Fighting in Palestine, 1936 (These Tremendous Years 1919-1938; A Daily Express Publication, U.K. 1938)

(1936) IN PALESTINE FIGHTING: Resentful of the plan made under the terms of Britain´s League of Nations mandate for a Jewish National Home, Palestine´s 1,000,000 Arabs had long been antagonistic to the 400,000 Jews there, and in April trouble broke out at Jaffa, when Arabs and Jews met in armed conflict. It was the start of seven months´ rioting, ambushes and sabotage in which British troops were needed to imposed order. During that time 37 members of the defence forces, 82 Jews and more than 1,000 Arabs lost their lives.

Meanwhile in Spain... WAR (These Tremendous Years 1919-1938; A Daily Express Publication, U.K. 1938)

(1931) EXILED QUEEN SAYS GOOD-BY: With the words: "Adios Madrid! Adios Espana!" tears running down her face, Queen Ena left Spain on April 15, travelling secretly to meet her husband, King Alfonso, who had abdicated following the news of sweeping Republican success in the municipal elections.

(1936) Meanwhile in Spain - WAR: Middle class intelelctual formed the Republcian government of Spain after the flight of King Alfonso in 1931. They believed they could alter things in Spain without a revolution; but they faced opposition from Church, army and landowners. In February 1935 came a general election. Republican parties joined up and got 4,839,449 votes; Rightists parties got 3,996,931 votes. Six months later, on July 18, the Rightists rose againts the newly-elected government. Civil war had come to Spain.

(1938) SINKING OF THE BALEARES: Seventy miles off the coast of Cartagena, Spain, a Loyalist fleet of four destroyers and two cruisers met a Rebel fleet of four destroyers and three cruisers, shortly after midnight on march 6. First major naval battle since 1916, it ended at 2.30 a.m. with the sinking of the Rebel cruiser Baleares by a Loyalist torpedo. Ignoring shouts to jump overboard from sailors of the British destroyer Kempenfelt that had come to the rescue, five hundred of the Baleares crew, including the admiral in command, were burned to death. (Men swimming from the Baleares can be seen in lower left corner of the picture.)

Right Whales Return (National Geographic, May 2009)

Photograph courtesy Brian Skerry/NGS

The distinctive calls of North Atlantic right whales have been detected off former killing grounds, a hopeful sign for the recovery of the rare species.


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090526-right-whales.html?source=email_inside_20090528&email=inside

LIVING MATHEMATICS: What would you like to know about your Universe? — The Second Poll ( Wednesday, April 08, 2009)

As part of our celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 we brought you the article What happened before the Big Bang?, in which John D. Barrow tells us all about the bubbly multiverse we apparantly live in. Here is the podcast of this interview, so you can listen to these strange ideas with your own ears.

THE ANCIENT WISDON (Geofffrey Ashe; British Library Cataloguing 1977)

"Years of detailed research into Celtic and Arthurian history have brought Geoffrey Ashe face to face with wider mysteries and conundrums that go to the heart opf human civilisation. This book is a quest for an original and universal knowledge -the Ancient Wisdom- nurtured by priests, shamans and occultists, claimed by scientists and historians since earliests times."

A medieval alchemists´ diagram showing the symbols of the Seven Metals within their corresponded planets.

Nicholas Roerich, artist and anthropologist, investigator of the legend of Shambhala.

The seven chakras of the Tantric scheme.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy.

One of the earliest representations of the Menorah

Artemis as Mistress of Animals, on a gold plaque from Rhodes, 7th century B.C.

A maze pattern on an Etruscan vase of the 7th century B.C., showing a labyrinth ritual, the Trojan Game (or maze dance.)

Hermes as teacher of the ´Hermetic´ system, with a symbolic seven-branched lamp.

SUFISM: al-Ghazali on "perfection" and his last words

"The moth which has become the lover of the flame, has the light of the aura as nourishment as long as it is still some distance from it. It is the portent of the dawning illumination which both calls and welcome him. But he must continue to fly until it catches him. When he has reached it, it is not up to him any more to move towards the flame, it si the flame that advances within him. The flame is then not his nourishment but he is nourishment for the flame. And that is the great mystery. One moment a fugitive, he then becomes his own beloved, since he is the flame. And that is his perfection. al-Ghazali (1058-1111 CE)"

Ghazali's last words

Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh: The Limits of Mathematics

BUT WAIT! Can everything be mathematized? Is there anything in the world which can never become the subject of a mathematical theory? Certainly in the physical world we do not believe there is anything un-mathematizable. There may be phenomena, such as turbulence, whose mathematical descriptions are so complex we are unable to analyze them or compute them in any reasonably effective sense. We are confident, however, that physics can encompass any physical phenomenon, and do so by means of a mathematical formalism, whether it be the old, familiar one of differential equations with initial and boundary conditions, or the up-to-date one of mappings between high-dimensional or infinite dimensional non-linear differentiable manifolds.

To find things that cannot be mathematized, then, we must look away from the physical world. What other world is there? If you are a sufficiently fanatical mechanical materialist you may say none. Period. Discussion concluded.

If you are more of a human being, you will be aware that there are such things as emotions, beliefs, attitudes, dreams, intentions, jealousy, envy, yearning, regret, longing, anger, compassion, and many others. These things -the inner world of human life- can never be mathematized.

True, some psychologists and sociologists have come around with their queationnaires and chi-square statistics, purporting to study the human mind quantitatively, but most such investigations are so remote from the target that the critic need hardly say, "Pooh!" They fall over of their own absurdity and pomposity.

I don´t mean to say that it is only the inner life of the individual that is beyond mathematcis. Evern more so is the "inner life" of society, of civilization itself, for example, literature, music, politics, the tides and currents of history, the stuff and nonsense that fill the daily newspaper. All this falls outside the computer, outside equations or inequalities. And a good thing, too.

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party (William Castleman)

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo

Isaac Asimov: The Nature of Science - III

Scientists share will all human beings the great and inalieable privilege of being, on occasion, wrong; of being egregiously wrong sometimes, even monumentally wrong. What is worse still, they are sometimes perversely and persinstently wrongheaded. And since that is true, science itself can be wrong in this aspect or that.

...With the possible wrongness of science firmly in mind, the student of science today is protected againts disaster. When an individual theory collapses, it need not carry with it one´s faith and hope and innocent joy. Once we learn to expect theories to collapse and to be supplanted by more useful generalizations, the collapsing theory becomes not the gray remnant of a broken today, but the herald of a new and brighter tomorrow.
...Third, by following the development of certain themes in science, we can experience the joy and excitement of the grand battle againts the unknown. The wrong turnings, the false clues, the elusive truth nearly captured half a century before its time, the unsung prophet, the false authority, the hidden assumption and cardboard syllogism, all add to the suspense of the struggle and make what we slowly gain through the study of the history of science worth more than what we might quickly gain by a narrow glance at the growing edge alone.
...To be sure, the practical thought migh arise: But would it not be better if we learned the truth at once? Would we not save time and effort?
...Yes, we might, but it is not as important to save time and effort as to enjoy the time and effort spent. Why else should a man rise before dawn and go out in the damp to fish, waiting happily all day for the occasional twitch of his lin when, without getting out of bed, he might have telephone the market and ordered all the fish he wanted?

Isaac Asimov: The Nature of Science - II

In fact, an overly exclusive concern with the growing edge can kill the best of science, for it is not on the growing edge itself that growth can best be seen. If the growing edge only is studied, science begins to seem a revelation without a history of development. It is Athena, emerging adult and armed from the forehead of Zeus, shouting her fearful war cry with her first breath.

How dare one aspire to add such a science? How can one ward of bitter disillusion when part of the structure turns out to be wrong. The perfection of the growing edge is meretricious while it exists, hideous when it cracks.

But add a dimension!

Take the halo of leaves and draw it together with branches that run into limbs that join to form a trunk that firmly enters the ground. It is the tree of science that you will then see, an object that is a living, growing, and permanent thing; not a flutter of leaves at the growing edge, insubstantial, untouchable, and dying with the frosts of fall.

Science gains reality when it is viewed not as an abstraction, but as the concrete sum of work of scientists, past and present, living and dead. Not a statement in science, not an observation, not a thought exist in itself. Each was ground out of the harsh effort of some man, and unless you know the man and the world in which he worked; th assumptions he accepted as truths; the concepts he considered untenable; you cannot fuly understand the statement or observation or thought.

Consider some of what the history of science teaches.

First, since science originated as the product of men and not as a revelation, it may develop further as the continuing product of men. If a scientific law is not an eternal truth but merely a generalization which, to some man or group of men, conveniently described a set of observations, then to some other man or group of men, another generalization might seem even more convenient. Once it is grasped that scientific truth is limited and not absolute, scientific truth becomes capable of further refinement. Until that is understood, scientific research has no meaning.

Second, it reveals some important truths about the humanity of scientists. Of all the stereotypes that have plagued men of science, surely one above all has wrought harm. Scientists can be pictured as "evil," "mad," "cold," "self-centered," "absentminded," even "square" and yet survive easily. Unfortunately, they are usually pictured as "right" and that can distort the picture of science past redemption.

ASTRONOMY: Sun, Moon and Stars (Agnes Giberne; London 1889)

Agnes Giberne (1845 - 1939) was a British author who wrote fiction with moral or religious themes for children and also books on astronomy for young people.

Giberne started publishing didactic novels and short stories with improving themes under her initials A.G. Later she used her full name for her fiction, for her works on astronomy and the natural world.

She was an amateur astronomer who worked on the committee setting up the British Astronomical Association and became a founder-member in 1890.

Donati's Comet, 1858.

Lunar Landscape, Sunset.

Total eclipse of sun, 1860, from Tarragona (Spain)

Eclipse of the Moon

Midnight in Saturn

Shower of meteors, 1866

Solar corona and prominences. As seen and measured by Professor Prichard and Mr. de la Rue at Cujuli, on the Spanish Pyrenees of 1860.

Isaac Asimov: The Nature of Science - I

A number of years ago, when I was a freshly appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.

I was sorry for a man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science-in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid het at the very center of the glow.

In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It as he, not I, who lived in the blaze.

I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the "growing edge"; the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by the advance was faded and dead.

But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning.

There is no discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. "If I have seen further than other men," said Isaac Newton, "it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."

And to learn that which goes before does not detract from the beauty of a scientific discovery but, rather adds to it; just as the gradual unfolding of a flower, as seen by time-lapse photography, is more wonderful that the mature flower itself, caught in stasis.

To be continued...

La Silla Telescopes Live.

La Silla, in the southern part of the Atacama desert, 600 km north of Santiago de Chile and at an altitude of 2400 metres is the home of ESO's original observing site.

Here ESO operates three major telescopes: the 3.6-m telescope, the New Technology Telescope (NTT), and the 2.2-m Max-Planck-ESO telescope. They are equipped with state of the art instruments either built completely by ESO or by external consortia, with substantial contribution by ESO.

La Silla Observatory is hosting regularly Visitor Instruments that are attached to a telescope, for the duration of a run of observation and then is removed from the telescope.

La Silla also hosts national telescopes, such as the 1.2-m Swiss Telescope and the 1.5-m Danish Telescope.

http://www.ls.eso.org/lasilla/dimm/lasc/

Graham Hancock - Supernatural Pt.1

Researcher and author Graham Hancock discussed how humanity received a jump start some 40,000 years ago, when our ancestors took psychoactive plants and had contacts with non-terrestrial beings who served as teachers. Their visions and encounters were depicted on cave paintings, he said. The Amazonian hallucinogenic brew known as ayahuasca is being used today, and its active ingredient DMT, is naturally made in the human pineal gland. People who have spontaneous visions may produce higher levels of this chemical in their bodies, he noted.

In Dr. Rick Strassman's experimental studies of DMT, users reported experiences similar to alien abduction scenarios, Hancock reported. In fact, aliens, fairies, and spirit beings may all be the same thing, just construed differently based on cultural frameworks, Hancock suggested. He argued that hallucinogens such as ayahuasca should be made legal, as they help to advance the freedom of consciousness.

Hancock touched on some of his other areas of research, detailing how a lost civilization predating the Egyptians, created the megalithic structures on the Giza Plateau. This civilization was destroyed in a global cataclysm-- something that we may face in our own time as part of a recurring cycle of destruction, he warned. The ancient Mayans created a calendar that is strikingly accurate, more so than the Gregorian one we use today, he added.

THE LUNAR REPUBLIC SOCIETY (Official Website of the Moon)

Rupert Murdoch: "Current days of free internet will soon be over" (The Guardian; Thursday 7 May 2009)

Rupert ­Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation's newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a ­"malfunctioning" business model.

Encouraged by booming online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal, the billionaire media mogul last night said that papers were going through an "epochal" debate over whether to charge. "That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal's experience," he said.

Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, he replied: "We're absolutely looking at that." Taking questions on a conference call with reporters and analysts, he said that moves could begin "within the next 12 months‚" adding: "The current days of the

internet will soon be over."

Plunging earnings from newspapers led the way downwards as News Corporation's quarterly operating profits slumped by 47% to $755m, although exceptional gains on sale of assets boosted bottom-line pretax profits to $1.7bn, in line with last year's figure.

MAIL: Meanwhile, somewhere in the South Pacific...

(*) I received a mail with the enclosed pics yesterday evening: