Fun
Saturday’s photoguess: what does this monkey symbolize?
There are two questions for this week’s photoguess:
1) What exactly does poor monkey symbolize?
2) Where is this strange artefact located? (Answering this question will also help you to find answer for the question 1).
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Dynamics of space storm
A team from the U. of Alberta was able to observe a space storm in its full dynamics – at least during first minutes from its birth. For that, they used a network of cameras located in multiple places within Canada – you can see exact location of vertices of the grid on the video below. Phase front propagation velocity of the storm in the atmosphere was about 100000 km/h, so it took a couple of minutes for the storm to cover the whole Earth (well, half of it) from the moment first electrons hit the atmosphere.
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One step for a Man
Nature News has decided to start running a Twitter microblog devoted to the history of Apollo 11 mission – the first manned mission to the Moon. They will basically twit all the steps of the mission, to the Moon and back, day after day, event after event as if it was happening today, in 2009. They also promise that the feed will include various contextual information – politics, related events, etc. Following this Twitter feed you will open yourself to a quite unique experience: learn exactly what your father felt back in 1969. Thanks so much for this precious gift, Nature. Such feeds as yours make Twitter a really great service, worth to have a Twitter account.
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The very meaning of socialism
Hehe, Lubos Motl will go crazy… 
I received a rather strange email message yesterday; since it was from unspecified person (spam in other words), I decided to share it with you – see below.
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Carnegie Mellon’s contribution to Star Trek universe
… apart from training Spock, I mean – the head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon U. discusses several interesting projects being developed at the University which are worth putting into the universe of Star Trek.
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Tour of Ares IX
Jim Halsell (former astronaut) takes Miles O’Brien on a tour through the various components of the new NASA Ares IX rocket.
How to spot a black hole on the Sky
Here is a video from NewScientist featuring simulations by Loeb and his collaborators (we have discussed Loeb’s results several times on NEQNET). The idea is that BH acts as a strong gravitational lense, so if we have a close system “star-BH”, we will see a very specific pattern of light when the companion star crosses the “disk” of BH. Of course, in order for us to spot this pattern, it is better if the line of our sight lights in the orbit plane of the star.
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On Harvard – again
By the way, why Harvard is called Harvard? Who is it named for? I guess, everybody knows that, but for me – it was a discovery of the day.
It was named for English clergyman John Harvard. Mr. Harvard together with his wife has moved from London to America in 1673. He became a clergyman there and has died of tuberculosis a year later.
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Saturday’s photoguess: what are they doing?
and where are they located? (take a careful look at the lower part of the photo.)
The full answer is: they took a tour at the Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo, Egypt. The date was June 4, 2009. The mosque is one of the largest in the world (it was built in 1256).
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Biocentrism: book review
I was asked to review the book by Dr. Robert Lanza called “Biocentrism: how life and consciousness are the keys to understand true nature of the Universe“.
If you are a scientist good enough in your area of expertise, at some point you start wondering whether you can explain everything around you, every single event, physical phenomenon, consciousness, human nature etc. etc. by using methods from your area of expertise.
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Small amphibian collider
Art by immortal Abstruse Goose, poetry by @Yarbo 
How many scientists fabricate or falsify their research?
This is the title of a rather intriguing paper recently published in PLos ONE. As it turns out, approximately 72% of researchers have seen at least once how their colleagues used inappropriate or incorrect methods of research.
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Jim Simons and C.N. Yang interviewed by Bill Zimmerman
… about math (geometry)/physics interplay.
Yang: there are two types of modern math books – the ones which you cannot read beyond the first page and the ones which you cannot read beyond the first sentence. Stinrood is of the latter kind.
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Google Wave
Everybody (Terence Tao for one) seems to be excited about forthcoming Google Wave, and so am I. Here is the video demonstrating some of the product’s features:
I think, we are yet to see whether Google Wave is to become ultimate science collaboration tool (I signed up on their site – and hope they’ll get me into beta testing). My current opinion is that Google Wave provides you functionality similar to forums rather than wikis: in collaboration projects, I’ve found that messages tend to group into project categories, not conversations – since it is also good to see also conversations which ended up long time ago, not just recent ones, if the topic of the conversation is the same. And of course, I would love if a collaboration platform naturally would support TeX formulae (embed them as fugures, MathML or in some other – not terribly ugly – way) (nobody among big players seems to be interested to satisfy needs of little egghead nerds – scientists)
On gun politics and culture in US
In Russia, any talk about personal weapons/gun policy gets immediately reduced to the question of how actually effective are guns for personal self-defence on the street. On the other hand, in US general attractor seems to be discussion of the statement that personal weapons is your defence against tyranny, i.e., “armed man=free man” etc. etc.
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