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

Mad and mad

I am just kind of tucking this away here: an article about how kids in foster settings are drugged. What I know that most don't is how this is functional in a larger context. But I don't know how to express this so that something is communicated that does not seem heartless.

http://www.madinamerica.com/2015/03/drugging-children-foster-care/

Good and bad and ....

quoting the headline from an Aeon article

The fault in our design

We tend to think that technological progress is making us more resilient, but it might be making us more vulnerable

Colin Dickey

The point of this brief mention is that above is a great example of binary thought. " Technological progress" is GOOD, OR is BAD. Wait though, it is both, of course it is both. Technological progress is good and it is bad.  This obviousness is hidden because we see above our rational, ordinary mind at work. Our binary mind--- everything has to be this or that. Two choices. Both/and is ignored. 

Is not both/and also binary? But it points to a greater complexity, and really, considering the point of this post, we have to say reality surely is either/or AND, it is at the same time, BOTH/AND.

I can't help this reality--- I didn't make this planet. 

MYcrobes or Ourcrobes

Sometimes this space features egregrious examples of fallacious thinking. Today though we excerpt an article from an Oxford University Press blog. We like it for a complex look at man's interconnectedness. We like it so much we will not even stress how it understates this interconnectedness.


Missing the opportunity to learn something about microbiology is a mistake. The uninformed are likely to be left with a distorted view of biology in which they miscast themselves as the most important organisms. For example, “Sarah” is a significant manifestation of life from Sarah’s perspective, but her body is not the individual organism that she imagines, and nor, despite her talents, is she a major player in the ecology of the planet. Her interactions with microbes will include a healthy relationship with bacteria in her gut, bouts of influenza and other viral illnesses, and death in old age from an antibiotic-resistant infection. Sarah’s microbiology will continue after death with her decomposition by fungi. In happier times she will become an expert on Milton’s poetry, and delight students by reciting Lycidas through her tears, but she will never know a thing about microbiology. This is a pity. Learning about viruses that bloom in seawater and fungi that sustain rainforests would not have stopped her from falling in love with Milton.