Away from Blog

I am travelling for work this week and next and will be away from the blog.  Blogging will resume on the last weekend of the month.

Thunderstorms Produce Beams of Antimatter Plus Dark Matter Mysteries

Image Source: NASA via BBC.

Caption for the above image: Electrons racing up electric field lines give rise to light, then particles, then light.

BBC is reporting on research findings presented at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which state that thunderstorms emit Antimatter.  From the report:

[The Fermi] space telescope has accidentally spotted thunderstorms on Earth producing beams of antimatter. Such storms have long been known to give rise to fleeting sparks of light called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. But results from the Fermi telescope show they also give out streams of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. The surprise result was presented by researchers at the American Astronomical Society meeting in the US. It deepens a mystery about terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, or TGFs - sparks of light that are estimated to occur 500 times a day in thunderstorms on Earth. They are a complex interplay of light and matter whose origin is poorly understood.

Thunderstorms are known to create tremendously high electric fields - evidenced by lightning strikes. Electrons in storm regions are accelerated by the fields, reaching speeds near that of light and emitting high-energy light rays - gamma rays - as they are deflected by atoms and molecules they encounter. These flashes are intense - for a thousandth of a second, they can produce as many charged particles from one flash as are passing through the entire Earth's atmosphere from all other processes.

Read the rest of the report here.

Laugh of the Day

Man brought back after more than three hours of being dead.  Image Source: Daily Mirror via Yahoo News.

Okay, that does it. Things around here are getting way too damned depressing and weird.  For me, the breaking point came earlier this morning when I saw the headline on Yahoo News: "Quick-thinking doctors helped Arun Bhasin breathe after more than three hours with no heartbeat." After hearing about this NHS triumph, I needed something lighter. Check out these videos that made me laugh out loud, not LOL, but truly the real thing. (Hat tip: Glowpinkstah)

The Night of First Ages

King Kong (2005). Image © Universal Pictures. Image Source: DVD Exchange Online.

2011 began with high hopes.  Given the early January headlines, I find myself speculating on what we can already gather from the tone of a new year.  Deaths of birds and fish across the globe fueled the apocalyptic eschatology which has become an ever-present subtext in popular discourse.  An American Congresswoman was targeted in a brutal and horrifying assassination attempt, while other people were tragically killed and injured by her side.  And Facebook has received a shot in the arm of half a billion dollars.  It is not cheerful fare. Wikipedia and NASA have marked some crucial anniversaries in the past two weeks, but those testify to the mind-boggling changes we have endured in terms of information-based and technological innovations in the past three decades. The fact that Wiki is only ten years old, yet is already a monolithic institution shows how rapid the changes are.

The anticipated Technological Singularity is narrowly defined on Wiki as an exponential acceleration of technological change past a point which we can currently comprehend. From Wiki: "Many of the most recognized writers on the singularity, such as Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, define the concept in terms of the technological creation of superintelligence, and allege that a post-singularity world would be unpredictable to humans due to an inability of human beings to imagine the intentions or capabilities of superintelligent entities."

Anniversaries: Wikipedia's Tenth Birthday

Image Source: Wikipedia's entry on Wikipedia.

Today is Wikipedia's tenth birthday.  Founded on January 15, 2001 by Gen Xers Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and others, the site embodies many of the original ideals that surrounded the internet.  It encompasses some of the best of the Web's possibilities in being direct, useful, free, democratic and informative - albeit with sometimes dubious editing and debates on particular entries.  Time has a report on Wiki's ten most memorable entries here. Of those, the three that caught my eye were Wiki's List of Unusual Deaths; the number 6174; and the Medieval Dancing Plague.

Because it is free and widely accessible, Wikipedia is probably the most widely used encyclopedic resource commonly used today. It is a triumph of the Millennial reimagining of the Neo-Classicisal rational ideals of the eighteenth century on the internet.  The original French Encyclopédie was published from 1751 to 1772.  Encyclopedias as a form of reference source are 2,000 years old.  The first one we are aware of (according to Wikipedia) is Natural History by Pliny the Elder.

Anniversaries: Landing on Titan

The first picture "from the surface of a planetary body outside the inner Solar system." 2005 © NASA/ESA/ASI. Image Source: Wiki.

Today is the sixth anniversary since the phenomenal landing on Saturn's moon, Titan, during the Cassini–Huygens spacecraft mission to study the Saturnine system.  This is just one of the great scientific achievements of our era that is of epic importance. The mission was a joint NASA, ESA and ASI initiative. The NASA site is here. The ESA site on the mission is here and the ASI site is here. There is a good NASA video on the landing, with views of the moon as Huygens landed on it, here.

Thirteenth Zodiac Sign Ophiuchus Reintroduced

Image Source: Hubble Source.

Several sites on the Web are reporting that an extra sign, Ophiuchus, also known as Serpentarius, the Serpent-Bearer, has been added to the zodiac because a wobble in the Earth's rotation has created a discrepancy between 2,000 year old astrological predictions about the planetary positions and actual astronomical data of nearly one month.  This sign has finally made a comeback after originally being discarded by the Babylonians.

Only Beasts and Gods

The martyrdom of St. Ignatius of Antioch on orders of Emperor Trajan.  Image Source: Mystagogy.

A recent letter (here) on the editorial page of Canada's National Post newspaper in favour of waterboarding was pretty medieval.  But the writer's reference to Aristotle caught my eye: "only beasts and gods live beyond a city’s walls." There is a discussion on that reference here:

"For Aristotle's zoon politikon there are no persons beyond the walls of the city; outside the city there exist only beasts or gods. To be a person means to be part of the corporate whole of the polis. The essence/end of the person does not inhere in the individual; it does not emerge in the development of the solitary self nor in the development of the self in family as child, brother or father. Neither, for Aristotle, does the person emerge in village, imperial or cosmopolitan life. Only in the polis can there be persons, for the nature of the person is political."

Going beyond the pale, moving beyond the bounds of what previously defined civilization, is now common.  It started with the Battle of the Somme, then the Holocaust. The technological and information revolutions have accelerated a process already taking place.  In the new Millennium, we are all beasts and gods.