An international research team has gathered a database of the oldest people in the world - those who lived beyond their 110th birthday, and while searching for these 'supercentenarians' and trying to find accurate documentation of their age, they also documented the personal histories and wisdom of those who long-lived folks.

The result; a book called "Supercentenarians" and  coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock/Germany.

It is Sunday morning, and I am about to leave for a day on the beach, the first of this busy 2010; so this post will be shorter than I would like it to be... There would be lots to say about exclusive physics at colliders. But I still want to share with you a figure extracted from a recent 4-page preprint article by James Pinfold, who nicely summarizes the signals and searches for exclusive processes at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider.

The Science Of Whitewash



A complaint often leveled against climate scientists is that they fake their graphs and that investigations into such fakery which fail to show fakery must accordingly be a whitewash.

I have news for these people.

All graphs are fake.

An argument often used in philosophy is that nothing can be known as 100% truth.  The same can more properly be argued from the findings of science.  Every bit of knowledge comes from human experience and judgment.  The human brain is easily fooled: illusions, hallucinations and mirages demonstrate this. 

I've been a blog slacker and for that I deserve a spanking. My vote is from the capable hands of the UCLA women's volleyball team. But that's another story. Here's the real story: country music kills.

I've long known that country music makes me want to grab a lariat and hang myself from the nearest old elm tree. And now I find I'm not alone: social psychologists Steven Stack and Jim Grundlach found that the more a city's radio stations play country music, the higher the white suicide rate(1).

Seriously.

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), only about 160 000 light-years from our own Milky Way, so very close on a cosmic scale, is one of the closest galaxies to our own Milky Way and in this spectacular new image from the Wide Field Imager (WFI) at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, a celestial menagerie of different objects and phenomena in part of the LMC is on display, ranging from vast globular clusters to the remains left by brilliant supernovae explosions. This fascinating observation provides data for a wide variety of research projects unraveling the life and death of stars and the evolution of galaxies.

Music - The International Language

Peoples of all cultures love music and song.

This article addresses two urban myths: that yodelling originated in the mountains of Austria, Bavaria and Switzerland and that it evolved as a means of calling from mountain to mountain.

Yodelling is fairly universal and is independent of terrain.  The greatest variation is in the choice of musical instrument to accompany the yodelling.  Modern musicians prefer guitars and electronic instruments.  Austrians tend to favor the piano accordian and acoustic guitar.  Other cultures favor the 'thumb piano' or lamellophone.

Last night, while gym climbing with a science manager, I found he also did outdoor climbing, hiking, and yoga.  Yoga is a great exercise system.  Scientists need healthy bodies to match our super-healthy minds.  Yet a websearch on 'Yoga for Scientists' reveals nothing about how Yoga can help Scientists!  Well, except for "Yoga-- Naked Scientists Discussion Forum" (go ahead, I know you want to look).

NOTE: This is just an introduction, for the body of this paper (theories on terraforming Venus and Mars), click here.


Eventually, the Earth will no longer be fit for human existence. In approximately 5 to 6 billion years the sun will exhaust its hydrogen supply. In the next 10 million years a comet will likely strike Earth, or the planet will be doused in supernova radiation. Within the next 100 thousand to 1 million years an asteroid similar to the one that created the Chicxulub crater and caused a mass extinction event will likely collide with Earth.

"Empathy is one of those ski

The Science Of Fiction

Tip of the hat to Eric Diaz for reminding me of the muse.


Long before writing was invented, amazing stories were told through the medium of the ballad and the saga.  Those old tall tales and modern science fiction often have a few common themes - ethics,  morality, gadgets and heroic deeds.  Gadgets run the full gamut  - from the bag of wind used by Odysseus to fill his ship's sails, to the talking computers and planet busters in movies.