A Visit to Deer Flat Ranch

In the “Further Evidence that Youtube is Awesome” category, we have this home video uploaded by Youtube user carminesmith.  The video primarily consists of footage shot in 1987 of a family visit to Linus Pauling’s ranch on the Pacific coast near Big Sur, California, and it lends the viewer a terrific sense of the remarkable [...]

The Miller Farmhouse

Ava Helen Pauling’s childhood residence near Beavercreek, Oregon, now known as “The Miller House,” was built around 1907 and constructed so solidly that it still stands, albeit in a different location and with a different paint job than was originally the case. It has survived more than one-hundred years of weather and use, beginning with [...]

Linus Pauling and the Search for UFOs

Upon Linus Pauling’s death, the OSU Libraries Special Collections received approximately 500,000 of his and his wife’s personal items. Of this half-million item collection, a significant portion is comprised of his personal books which range from heavily academic texts to science fiction and murder mysteries. Amid the shelves of chemistry texts and genre fiction, however, [...]

A Halloween Tale of Ice Cream and Ethanol

In honor of today’s festivities, we’re passing along one of our favorite Pauling notes to self — a ghoulish tale penned shortly after midnight on November 5, 1974.  While the content of the note is surely atypical, its rigorous attention to detail (complete with metric conversions) and unflagging scientific insta-analysis of the data are pure [...]

Linus Pauling baseball!

As the Phillies and Rays prepare for another rendition of the Fall Classic, we thought it appropriate to share with you one of our favorite pieces of video:  Linus Pauling playing beach baseball at a Caltech chemistry department picnic in 1938. Author of more than 1,100 published articles and inarguably one of history’s great minds, [...]

Two Linuses in One

From the “Peanuts on Parade/Charlie Brown Around Town” celebrations held in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2003. Photo by Have Bag Will Travel