It's a time of the signs

 

        

Indonesian man becomes an instant millionaire as meteorite worth £1.4m crashes through his roof  Nov 17th 2020, 17:57 Josua Hutagalung, 33, was working on a coffin next to his house when the meteorite smashed through the veranda at the edge of his living room in Kolang, North Sumatra.

And-- 

Thai fisherman finds 'the world's biggest' blob of whale vomit - that could be worth £2.4MILLION Dec 1st 2020, 00:05 Naris Suwannasang, 60, saw the Ambergris -while he was walking by the sea in Nakhon Si Thammarat, southern Thailand.

Consistently bizarre

 

How bizarre is it that the word--- bizarre--- has a disputed etymology?

...."Obviously, if a word appears from nowhere and has no ascertainable native roots, it may be a borrowing. And here I must turn to the language of the Goths, which I mention with great regularity in this blog, because Gothic is the oldest Germanic language that has come down to us (if we disregard runic inscriptions from medieval Scandinavia): significant parts of the New Testament, translated by Bishop Wulfila in the fourth century from Greek into Gothic, are extant. Two Gothic kingdoms flourished in the past: one in Italy (with its capital in Ravenna, where tourists can still see Ostrogoth King Theodoric’s Mausoleum) and one in Spain, with the capital in Tolosa. The eastern kingdom existed only from 453 to 555, but this period was the time of the efflorescence of Gothic culture, its Golden Age. The Visigoth kingdom had a much longer span of life: from the early fifth century to 711, when it was destroyed by the Arabs. As could be expected, Modern Italian and Modern Spanish have preserved relics of many Gothic words, some of which did not turn up in Wulfila’s translation. Such words were reconstructed from the dialects spoken today: thoroughly assimilated inserts of Old Germanic in the speech of modern people. Hence the idea that bizarre may be one of such relics, a continuation of an old borrowing from Gothic....

Picture poppies

Tomorrow's Headlines

 

Or maybe next month's:

DELTA HITS THE DELTA AND DESTROYS GULF DEAD ZONE

(an area in the Gulf of Mexico, the size of Massachusetts, with little oxygen.) This will be called ironic, but is nothing like that.

Anybody who got a real glimpse of what Jan Cox was about

 

Anybody who got a real glimpse of what Jan Cox was about will appreciate that Jacques Derrida was a tasty cookie--- store bought goods, but edible. A review of a new biography of the French philosopher at the link.

Everything

Everything works for the progress of Life

(paraphrase of Jan Cox) 

Dark Matter a Dark Horse

 

citation -- https://phys.org/news/2020-08-dark-destruction-extra-galaxy-center.html?

Study rules out dark matter destruction as origin of extra radiation in galaxy center

...

"We looked at all of the different modeling that goes on in the Galactic Center, including molecular gas, stellar emissions and high-energy electrons that scatter low-energy photons," said co-author Oscar Macias, a postdoctoral scholar in physics and astronomy at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo whose visit to UCI in 2017 initiated this project. "We took over three years to pull all of these new, better models together and examine the emissions, finding that there is little room left for dark matter."

.....

The group tested all classes of models used in the Galactic Center region for excess emission analyses, and its conclusions remained unchanged. "One would have to craft a diffuse emission model that leaves a big 'hole' in them to relax our constraints, and science doesn't work that way," Macias said.

Kaplinghat noted that physicists have predicted that radiation from dark matter annihilation would be represented in a neat spherical or elliptical shape emanating from the Galactic Center, but the gamma ray excess detected by the Fermi space telescope after its June 2008 deployment shows up as a triaxial, bar-like structure.

"If you peer at the Galactic Center, you see that the stars are distributed in a boxy way," he said. "There's a disk of stars, and right in the center, there's a bulge that's about 10 degrees on the sky, and it's actually a very specific shape—sort of an asymmetric box—and this shape leaves very little room for additional dark matter."

Does this research rule out the existence of dark matter in the galaxy? "No," Kaplinghat said. "Our study constrains the kind of particle that dark matter could be. The multiple lines of evidence for dark matter in the galaxy are robust and unaffected by our work."

Far from considering the team's findings to be discouraging, Abazajian said they should encourage physicists to focus on concepts other than the most popular ones.

"There are a lot of alternative dark matter candidates out there," he said. "The search is going to be more like a fishing expedition where you don't already know where the fish are."