Waterfalls

Beautiful!

clipped from www.widerange.org

Blog Action Day

Great Idea! Tune in here for post on Monday.

clipped from blog.blogactionday.com

Bra to Detect Cancer

Wouldn't this be a wonderful development!

clipped from dsc.discovery.com a bra for women, and eventually briefs for men, could have some real health benefits by detecting cancerous cells The undergarments could serve as monitoring and early warning systems to alert at-risk patients of a problem years before a tumor forms. The device is built on technology called microwave radiometry, which measures small temperature changes in internal tissue. Cancerous tumors are known to have a different temperature than the surrounding tissue Some doctors already use microwave radiometry for breast cancer detection, but the equipment is elaborate and far from portable. Siores's idea is to shrink the technology down to cup size. Tiny, fiber-like antennas would be woven into each side of the bra. The antennas would pick up the thermal signals coming from tissue inside the breast.

New Earth Photo

Beautiful photo

clipped from www.livescience.com NASA Releases New Views of Earth

Space Shuttle Launch

I've always found this to be such a spectacular photo.

clipped from www.space.com

Mathematicians Map Lie Group

Beauty of Mathematics

clipped from www.sciencedaily.com Mathematicians have mapped the inner workings of one of the most complicated structures ever studied: the object known as the exceptional Lie group E8. the E8 calculation is an investigation of symmetry. Mathematicians invented the Lie groups to capture the essence of symmetry: underlying any symmetrical object, such as a sphere, is a Lie group. The ways that E8 manifests itself as a symmetry group are called representations. The goal is to describe all the possible representations of E8. The new result is a complete list of these building blocks for the representations of E8, and a precise description of the relations between them, all encoded in a matrix with 205,263,363,600 entries. we physicists have come to appreciate its exceptional role only more recently --- yet, in our attempts to unify gravity with the other fundamental forces into a consistent theory of quantum gravity, we now encounter it at almost every corner! Beautiful Symmetry E8 itself is 248-dimensional!

Singing Sand Dunes Around the World

clipped from www.nytimes.com Secrets of the Singing Sand Dunes The dunes at Sand Mountain in Nevada sing a note of low C, two octaves below middle C. In the desert of Mar de Dunas in Chile, the dunes sing slightly higher, an F, while the sands of Ghord Lahmar in Morocco are higher yet, a G sharp. At Sand Mountain, for example, dunes can sing slightly different notes at different times, from B to C sharp. The outer layer of the dune vibrates like the cone of a loudspeaker. The particular note depends primarily on the size of the grains. no dune was required at all. The scientists shipped sand from a Moroccan desert to a Paris laboratory and reproduced the singing by pushing the sand around with a metal blade. It’s not at all like any other instrument we know The most beautiful dune tune comes from the sands of Oman. The least musical bits of silicon were those from China, which hardly sang at all.

Singing Sand Dunes

I find this to be fascinating. I had no idea that sand dunes made sounds, let alone musical tones!

clipped from dsc.discovery.com When Sand Dunes Go Boom The age-old mystery of why the dunes of 30 or so sand fields worldwide make eerie booming and singing sounds may be solved. the deep tones made by the 30 or so singing dunes worldwide aren't very different from those made by a stringed instrument. "We've been sliding down dunes and the whole thing is vibrating," she said. Audio analyses of the dune noises show a surprisingly pure tone. "It looks right on — you even get the harmonics just like you do with a [cello] string." It's as if there is some sort of "waveguide," like a giant string, in the dune that favors only certain frequencies of sound. That waveguide, it turns out, really exists. It's on the slip-face of the dunes — that's the steep side facing away from the prevailing wind. "The sand moving down the face is the moving string, but it's really playing the whole body," Hunt told Discovery News. clipped from dsc.discovery.com Hunt's team has come up with a recipe for singing dunes: they must be big, dry and dense.

Reflections on Getting Older

Today's topic came to me just now when I (once again) clicked the "larger type" button on a web page I wanted to read. For the past few years, my eye doctor has asked at each visit if I'm beginning to get far-sighted yet. I always assure him otherwise and ask if he is. (We are the same age). I'm so very near-sighted that it has always been difficult to read fine print anyway, but lately it seems that there are certain print sizes that just don't come into focus for me whether I get closer to them or not. Then, I discovered that I can very easily make print on the screen larger with just a mouse click, and for the first time I'm preferring reading on line over reading from print material. So, maybe far-sightedness is beginning to creep up on me.

The larger type button called to mind a number of other little thoughts over the past few days. I arrived on campus yesterday and noticed a big poster taped to the windshield of a van. I thought it must have something to do with homecoming and started reading it out of curiosity (the print was visible even for me at quite a distance). The text said that anyone who had not voted was a number of not very nice things. I shook my head, with some amusement, and hoped the poster-maker was not much over 18. While I admired his/her civic concern, both the medium and actual content of the message was one I would have appreciated far more at that age.

A few days earlier, I had found a conversation with my cousins about how teens communicate to be very interesting. None of us is technologically illiterate. However, the extent to which teens interact through IM, texting, and the internet is a long way from our own high school and college experiencesor even our own experience now. While I use texting, blogging, emailing, and so on comfortably, and, like some of the younger generation of cousins, find that I am maybe a little more socially comfortable with the help of technology, these tools are still a little new and a little foreign to me, while they are almost an extension of the person for many of the younger generation. I feel a little like Arthur Weesley exclaiming over how wonderful Muggle gadgets are in my approach to these things.

This is all a bit strange to me because being a student myself, I perhaps often see myself as part of the younger group that is part of the stimulus for this reflection.

I can very clearly see that I don't learn as fast as I did when I was younger or assimilate new technologies or ways of doing things as easily as I did when I was younger, and in that respect my younger colleagues have a clear advantage over me -- something that has been a cause for concern to me at times. On the other hand, when grad students get together to talk, those of us who are my age have a sense of perspective that the younger students have had not yet had the opportunity to acquire. In career-related discussions, we raise questions and issues that don't occur to the younger students. We also have skills from previous careers that give us advantages when it comes to using the mathematics knowledge that we are developing now.

I feel like I should have some sort of concluding paragraph, but I suppose reflections don't really have to conclude -- these are just some thoughts. I'd be interested to know if others are thinking along these lines ...

Andrea Jo