FYI February 13, 2018

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On This Day

1867 – Work begins on the covering of the Senne, burying Brussels’s primary river and creating the modern central boulevards.
The covering of the Senne (French: Voûtement de la Senne, Dutch: Overwelving van de Zenne) was the covering and later diverting of the main river of Brussels, and the construction of public buildings and major boulevards in its place. It is one of the defining events in the history of Brussels.

The Senne/Zenne (French/Dutch) was historically the main waterway of Brussels, but it became more polluted and less navigable as the city grew. By the second half of the 19th century, it had become a serious health hazard and was filled with pollution, garbage and decaying organic matter. It flooded frequently, inundating the lower town and the working class neighbourhoods which surrounded it.

Numerous proposals were made to remedy this problem, and in 1865, the mayor of Brussels, Jules Anspach, selected a design by architect Léon Suys to cover the river and build a series of grand boulevards and public buildings. The project faced fierce opposition and controversy, mostly due to its cost and the need for expropriation and demolition of working-class neighbourhoods. The construction was contracted to a British company, but control was returned to the government following an embezzlement scandal. This delayed the project, but it was still completed in 1871. Its completion allowed the construction of the modern buildings and boulevards which are central to downtown Brussels today.

In the 1930s, plans were made to cover the Senne along its entire course within the greater Brussels area, which had grown significantly since the covering of the 19th century. The course of the Senne was changed to the downtown’s peripheral boulevards. In 1976, the disused tunnels were converted into the north-south axis of Brussels’ underground tram system, the premetro. Actual purification of the waste water from the Brussels-Capital Region was not completed until March 2007, when two treatment stations were built, thus finally cleansing the Senne after centuries of problems.

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Born On This Day

1926 – Fay Ajzenberg-Selove, American nuclear physicist (d. 2012)
Fay Ajzenberg-Selove (February 13, 1926 – August 8, 2012) was an American nuclear physicist. She was known for her experimental work in nuclear spectroscopy of light elements, and for her annual reviews of the energy levels of light atomic nuclei. She was a recipient of the 2007 National Medal of Science.[1][2]

Early life and education
She was born Fay Ajzenberg on 13 February 1926 in Berlin, Germany to a Jewish family from Russia. Her father, Mojzesz Ajzenberg, was a mining engineer who studied at the St. Petersburg School of Mines and her mother, Olga Naiditch Ajzenberg, was a pianist and mezzo-soprano who studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Music. In 1919, they fled the Russian Revolution and settled in Germany, where her father became a wealthy investment banker.[3]

They were bankrupted by the Great Depression, so the family moved to France in 1930. Her father worked as a chemical engineer in a sugar beet factory owned by her uncle Isaac Naiditch in Lieusaint, France in the department of Seine-et-Marne. Ajzenberg attended the Lycée Victor Duruy in Paris and Le Collège Sévigné. In 1940, the family fled Paris prior to the Nazi invasion of France. They took a tortuous route through Spain, Portugal, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba before they settled in New York City in April 1941.[3][4]

Ajzenberg graduated from Julia Richman High School in 1943. Her father had encouraged her interest in engineering.[5] She attended the University of Michigan, where she was friends with the later notorious Haitian dictator “Papa Doc”.[6] She graduated in 1946 with a BS in engineering, the only woman in a class of 100. After briefly doing graduate work at Columbia University and teaching at the University of Illinois at Navy Pier, she began doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

At Wisconsin she worked with the nuclear physicist Hugh Richards who was studying nuclear reaction energies and classifying the energy levels of light atoms.[7] She found a method of creating 6Li targets by converting the sulphate to a chloride and electroplating it to the target. She also demonstrated that the excited states of the 10B nucleus were not evenly spaced as previously thought.[3] She received her MS in 1949 and her PhD in physics in 1952 with a dissertation titled “Energy levels of some light nuclei and their classification.”[5]

She was an atheist.[8]

Physics career
She did postdoctoral work with Thomas Lauritsen at the California Institute of Technology. Together they would publish Energy Levels of Light Nuclei, a compilation of the field’s best yearly research regarding nuclear structure and decay of nuclei with an atomic mass number A from 5 to 20. Since 1973 Ajzenberg published them herself.[3] Eventually Ajzenberg would publish 26 of these papers, primarily in the journal Nuclear Physics, until 1990. They have been called “the nuclear scientists’ bible.”[4]

Following graduation, Ajzenberg was a lecturer at Smith College and a visiting fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was hired as an assistant professor of physics at Boston University, but the dean lowered her salary 15 percent when he learned Ajzenberg was a woman. Ajzenberg refused the position until the initial salary was restored.[3]

While at Boston University, she met Harvard University physicist Walter Selove and they married in December 1955.[3] In 1962, using the bubble chamber at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, he discovered a meson he named the fayon (f2) after her.[9] Ajzenberg-Selove and her husband were honored with a symposium about their work at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005.[10] Selove died in 2010.[9]

In the 1960s, she worked at Haverford College, where she was the first full-time female faculty member.[4] In 1970, Ajzenberg-Selove began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, where Selove had taught since 1957. In 1972, she applied for one of three tenured positions there.[3][4] She was not hired; the reasons cited were age and “inadequate research publications”.[3][4] Ajzenberg-Selove was only 46, had a citation count higher than everyone in the physics department except for Nobel laureate J. Robert Schrieffer, and was Nuclear Physics Section chair of the American Physical Society.[3][4] She filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission and in 1973 the University of Pennsylvania was ordered to give her a tenured professorship.[3][4] She became only the second female professor in the university’s School of Arts and Sciences.[3][4]

Publications
In 1994, she published a memoir, A Matter of Choices: Memoirs of a Female Physicist.[10]

Honors and awards
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
Fellow, American Physical Society
Chair, American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics (1973-1974)
Award for Distinguished Teaching, Christian and Mary Lindbeck Foundation (1991)
Nicholson Medal for Humanitarian Service, American Physical Society (1999)
Distinguished Alumni Fellow Award, University of Wisconsin Department of Physics (2001)

 
 
 
 

FYI

By Heather Chapman: Kansas’ likely oldest working journalist dies at 102
When Protection Press community columnist Bonnie Brown gathered news for “Bonnie’s Blog” in the weekly paper, she went on foot; she gave up driving when she was 98. And in her eight years of writing for the Press, she only missed two deadlines — one last year when Protection was evacuated for wildfires, and a few weeks ago when she caught a cold. But the upbeat woman who many think was Kansas’ oldest working columnist was found dead in her apartment Saturday morning, just 11 days before her 103rd birthday. Her son, Rodney Brown, said her cold had turned into pneumonia. “In her last column, published this past week, Mrs. Brown wrote that she wasn’t feeling ‘up to par yet but hope I am on the last mile … If all goes well, I may make it for my next birthday. One never knows what’s in store for any of us,'” Beccy Tanner reports for The Wichita Eagle.
 
 
 
 
By Katelyn Caralle: Obama adviser pleaded guilty to trying to take pictures up women’s skirts on the train
The former executive director of the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education, who was also a Department of Education official, attempted to take photographs and videos up women’s skirts at least four times while using his government issued iPhone in July 2016.
 
 
 
 
By Sandee LaMotte, CNN: ‘I looked at it, and it was moving’: Worm in woman’s eye leads to unique discovery
Growing up on a ranch in Brookings, Oregon, surrounded by cattle and horses, Beckley loved the outdoors. She also had a burning desire to travel. So, in July 2016, she jumped at a chance to combine the two by working on a commercial salmon fishing boat in Craig, Alaska. It was only a couple of weeks into the job that the symptoms started.
 
 
 
 
By Colin Marshall: Watch Edith+Eddie, an Intense, Oscar-Nominated Short Film About America’s Oldest Interracial Newlyweds
 
 
 
 
WalkingandhikingIreland: Walking Ireland’s Iconic Mountains – Number 6: Croagh Patrick
 
 
 
 
Driving in an ice storm is the first problem…
By David Tracy: Towing An Old Jeep Through An Ice Storm With A 707 HP Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk Was Truly Terrifying
 
 
 
 
By Yessenia Funes: The 2018 Underwater Photography Winners Are Otherworldly
 
 
 
 
By Patrick Reford: Bike Race Course Goes Directly Through Man’s Living Room
 
 
 
 
By Kate Bernot: Last Call: Katharine Hepburn and contemplating mortality
 
 
 
 
Heart shaped pancakes? Get divorced at…?
By Gwen Ihnat: Pancake lovers can get married at Denny’s in Vegas on Valentine’s Day for $99
 
 
If a pancake wedding is just not your jam, no worries: The Taco Bell in Las Vegas just started offering weddings this past August. That ceremony is a bit pricier at $600—but it does include a “sauce packet bouquet” for the bride “to borrow.” Could McDonald’s be next? After all, it’s already got the ring.
 
 
By Jen Harper: 6 Valentine’s Day Books for Strong, Smart, and Savvy Girls
 
 
 
 
By Lisa Campbell: Lets Get Cooking! 10 New and Tasty Cookbooks
 
 
 
 

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