroform and ether, became popular anesthetics. While not sufficiently effective as general anesthetics for the modern operating theater, all were effective enough to become popular in dentistry. Of the three, nitrous oxide is still widely used.
Nitrous oxide is also used as an aerosol-spray propellant, especially in whipped-cream canisters and cooking sprays. Its solubility in fatty compounds allows for up to four times as much whipped cream to be produced as the liquid contained in the can.
Owing to its nontoxicity and relatively easy storage, nitrous oxide is also a popular oxidizer for rocket motors and is used in car racing to boost power.
Outside the commercial world, nitrous oxide is best known for its recreational use as an inhalant for getting high. The resulting euphoria is often accompanied by some pretty loopy behavior, which is where the “laughing gas” moniker comes from.
For every upside there’s a downside, though, and nitrous oxide’s is considerable. It’s a major greenhouse gas and therefore a major contributor to global warming.
It seems that JetBlue, Yahoo and Research in Motion plan to offer free, in-flight, WiFi web connections for laptop computers and advanced cell phones. RIM made the announcement yesterday.
The service will apparently allow passengers to access customized Yahoo mail and Yahoo instant messenger services on their laptops or to access corporate e-mails on WiFi enabled BlackBerrys.
According to a spokesperson for RIM the first JetBlue flight offering the service will be on December 11, on Flight 641 from New York to San Francisco.
I hope this proves to be an indicator that RIM is going to start putting WiFi in more and more BlackBerrys – right now the only modern generation Berrys to have it are the BlackBerry 8820, 8320 and 8120.
I think WiFi has now become a smartphone must-have… it should be included on every BlackBerry released from now on.
Too bad I never fly JetBlue. Airlines….are you reading this?
This Christmas I decided to give a few gifts to people in the open-source community.
I’m making donations to the maintainers of some of my favorite and most widely-used software projects. They’ve earned some payback!
Most of the programs I depend on most, I’ve discovered, are actually not big ones — they’re little things, applications that fill in the gaps between other apps, and that make my work all the easier.
The first big open-source project that gets a little of my Christmas cheer is the PortableApps suite, an incredibly useful bundle of no-install-needed editions of popular open-source programs.
It’s a one-stop shop of sorts for a whole slew of common apps — Firefox, the OpenOffice.org suite, VLC, and 7-Zip — and it can be run either from a removable drive or from a single self-contained directory on a PC.
I’ve pointed a number of friends at it as an easy way to consolidate all of their applications and documents into one place.
If they upgrade to a new machine — or if their PC ever gets borked and they need to recover files from it — they can simply copy the PortableApps directory somewhere else and pick up right where they left off.
It’s funny how many open-source projects of one kind or another you can end up using without even thinking about it.
Not long ago I started using the above-mentioned 7-Zip as my archiving application of choice — not only because it was open-source, but because it actually gave me slightly better compression ratios than WinRAR on certain kinds of files.
I’d originally started to use it provisionally, more as a companion program to WinRAR than a flat-out replacement.
Eventually I disabled WinRAR’s Explorer menu integration; not long after that, I deinstalled WinRAR completely. Any program that gets that much use from me deserves a hand.
Some of my other favorite programs are not open source, but are freeware and get my support just because they’re that good.
The image viewer and converter Irfanview, for instance: I can’t think of any other program I install as unhesitatingly on any computer as this one, and that I get quite as much use out of. Its author definitely gets a donation from me this year, whether there’s source code or not.
What projects, open-source or not — but ones you’ve used regularly — have you donated to?
December 7, 1941: Air raid, Pearl Harbor. The Japanese, concluding that war with the United States is inevitable, attempt to knock out the U.S. Pacific fleet based in the Hawaiian Islands at Pearl Harbor.
Japan knew it could not defeat the Americans in a conventional war, lacking as it did sufficient manpower and raw materials (notably oil) for such a sustained effort.
By destroying the U.S. fleet all at once as war began, the Japanese were gambling that they would be able to complete their Asian conquests before the Americans could recover.
A successful raid, the Japanese believed, would delay America’s entry into the war by months, if not years. Faced with the reality of an unassailable Pacific empire, the Americans might then choose negotiation over fighting.
Minoru Genda, one of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s most innovative officers, was the primary architect of the Pearl Harbor raid. Success, he knew, could only be achieved through total surprise.
Relying on carrier-based dive bombers, fighters and torpedo planes, his targets included not only the ships anchored at Pearl but the nearby airfields and oil storage facilities.
Observing strict radio silence, the Japanese task force put to sea November 26 and steamed undetected to within striking distance of the Hawaiian Islands.
The first wave of attackers left their carriers upon receipt of the signal “Climb Mount Niitake” and were guided in by picking up the signals from a Honolulu radio station.
Early on a Sunday morning, Pearl Harbor was not exactly on combat alert even though the Americans knew — from having broken the Japanese codes — that an attack somewhere was imminent.
They never dreamed an attack would come this far east, however. When a couple of radar operators working a test problem near Pearl reported a huge blip headed their way, they were essentially told to forget about it.
The attack unfolded almost exactly as Genda had drawn it up and might have succeeded strategically, too, if the American aircraft carriers had been in port on December 7.
As it was, the three carriers were at sea that day and escaped unscathed, a fact that would come back to haunt the Japanese seven months later at Midway.
The raid must be considered only a partial tactical success as well. Surprise was achieved, and the American fleet took a beating, particularly the battleships. The major airfields were put out of action, and most of the planes were destroyed on the ground.
However, the Japanese failed to get the carriers — which would prove to be the decisive weapon of the Pacific war — and also committed a major blunder by failing to destroy the oil reserves on Oahu, reserves that would have taken months to replenish from mainland refineries.
A third wave was to have attacked these tank farms, along with U.S. Navy machine shops, stores and administrative centers.
The commander of the Japanese task force, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, canceled the third wave and withdrew, fearing that his own ships were vulnerable to an American counterattack.
Will Ferrell is one of my favorite comedians. He has so many characters that he can pull off.
Probably the one that sticks out in my head right away is Will Ferrell as fictional cowbell player Gene Frenkle.
Doing some poking around this morning, I came across this movie trailer for Will Ferrell’s new movie Semi-Pro:
Here is the basic plot line for the movie:
Jackie Moon (Will Ferrell), the owner-coach-player of the American Basketball Association’s Flint Michigan Tropics, rallies his teammates to make their NBA dreams come true.
The movie is scheduled to be released here in the USA on February 29, 2008 and also stars Woody Harrelson. It should be a funny movie. I’m looking forward to seeing it.