Conference Report - Explaining Religion at Bristol University 2010

blume — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 20:45:46 +0200

Among those scientific conferences I had the pleasure to attend, "Explaining Religion" at Bristol University won (and will hold) a very special place. It had been very well-organized by Finn Spicer, Nathalia Gjersoe, Andrew Atkinson and Samantha Barlow, who not only provided for a beautiful yet concentrated space for lectures, debates and come-togethers, but also for a caring, open and humorous atmosphere among all those attending. Thus, the meeting of diverse scientists interested in the evolution of religiosity and religions managed to bring together hypotheses, fresh data and especially people enjoying to share...

Dancing for Science

holtkamp — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:34:03 +0200

What do South American dances have to do with space science? For the past ten years a quartet of satellites named Rumba, Salsa, Samba and Tango have been orbiting the Earth in kind of a formation dance yielding valuable insights into the plasma processes in the Earth's magnetosphere...

Cluster is one of the Cornerstone missions of the European Space Agency ESA. The idea behind it is to have a set of satellites fly around the Earth in a highly elliptical orbit to investigate the interaction between the solar wind and the Earth's magnetosphere in 3-D and time. At least four spacecraft are needed for this task. Depending on the scientific objectives their mutual distance has been as low as 16 km and as large as 10000 km.

The Fritz Zwicky Paradoxon: the fourth failure of Newton (MOND, MOG, etc)

kroupa — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:00:37 +0200

The radical conclusion that Cold- or Warm-Darm-Matter cosmology ought to be discarded as a viable description of physical reality would imply, as a strict logical process, that this physical reality must be non-Newtonian in a certain physical regime which is found on galactic scales and beyond. This goes hand-in-hand with discarding Newtonian dynamics in these regimes.

Indeed, changing dynamics away from Newtonian dynamics is actually already a very well established tradition in physics and results from the desire to understand how objects with "mass" move about and influence each...

Migraine and marihuana

dahlem — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 08:06:20 +0200

I just read a comment about my visual migraine aura video in YouTube

The shaping and flashing of it is near perfect; however, it needs Color, and, some auras loop into a closed figure, while expanding outward. Your simulation seems most accurate near the end of it, when the aura is larger and wider. I'm very very pleased that so many people are doing simulated Auras for migraine sufferers, this is extremely important educational information. I wonder if anyone has studied to see if weed has any treatment effect on migraine? I would use it if so.

I guess that this questions was asked by many people and probably answered by some of them in a...

First Human to Walk on the Moon Turns 80

khan — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:15:11 +0200

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's most poignant sonnet "Mezzo Cammin" starts:

Half of my life is gone, and I have let
The years slip from me and have not fulfilled
The aspiration of my youth, [...]

Those select few among us who can claim that this does not apply to them are really lucky. Among them is Neil...

The 60th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in one blog post

rathi — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:53:01 +0200