Originally shared by Adafruit Industries

The Incredible Bessie Blount

https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/10/20/the-incredible-bessie-blount/

via Smithsonian

In 1952, Bessie Blount boarded a plane from New York to France to give away her life’s work. The 38-year-old inventor planned to hand over to the French military, free of charge, an extraordinary technology that would change lives for disabled veterans of the Second World War: an automatic feeding device. To use it, a person only needed to bite down on a switch, which would deliver a mouthful of food through a spoon-shaped tube.

Read more

https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/10/20/the-incredible-bessie-blount/

Originally shared by Chris Veerabadran

The Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting

“Day and night he wrote visas. He issued as many visas in a day as would normally be issued in a month. His wife, Yukiko, massaged his hands at night, aching from the constant effort. When Japan finally closed down the embassy in September 1940, he took the stationary with him and continued to write visas that had no legal standing but worked because of the seal of the government and his name. At least 6,000 visas were issued for people to travel through Japan to other destinations, and in many cases entire families traveled on a single visa. It has been estimated that over 40,000 people are alive today because of this one man.”

We need more software engineers like this.

Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society

Today’s the birthday of Margaret Hamilton.

What I find fascinating about her work was the fact that she was building the field of computer software engineering as she went along. The brilliance of her work wasn’t so much that she build a system to help the astronauts reach the moon, but that she built it to basically save them from their own mistakes.

When NASA began its quest to send the first humans to the moon, there was immense pressure to make certain that whomever went up into space also came back down safely. Too much was riding on the success of the moon landing and any mistake could have dire consequences for the astronauts. It would be devastating to the space program if something terrible happened with millions of people around the world sitting on the edge of their seats watching each space launch and landing.

Astronauts are highly trained, intelligent people, selected for their ability to function under extreme pressure. But even astronauts make mistakes, push the wrong button, switch the wrong knob. How do you reconcile the absolute need for “no room for error” with the fact that “to err is human?”

Margaret Hamilton figured out a way.

Read more about her on the SRPS blog: https://selfrescuingprincesssociety.blogspot.com/2017/08/todays-birthday-of-computer-science.html

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

Nice profile of this physicist. “In 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics for describing the layered, shell-like structures of atomic nuclei. No woman has won since.

One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu. Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an experimentalist at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva that houses the Large Hadron Collider. Wu’s name appears on more than 1,000 papers in high-energy physics, and she has contributed to a half-dozen of the most important experiments in her field over the past 50 years. She has even realized the improbable goal she set for herself as a young researcher: to make at least three major discoveries.

[…]

Sau Lan Wu was born in occupied Hong Kong during World War II. Her mother was the sixth concubine to a wealthy businessman who abandoned them and her younger brother when Wu was a child. She grew up in abject poverty, sleeping alone in a space behind a rice shop. Her mother was illiterate, but she urged her daughter to pursue an education and become independent of volatile men.

[…]

Although she originally intended to become an artist, she was inspired to study physics after reading a biography of Marie Curie. She worked on experiments during consecutive summers at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, and she attended graduate school at Harvard University. She was the only woman in her cohort and was barred from entering the male dormitories to join the study groups that met there. She has labored since then to make a space for everyone in physics, mentoring more than 60 men and women through their doctorates.

Quanta Magazine joined Sau Lan Wu on a gray couch in sunny Cleveland in early June. She had just delivered an invited lecture about the discovery of gluons at a symposium to honor the 50th birthday of the Standard Model. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.”

Originally shared by Anne-Marie Clark

Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a hero, who saved ~30,000 Jews & others fleeing Hitler, 10x that of Schindler, defied his dictator govt & died shunned, in poverty:

“Portugal was neutral during the war. But its Fascist dictator, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, had actually issued orders banning Jews, Russians and stateless people from entering the country.

“Sousa Mendes, his country’s consul general in Bordeaux, knowingly disobeyed those orders, frantically signing visas day and night just before he was recalled to Lisbon in late June 1940.”

^^^^^

“Starting today I will obey my conscience. As a Christian I do not have the right to let these women and men die.”

Quoted in this article, written by his grandson:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/holocaust-remembrance-day_1_b_1434733.html

^^^^^

“I cannot allow all you people to die. Many of you are Jews, and our constitution clearly states that neither the religion nor the political beliefs of foreigners can be used as a pretext for refusing to allow them to stay in Portugal. I’ve decided to be faithful to that principle, but I shan’t resign for all that. The only way I can respect my faith as a Christian is to act in accordance with the dictates of my conscience.”

Quoted in this article:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/sousa-mendes-saved-more-lives-than-schindler-so-why-isnt-he-a-household-name-too-2105882.html

More:

http://sousamendesfoundation.org/aristides-de-sousa-mendes-his-life-and-legacy/

So much to draw from for stories here.