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April 22: international Earth Day, not today?

Today, April 22, Earth Day is celebrated mainly in the US. The day originates in the early 70s as a public demonstration of popular political support for an environmental agenda and was organized for the first time in 1970. The day’s date is somewhat arbitrary but approximates Arbor Day. Equinoctial Earth Day is celebrated in most countries on the day that the sun passes the equator and night has equal length as day. The vernal equinox (or spring equinox) marks the beginning of astronomical spring. It occurs around 20 March in the Northern Hemisphere, and around 23 September in the Southern Hemisphere. With science taking the role of religion as the leading guide in Truth and the Enlightment of Mankind the celebration of the beginning of Spring has only folkloristic meaning. And with a global environment being under threat of the uncontrolled and gratuitous dumping of industrial waste, today’s Earth Day is of greater importance than the equinoctial celebration. Allow a minute of your time and breathe in some information on the beauty and diversity of the planet at the links below. Links: World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) National Audubon Society The Nature Conservancy National Arbor Day Foundation United Nations Environment Program Earth Day – US Government Portal
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Another look at Vega

Dean Peterson from the Stony Brook Astron Group published a paper in Nature on the calibrator star Vega. He was able to show convincingly that Vega is, contrary to what was thought so far, a rapidly rotating star that is visible at a 5 degree pole-on angle. His paper Vega is a rapidly rotating star was published in Volume 440 of Nature, 13 April 2006.
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11-16 April, 2006 – Milad un Nabi: Birthday of the Prophet (pbuh)

Part of the Muslim community will celebrate the birthday of the prophet Muhammed, according to tradition on 12th of Rabi’-ul-Awwal of the lunar calendar, which in 2006 falls on April 11 for Sunni and April 16 for Shia. While some believers see the Mawlid or Milad (Arabic has no written vowels) as a modern addition to Islam, the tradition found its origin in the 13th century, others will commemorate the birth of the ‘Arab Jesus’ extensively. Little factual is known from primary sources about the birth of Muhammed. The first account of his birth is a biography of ibn Ishaq. Ibn Ishaq wrote his biography about one hundred years afterMuhammed’s death, and his work we only know through quotes of two other historians who lived another hundred years later. Ibn Ishaq wrote his biography under the auspicien of the Abassid caliph of Baghdad Mansur, therefor the biography may be regarded as a predominantly Sunni document. Resources: - Wikipedia – Islam
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Massachusetts House approves Health Care for All Act

The Massachusetts Legislature has passed with overwhelming majority a new bill that obliges all inhabitants of the state to get a health care insurance plan. The Jurist website of the School of Law at the University of Pittsburgh features a brief explanation of new bill. The full Text of Bill (House, No. 4850) is published on the Massachusetts government portal. The advocate group Health Care for All has been leading the charge for this new bill. While the concerned conservatives of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation are more concerned with their own bank account than with the state of the public’s health. The New England Economic Partnership is a non-partisan think-thank for the New England region. The [public@mindxp.com / mindxp] Boston Globe – Rally ’round the … employer assessment features news and information for the Boston region.
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The Death of Literature
Death in literature is an elementary metaphor, as the fear of death is one of our Id’s primal impulses, together with the sexual urge to reproduce and overcome it. The resurrection of our mind is the symbol for the cycle of life, the seasons, birth and death, crucifixion and resurrection, destruction and creation, night and day, there’s probably nothing more universal, nothing more primal than death and life. The article in the Guardian In theory: the death of literature is a great short essay that analyzes the perspective of the Romantics on death in literature as an elementary original perspective that lays at the root of the birth of the modern novel. It’s a very original view with lots of references in high overview, which makes it easy to make any argument, but it’s convincing until midway when the argument becomes an old man’s lamentation on modern times. Here is where the author Andrew Gallix the other essence of the Romantics in my opinion, namely the overcoming of the fear of death in favor of a naive and blind will for creation, this resurrection of the conscious mind is what represents the true power of the Romantic era. In the face of death we are not afraid to throw ourselves in the abyss and love.

Der Zauberberg (1982)
An international production of Thomas Mann’s 20th century classic about the first world war, Der Zauberberg (1982).

Divine Mathematics: George Cantor and Infinity
In Dangerous Knowledge – BBC, Georg Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis and Georg Cantor‘s life is described. Cantor was obsessed with the problem of infinity. Cantor reminds me Pythagoras, who founded a religious school of Pythagoreans who searched the divine truth by revealing the mathematical formulas that described nature. Boltzmann defined a breakthrough in the field of probability, which is crucial for the theory of entropy and chaos.

Solve Puzzles for Science - Fold.it
Solve puzzles for science with Fold.it. Crowd-sourcing scientific problems.

The Master and Margarita - Russia TV
The Master and Margarita – Russia TV Russia’s first television production of The Master and Margarita, the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. Vladimir Bortko is the director and screenwriter of the new adaptation. The mini-series of ten 52-minute episodes was first screened on the state television channel “Россия” (“Russia”) on December, 2005. The Master and Margarita is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven about the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider the book to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, as well as one of the foremost Soviet satires, directed against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order.

Hunting the Hidden Dimension
Hunting the Hidden Dimension Pt. 1 This film is about looking at the world around us in a completely different way. If you pay attention, you can see that fractals appear throughout nature. But until Benoit Mandelbrot came along, no one really understood what was there all along. more...

Benoit Mandelbrot, Father of Eternity, Coined the Term 'Fractal'
Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician, Dies at 85 Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.

Comparative Democracy
Originally, I was playing with the idea that representatives should have to pass an exam to become eligable to run for political office. While listening to C-SPAN broadcasts of Congress committees, or members of Congress giving interviews to NPR, where on some shows they are allowed more speaking time than the 20 or 30 seconds, I am too often shocked by the lack of depth and the absence of fact in their statements. more...

The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. The project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics. Another project that visualizes the phylogeny of life for the plants phylum is Deep Green by the Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group of Berkeley University.

Litarary Word Comparison
Introduction This is one of the small research projects that I am currently conducting. I am not pretending to offer or accomplish any scientific added value to the research community in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) but humbly submit my efforts to gain further personal learning. While the research remains unfinished and until I publish it formally, I will keep this post as a mini-post. As a Universal Man, a Humanist, a Renaissance Man each individual man has an obligation to question and further his or her knowledge and understanding, as it lies within our capacities. Learning is a tool to humble our heart, and most of all we should mistrust brave hearts. Matt Ridley in his book Nature via Nurture says (says Richard Dawkins in his The Ancestor’s Tale in The Mouse Tale chapter) that “the list of words in David Copperfield is almost the same as the list of words in The Catcher in the Rye.” Springing from this saying, I concluded that it would be an interesting project to create a plotter diagram in which the major works in literature (written, translated or edited into modern English for reasons of ease of comparison) are set out as number of total words versus the number of different words used and another network graph that displays the relative closeness of literary works by words used. The first diagram is the easiest to create of course, so I will start with this first, then moving on to the next network diagram. more...