Eulogy for Hank

Echidne of the Snakes has a heartbreaking eulogy for her Labrador, Hank. I dare you to read it at work.

Physicists-Speak Up!

...and now for something completely different.Seed Magazine reports that which we who have gone through a Varsity Physics course at Major level already know all too well: that Physicists and Mathematicians should be talking to each other a lot more than is customary.

See, there's this nifty little function called the Zeta function , discovered by Riemann quite a while ago, which when fed integers outputs a 3D graph, the zero points of which turn out to be the prime numbers.

Nice.But what's nicer is that these prime numbers,or zeta function zeros, are not distributed randomly in the 3D space-they line up neat as a motorway though the landscape.Dead straight line.

The core of Riemann's Hypothesis is that the Primes will always fall on this straight line, although of course we don't know that for a fact as we haven't found all the Primes yet.Still it looks fairly credible that they will continue to be found in this straight line and nowhere else on the zeta function graph.
Still with me? Good. For while the Mathematicians were oohing and aahing about this neat trick, the Physicists had produced one that was almost identical in every way-but it was produced by a mapping of the energy levels of any moderately-heavy atom.

Well, that's blown my socks off for the day-and I'm sincerely using no sarcasm here, difficult as that may be to believe.

Thing is, Physics students (serious ones) always learn core mathematics before the serious Mathematics students-they need it to handle most of the ideas in Physics.So Physicists end up having a healthy and practical mathematical ability which, to be frank, Mathematicians tend not to believe anyone outside of their own speciality posesses.
But I could've told you.
Physicists,and Physics students, too, need to learn to speak up outside the Faculty Tearoom-and especially to compare notes with the Mathematicians,and together they may crack some of the keys to undeerstanding.

Oh, and Douglas Adams might yet get that beatification.

He may well have been right about 42 all along.

God: I’ve lost faith in Blair

From the good old Grauniad

(British Readers' joke)

A source says Gabriel has spent days trying to dissuade the Almighty from loosing a plague of toads upon the Blair family. Gabriel reminded God that Cherie and the children had nothing to do with Tony's decisions. God's response, it is reliably reported, was: "Blair says the Iraqis are lucky to have got bombed, so how can he complain if his family gets a few toads in the bath?" The archangel is said to be ticked off with God's ability to provide glib answers without even thinking.

Oh, Really?

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Let Them Eat Archives

There seems to be some kind of perception around the G8 that African scientists are living in shacks and begging at the traffic lights.

I mean,how else am I to interpret this incredibly condescending offer from The Royal Society of Chemistry , in smug collaboration with the British House of Commons

Not that the African scientists themselves are feeling condescended to, it appears. One Ethiopian biologist syas that more scientific journals needed to give free access to their papers.

"I would like to call on all publishers of chemistry journals to follow the lead of the RSC to support young chemists like me with their archives so that we can bring the benefits of chemistry to our great continent," she added.

Great. Humble Dark Continent scientists with hands out for more (information) baksheesh.

Rather than handouts, we could probably do with a tad more cooperation between people as a whole.

Perhaps the Europeans are feeling guilty about things like this , hmm?

And Humble Dark Continent scientists can blame White Imperialism . Again.

Round and round it goes.

What gets my dander up most of the time (not a difficult task you’ll most likely agree) is the blatent materialism which has a throttle hold on most of Africa, particularly here where the material is slightly more available to your average crook…err…Joe On the Street.

What’s the first-the very first thing the semi-mythical Emerging Black Middle Class..umm…Joe acquires as a symbol of his arrivist status?

Big bloody petrol-guzzling, atmosphere-fogging car, that’s what.


He attends a Christian Church to feel spiritually like his former betters, dresses like an American Gangsta,consumes masses amounts of resource-intensive fast foods, and trundles to the KFC in a needless cloud of half-burnt petroleum and other oil products.


Hardly a thought is spared to the heavy impact this lifestyle has on the earth.

Not that the entrenched White Aristocracy is any bloody better.

But it puts me in mind of the early days of democracy under the Greeks.

For a while, the masses found that they could vote themselves Bread and Circuses.

Live it up! You only live once!

Screw that for a life philosophy.

Every now and then, I become convinced that, while we may be the only species on earth capable of manipulating our environment, it would be loads better if we could see beyond our immediate desires and stop having more children than we can afford to raise, and stop living like there was no tomorrow and no need to save something for a rainy ecological day.In fact, if we could just cut our numbers down a whole whack…or maybe just learn to live a little more lightly upon the only planet we (so far) have to support us.