Uranus Is Not A Black Hole
History made! Decades ago, I recall explaining to someone in my patented condescending tone that it is impossible to photograph a Black Hole. Guess what? Once more, I was wrong wrong wrong. Behold, the first photograph of the event horizon around a supermassive Black Hole. This is indeed wondrous: (more…)
March 14 every year is a special day for me. In North America, it’s “pi day” (3.13…. 3/14… get it?) I was going to celebrate with some actual pie, but my fasting blood sugar levels suggested that that’s not the wisest move, so I reneged.
Today, it’s also a sad day, due to the passing of Dr Stephen Hawking. When I was a young physics student, Hawking fascinated me (as he did everyone else) for so many reasons. His debilitating disease gave him an air of specialness that, thankfully, was well correlated with his intellectual heft. (more…)
Huzzah! The Chinese have just successfully landed a rover on the surface of the Moon. The landing marks the first so-called “soft landing” in four decades. The last one was by the USSR in 1976. It also marks China’s definitive status as the #3 space power in human history, and –dare I suggest it– the #1 contender for a promising deep-space human presence. Let’s not forget that China in 2003 became the third country to independently put people into space. (more…)
About ten years ago, I started working for a company in the Washington, DC, area as lower management. As part of my training, I was required to take the standard management trainee classes, which included everything from conflict resolution to guidelines for appropriate inter-personal actions. (I’m sure the latter will surprise many of my friends, as I am not particularly known for conforming to any standard definitions of appropriateness). In one such training session, the topic of religious tolerance was brought up. It was stressed that we must allow employees to display tokens of their faith in their place of work.
Utterly bored by this point, I needed to turn the affair into something more akin to a philosophical discussion. So I asked, “What if I were to wear a swastika to the office?”
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