HorsePerson and the ShoeMan

I should have probably posted this two weeks ago.

I'm away and therefore don't have much computer time. The time I do get on the computer, I end up spending doing other things.

I'll be back around mid-July. Until then, if I happen to have extra time, I'll post. But if not, see you in 3-4 weeks.

Melly

Once upon a time there was a Tai-Chi practitioner -- me. Tai-Chi meditation, at least at the level that I practiced it, is done standing. The thighs are bent so that all the weight is absorbed by the leg muscles. In addition to dealing with that (shaking legs etc.), one is supposed to clear his/her mind and focus on some distant point (there's more to it but I tried to be quick).

To be honest, I hated it. Not so much because of the rigorous stance, but because I had a hard time "clearing my mind" and truth be told - I was bored. However, it's been about a year and a half since I stopped practicing and I miss it terribly. More and more each day. I can't explain why I miss it, or what it is that I miss most, and I also can't explain what is different when I practice Tai-Chi (other than my body now has no bruises from sparring) than when I don't. I just know/feel that I miss it.

Then, about a week or two ago, I watched a show The Pursuit of Happiness where, among other things, they checked brain waves of Tibetan Monks.

"Rather than thinking about qualities like happiness as a trait," Davidson says, "we should think about them as a skill, not unlike a motor skill, like bicycle riding or skiing. These are skills that can be trained. I think it is just unambiguously the case that happiness is not a luxury for our culture but it is a necessity."

A couple of days ago I also came across this article in Nature about mind focusing as a result of meditation, again, of Tibetan Monks.

Meditation could conceivably help people with depression, or who have recently suffered a trauma, to stop their minds constantly dwelling on negative thoughts, she suggests.

I, personally, always thought that the mind is something we can control more than we think. If we're down, we can make ourselves 'up' by positive thinking, if we're obsessed and/or worried about something, we can calm ourselves. The trick is not to get dragged down by emotions and not to let them control you. You should control them.

It's not easy to accomplish, and one needs to practice this a lot, but it is possible.

My point - I think I'll go back to practicing Tai-Chi in the fall.

Categories: science

That's my birthday.

So... I won't be posting.

Have a good day.

Categories: personal

The past few days have been just unbelievable. There was so much stuff, I could hardly keep up. So while, unfortunately, there is always depressing discussions about budget, on the brighter side, the Mars Rover finally released itself from the sand dunes.
Here are a few other interesting things:

Where is the Neutron Star?

A search for the remains of a nearby stellar explosion has come up empty. Astronomers observed the blast site of the supernova, SN 1987A, with the Hubble space Telescope, but could not find any sign of the dense stellar core.

"We think a neutron star was formed. The question is: Why don't we see it?" astronomer Genevieve Graves of the University of California at Santa Cruz said Monday.

Comets 101

On July 4, the Deep Impact mission will smash a probe into Tempel 1, a potato-shaped comet discovered in 1867 and believed to be representative of most comets.
...
Scientists also hope to discover what the interior of Tempel 1 — and by extension, other comets — is like. Is it porous like a pile of sand? Or solid and more like an icecube?
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To find out, scientists will blast a crater in one and see what happens. Yeomans explained that nearly every aspect of the blast will yield valuable information...

Merging Stars

The stars of a binary system of white dwarfs might collide and merge in about 500,000 to one million years from now after dancing around each other in an increasing gravitational spin. Don't miss out on the movie.

Hayabusa Probe Closing In on Itokawa

A celestial “smash-and-grab” space mission that could become the greatest triumph in the history of the Japanese space program is entering its most challenging stage in deep space.
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The Hayabusa probe is slowly closing in on a distant asteroid named Itokawa. Within a few months ... Hayabusa will swoop down to its surface and grab samples of the dirt for return to Earth, like a spacefaring bird of prey. In fact, the spacecraft's name comes from the Japanese word for "peregrine falcon."
...
The probe uses an ion-drive system pioneered by NASA’s Deep Space 1 comet scout, but with a distinctive design innovation. It is the first probe to use microwaves to ionize the xenon fuel.

Categories: space

Whoever needs categories on Blogger, can look at my post in my other blog where he/she would be directed to the right place.

The result isn't elegant but it serves a purpose.

A 'Brain Helmet' developed at Bar-Ilan university claims to raise the user's IQ by 20% in just three months.

The helmet has a visor that fits over the eyes of users, putting them in a virtual reality world where they solve mathematical problems and learn to assemble and take apart three-dimensional objects.
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[Dr. David] Passig says that, if the users wear the helmet 10 to 20 minutes a day for three months, their IQ can improve by as much as 20 percent.

Link

While I've written a lot in this blog about things that interest me, I haven't written much of my thoughts and comments on these things: the musing part of my blog is (was) missing.

Well, I'm going to rectify that right away.

One of the most interesting things I've read lately was no doubt about the 'scientific proof' of the high intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews.
I put 'scientific proof' in quotations because some parts of this research are still open to debate and until such a 'genius gene' is irrefutably found I still look at the research as one that the scientific community still needs to look at and approve.

Research such as this one, what one might call racist science, is inevitably teeth grating. Already I have seen white supremacist pages siting the research as proof for Jews' "diabolically clever" nature. Yet research such as this is also helpful in discovering diseases tendencies, harmful genes etc.

In my post about sexism, one of the points was the definition of racism and sexism. Some think that racism and sexism is the actual belief that races and genders are different. For them, this kind of research is racist by nature. They strive to prove the opposite - that no differences exist.

Others, like me, believe that differences exist. Be it from natural selection, evolution, what not. This kind of research therefore supports my view. It doesn't mean that I think people should be treated differently because they belong to a certain race or sex, it just means that we have more information about humanity.

Not only that, but most of the racist and sexist research finds that the differences are the results of years of conditioning (men used to hunt, women gathered fruit hence men are more spatial oriented and women are more detailed oriented etc.). If the conditioning is removed by living in a society that gives equal opportunities to everybody and encourages everybody to act on their wills and wants then maybe in time these observed differences will be minimized and we will finally achieve a truly homogeneous society.

NASA's Next Mission to Mars

NASA is moving ahead with plans to put a long-armed lander on Mars' icy north pole to search for clues for water and possible signs of life, the space agency said Thursday.
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Scientists hope the Phoenix mission will yield clues to the geologic history of water on the Red Planet and determine whether microbes existed in the ice.
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Phoenix will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in August 2007 and land on the planet nine months later. The mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena.

Link


First Solar Sail Flight

The solar sail-propelled Cosmos 1 vehicle, hailed as the world’s first solar sail spacecraft, has left its Moscow testing center and now bound to Severomorsk, Russia, where it will be loaded into a modified intercontinental ballistic missile and readied for a June 21 launch, mission planners announced Monday.

Link


Space Picture Perfect
How Do Space Pictures Get So Pretty?


And finally...
High Intelligence - Do We Dare Repeat this?
The High Intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews

Put these two things together - a correlation of intelligence and success, and a correlation of success and fecundity - and you have circumstances that favour the spread of genes that enhance intelligence. The questions are, do such genes exist, and what are they if they do? Dr Cochran thinks they do exist, and that they are exactly the genes that cause the inherited diseases which afflict Ashkenazi society.

Link

Categories: science, space

I don't think there's doubt in any one's mind anymore that the Earth is warming up. Global warming is a fact.

The only thing that I'm not sure about and will be happy to be educated if any one wants to direct me to the right place is - How do we know the Earth is warming at a different rate than before? Don't we have better technology and instruments now that can measure whereas before we didn't? So how do we know that the Earth wasn't warming up before, but we just couldn't measure it?
Unless what they're saying is that the warming is a natural occurrence and we're just helping it, accelerating the warming with the pollution?

Anyways, it's starting to get scary:

A new study finds 125 large lakes in the Arctic have vanished as temperatures rose over the past two decades. Many other lakes have shrunk.

The lakes once sat atop permanently frozen soil called permafrost. Other studies have shown permafrost is melting around the world, causing low-lying ground to slump and rock to fall from mountains.

Link

Categories: science

Get someone to sniff a new potion made from the chemical oxytocin and they'll be more willing to loan you money.

The processing of romantic feelings involves a "constellation of neural systems."
The researchers -- neuroscientists, anthropologists and social psychologists -- declare love the clear winner versus sex in terms of its power over the human mind.

DeLay said NASA is a priority—even in a time of war and tightening budgets.
"We will provide the funding necessary to get us where we want to go," the House majority leader said. "And hopefully we can do it in an expedited manner."

If you've ever worked in an open space environment, then you know how impossible it is to have peace, quiet, not to mention privacy in such an office. A new product by Applied Minds, Babble, should be able to help.

Babble, which is intended to function as a substitute for walls and acoustic tiling, is an example of a new class of product that uses computing technology to shape sound.

Applied Minds seems to have more to offer:

One of the prototypes closest to becoming a candidate for a spinoff is a novel tabletop digital map, about the size of a large flat-panel television. The system has a touch-sensitive screen, making it possible to handle high-resolution digital imagery as easily as sliding a paper map across a table.
The system is controlled by a series of hand gestures. For example, to zoom on a region, a user touches both hands to the screen and slides them apart.
Hillis recently demonstrated the system ... "People came up afterwards and said they were moved to tears by the demonstration," Hillis said.
When a recent visitor mentioned that the demonstration was like something from "Star Trek," Hillis was visibly enthusiastic.
"That's what I've always wanted to do," he said. "Be ahead of 'Star Trek."'

Link