Mysterious cold spot in the universe

There is a mysterious cold spot in the universe and an empty spot according to The Independent.

The concluding paragraph:

The Hawaii scientists said that while “the existence of the supervoid and its expected effect on the CMB do not fully explain the Cold Spot, it is very unlikely that the supervoid and the Cold Spot at the same location are a coincidence”. The team will continue to study the cold spot using extra data, they said.

Is 'extra data' just an infelicitous expression? It suggests people scooping up some chads from a laboratory floor. Popular science is the point where sloppy thinking meets something that could be interesting.

AND AN UPDATE to this story-- comparing the Guardian version of this story we find a void in the Independent's reporting----

The Guardian says:

....The supervoid is not an actual vacuum, as its name suggests, but has about 20% less stuff in it than our part of the universe – or any typical region. “Supervoids are not entirely empty, they’re under-dense,” said András Kovács, a co-author at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

And this quote compares instructively with the below,  from The Independent article cited at the start of this post:

The ‘supervoid’ is 1.8 billion light years wide, ‘the largest individual structure ever identified by humanity’ and full of absolutely nothing.

We at least know this: they are not both quoting the wikipedia source.

More light on dark energy

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-universe-fast.html?


and meanwhile, at Fermilab--
"Absence of gravitational-wave signal extends limit on knowable universe"

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-absence-gravitational-wave-limit-knowable-universe.html?


So all our measurements are off, and, there are no cosmic strings close by. Something's moving faster. All I can say is that "chipping away at the universe," is bad writing.

Great book on Heidegger just published

Heidegger's Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in "Being and Time" and Beyond (2015) . Ryan Coyne.

I really hope it gets the attention it deserves for illuminating Heidegger's methods of analysis. The recent revelations of the extent of Heidegger's ghastly prejudices, which for instance have led to the resignation of the German head of a society to study Heidegger, were made after this book went to press, may make many just want his work to disappear. Still we need to understand the role he played. An sense of disdain for this thinker does not mean his effect on European thought can be ignored.

Ryan Coyne was a student of Amy Hollywood. Enough is available to sample at gbooks to get a sense of the quality of this book.

A link to the formation of the moon

Fascinating read, didn't quite understand the point, but it is nice to think physics is getting a scenario of how the earth and moon formed.

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-view-moon-formation-crucial-difference.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=splt-item&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter