1874: Carl Bosch, a chemist whose work would transform agriculture and industry — and eventually enable the Green Revolution — is born.
Bosch’s contribution to humanity was the development of the Haber-Bosch process, a technique for creating ammonia in large quantities.
Ammonia is an essential component of agricultural fertilizers, because it’s rich in nitrogen — which makes plants grow bigger. Bosch’s work led directly to a massive increase in agricultural productivity in the 20th century, and at least one professor has estimated that 40 percent of the world’s food (.pdf) can now be traced back to the process.
Coupled with the development of plant varieties better able to absorb nitrogen, (spearheaded by Norman Borlaug in the 1960s) the Haber-Bosch process helped save many people from starvation. It also no doubt helped facilitate the population explosion of the past century.
And it won Bosch the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1931.
Amazon Sells More E-Books Than Hardcovers
Photo of a Kindle by Charlie Sorrel
E-books have hit the mainstream, and for the first time are consistently outselling their pulp-and-ink brethren, according to Amazon.com.
Amazon hit a symbolic milestone last holiday season, when for one day its sales of e-books exceeded the number of dead-tree books it had sold.
Now the company has hit a more significant milestone, selling 143 e-books for every 100 hardcover books sold over the course of the second quarter. The rate is accelerating: For the past month, Amazon sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcovers, and it sold three times as many e-books in the first six months of this year as it did in the first half of 2009.
Amazon’s Kindle bookstore now offers more than 630,000 books, Amazon says, plus 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright titles.
How I Used Twitter to Live-Blog the Opera
SAN FRANCISCO — Opera and Twitter: Could any two vehicles for human expression be more diametrically opposed?
And yet they kind of go together, as I found out this week while live-tweeting the San Francisco Opera’s performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre, a four-and-half-hour epic noted for its ambitious staging, bravura solos, massively overwhelming orchestration and ladies with pointy Viking hats.
Yes, I was the annoying guy sitting amid a sea of evening wear in a T-shirt and sneakers, holding an iPhone as low as I could and trying to not to get kicked out by the ushers for violating the house “no electronic devices” policy.
You might think that Twitter and opera (not the browser) don’t work together. On the one hand, you’ve got epically long, rich visual and auditory feasts for the senses that require significant education to appreciate. On the other, you’ve got a text-only medium that restricts you to 140 characters, is free to use, and currently reaches more than 30 million people, who use it to broadcast such prosaic items as what they’re wearing, whether its raining or if Ronaldhino has just scored a goal.
On top of that, opera is, well, old. I think the medium was last popular in about 1895, whereas Twitter is very much a child of the 21st century’s always-on, internet-saturated lifestyle.
But if you treat opera as an event, it sort of makes sense to integrate it with Twitter. After all, people have live-tweeted Steve Jobs keynotes, ballgames, breaking news events and even births. Twitter is very well-suited to giving people a glimpse of something as it happens, adding a communal (and even global) dimension to real-time events. So why not opera?
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