Waiting for moderna times - Tab cleanup

While I’m waiting for my jabs, I shouldn’t forget cleaning up my browsers once in a while and feed my blog.

76 years ago, WW2 ended

Today I was pointed to a famous speech of former President Richard von Weizsäcker he held on the 8th of May 1945 - back then, it was already 40 years ago, that the second world war ended. The speech is about 45 minutes long (and in German), but if you’re a frequent podcast listener, you can put the speed at 1.5 and listen to the memorable speech in about half an hour.

Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) vs Dark Matter

I’m really not an expert on this - I haven’t studied physics. But since this is my blog, I can give you my personal opinion. I have always favored falvors of MOND over dark matter - that the rotational speeds of galaxies do not correlate with our current theory of gravitation, in the light of visible matter, seemed always more natural an issue with gravitation rather than missing out massive amounts of matter. It seemed that in the time where particle physics completely dominated physics budgets and career ladders in physics, it was a clear case of “What you see is all there is”, or, if you know how to wield a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Thankfully, MOND is far from dead and in fact in many circumstances explains observations far easier than dark matter. Susanne, in her typical attitude of thinking for herself, argues that both may be correct and are required to explain all of the observations - which, to me, has a nice symmetry to the basic and fundamental divide between our two most successful physical theories.

I should have loved biology…

…is a sentiment that I definitely share with James Somers, an argument that he outlines in his equally named post. The things I’ve learned through following posts and tweets from experts in the fields of Immunology and Virology, Vaccines, DNA, RNA, and mRNA have left me in awe at the wonderful machinery of life, a machinaery that begins in brownian motion and molecular mechanical devices and ends in human minds designing mRNA to combat a new pathogen. Fantastic! We need to touch the emotions of kids when we introduce such things in school - facts are fantastic, but they must be connected to our emotions, to our spiritual self, if you feel. It is, after all, nothing but a miracle that if you throw quadrillions of molecular devices together, and connect them through thousands of different interactions you get complex life.

Interview with Kent Beck

Mr. Beck is probably someone who comes closest to be a person that inspires me - here’s an interview with him I had hanging around in my tabs.