Showing posts with label Dark Matter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dark Matter. Show all posts

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Darwin versus Donatella Versace: like Mind,the Flesh,Sex is

drawing by marguerita


Ça faisait floc floc.
it is the sadness that informs
as it “leads an animal to pursue that course
of action which is most beneficial.”
The darkness was a kind of light.
Et quand un homme vous aime, ça change tout !

Sometimes, Darwin wrote
William Styron described as a “gray drizzle of horror . . .
a storm of murk.”
Obsessed with our pain, we will retreat from everything.
We will stop eating, unless we start eating too much.

Sex will lose its appeal; sleep will become a frustrating pursuit.

We will always be tired, even though we will do less and less.

We will think a lot about death.

The persistence of this affliction — and the fact

that it seemed to be heritable — posed

a serious challenge to Darwin’s new evolutionary theory.

If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made

a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that

impedes reproduction — it leads people to stop having sex .


.......Andrews and Thomson

struck up an extended

conversation on the

evolutionary roots

of depression.

They began by focusing

on the thought process

that defines the disorder,

which is known as rumination.

(The verb is derived

from the Latin word

for “chewed over,”

which describes the act of

digestion in cattle, in

which they swallow,

regurgitate and then

rechew their food.)

“This is a very delicate subject.

“I don’t want to

say something reckless.

On another note:

Donatella Versace had re-visited everything — blasts of bright color,
leather given a sensual spin and evening dresses opening windows to bare flesh.
And on another Note:
Mr. Bras said that the world is becoming
so virtual and ephemeral that
what he wanted most was to give
this dish a real identity, one that
bears the marks both of the chefs
who cooked the ingredients and
of the farmers
who created them.


Thursday, December 24, 2009

Dark Matter and Us


Zyg & Mea- graphic novel pages by marguerita bornstein

,published in Poignant Frog previously

A consensus has emerged that dark matter mostly consists of massive particles coughed out of the big bang. The reason for the appellation "dark" is because, unlike atomic particles, they have no electric charge, so cannot emit or scatter light. Nor do they feel the strong nuclear force that traps protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei. As a result, the dark particles interact so feebly with ordinary matter that they mostly pass right through it.

The race to detect and identify these particles started in the 1980s. Because the solar system orbits the galaxy at more than 200km per second, it should be ploughing through an ocean of primordial dark matter. As a result, there is a small probability that a dark matter particle will bump into an atomic nucleus and send it flying.

The challenge is to detect such a collision.

One such experiment, known as the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, in Minnesota, has been gathering data for several years. Now, following painstaking analysis, project scientists have declared that they have recorded a couple of likely looking dark matter events. Theoretical physicists long ago predicted the existence of various weakly interacting massive particles.

One of these theories, called supersymmetry, links the nature of fundamental particles to the structure of space and time, and is an essential ingredient of string theory, the scheme that seeks to unify all nature.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/23/dark-matter-key-understanding-universe