Category Archives: Science

Sieben auf einen Streich

NPR the two-way: Astronomers Find 7 Earth-Size Planets Around A Nearby Star.

“A small, faint star relatively close by is home to seven Earth-size planets with conditions that could be right for liquid water and maybe even life.

The discovery sets a record for both the most Earth-size planets and the most potentially habitable planets ever discovered around a single star.

The strange planetary system is quite compact, with all of these worlds orbiting their star closer than Mercury orbits the sun, according to a newly published report in Nature.

“If you were on the surface of one of these planets, you would see the other ones as we see the moon, or a bit smaller,” says Michaël Gillon, an astronomer at the University of Liège in Belgium. “The view would be very impressive.””

Last man to walk on the moon

The Two-Way: Gene Cernan, Last Man To Walk On The Moon, Dies At 82.

“The last person to leave footprints on the moon has died. NASA reported that Gene Cernan died Monday at the age of 82, surrounded by his family.

Gene Cernan flew in space three times, including twice to the moon. Cernan was big, brash and gregarious. And if he hadn’t been lucky, he could have missed his chance to walk on the moon.”

See also MetaFilter: The Last Man on the Moon for more links.

Big Data

David Kriesel: SpiegelMining – Reverse Engineering von Spiegel-Online. “Wer denkt, Vorratsdatenspeicherungen und „Big Data“ sind harmlos, der kriegt hier eine Demo an Spiegel-Online.” Vortrag vom 28.12.2016 beim 33. Chaos Communication Congress [33c3] des Chaos Computer Club [CCC].

“Seit Mitte 2014 hat David fast 100.000 Artikel von Spiegel-Online systematisch gespeichert. Diese Datenmasse wird er in einem bunten Vortrag vorstellen und erforschen.

Der Vortrag gibt tiefe und überraschende Einblicke in das Verhalten des vielleicht größten Meinungsmachers Deutschlands. Ihr werdet Spiegel-Online danach mit anderen Augen lesen.

Dazu gibt er einen allgemeinverständlichen Überblick, was mit der heutigen Daten-Auswerterei alles geht. Ihr werdet also vielleicht auch mehr aufpassen, was für Daten von euch ihr ins Internet lasst.”

David Kriesel hat natürlich eine Website mit einer Liste aller Artikel zum Thema Spiegelmining.

You’ve probably never heard of the language they deemed the hardest of them all

The Economist (on Medium): We went in search of the world’s hardest language. “English is pretty simple. Learning to speak Ubykh or !Xóõ presents more of a challenge.”

“With all that in mind, which is the hardest language? On balance The Economist would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. […]

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)“ , while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)“ . English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.”

Link via MetaFilter.