Below are the 3 most recent journal entries recorded in stephenshevlin's LiveJournal:

Wednesday, January 18th, 2006
5:44 pm	Galactic cartography James Nicoll's journal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll/ has started to make me think about galactic cartography, the position and distribution of stars and gas in the local neighbourhood. It's an interesting subject, and one I've decided I need to find out more about. Unfortunately a quick Google search on galactic cartography tends to throw up references to Star Trek, but this looks like an interesting site: http://www.anzwers.org/free/universe/ which at least looks interesting. And now I have some idea of the structure of the nearby galactic superclusters. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 17th, 2006
5:22 pm	Items of interest in various journals I've glanced at. In most cases this is just going to be pointing out titles of papers that sound interesting, whether they actually are or not I don't know. Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 010401 (2006) Using QM to increase the precision of an experiment (quantum metrology apparently). I've no idea how this works but it's sufficiently counter-intuitive for me to believe that it's possible (yes, that makes no sense but QM is often like that). Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 011301 (2006) General Relativity isn't quite as accepted as Special Relaitivity yet, mainly because it's very complicated and there isn't that many tests you can do to check it (thus Gravity Probe B). There still may be room for different theories, such as flavours of modified newtonian dynamics (MOND). This paper considers a particular flavour of MOND and possible outputs of it, such as large-scale galaxy cluster distributions and/or quintessence fields. I suspect there may be many papers like this. Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 018702 (2006) An explantion of why scale-free networks are so stable, it turns out they possess dynamical advantages such as reproducible states. I feel I should know more about this subject, for some reason I feel it's more important than it seems to be. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119, 251–261 (2006) Pressure-sensitive paint, used as a microphone. The walls have ears..... Unless they're wallpapered over. Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 261301 (2005) Measurements via radio measurement of exictations lines of hydroxyl plus other species on how alpha has changed over the last 6.5 billion years. Answer, not by a lot at all (less than 6.7times10-6) Geophys. Res. Lett. doi:10.1029/2005GL024782 (2006) Martian aurorae observations. Mars does not have a global field, but it does have local fields in several areas, so this isn't a surprise to me. Nature 439, 130-131 (12 January 2006) | doi:10.1038/439130a Oh this is interesting, a report on a new theory on the evolution of DNA from RNA. Short form, DNA orginated in viruses to get past defenses on cell walls of larger organisms, whence they got coopted. Very speculative, but at least now I know that "the DNA polymerases of eukaryotes and bacteria are more closely related to similar enzymes found in viruses than they are to each other." And that's the stuff that jumped out at me (from a non-work POV) this week. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
4:34 pm	What is this for? Why am I bothering to do this? Well, I've had enough of being anonymous whilst commenting on some journals. And it seems everyone is doing this LiveJournal thing now, so it's best I adapt to this before I become extinct. Also, I need someplace to just jot that things that catch my interest, but aren't worth the time and effort to fully follow up. A storage place, an extra brain if you will. An exobrain. Of course, in olden days this would have been referred to as a journal.... (Comment on this)