Good morning! It's The Nerd's Almanac for Saturday, September 3, 2011.
Today is the anniversary of the landing of Viking 2 on the surface of the planet Mars in 1976. The landing occurred at a place called Utopia Planitia, which means "nowhere plain". The Viking 2 Lander searched for life, performed analysis and took pictures until its batteries ran out in 1980.
Today is the birthday of Carl David Anderson, born in New York City in 1905. He became a physicist, and is best known for discovering the positron in 1932, for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1936. The positron is an antimatter particle, the "antimatter counterpart of the electron", and is also called the "anti-electron"
And today is Malcolm Gladwell's birthday! He may be best known for his best-selling books based on academic research in the social sciences. The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers are extremely informative and enjoyable. He also wrote What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, a collection of articles originally from The New Yorker magazine, where he has worked as a writer since 1996.
Here are two quotes for today:
"The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter."
-- Malcom Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
"Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good."
-- Malcom Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success.
And that's the almanac for today. Nerds of the world, we salute you!
Sources:
Wikipedia: September 3
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