Once upon a time in Nordkapstrasse 2, 10439 Berlin
Women, stay away from football!
The answer to
my puzzle from 10 days ago seems to be that
there are two possibilities, it is either the place of birth of the player himself or his father's.
And what about mum, he?
Richard Dawkins
There is an interview with Richard Dawkins on Spiegel. I don't know whether this interview is particularly good, but I generally would subscribe to most of his views about religion.
"Unsere heutige Ethik haben wir doch gar nicht aus der Bibel. Unsere Werte - Gleichberechtigung zum Beispiel oder das Verbot von Sklaverei und Folter - haben der Schrift nichts zu verdanken. Sie sind entstanden in einem liberalen Konsens, den wir mit allen Menschen teilen, die wir zivilisiert nennen. Wenn wir unsere Ethik wirklich aus der heiligen Schrift bezögen, wäre die Welt ein entsetzlicher Ort. Wie das Afghanistan unter den Taliban."
full text
Physics
People often claim that the situation in physics nowadays is very similar to then back in the golden days at the beginning of the 20th century when Einstein cooked up all his marvelous theories and quantum mechanics peered around the corner and physics was full of genius' like Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Schroedinger and Dirac... Is this really true?
The reason why they claim so is that nowadays there are some known fundamental questions which go to the very heart of what we know and believe: For instance what happens to general relativity at very small length scales? It cannot be quantized along the way as you quantize the other field theories. What about the
hierarchy problem? Is it a real problem? What is all this so called dark stuff out there made off? Is there something behind the standard model of particle physics and what is it?
Though these question are there, aren't they
purely theoretical? It is just aesthetical uneasiness of theoretical physicists, this conviction that there must be some kind of inherent beauty in final theory which makes it clear
that it could not have been different. Or two theories that are not consistent somewhere at a scale where we, honestly, don't know anything about. There is no experimental indication so far for these problems, (with the exception of
dark matter, afaik). In particle physics for instance, all data we have support the standard model to a very good accuracy. We have not seen anything contradicting it (of course we
might do so very soon at the LHC).
100 years ago it was different:
People were not hunting for a fancy theory, rather they were looking for something that could explain data. Known facts that contradicted what were the theories of the time like for instance
the black body radiation, the photo electric effect, the stability of atoms.
Germany - Wales
The UK is the only (afaik) country in the world with several football national teams. But how is it determined whether a player plays for England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland? The place of birth? The place of birth of his grandfather? The club where he has been playing at the age of 10 1/2?
Keep an eye on your eyes
Yesterday I was at the Ophtamologists who (mis)treated my eyes with some drops that paralyse them completely. That is, they disable your iris to close such that he could scan the interior of my eyes with a broad light. So far so good, but after this even cloudy Wuppertal weather is too bright and you are not able to focus your eyes. Even wearing glasses, you can't read. Think about it, how much of the things you normally do, involve some kind of reading or looking at something accurately. It's frightening. I went home, had a nap, did some cooking and watched a German movie. (I wouldn't have been able to read any subtitles, but watching the images is ok).
From what I heard at the doctors, the effect of these drops should cease after 5 hours or so. For me, it only did slowly slowly today. I still have the impression that my pupils are oversized and the sun (yeah it happens in Wuppertal) is too bright.
