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My comment here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17453822

Beauty and intelligence and the sense of beauty and the sense of intelligence are what drives humanity, of course, other than wealth and power and stuff like that. Why is it that nobody seems to crib about how "what is perceived" to be intelligence in the media portrayed? How do all the less intelligent people feel when they see intelligent people in the media?

Reluctantly, my girlfriend of four years told me today that she went to have dinner with a chap her father gave her number to when he called him up after viewing her profile on an arranged marriage site called shaadi.com. Its not that her father is not the understanding types, he's a rather nice chap, educated and all, of whom she earlier said would stop pressing her if she didn't want him to, but her usual attitude is that her parents are after her to get married. This is a common excuse used when the girl in question "decides to settle down", "settle down" being a stereotypical term that she herself would be mocking until then just like she would be mocking arranged marriages.
Superficiality is the norm here, which I understand pretty well. But when someone you are close to, you realise in retrospect, had just been making your point of view theirs for quite a while, it doesn't feel good at all. I'm unable to figure out if its fair or not.

People say "Dark Matter" and stuff like that is a fantasy of sorts which makes researchers get around what really happens. Here's my reply to a chap over here who says "... Isn't the dark matter simply proposed because the math doesn't work to form the lens without it? How scientific is that really? Where I come from, this is called a mathematical fudge factor...."

Dark Matter is indeed a "fudge factor". That's why the called it "Dark" matter. Nobody denies that it is invoked to explain observations which are beyond our current understanding as per our theories. If you look around, there are quite a handful of dark matter models and stand-ins. They are all working towards the goal of trying to make sense of what is observed. All these models place limits on measurable terms (beyond which the model deviates drastically from observations). As long as observations do not show these limits as broken, any model is as good as the other. And that's another problem - there can't surely be so many models for one phenomenon. So the observations get better, which get rid of some models and so on.
The term "Dark Matter" is generic. It does not mean a particular model.

Well, they are part of the same thread ! Interesting first person accounts of Adik and Gilmour here.

In the comments section of Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth (here) on youtube one finds the usual "Gravity is a Law", "Evolution is only a Theory" argument. I joined in to say:

A "law" is vastly inferior to a "theory". A law is simply a representation of a phenomenon that appears to hold true every time. It does not *explain* why it holds true. A theory supersedes a law by explaining why the law holds true and at the same time not only derives the law from its (the theory's) basic components but also derives other laws which seemed unrelated to the law in question.

Also, a theory is accepted as an accurate (not true of false) description of reality 'iff' it is able to predict a new phenomenon that was so far unknown! Example, The Laws of Gravity speak *nothing* about time dilation, length contraction or frame-dragging. In fact it was a break-down of the laws of gravity at Mercury's orbit that emphasised that a theory was needed. So, the laws of gravity are only a weak-field approximation in the theory of gravity.

You'll have to download this 3 MB pic to be able to read it.
The page itself is here.

I had written on this subject earlier: Soul and Cold.

While on the browse, I happened to hit on a page which has a good article on the same subject. Its called "Physics and the Immortality of the Soul" by Sean Carroll. It makes a good read, especially so if the dance scene in Pulp Fiction amused you. (Read the comments after the article to see the connection). Poor Sean. Lol! In fact I just got an idea for a cartoon. Hmmm.

                                                     

"...electron has a mass and it is an ideal point particle then is it a black hole? "


The smallest black hole has the radius of a Plank length unit or some simple function of it. Something amazing happens when the particle's mass reaches the Plank mass (or some simple function of it). While all particles above this critical mass have an associated length (radius) proportional to the particle's mass (called its Schwarzschild radius), those below this critical mass have an associated length (its Compton/deBroglie wavelength - its region of localization) inversely proportional to the mass.
The evaporation time of Black holes also converges at the Plank length. The Plank mass has its

Evaporation time*c = Compton wavelength = Schwarzschild radius.
 

So there can be no black holes that can be localized at all below the Plank mass. Beautiful, eh? Singularities, yes (electrons are charge singularities), but no black holes.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-space-chessboard.html