Saturday, October 15th, 2016
Marina Koren , - The Atlantic
Stephan: Another door opens to show us how vast, ancient, and complex the universe is. When you see this research, and you compare it to the little story told by Creationists -- the universe was created in six days, 6,000 years ago -- you can see how big the disconnect is between the Theocratic Rightist view of the world and the world of actual facts. Once your realize that these fundamentalists deny something as dramatic as this kind of research, you can understand how willful ignorance takes hold in a culture and can exercise a powerful dumbing down effect that is very dangerous.
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows thousands of galaxies whose light took billions of years to reach Earth.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz (STScI)
The earliest estimates of the number of galaxies in the Universe were very small. For centuries, astronomers thought there might be just one—our own. Most recent estimates built off observations from 1995, when NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope stared at a dark patch of sky for hours and returned a picture of thousands of glittering galaxies no one had ever seen before. Further measurements led astronomers to believe there are between 100 billion and 200 billion galaxies in the observable Universe that human-made technology can detect.
And that was the working estimate for the next two decades, until this week. Astronomers at the University of Nottingham now say the number of galaxies in the observable Universe is 2 trillion, more than 10 times as […]
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Saturday, October 15th, 2016
Masha Gessen, Russian-American Author and Journalist - The Washington Post
Stephan: I am increasingly concerned that forces in Russia and the U.S. for quite different reasons are both promoting a new cold war. I haven't been to Russia in a few years -- for nearly a decade I spent 3-4 months a year in Russia and had several businesses there, after having worked in citizen diplomacy. So I can't be sure what is going on there, since in the U.S. corporate media coverage of Russia is very skewed, and Russian media is now state -- read Putin -- controlled. Therefore I was interested to see this essay, which as it turned out comported with the little I had been able to dig out. One thing I am certain of: no one but an elite few in each country gains from a cold war.
Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton
During the 2012 presidential debates, President Obama mocked challenger Mitt Romney for identifying Russia as the “No 1. geopolitical foe” of the United States. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Obama quipped. Four years later — after Russian aggression in Ukraine and Crimea, along with a political crackdown within its own borders — there’s broad consensus that Russia is indeed a serious threat to the United States and its allies. But there’s still widespread misunderstanding of what Russia is about.
Myth No. 1
Russia is trying to throw the U.S. election to Donald Trump.
The idea that Russia is trying to help Trump went mainstream over the summer. “Donald Trump’s presidential bid can count on at least some backing from Moscow,” Guardian world affairs editor Julian Borger wrote in one of many such reports. This is less a myth than a
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Saturday, October 15th, 2016
Thomas Graham, Matthew Rojansky, Managing Director at Kissinger Associates and a Senior Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University/ Director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and the U.S. Executive Secretary of the Dartmouth Conference. - Foreign Policy
Stephan: Here is a second take on the U.S. Russian relationship. I am making this such an issue in today's SR because I don't see either party doing a very good job of handling one of the major geopolitical relationships of the age.
If you are over 50 you remember when nuclear war was a constant stressor -- remember The Day After Tomorrow. Remember, as a student crawling under your desk with your head tucked into your knees as a training procedure for nuclear war? I find all this casual talk about nuclear weapons almost mind-bendingly surreal. Apparently our cultural memory is so short that nuclear war has passed from people's awareness.
By any number of measures, Washington’s Russia policy has failed. While ostensibly suffering from diplomatic and economic isolation under a U.S.-led international sanctions regime, Moscow has succeeded in challenging a wide range of American interests, most notably in Ukraine, Syria, and cyberspace. Coming up with a new approach on Russia should therefore be a top priority for either President Hillary Clinton or President Donald Trump soon after Jan. 20, 2017. So far, however, neither candidate has offered a vision that goes beyond the failed tropes of the past, with Clinton painting Russian President Vladimir Putin as a cartoonish villain and Trump viewing Moscow as an ally in-waiting.
The most common U.S. policy responses to Russia — from both Republican and Democratic administrations across three decades — have depended either on the hope that Moscow can be fully defeated or that it can become a friend and fellow democracy. But Russia is not a democracy, nor is it democratizing, and although Russia may be in secular decline, it is a major power on the world stage. […]
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Saturday, October 15th, 2016
, - University of Cincinnati/EurekaAlert
Stephan: Another chapter of the past opens, and it is a fascinating story.
The Griffin Warrior
When University of Cincinnati researchers uncovered the tomb of a Bronze Age warrior — left untouched for more than 3,500 years and packed with a spectacular array of precious jewelry, weapons and riches — the discovery was hailed by experts as “the find of a lifetime.”
Now, only a year after archaeologists completed the excavation, new understandings of the artifacts — particularly the discovery of four golden rings — and the insights they provide to the origins of Greek civilization may prove to be the team’s next big discovery.
Shari Stocker, a senior research associate in UC’s Department of Classics, and Jack Davis, the university’s Carl W. Blegen chair in Greek archaeology, will reveal the UC-based team’s findings from the so-called “Griffin Warrior” grave Thursday, Oct. 6, at The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece.
The husband-and-wife team’s highly anticipated lecture is generating worldwide attention, including a feature in the New York Times.
The ‘find of a lifetime’
Stocker and Davis, along with other UC staff specialists and students, stumbled upon the remarkably […]
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Friday, October 14th, 2016
Stephan: Even in the U.S. which is far behind Europe it is becoming clear that electric powered vehicles are the best choice.
It might sound like an obvious thing to most people, electricity is cheaper than gas, but I find that people are not really aware of the electricity rate discrepancy around the US and the world. It’s understandable. Who has time to track electricity and gas prices outside of your own market? Plugless has time and did it.
The company came up with a neat study looking at gas prices and electricity rates – without taking into account time-of-use rates where available – in each state over the last year and came to the conclusion that electric vehicles are cheaper to fuel in all 50 states.
EV drivers can see savings between $300 and $1,300 per year. Plugless explains that the result is despite gas having a significant advantage over electricity over the time period of the study:
In many ways, the snapshot loads the deck in favor of gas cars. For one, gas prices have been very low for the past year. The national average cost of gas in this snapshot is $2.20 per gallon. […]
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