Welcome to the world of Pollyanna

  Hi everyone,
this is the week of Tu B'Shvat, the Jewish holiday of nature.  In Israel it is a day for tree planting and going out to enjoy nature with which no one can argue.  In the Talmud it is mentioned as the New Year of fruit tithes.  The idea was that a date in the winter serves as a way of separating the fruits of last year from the fruits of the coming year.  |In medieval times, the Kabbalists devised a seder of fruits and wine associated with the spheres of heaven and earth and the types of people who inhabit them.  I have participated many times in such a seder as conducted by our former Rabbi.  In the 20th century it was  adopted by the Zionist movement and the JNF as a tree and nature day and now it is the central holiday of the Green Movement.  So enjoy the great outdoors and the sweet fruits which which our land is blessed.

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This week also marks the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. which is celebrated throughout the US.  It coincides more or less with the reading in synagogue of the story of the Exodus from Egypt and the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery.  I once spoke in synagogue on the fact that he is not only analogous to Moses, but also to the Hebrew midwives, Shifra and Pu'a who disobeyed the racist orders of Pharaoh and did not kill the male infants.  Civil disobedience at great risk when standing up for moral principles is a great virtue.  Dante wrote that there is a special place in hell for those who remain silent during times of moral crisis.  King wrote that the evil of the bad is less distressing than the indifference of the good.  His legacy is worthy of our attention today.

This week there is an event in Prague honoring Sir Nicholas Winton now aged 101 who rescued hundreds of Jewish children in 1938,   He truely deserves to be considered among the righteous of the nations of the Earth.  So let us praise these great people who set an example for all of us.

Round and Round They Go  The fact that stars appear to be fixed in their positions in the night sky is partly the result of our relatively short life spans. All stars are in motion, most of them imperceptibly, but over time and with increasingly sophisticated observational tools it has become possible to map just where and how fast the stars are moving. Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn, born 160 years ago this week, devoted considerable effort to measuring the proper motion of stars, and he found that most were not traveling randomly, as had been thought, but were heading in one of two opposing directions. Kapteyn’s analysis provided some of the earliest evidence for the rotation of our galaxy. Seen here is NGC 2903, a rotating barred spiral galaxy slightly smaller than our own, 30 million light-years away.
Image credit: R. Jay GaBany / www.cosmotography.com

In the spirit of marking birthdays and holidays, I am including a link to the calendar blog, The Year in Space  that contains many interesting events and anniversaries, such as the above picture in memory of Jacobus Kapteyn.  If you like it  or not, please comment.  If you like it, I will include it every week.  I am sure the bloggers will not mind.

Walking down memory lane  is something that we all like to do.  It is of interest that the walk is enhanced by the ongoing birth of new neurons in our brains.  This is encouraging for those of us who are getting on in years and would like our minds to stay with us as long as possible.  Contrary to what my daughter Zohar says, I have not given up on my mind yet.  She said this in the context of the fact that my late wife was a psychologist and my partner now is a physician, i.e. now that I have given up on my mind I now have a doctor around to look after what is left.  Some of you may agree with her, but I am still trying.

A supercluster of galaxies as it appears in Planck data (l) and in XMM data (r). Such structures contain hundreds of billions of suns

The Planck Space Telescope is revolutionizing our view of the universe.  I would like to share some of these mind-boggling discoveries with you.   It has found dozens of huge clusters of galaxies, the largest structures ever found in the universe. Its findings in the microwave spectrum where it sees the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) are confirmed by the X-ray observations of the Newton satellite shown on the right of the figure. The CMB is the radiation left over from the Big Bang that created our universe. I could go on about this forever, but instead will refer you to a BBC science report that contains links to other sources. 
Here is a nice shot of the universe gathered by Planck  over a year of observing.

Planck's view of the entire sky: Ultimately, scientists must remove all the foreground "noise" (blue) to get a clear view of the CMB (magenta and yellow)

 It is of interest to look back in time at the Big Bang and indeed what has been found is that there must be more out there than we can see, the so-called dark matter and dark energy, needed to account for the expansion of the universe.  I refer you to an interesting article in the New York Times science section.
Thanks to Richard for pointing it out.

In Israel we  are looking to desalinization to resolve our water crisis.  Now doubts have been raised about how eco-friendly the process is and what might be the hidden costs.  Not only is the energy involved considerable, it can have ecological effects, such as harming marine life.  If it focuses on brackish ground water, then there may be seismological problems.  For a review of this complex issue I recommend this article in Slate magazine.

 Congratulations to  the author IanMcEwan

on the occasion of his winning the Jerusalem prize.  I enjoyed both Atonement and Amsterdam and consider it a good choice.

Let us wind up with Andy Borowitz  and Gene Weingarten Below the Beltway .

Really great music to be taken away from us

 

Here comes Pollyanna again-January 7, 2011

Welcome to the first Pollyanna blog of 2011.  We Jews get to celebrate New Years Day twice, one in synagogue and once wherever having fun.

This has not been a week that Pollyanna would have enjoyed in Israel or around the world.  We are hearing about floods in Australia,  assassination  of a liberal politician in Pakistan and the passage of fascist legislation in Israel.   I would like to wish a Merry Christmas to our friends who observe the Orthodox calendar, especially the Copts in Egypt who suffered a terrible terrorist attack on their church in Alexandria last week.

Nevertheless, I shall try to find some good things to share with you.  We can start with something quite amusing:

THE VILLAGE IDIOTS
Some of you may recall that serious news media in Saudi Arabia picked up on an Andy Borowitz satire in which he claimed that Obama was willing to admit to the Republicans that he was a Muslim and that his birth place was negotiable, possibly in the mid-Atlantic in return for the odd vote in the House of Representatives..  The Saudis took it seriously and trumpeted that indeed Obama was one of the Faith.  This week they cemented their claim to be the village idiots of the Middle East with the story of an espionage vulture used by Israel to spy upon them.


The poor griffin vulture (an endangered species) was carrying a GPS device placed on it by Israeli zoologists to track its migration pattern.  This competes very well with Egyptian claims that the shark of Sharm el Sheik had been sent by the Mossad to harm the Egyptian tourist industry.  Of course, since the Mossad does not own sharks, it must have borrowed it from Steven Spielberg, which of course makes it a loan shark.  (adapted from a bad pun by Aaron Barnes).  If there was only one shark, it also was a lone shark.  Sorry about that...
BTW, I was told once by an Amnesty International colleague from Norway that, according to Swedish TV, the Norwegians are the descendants of the village idiots of the Mediterranean.  The proof lies in the fact that when the ice sheets receded they followed them.  I have never figured out what this implies about the Swedes, but we have enough troubles of our own without concerning ourselves with the internal politics of Scandinavia.
CHEMISTRY NEWS
January 1, 2011, ushers in the International Year of Chemistry. The American Chemical Society has compiled on online calendar that points to landmark events and trivia to celebrate on roughly 250 days, if you’re so inclined.  Some of the events are more earth shaking than others, but this is  chemistry not seismology...
Another piece of news from the Chemistry Department is the updating of the format of the periodic table to reflect the existence of isotopes and to show the range of masses of each element found in nature.

SOCCER FOR PEACE
Before we go on to the science fun, let me report on a  soccer tournament  in Jerusalem 
that brought together Jewish and Arab children.

  It will not make peace in the Middle East but at least a few kids learned that the other is not a demon.

HOT STUFF

As a space plasma physicist, I have long shared the frustration of not understanding why the solar corona is several hundred  times hotter than the surface of the Sun.  Judy (thank you) pointed out a recent publication that indicates that we might have a handle on it and that instead of the magnetohydrodynamic waves whose absorption never provided a satisfactory answer in terms of energy, it may be in the spicules.  These wispy filaments coming out appear to have enough energy to drive the heating.  So let us salute Bart De Pontieu for this exciting result.  For details go to Physics World  or to Scientific American..  For those with library access, the paper was published in Science, January 7.
BIOPHYSICS MAKES THE DIFFERENCE

Physicists are mapping out how T cells (yellow) and other immune players respond to threats like viruses (blue).

 Biologists have long struggled to figure out how the immune system protects us from disease and infection.  Until recently the details have remained a mystery.  Now the introduction of statistical physics to model the interactions has shed light on the conundrum.  I am linking to a  report on recent progress.   It is somewhat long and detailed, but IMHO well worth the read.  I found it fascinating.

NEW RESULTS IN PALEONTOLOGY
I quote here  a press release from Tel Aviv University about new findings in Israel that may shake up our view of the earliest history of our species.   For those of you who have library access to Nature News  I append a link to an interview with the researchers  that will also show some of the controversial aspects of the discovery and its interpretation.

The Qesem Cave site in Israel has yielded ancient human teeth with controversial implications.

Evidence was discovered pointing to the existence of modern man (Homo sapiens) in Israel as early as 400,000 years ago
This is the earliest evidence for the existence of modern man anywhere in the world : Up to now remains have been found of modern man from around 200,000 years ago only in Africa, and the accepted approach has been that modern man originated on that continent.
Researchers from Tel Aviv University have uncovered finds that indicate the existence of modern man (Homo sapiens) in Israel as early as about 400,000 years ago. This is the earliest evidence for the existence of modern man anywhere in the world. The findings were discovered in the Qesem Cave, a pre-historic site located near Rosh Ha’ayin that was uncovered in 2000, and are now being published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Researchers Prof. Avi Gopher and Dr. Ran Barkai of the Institute of Archaeology, who run the excavations at the Qesem Cave, and Prof. Israel Hershkowitz of the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine, together with an international team of scientists performed a morphological analysis on eight human teeth found in the Qesem Cave.
The detailed morphological analysis of the teeth, which included CT scans and X-rays, indicates that the size and shape of the teeth are very similar to those of modern man, early findings of which were previously discovered dating back only 200,000 years on the African continent. The teeth found in the Qesem Cave are very similar to evidence of modern man from Israel, dated to around 100,000 years ago, discovered in the Skhul Cave in the Carmel and Qafzeh Cave in the Lower Galilee near Nazareth.
Qesem Cave is dated to the period between 400,000 and 200,000 years BP (before the present) and archaeologists working there believe that the findings indicate significant changes in the behavior of ancient man. This period of time was crucial in the history of mankind from cultural and biological perspectives, and the fact that teeth of modern man were discovered indicates that these changes are apparently related to evolutionary changes taking place at that time.
Prof. Avi Gopher and Dr. Ran Barkai noted that the findings that characterize the culture of those who dwelled in the Qesem Cave, such as the systematic production of flint blades, the habitual use of fire, evidence of hunting, cutting and sharing of animal meat, mining raw materials to produce flint tools from subsurface sources and much more, reinforce the hypothesis that this was, in fact, innovative and pioneering behavior that may correspond with the appearance of modern man.
According to researchers, the discoveries made in the Qesem Cave may change the perception that has been widely accepted to date, according to which modern man originated on the continent of Africa. In recent years archaeological evidence and human skeletons have been discovered in Spain and China that are liable to undermine this perception, but the findings now uncovered at Qesem Cave are significant and invaluable, and their early age is undoubtedly an extraordinary archaeological discovery. Excavations at Qesem Cave continue and the researchers hope to uncover additional finds that will enable them to confirm the findings published up to now and to enhance our understanding of the evolution of mankind, and especially the appearance of modern man.



FEMALE TORAH SCRIBES

Last month we (YandA) visited the Jewish Museum in San Francisco where we saw a video of the work of a female Torah scribe.  We reported on it in our YandA travel blog. which I invite you to visit.  Now we have a report on another female Torah scribe who is fighting against male chauvinism while remaining within the Orthodox fold.  Let us all salute her.

ENGLISH AS SHE IS SPOKE AND WROTE IN ISRAEL

There is a widespread myth that educated Israelis speak and write English fluently. Over the years as a
Tel Aviv University faculty member I encountered countless counter examples. I taught a course in
scientific writing in English for Ph.D. students and while some of them were reasonably competent in the language, I turned down most of the applicants for the course. I might add that the writing skills of
most of them in Hebrew were not much better since the techniques that are (were?) taught in schools in
the US are absent in the local school curriculum. Even if we leave aside the total inability to come to
terms with perfect tenses and other mysteries of the universe, far too often we are called upon to read
something that is nearly incomprehensible. As an example, I append a weather forecast   that could make
you both laugh and cry. I wonder if it was done by a computer. For example, why would Friday have more than one afternoon and "Tomorrow the winds have changed..." is priceless. This site appears to be a private meteorological company and I wonder if anyone paid for this forecast. Someone named Boaz Dayan has his name on it. He also has a Facebook link so I suggest you all go there and castigate him for the terrible English that he writes. 

Of course I am not going to send you off without a Gene Weingarten Below the Beltway comment.

Have a nice week everyone.  I apologize for some of the format irregularities.  Sometimes this blogger software seems to have a mind of its own.

Pollyanna is back, December 25, 2010

Xmas Day 2010 Happy New Year to all.
It has been a long time since I last blogged for Pollyanna and
I hope you enjoyed the respite. We are approaching the end of
this disgusting year and I think this is a good time to return
to the blogosphere with some optimism..  We can start with some heavenly delights from Bosch.

In the spirit of optimism as the New Year approaches, I would like to call your attention to the many apocalyptic predictions made over the centuries that the end of the world was at hand.    Obviously that has not happened so let us all keep a stiff upper lip and slog on.  In my other blog, I detail the ghastly things that happen.  Let us here concentrate on some good things.
Since the world has not ended, it is interesting to note that it may have ended and rebooted many times in the past and the universe as we know it is just one in a series of Big Bangs

 Dark circles indicate regions in space where the cosmic microwave background has temperature variations that are lower than average. The features hint that the universe was born long before the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago and had undergone myriad cycles of birth and death before that time. .  This is a proposed interpretation of radio astronomy data that I find intriguing.  The jury is still out on this hypothesis, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, the Large Hadron Collider has been making little bangs with interesting results.  There have been the usual crackpot rants that this will make a black hole and devour the universe.   Instead we are getting exciting results including trapped antihydrogen.  Physicists at CERN have taken a big step towards making the first spectroscopic measurements on a beam of antihydrogen atoms. The antihydrogen atoms, which consist of an antielectron orbiting an antiproton, were made by members of the lab's ASACUSA group. The beams could be used to carry out the first detailed studies of the energy levels in antihydrogen. The antihydrogen is on the cusp.  For details of this fascinating result, go to the blog at Physics World.

I am proud to know two people who are involved in this research, Katia Gomboroff and Jon Wurtele.

Apropos black holes, a laboratory analogue has been developed by a Canadian group using nothing more exotic than water.  It generates a white hole, i.e. something that excludes rather than sucks in and can provide an acoustic analogue to Hawking radiation that is supposed to be emitted by black hole escapees.  The real radiation from astrophysical black holes is too weak to detect at cosmic distances, which makes the analogues important.

A black hole escapee Particle-antiparticle pairs pop in and out of existence at a black hole’s edge. If one particle falls in, the other can fly away as Hawking radiation   

Back to astronomy and let us welcome a possible new guest in our galaxy.  An exoplanet orbiting a star that entered our Milky Way from another galaxy has been detected by astronomers.  This Jupiter-like planet is unusual because it is orbiting a star nearing the end of its life and could be about to be engulfed by it.   Over the last 15 years, astronomers have detected nearly 500 planets orbiting stars in our cosmic neighborhood, but none outside our Milky Way has been confirmed.

Visible light view of the star

 For details go to this interesting article.

Odd things are happening in physics, in the cosmos and in the lab.  One of the weirdest set of phenomena is associated with entanglement and totally counter intuitive things in modern quantum physics.  I refer anyone interested to the November 20 Science News which devotes a section to articles on spooky topics.

Let us wind up with something exciting from biology.  It is claimed that bacteria found in Mono Lake in California substitute arsenic for phosphorus in their complement of elements necessary for life along with carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and sulfur. 

The researcher in action.

NASA made a big noise about it but since then the research and its interpretation have encountered criticism in the scientific literature.  Again, we shall wait and see.. 

Let us wind up with some Walter Mitty fantasy  from our hero Gene Weingarten.  Pocketa peep....

Here comes Pollyanna again-October 15, 2010

This time we are bringing out the blogs on  Friday because it is World Bloggers Day.
I want to refer you to the nasty blog because it has a long post dealing with water.  The bloggers of the world chose water  as this year's topic.  I do not want to repeat the long rant I put there about access to clean water as a human right, but would like to ask you to read it.
Of course, the most Pollyanna event one might think of happened before our eyes as 33 trapped Chilean miners were brought to the surface after 69 days underground.  I have incredible admiration for these men who managed to survive and get along with one another during this terrible time of burial.  I also salute the Chilean engineers and technicians who brought them up.  It is all a tribute to the human spirit.
This is Nobel Prize season.  The Peace Prize is dealt with on the other blog as well because it involves a major human rights issue.  We will start here with the  prize for medicine given to the man who pioneered in vitro fertilization and enabled countless childless couple to become parents.   Cheers for Dr. Edwards!

The prize of physics went to the developers of graphene which is a fantastic form of carbon, one atom thick that may yet revolutionize technology.  Kudos to Drs. Drs. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, for brilliant work.  Just for the record, Andre Geim was involved in an Ignobel prize  project ten years ago, the levitation of frogs by magnetic fields. .

The literature prize went to a Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa  who is another example of a dissident being recognized more abroad than at home. 

Our Neanderthal cousins have long had a bad press.  It is nice to hear that anthropologists are rethinking the stereotype and are drawing different conclusions.  The Neanderthals were apparently capable of making adjustments to environmental changes without the example of modern humans.

Artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis crafted this re-creation of a Neanderthal woman whose subspecies roamed Eurasia for almost 200,000 years. (Joe Mcnally/getty Images) 

 

New research is looking into the cerebral means of choosing right or left, albeit not in politics.  It seems that our brains have mechanisms for choosing which hand we use for a given task.

Recently I watched a television program featuring Steven Hawking talking about the universe.  He was fascinating and brilliant and laid out what we must do in order to survive in the long term, i.e. time scale much greater than the 5 billion years we have left to enjoy our Sun and Solar System.  He is a practicing atheist whereas Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal who has just completed a term as President of the Royal Society believes in a peaceful coexistence between science and religion.  He gave an interview that is of interest.
Let us wind down with a new take on evolution from Andy Borowitz    
I also owe you two does of Below the Beltway of Gene Weingarten.  In one of them our hero tries his hand at doggerel poetry  and in another he goes in for a bit of philosophy about mortality 
in a cemetery that is respectfully used as a canine latrine.

a

Moadim L'Simcha, Happy Holidays and some fun

SUCCOT AND SIMHAT TORAH
We are reaching the end of the fall Jewish Holiday season with  Succot and Simhat Torah
Succot  is a holiday on which we are commanded by God to be happy and
we do our best. We eat in tabernacles, little huts designed to
remind us of how our ancestors in our mythic history lived in
huts in the desert.

This week is marked by people traveling
around, camping, enjoying nature, all very nice. Thursday we
have the holiday of the Eighth Day, which here in Israel
coincides with Simhat Torah, the rejoicing of the completion of
the annual cycle of reading the Torah in the synagogue.
Actually in our little Reform synagogue we read the Torah in
three years, a third of each weekly portion each week. In any
case, people will dance with the scrolls and children will wave
flags.

The flags have pictures of little boys carrying Torah
scrolls. My granddaughter Maya asked a rabbi why there are no girls carrying scrolls. I doubt that she got a satisfactory answer.

The strip Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal to which Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy introduced me has a posting  starring him on how to debate with creationists, i.e. do not even try. One should never give them the legitimacy of sharing a platform. I get calls occasionally from local community TV stations to appear with Gaists, astrologers or creationists and I always refuse. This is why:
you should never appear with them

If any of you worry that our atheist friends are left out of all
the fun,  rest assured.   The strip Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal to which Phil Plait
of Bad Astronomy introduced me has good news about their faith.
The strip in general is funny and to the point, such as this
comment on how scientists can raise money to fund their labs.
It is more or less how we write proposals.

OK, enough fooling around and let us get on to the serious
stuff that Polyanna likes such as science and good news. Of
course, science can provide disturbing news as well such as the
forthcoming solar maximum in 2012-13 that should provide us
with some space pyrotechnics that will be beautiful but also
destructive. The Sun has an eleven year cycle in its activity
and during most of this decade we have been going through a
deep minimum which has been a bounty for solar physicists who
are busy learning more and more about our local star. The next
maximum will have fewer than usual sunspots, but they will be
more intense than usual and the flares caused by their merging
(they come in pairs of opposite magnetic polarity) will be

Active Sun

ferocious. Such events have happened in the past, in 1859 when
telegraphy was knocked out and 1921 when radio communications
were affected,
Now we have much more sensitive electronic and
digital infrastructure and things will be tough. For detail
look at this report

and a bit more from NASA

DISMAL PLACES TO LIVE

It appears that a magazine called Urban Realm that deals with
architecture awards a prize called the Carbuncle Award to a
town designated as the most dismal place to live in all of
Scotland. This year's "winner" was John o'Groats which declined

the Plook on the Plinth, but the runner up Denny claimed it
with eagerness.  I wonder at the
inertia that causes people to stay in such places, but on the
other hand, all the nice places would be overcrowded if all
fled the plooks. I wonder what Pollyanna would have said about
these places. BTW, I recommend a google search for plook.

WATER ANYONE?

The existence of water on the primordial Earth has been
attributed to comets that bombarded it. Not astronomers have
found the minerals that form in the presence of liquid water in
the dusty disks surrounding young stars. This can provide a
clue as to how the phyllosilcates came to Earth. Science News
also gave the article a catchy title.
In two weeks, I shall participate on my other blog in the WATER DAY of the world blogger
community whose subject this year is water.
 ALMOST A STEALTH BOMBER
 In WWII near the end the Germans came close to putting up an
 aircraft that might have changed the course of the war.  It is
 both frightening and  fascinating to read about it now.
 They also had a jet fighter and bomber of conventional design,
 but by the time there were ready to go into production Germany
 had run out of pilots to fly them and could not train them
 fast enough.  In general, fuel and other resources ran out and
 the Reich collapsed, thank God.  Thanks to Yoav for calling
 this story to my attention.



In the last blog I complained, with documentation, about the
prevalence of smoking in public places in Israel. It appears
that the prohibition if enforced properly can have major
positive public health effects. In Scotland the incidence of
asthma among children has decreased in the wake of the 
smoking ban

A MAGIC HAND Some of us were at some stage in our lives faithful readers of a little magazine called
MAD. It features great political satire and a character called Alfred E. Neuman--of course, just like
the samizdat, but in America out in the open, it was a mostly Jewish send up of the establishment of the
day. One of the greatest cartoonists of MAD was Al Jaffee, still around at 90. A  biography of his mad
mad life has just been published. I append a review  from Forward. I intend to get the
book.

JUPITER IS NEAR or relatively so. We are having an opposition and since the orbits of both Earth and
Jupiter are slightly eccentric, the distances can vary.. This is as close as we have been since 1951 or
will be until 2022; Read all about it and go outside after sunset and gaze at the eastern sky. With
binoculars you might get a glimpse of Uranus as well.

ODDITIES OF NATURE

Each blog I try to dig up something in science that challenges
conventional and received wisdom. Today it is the barium  that
is located in a star that has no business containing it because
the star is too old. I admire the people who do the analysis to
come up with results that that make scientists scratch their
heads and go back to the proverbial drawing board. Indeed, the
issues of the fine structure constant and radioactive decay
rate variation are still up in the air and confirmation is
still pending. On the other hand, careful isotope analysis with a
very sophisticated instrument
of an old star gives a solid result that has to be explained and
indeed some explanations are coming up.


WE LOVE CHOCOLATE!
It is great news that the genome of
chocolate has been mapped and we addicts can feel at home. It
is indeed not a trivial matter and it is hoped that the
information gleaned will be useful for protection of the cacao
trees and helpful to the economic well being of the farmers in
the Third World who produce it.

This blog has become too long and perhaps I should go back to
weekly posting. Comments are invited. In the meantime, join a
political protest that Pollyanna would have liked--Andy
 Borowitz has the details. Gene
Weingarten has some sad words on the demise of English. He
should come to Israel where Hebrew after being a dead language
for 2,000 years was resurrected for a while and has died again,
alas.

Let us close with a 130 year old picture, the first taken
of the Orion Nebula.

Pollyanna prepares for Yom Kippur

Ashkenazi Jews at Yom Kippur in 19th century Central Europe from a painting by Gottlieb.

Yom Kippur is coming up and traditionally Jews go to synagogue, vid. this image and think about their actions during the past year.  This shows a 19th synagogue in Europe.  There is another tradition that has grown up in Israel amongst those who do not participate in the religious aspects of the holiday.  Since no one drives on this day except for ambulance and fire truck drivers, the highways are empty and are filled with bicycle riders.  Here is a shot of the Ayalon Freeway in Tel Aviv near the crossing of the Yarkon River.
This is also a form of introspection.
Thanks to Hadass for a very appropriate Rosh Hashana card:

OK, that is as much as I am going to copy from the nasty blog.  You may read my comments on my personal Yom Kippur   there if you wish.

PROUD PAPA

 

As most of you know, my daughter Zohar is a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Haifa University where she researches brain function and cognition.  A few years ago she did some work on the cognitive burden of learning to read Arabic and the research has now generated a major splash.  As you may imagine, I am extremely proud of her. For details of the research, I refer you to Science Daily  which is one of the many media outlets that picked up on the story.  You can find the original articles by means of Google Scholar.

BUGS MAKE CHOICES
Have you ever walked in the woods in the Northland with a partner and wondered why the mosquitoes prefer you to her?  Of course DEET puts them off and if both of you are sprayed then it should not put you off one another.  Now our friendly folks of biology have delved into the issue and have come up with what the little critters do to make their choice of whom to bite.   It appears that they have olfactory sensors that enable them to spot the potential victim. as described in this somewhat humorous but quite informative article.   For the record, I am a very tasty host and when I am around Yosefa gets off.  Sexism?

Before heading off to the world of astronomy, here again is something new of biological interest.  It appears that one of the well established theories of how evolution works, kin selection,

Honeybees, a big happy family

has come under attack and the community is in a furor, which is of course good for science.  As a biology layman, I would not care to comment one way or the other, but the issue is most interesting.

A PHYSICAL ODDITY
These days many strange things come up in physics and established concepts are challenged very often.  One concept with which we have all grown up is that radioactive decay rates are constant.  Now some data have come up that would, if validated, indicate otherwise and possibly involve previously unknown particles from the Sun.  One of the people connected with the strange story is an old colleague of mine, Peter Sturrock a solar physicist  from Stanford, also an emeritus now.

Peter came into this story by accident, but is now quite engrossed.  It has to do with radioactive dating by  anthropologists and it may lead to a revolution in physics.  It also may lead nowhere if the results turn out to be an artifact of data analysis.  Stay tuned!

While we are into the possible lack of constancy of the constants of physics,  we must consider the fate of another pillar--the fine structure constant.  It is essential that it be constant if physics is to be the same in the entire universe.  Now there are some results that appear to indicate otherwise.
Naturally the result is controversial and also may be related to errors in data analysis.  Much more study is required before the community will accept this phenomenon as real.

ASTRONOMY CAN BE JUST AS WEIRD
  We are told that diamonds are forever, which is probably true since the theory of proton decay has not been verified.
   Now a star has been discovered with  a mass of a bit less than that of the Sun and it is just one huge chunk of compressed carbon, i.e. a diamond of about 10^33 carats.  Astronomers have decided to call the star "Lucy" after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
  The BBC has details of the discovery.

We have been having company.  Two small asteroids flew between the Earth and the Moon within hours of each other on September 8.  It may sound a bit uncomfortable, but this happens all the time.
and there are dedicated telescopes and cameras on asteroid patrol.  The media made more of it than the asteroid research community did.

CASSINI PHOTOGRAPHS DIONE--COOL AT SATURN

I find the new images of Dione, a satellite of Saturn that has undergone eons of meteorite and asteroid bombardment, to be more interesting.  In the stellar world, we have something quite surprising to the professionals, gamma rays from a garden variety nova, i.e. a small exploding star.  These highly energetic rays have always been associated with supernovae, the big guys that really whack the galaxy. A recent discovery has shown that nature can always surprise us.  It is also a sign of our times that new discoveries of this type, which are impossible from the ground, are made by telescopes in space and we regard that as commonplace.
I hope I have not bored anyone with this stuff which is what helps to keep me happy and full of hope in this non-Pollyanna world.  Let us wind up with Andy Borowitz and Gene Weingarten to introduce a lighter element
 

Pollyanna is back from her happy vacation, September 1, 2010

 

שנה טובה

عيد  سعيد

Happy Holidays Rosh Hashana and Eid to all who celebrate at this time of year.

Yes, we are back with Pollyanna here and the bad guy over there.

We can start with a five part series from the NYTimes that we found of interest and we hope you do as well.  I will not spoil your enjoyment by commenting.  It indeed gives much food for thought.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Now that you have spent some of your precious time reading the above, we can go on to keep you happy and out of mischief.  Before that, however, I am going to include a beef and rant here about something that many of us dislike and suffer--passive smoking.  Even Pollyanna would not be glad about this.  In Israel, it is out of hand in too many places.  Yes, we have more or less cleaned out universities and some restaurants, but if you want to hear good jazz you usually have to put up with poisoning by your neighbors.  In Germany, smoking has been outlawed on railway ramps and in the US in stadia.  Here you are invited cordially to choke.  For a documented rant I refer you to this article in the Jerusalem Post.

Field Medal:

For the first time ever an Israeli mathematician has been awarded the prestigious Field Medal.  Congratulations of all the medalists.  The father of the Israeli winner was a classmate of mine, i.e. he studied math while I studied physics at the Hebrew University in the late 1950's and early 1960's.  Eilon Lindenstrauss and the Israeli science Nobelists are the products of an education system that is no more.  In the interest of egalitarianism, the governments of the last few decades have systematically degraded the level of education  in the country.  There is, however, some hope that this trend may be about to be reversed.  

Let us all hope this is true and that things will improve for the next generation of children growing up in our country.
A BIKE RIDE
I would like to share a few thoughts of the woman who took some Palestinian girls for a fun day in Tel Aviv.  This is not political, just some nice thinking. and maybe a hope for our future.

PTSD

 There has been much discussion about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.   There are new studies that indicate that this is an overused diagnosis.  I do not claim to be anything of an expert, but I am posting this in the hope that someone may find this article interesting and comment.

Missing matter can be a problem if you are trying to manage a universe.  The search for it can take you to some very strange places and you never know what you might find.   Let us wish them good luck in their search.

PAKISTAN FLOODS
The floods in Pakistan have killed over a thousand people and displaced millions.  Please take a minute, open your heart and pocket to help these victims.

For those of us who like science fiction (not scientific fiction), Ray Bradbury has long been an iconic figure.  He just had a  birthday (90) and it was marked by the Planetary Society and people from around the world.  I join in the good wishes to someone who has given me a great deal of pleasure over the years.

BEAR IN JAR

We all remember the Winnie the Poo story  of how our little bear friend got his head stuck in a jar of "hunny" and had trouble getting it out.  We have a story of such a case from the real world and it is worth a read.

Little Jarhead from Florida would have died of starvation if the plastic jar into which  he had poked his silly little head  had not been removed.  The video is interesting as well.  Kudos to the good people who saved his life.

Steven Hawking has come out with a warning that we soon will not have a planet on which to live.  Indeed we have overpopulated it, exploited it and polluted it.  His solution to the problem is very drastic, i.e. get out of here, but his point is well taken that we are in serious danger of extinction.  I know Pollyanna would not agree, but even on this blog we need to face reality.

Andy Borowitz  is a worthy competitor to Gene Weingarten so I will give you both.