estrade's blog

The nuclear physics trivia contests are back by popular demand!

There's certainly not a lack of theories about the end of the world. You can find completely unbelievable ones, or some that start with a scientific fact but blow it out of proportion. For example, just last week I had to reassure my mom that she had been the victim of one of the wacky ones in a TV show mysteriously named “Infinito abre tu mente” (infinite-open-your-mind). A pseudo scientist was claiming he’d discovered the five stages of the universe, and that it’d end in a reverse Big-bang 100 millions years from now, when we’d all end up as deconfined protons.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

A.C. Clarke, 1917 - 2008.


here an obituary

This is another story about lunar eclipses and the thrill of scientific discovery. As you might know there was quite a buzz about yesterday’s total lunar eclipse, the last one until 2011 or so. I felt a little indifferent to it. After all, what's the deal with an eclipse? Maybe during the Ming dynasty you could attain glory and celebrity status if you were able to predict one, but we've known for a while that it's just the earth sneaking in between the moon and sun, and even your local news weather guy could tell you up to the minute when it'll occur.

"Clearly we have worse weather than Spain and clearly the cuisine in Italy is better than in Germany, but the best league in the world is in England and they have the worst weather and the worst cuisine," said K-H Rummenigge in a NY Times article I came across not long ago - K-H Rummenigge, if you’ve not consumed fußball (aka soccer) since you've been able to walk, is a former star of the German national team who now holds some 'top' position in the mighty Bayern Munchen club.

It's been a few weeks since the 2007 DNP meeting - the annual get together of the American nuclear physicists (DNP=Division of Nuclear Physics) - took place, but I think I'm still on time for this not-so-short review. Here it is, dedicated to all of you who had to stay at the lab babysitting 84Mo and such exotic isotopes.

Once I was in a dentist's waiting room and picked up one magazines from the coffee table. It was "Caras" (faces) or "Hola" (hello) - the Latinamerican version of what you would buy at the checkout in Meijer. Besides seminude pictures of models and tv-stars I found a rare moment of light in that issue: some sort of interview of a couple old & famous Argentinian writers (just to set the record straight, I'm from Uruguay and not Argentina). One was J.L. Borges, and i think the other Bioy Casares, but i'm not sure.

Hello World

(and thus concludes my nerdy first blog entry!)