Zwei neibelungen wöhlen, ach! in meiner kopf.
–Goethe, more or less…
Interesting science reading for the day:
For those of you interested in astrophysics, this week’s Science has a very interesting set of articles about pulsars, magnetars and neutron stars. Particularly interesting are the news articles “The Pulsar Menagerie” (1) and “Crushed by Magnetism,” (2) and Lattimer and Prakash’s review article “The Physics of Neutron Stars.” (3) The latter includes a great discussion of the state of our understanding of type II supernovae and how neutron stars are formed.
(Interesting thought from this: The typical total energy release in a type II SNa is ~3*1053 erg, about 10% of the total mc2 for the star. Of this, about 1% is kinetic energy, 0.01% is photons, and the overwhelming remainder is a wall of neutrinos. During one key stage in the collapse, a region of star becomes sufficiently dense to become opaque to neutrinos (! – mean free path of about 10cm over a 20km region) so energy can build up in this form, and it’s the sudden release of that which triggers the primary explosive shock wave. There’s just something neat about that.)
And on another side, there’s a new report out by Laumann et al titled The Sexual Organization of the City. (4) It discusses how cities tend to split into several independent “sexual marketplaces,” often with radically different customs, leading to questions about how cities need to manage things like health and social issues with more refined tools. So far, I’ve only read the NY Times review, but I intend to get my hands on a copy of the full report asap – it looks like a good read.
(1) Science, 23 April 2004, vol. 304 pp. 532-3
(2) Science, ibid., pp. 534-5
(3) Science, ibid., pp. 536-41
(4) E. O. Laumann et al., (eds.) The Sexual Organization of the City, Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 2004.
Filing
For those of you who haven’t seen the news yet, Google filed a form S-1 this morning.
And that’s the last that I can say for the next six months or so. 🙂
There are strange things on television.
The Hezbollah has a game show.
I suppose it would be appropriate to say something about postmodernism here, or about how media is starting to pervade and reshape even corners of the world that seem anti-modern by their nature, but this is really just surreal.
Random thought for the day:
A single word can have two different antonyms which are not synonyms of one another. For example, synonymy (the condition of two words having the same meaning) has antonyms antonymy (the condition of two words having opposite meaning) and polysemy (the condition of one word having multiple meanings).
Also, “synonymy,” “antonymy,” and “polysemy” are cool words.
Propagating the ol’ meme
From , although suitably modified since if he did it, why shouldn’t I?
I want you, dear reader, whoever you are, to ask me exactly three questions about everything. I will probably even provide you with a truthful answer. Then copy and paste this to your own journal.
The difficulty of asking a finite number of questions about everything is left as an exercise for the reader. Which is a fancy way of saying, “I dunno if it can be done, either, so I’ll let somebody else worry about it.”
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 