The pentatonic scale

This video shows the working of the pentatonic scale in practice.
It says something about the universality of music.

The Universe

We now have the answers to the stuff the Universe is made of and how it evolved. The Planck satellite has measured precisely the first photography of the Universe when it was only 400 thousand years old. The following picture is a projection of the whole celestial sphere on a flat screen (like a whole Earth map)

After numerous calculations, the scientists have deduced the age of the Universe, 13.8 billion years ( give or take tens of million years). Three phases are important to grasp in the expansion of the Universe:

1. the inflation which started just after the Big Bang (within the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second), an exponential growth of the distance between any two points, which ends with the creation of matter (nothing to do with the monetary increase)
2. the power-law growth of the Universe during the first 5 billion years. This phase has seen the appearance of structures in the Universe leading to galaxies, stars and planets
3. the second inflation (also called dark energy): for the last 8 billion years, we have had another exponential growth of the distance between galaxies with time such that the dilution will make us drift apart from other galaxies forever.

The visible matter of the Universe is only ten percent of the total atomic matter. This atomic matter is only a fifth of the total matter, the rest being the dark matter which nature is totally unknown and has not been detected on Earth yet.

Crisis and innovation, hand-in-hand

You must read this short article (in French) by Marc Giget, a specialist of the economy of innovation.

Necrology

Here are important people who have died recently.

1. Marie-Claire Alain was the best organist of her generation. Her brother Jehan Alain was a good composer but died at the age of 29 during the 2nd world war. Listen to the "Litanies"
2. Stéphane Hessel was part of the resistance, became a diplomat. Famous for his little book "Indignez-vous".
3. Hugo Chavez was the president of Venezuela for 14 years. Mostly a dictator with a leftist cover. One can be generous with lots of petrol to sell. The justice and human rights have gone down. But, to be fair, poverty has decreased.

Market data

Here are names of the major index of market places that should be known. Current values can be retrieved from e.g. here.

• the CAC40 now at 3600 (used to be above 4000). It includes the 40 best valued companies with headquarters in France. Peugeot recently lost its place from the top 40 places
• the FTSE100 (or Footsie one hundred) lists the top 100 British companies, and is currently at 6300.
• the Dow Jones concerns the 30 major American companies and is at 14000
• the Nasdaq concerns technological American companies and is at 3100

Economics got it all wrong?

Are mainstream economists able to withstand the massive blow on their credibility they received during the recent and still on-going world-wide crisis?
In response to Paul Krugman's article ("How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?"), one can read this article ("Who Are These Economists, Anyway?", translated into French here) by James Galbraith (not Kenneth) which is very insightful. For example, talking about the sub-prime credit market crisis, he writes "None of this was foreseen by mainstream economists, who generally find crime a topic beneath their dignity".
Still, economics is not a science based on hard-facts acquired by experiments. It has many flaws. There are two contradictory theories backing the same set of evidence. For each new crisis in the world, I am sure that one can find some economists who can pretend to have predicted it and say "I told you so".
Yet, a lesson which could be taken from basic physics is that, in order to prevent a dynamic system from becoming unstable, you need to put some dampening, aka regulations and taxes in economics.

Asteroids

Rather than worrying about horse-meat in the cow food chain, one pope replacing another, we should be more concerned with the fact that the sky is falling down. Well, bits of rocks are falling down, once in a while. Recently, an asteroid came quite close to falling on Earth. The largest recorded similar event happened in 1908 in Russia. It is thought that a massive asteroid is at the source of the extinction of dinosaurs about 65 millions years ago. Every cloud has a silver lining, the disappearance of dinosaurs allowed little mammals to thrive. They could then evolve in the tree of life toward human beings.