[Le Golfe Persique vue par Satellite]

الخليج الفارسي: من هنا بدأت الصراعات في منطقة الخليج العربي
From Wikipedia

The Persian Gulf, in Southwest Asia, is an extension of the Indian Ocean located between Iran (formerly called Persia) and the Arabian Peninsula.

The Persian Gulf was the focus of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, in which each side attacked the other's oil tankers. In 1991, the Persian Gulf again was the background for what was called the "Persian Gulf War" or the "Gulf War" when Iraq invaded Kuwait and was subsequently pushed back, despite the fact that this conflict was primarily a land conflict.

The Persian Gulf has many good fishing grounds, extensive coral reefs, and abundant pearl oysters, but its ecology has come under pressure from industrialization, and in particular, oil and petroleum spillages during wars in the region.

Historically and internationally known as the Persian Gulf, this body of water is sometimes controversially referred to as the Arabian Gulf or simply The Gulf  by most Arab states, although neither of the latter two terms is recognized internationally. The name Gulf of Iran (Persian Gulf) is used by the International Hydrographic Organization.

Geography

This inland sea of some 251,000 km² is connected to the Gulf of Oman in the east by the Strait of Hormuz; and its western end is marked by the major river delta of the Shatt al-Arab, which carries the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Its length is 989 kilometres, with Iran covering most of the northern coast and Saudi Arabia most of the southern coast. The Persian Gulf is about 56 kilometres wide at its narrowest, in the Strait of Hormuz. The waters are overall very shallow, with a maximum depth of 90 metres and an average depth of 50 meters.

De-icing of airplanes (Left click to Zoom In)

Saturday, January 22nd: "from mind to body"

"I''ll see you on January 22nd at BIEL, it's the biggest show I have, maybe will ever do, so it's a ONCE IN LIFE TIME OPPORTUNITY, because it's so big and it's so expensive that I don't know if we could bring it a lot to other countries..."
Mirage: A project that lasted two years straight ... Imagine !

2-Sun Theory

A red super-giant star, as in it’s about to die, in the Orion’s nebula we’ll be seeing a pilgrimage to recreate the Luke scenes for weeks on end. The star know as Betelgeuse (Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse!) is predicted to be at it’s end and about to go all Death Star with a massive super-nova that could reach Earth by the end of 2012. The second largest star in the nebula, when it finally decides to call it a lifetime and collapse it’ll be tens of millions of times brighter than our sun. Just don’t go stocking up on sunscreen just yet however, this is only a theory.

According to Dr. Brad Carter, Senior Lecturer of Physics at the University of Southern Queensland “This old star is running out of fuel in it’s center…This keeps Betelgeuse shining and supported. When this fuel runs out the star will literally collapse in upon itself and it will do so very quickly.” The bad news is, it might not happen for another million years but when it does whoever is alive to see this will need sunglasses for sure. The resulting bang will mean that for several weeks it’ll be perpetual sunlight, 24 hours of tanning light. After a few weeks it will finally begin to fade and after a few months it’ll become very hard to see at all. With Star Wars forums lighting up with news over this it has been accompanied by doomsday theories, with the impending supernova being associated with the end of the world.

Even if this double sun has people thinking it’s going to be the end of the world George Lucas is going to make a ton of money releasing a line of Tatooine clothing (hint,hint). If 2012 means the end of the world at least a world of nerds will be able to fill out a wish from their bucket list.

GRE scores from different fields ..

From Discover magazine, a basic analysis of GRE scores from different fields. We do pretty bad in math, but ok, though not great, in writing and verbal scores. The chart makes sense. A few comments:

The surprise for non-academics is that economics has converted itself into a kind of engineering. The profile of students is pretty much what you get in engineering and most physical sciences. It’s also apparent in their approach to research, mimicry of physical science.

I’m a little surprised that business does so badly in these comparisons. It’s a competitive field and the b-schools often have high quality economics and statistics programs.

Academia does break up into big clusters, a la Snow’s two cultures thesis. I think you could argue that the humanities have a more verbal profile than the bio/social sciences/professions cluster (minus econ).


Philosophy is the only field that does not fit into one of the two (or three) major camps. Probably the only “sui generis” discipline, which kind of makes sense.

Interesting stuff ! :-)

Universe Sandbox














Universe Sandbox is an interactive space simulator for Windows based PCs.

Unlike most astronomy software that just shows you what the sky looks like or where the planets are, Universe Sandbox is a powerful gravity simulator. You can add another star to our solar system and watch it rip the planets from their orbits.
The free forever version allows you to explore and discover any simulation. Optionally you can upgrade to to the premium version for unlimited control.

Download here...