Sir Francis Walsingham
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Author Archives: gmcdavid
Monday Night Irish Class, February 3, 2014
Irish Class, February 3, 2014
Rang Gaeilge, 3ú lá mí Feabhra 2014
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Little Christmas
The elves of Iceland
Elf lobby blocks Iceland road project
Why So Many Icelanders Still Believe in Invisible Elves
The description of the the elves in the second article reminded me very much of the elves in Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword. This is not at all surprising.
The Most Dysfunctional Family in History
Supernova notes
- Why M82’s New Supernova Excites Astronomers
- Supernova Alert!
- Supernova in M82 Keeps Brightening
- Bright New Supernova Blows Up in Nearby M82, the Cigar Galaxy
- Hot News! Supernova in M82
- KABOOM! Nearby Galaxy M82 Hosts a New Supernova!
- Earth-shattering kabooms: A supernova in our lifetimes? Actually the forces involved are far beyond those available to Marvin the Martian. See Lethal Neutrinos.
- Bryan Gaensler, as I mentioned here, suggested some of the consequences:
Back of envelope calc: 106 [1,000,000] cubic parsecs fried by #M82supernova. Approximately 5000 earth-like planets wiped out.
“A world-class scientific-media screw-up”
From Matt Strassler.
Did Hawking Say “There Are No Black Holes”?
This is one of the responses by scientists to that media story. It is the snarkiest I have seen so far 🙂
How to Create a Golden Age
A really sobering thought….
From Bryan Gaensler:
Back of envelope calc: 10^6 [1,000,000] cubic parsecs fried by #M82supernova. Approximately 5000 earth-like planets wiped out.
The dirty secret behind ball lightning ….
This shows the role of luck in scientific discovery:
a team of researchers serendipitously observed ball lightning at a time when they had the right equipment to study it. Jianyong Cen, Ping Yuan, and Simin Xue were in the field measuring the properties of ordinary lightning when they happened to catch ball lightning with both their high-speed cameras and their spectrographs
Monday Night Irish Class, January 13, 2014
Irish Class, January 13, 2014
Rang Gaeilge, 13ú lá mí Eanáir 2014
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From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 