Chaos3612 - Chaotic Dynamics

This’s how Jupiter, Earth and Venus look like from Mars.

28.03.19 || coffee, a good book and beach sunsets. nothing even comes close to that.

you must insist on being curious. curious is what we should be. ask questions, research, know. being ignorant is not cool or trendy. fill your brain with knowledge.

I think schools need to emphasize more that they aren’t teaching specific facts but rather skill sets

are you gonna remember your algebra formulas ten years from now? Probably not. Are you going to be able to use basic logic to solve problems? Well hopefully with some solid logic practice, such as math, yeah!

did Shakespeare really mean that all of the themes of dark and light in his plays indicated internal struggle and opposing forces? Who knows! Is the ability to critically analyze a piece of writing and see larger trends and symbols useful? Hell yes!

Schools should really be upfront with students that no, this isn’t going to be wholly applicable, but any amount of school will develop your self-discipline and  overall versatility- and that’s a good thing 

Yesterday was hard.

I'm in some courses all this week, and I don't understand anything that 3 of the 4 speakers say. And I've just met the new PhD student of the department, and he's really smart and he's understanding most of the things. And on top of that my advisor is asking me to finish a big amount of writing. I feel really stupid and discouraged.

So, list of positive things to take into account this week:

- All of the courses are about PDEs and not Dynamical systems (which is my research topic). It's normal to not understand most of them.

- It is a great opportunity to see how people of other topics work, and what are they interests. You don't need to understand everything perfectly. Let go and enjoy.

- I learned a lot from yesterday's poster session, and from other students.

- Next year I would have a very smart PhD partner from who I could learn a lot.

- I am a slow-learner when understanding new topics, and that is okay. I could have other qualities that make me a good mathematician.

“Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action. Being smart will never deliver results on its own because it doesn’t get you to act. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior.”

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

real analysis is just applied triangle inequality

This is a video of an Oksapmin woman demonstrating the Oksapmin base-27 counting system. The Oksapmin people of New Guinea use body part counting as a base for their numeral system (which may sound wild and exotic, but is really just a more detailed version of what we do, most anthropologists think base-10 number systems come from humans’ having 10 fingers) starting with the thumb, going up the arm and head to the nose (the 14th number) and going down the other side of the body to the pinky finger of the other hand (the 27th number). It does not matter which side you start counting on, so counting from right-to-left or left-to-right makes no difference. 

And if that’s not the coolest thing you’ve ever heard, I don’t know what to tell ya

The Universe's Brightest Lights Have Some Dark Origins

Did you know some of the brightest sources of light in the sky come from black holes in the centers of galaxies? It sounds a little contradictory, but it’s true! They may not look bright to our eyes, but satellites have spotted oodles of them across the universe. 

One of those satellites is our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Fermi has found thousands of these kinds of galaxies in the 10 years it’s been operating, and there are many more out there!

Black holes are regions of space that have so much gravity that nothing - not light, not particles, nada - can escape. Most galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers - these are black holes that are hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of our sun - but active galactic nuclei (also called “AGN” for short, or just “active galaxies”) are surrounded by gas and dust that’s constantly falling into the black hole. As the gas and dust fall, they start to spin and form a disk. Because of the friction and other forces at work, the spinning disk starts to heat up.

The disk’s heat gets emitted as light - but not just wavelengths of it that we can see with our eyes. We see light from AGN across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the more familiar radio and optical waves through to the more exotic X-rays and gamma rays, which we need special telescopes to spot.

About one in 10 AGN beam out jets of energetic particles, which are traveling almost as fast as light. Scientists are studying these jets to try to understand how black holes - which pull everything in with their huge amounts of gravity - somehow provide the energy needed to propel the particles in these jets.

Many of the ways we tell one type of AGN from another depend on how they’re oriented from our point of view. With radio galaxies, for example, we see the jets from the side as they’re beaming vast amounts of energy into space. Then there’s blazars, which are a type of AGN that have a jet that is pointed almost directly at Earth, which makes the AGN particularly bright.  

Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been searching the sky for gamma ray sources for 10 years. More than half (57%) of the sources it has found have been blazars. Gamma rays are useful because they can tell us a lot about how particles accelerate and how they interact with their environment.

So why do we care about AGN? We know that some AGN formed early in the history of the universe. With their enormous power, they almost certainly affected how the universe changed over time. By discovering how AGN work, we can understand better how the universe came to be the way it is now.

Fermi’s helped us learn a lot about the gamma-ray universe over the last 10 years. Learn more about Fermi and how we’re celebrating its accomplishments all year.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.