In The News

[GordMay]

“How to Not Fall for Viral Scares”
“Momo is basically every parent’s nightmare. But as multiple outlets have pointed out, there’s no evidence that it's a real viral challenge ...
... While claims of suicides connected to the challenge started surfacing last year, according to Snopes, authorities have never definitively tied any cases to participation in an online game ...
... Momo appears to be another example not of dangerous behavior going viral, but of a hoax going viral ...”
More ➥ https://www.wired.com/story/momo-hoa...scares-advice/

[GordMay]

How to get money back for carbon pricing on your 2018 Canadian taxes
The new Climate Action Incentive has been added to the standard tax forms, at line 449
More ➥ https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitch...eral-1.5043558

[GordMay]

“The First Dog Ascent of a 7,000-Meter Himalayan Peak”
Mera, recently renamed Baru, made the first canine ascent of Nepal's 23,389-foot Baruntse, in Nepal’s Himalayas, located just south of Mount Everest, in November 2018.
More ➥ https://www.outsideonline.com/239045...baruntse-nepal

[GordMay]

Why does it cost millions to access publicly funded research papers? Blame the paywall
Universities struggle to pay for access to their own research reports as publishers profit.
Academic publishing is based on an unusual business arrangement where much of the content and the labour is provided free by the customer.
It works this way: Publicly funded scientists do the research, write the papers and act as peer reviewers for their colleagues' work without remuneration from publishing companies.
Then those companies charge universities and other institutions millions of dollars in subscription fees for access to the same published research. And those subscription fees increase every year.
➥ https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/resea...rnia-1.5049597

➥ https://www.universityofcalifornia.e...ccess-publicly

[senormechanico]

Arg. Trying to start another climate change thread....

[GordMay]

Well in my humble opinion, without the desire to offend those who think differently from my point of view, but looking at it in depth, taking into account the characteristics of each person, the biological construction and physical ability I honestly think ... I forgot what i was going to say...
Right ... I was going to quote John F. Kennedy:
“Too often, we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

[Lake-Effect]

On matters of importance, I subscribe to Harlan Ellison's quote

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”

(no surprise there, right? )

But this article makes the same point more gently and philosophically, with a nod to Plato, even.

[Reefmagnet]

Originally Posted by GordMay

... the ability for non-seep organisms to use chemosynthetic production as a trophic subsidy could have implications as we seek to spatially manage ecosystems in a way that promotes sustainable and productive ocean environments. This study provides the first evidence of seep derived food sources contributing to the diet of commercially exploited non-seep species, highlighting the potential importance of these environments for providing a provisioning ecosystem service...
... While we may still debate whether seeps act as oases in the deep, this study makes it clear that certain lines of evidence could under-represent the role of seeps and highlights the potential for seeps to act as critical oases to non-seep endemic fauna in the future...

Holy Guakomole!


Do scientists have some secret code in which they MUST both choose the most complicated words they possibly can, and then cram as many as possible into each written sentence?



Betimes, it's difficile to discern if these sesquipedalian jargon laden articles comprised of chains of compound-complex sentences contain malapropisms, obfuscations or are simply just prolix.


It can be very frustrating!

[SuW]

Originally Posted by GordMay

19: The True Story of the Yarnell Hill Fire
On the morning of June 30, 2013, all 20 members of Prescott, Arizona's Granite Mountain Hotshots headed into the mountains to protect the small town of Yarnell from an advancing blaze. Later that day, every man but one was dead. Through interviews with family, colleagues, and the lone survivor, a former hotshot pieces together their final hours—and the fatal choices ...
☞ https://www.outsideonline.com/192642...nell-hill-fire

Granite Mountain Hotshots: An untold story from the day 19 firefighters died
Just 600 yards away, a couple watched the fire from the relative safety of their ranch. Another 10 minutes, and the firefighters might have made it there, they say.
☞ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news...ite/674512002/

Very sad story. Thanks for that.

James Keelaghan has a song about Wag Dodge survivor of the Mann Gulch fire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qomNoN7MCYg

[GordMay]

A 116-year-old woman from Japan has been officially recognised as the world's oldest living person by Guinness World Records. Kane Tanaka was honoured by the organisation in a ceremony at the nursing home where she lives in Fukuoka, a city in southwest Japan.
The previous oldest living person was another Japanese woman, Chiyo Miyako, who died in July at the age of 117.
The oldest person ever was Jeanne Louise Calment, a French woman who lived to 122, according to Guinness World Records.
➥ https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/offbe...son/ar-BBUyMTN

[GordMay]

Explorers to send 1st live video broadcast from ocean depths
Early next week, a submersible is expected to dive to 300 meters (nearly 1,000 feet) off the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, and send images to a satellite transmitter on the mother ship. The Ocean Zephyr is the mothership of the British-based Nekton Mission. The Associated Press is accompanying the expedition, providing live underwater video from submarines diving from the ship, and using new optical transmission technology to broadcast the images worldwide.
➥ https://www.apnews.com/e3afd4eaf59341c1bb842e0832ed5d81

➥ https://www.ap.org/en-gb/topics/indian-ocean

[GordMay]

Stephen Hawking's ex-nurse barred from practising after failing to give him 'appropriate' care
The Nursing and Midwifery Council censured Patricia Dowdy, 61, who faced multiple misconduct charges, including financial misconduct, dishonesty, not providing appropriate care, failing to co-operate with the council and not having the correct qualifications.
Dowdy worked for Hawking between 1999 and 2004 and from July 2013 until being handed an interim suspension in March 2016.
➥ https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-suffolk-47540621

Born in Oxford, England, Hawking was a mediocre student as a child, but went on to revolutionize physics and cosmology — the study of the origin and evolution of the universe.
But he did something perhaps even more challenging: he brought such deep thinking about how the universe began and where it's going to the general public in his bestselling book, A Brief History of Time, which was later turned into a documentary.
Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, published in 1915, suggested the existence of black holes — an object whose gravitational pull is so intense that once something passes a region known as the event horizon, there's no escape.
In 1974, Hawking shocked the physics community by theorizing that some things can escape a black hole before crossing the event horizon. Subatomic particle pairs — such as photons and neutrinos — near that point of no return could result in one particle being ejected. This became known as Hawking radiation. Interestingly, Hawking initially didn't believe it possible, and came to that conclusion when he tried to prove a young student, Jacob Bekenstein, who had initially made the suggestion, wrong.
In 2014, Hawking released a paper titled “Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes” (Soft hair on black holes)*, in which he surprised the astrophysics community by suggesting black holes weren't so black after all. He challenged his initial theory from 1974, that suggested nothing could escape a black hole after crossing the event horizon. His new paper said light may be able to pass through the point of no return area, and leak information in the form of matter.
In 1970, Hawking, along with fellow physicist Roger Penrose, suggested the universe began with a singularity, a location where space and time are indistinguishable. It's as if a black hole went in reverse. Their research supported the theory that the universe began with a big bang.


* “Soft Hair on Black Holes” ~ by Stephen W. Hawking et al.
➥ https://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.00921v1.pdf


Hawking, S. (1966). “Properties of expanding universes” (Doctoral thesis)
➥ https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/251038

[GordMay]

Today is National Pi [π] Day, and the anniversary of Albert Einstein's birth.
➥ https://www.piday.org/
You can search the first 200 million digits of pi at the Pi Search website, maintained by David Andersen, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
➥ https://www.angio.net/pi/piquery
In 2016, a Swiss scientist, Peter Trueb, used a computer with 24 hard drives and a program called y-cruncher to calculate pi to more than 22 trillion digits, the current world record for the enumeration of pi. If you read one digit every second, it would take you just under 700,000 years to recite all those digits.

[Singularity]

For the hard-core science geeks, sort of huge if it pans out:
https://www.sciencealert.com/quantum...sn-t-objective

"A new quantum physics experiment just lent evidence to a mind-boggling idea that was previously limited to the realm of theory, according to the MIT Technology Review - that under the right conditions, two people can observe the same event, see two different things happen, and both be correct.
According to research shared to the preprint server arXiv on Tuesday, physicists from Heriot-Watt University demonstrated for the first time how two people can experience different realities by recreating a classic quantum physics thought experiment."

[skipmac]

Originally Posted by Singularity

For the hard-core science geeks, sort of huge if it pans out:
https://www.sciencealert.com/quantum...sn-t-objective

"A new quantum physics experiment just lent evidence to a mind-boggling idea that was previously limited to the realm of theory, according to the MIT Technology Review - that under the right conditions, two people can observe the same event, see two different things happen, and both be correct.
According to research shared to the preprint server arXiv on Tuesday, physicists from Heriot-Watt University demonstrated for the first time how two people can experience different realities by recreating a classic quantum physics thought experiment."

Another very interesting phenomenon from the edge of science. You might also be interested in quantum entanglement, another quantum phenomenon where groups of particles are entangled or linked so that something effecting one particle will simultaneously effect another entangled particle even if they are a distance apart, thus in a way "violating" the limit of the speed of light.