The God Particle

How close can we get to solve the mystery?

In other words / what are we really made of..!

Higgs Boson Explained by Cartoon:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120501.html

Explanation:
What is all this fuss about the Higgs boson? The physics community is abuzz that a fundamental particle expected by the largely successful Standard Model of particle physics may be soon be found by the huge Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Europe. The term boson refers to a type of fundamental particle with similarities to the photon, while Higgs refers to Peter Higgs, a physicist who among others published research predicting the mechanism through which such a particle might act. The above animated cartoon explains in humorous but impressive detail why the Higgs boson is expected, and one method that the Large Hadron Collider is using to find it. Although some rumors hint that preliminary traces of the Higgs boson are already being found, even not finding this unusual particle would open the door to a new fundamental understanding of how our universe works.

Dawn of the Large Hadron Collider
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080225.html

Large Hadron Rap:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM

 

If you like to learn more about this amazing experiment, the following Link is a Podcast [18 minutes] with Tejinder Virdee, CERN Physicist. Interviewed by Jim al-Khalili on BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/discovery

 

   

W & W Books

I have been commanded to participate in book questions and when one is commanded to do something, well … in most cases I just pretend I didn’t know about it but in this case it doesn’t hurt to play along.

The rules are as follows:

1. Post the Rules.
2. Answer the eleven questions that were asked of you by the person who tagged you.
3. Make up eleven new questions and tag your friends to do the same.
4. Let them know you tagged them or let them find by chance

 

Here are the questions that my ‘tagger’ made up and my answers:

1. Have you ever liked a movie more than the book? If so, what movie(s)?
   My Fair Lady. I saw the movie before I ever knew it was a book (Pygmalion) and I have tried twice to read the book but can never get past the first 20 pages. Inconceivable!
2. ________ opening for __________ would be a dream concert. Fill in the blanks. (You can fill them in with performers dead or alive.)
   I’ve never been much of a concert goer. I could count them all on one hand. Besides, there were not many concerts in the countries I lived in.. The last concert I went to was in 2001 when a friend surprised me with tickets to see a performance at a small venue. That was a good concert. Some local band I don’t even remember the name of opened the performance. I suppose it would be fun to see Eric Clapton in concert or Paul Simon but I don’t really care if I ever do. I am not considering Lebanese performers whom I have seen in the past years.
3. If you’re making dinner and don’t need to take into account anyone else’s tastes but your own, what do you find yourself having over and over again?
   Cereal, boiled eggs and Lebanese salads. Thank goodness I don’t have to cook for someone else.
4. You get to interview the author of the book you are reading right now. What’s the first question you’d ask?
   Since I am now reading The Heart of The Matter, I would ask Graham Greene why does Scobie believe that “no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness”
5. If the world becomes one in which all new novels are only published in digital format, what will you miss most?
   I don’t think I’d know how to fill in the shelves that are currently filled with my favorite books. Also. I’d really miss bookmarks and my need for commenting on books margins.
6. If you had been gifted to play any musical instrument brilliantly, what would you choose to play? (Or maybe you are so-gifted. If so, what do you play?)
   I never played any instruments. For a very very long time I wanted to learn how to play the piano. Currently I’d like to someday learn how to play a classic guitar. It’s much smaller and more portable. But then again, if #5 comes true I could put a piano in place of a bookshelf.
7. The “war between the sexes” has been around since the beginning of time. What do you think is the biggest problem between the sexes today?
   Frankly no-one has a definitive answer, neither do I; but I will borrow from Jane Austen, “half the world cannot understand the pleasure of the other.”
8. If you could switch places with any celebrity for three months, with whom would you like to switch places?
   I think I will pass on this. I’d never ever want to be a celebrity. I like my peace and quiet way too much and being followed around and having unflattering photos taken of me just is not so appealing. Even the thought of being Robert Redford for three months makes me cringe.
9. You can eat at any restaurant in the world. Where would you eat?
   A delicious meal cooked in my own kitchen by a wonderful friend. No restaurant anywhere can make me a meal seasoned with as much love and caring as she does.
10. What book do you wish you hadn’t wasted your time reading last year?
     The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
11. Would you like me to answer all these questions myself?
     But of course!

 

Now, here are my questions:

1. What is the first book you remember reading?
2. What book on your shelves have you owned the longest?
3. What is the oldest book on your shelves in terms of when that particular edition was published?
4. If you could meet a character from any book, what character would you like to meet?
5. What no longer living author do you wish were alive to write just one more book?
6. Where is your favorite place to read?
7. Do you like to snack while reading?
8. Do you read with music playing or the television on?
9. Has the internet shortened your attention span and made it harder to read books as cultural critics claim, or is your ability for sustained reading just as good or better than it ever was?
10. Do you belong to a book group?

    11.  What book or author haven’t you read yet and are always saying you’d like to get around to “someday”?

As for tagging eleven people, well, here I break the rules. Please play along if you’d like and just let me know via mail so I am sure to not miss your answers!

Some thoughts:

1. It will be really interesting looking at the various writer’s libraries and getting a sense of who they are and how they live.
2. I actually own no out-and-out pornography books. If I did, I will definitely have it out on my shelves. I’ve never liked the idea of a hidden book. It means no one will ever randomly pick it up and have a conversation with you about it.
3.  My favorite library in the book, not only for looks but also for content. I would even like a big Atlas one day.

I will leave you with this..

[When you look around somebody's personal library, you can actually see, physically, tangibly as objects, a map of that person's interests and preoccupations and memories. When you stand really close to somebody's library, you get a powerful sense of who they are, and not just who they are now but who they've been.

City & Concert

It is the so-called city of dreams that counts some of the greatest luminaries of music and art among its former inhabitants; and it seems Vienna still has plenty to boast about, as it has been named the best place to live in the world – for the third year running.

The Austrian capital, which was home to Mozart, Beethoven and Klimt, among others, and has a population of 1.7million, has the best living standards in the world, according to an annual quality of living survey. This result is from the Mercer 2011 Quality of Living survey.  Mercer conducts the survey to help governments and companies compensate employees fairly when placing them on international assignments.

Living conditions are analyzed according to 39 factors, grouped in 10 categories, including politics and social environment, economic environment, health and sanitation, education, transportation, housing and recreation.

Besides being the city of dreams, Vienna is also the city of music; and a major musical highlight is the New Year’s Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic that takes place each year in the morning of January 1^ST.  This concert is broadcast around the world to an estimated audience of 50 million in 72 countries and is considered the world’s most famous concert. The program always includes pieces from the Strauss family—Johann Strauss I, Johann Strauss II, Josef Strauss and Eduard Strauss — with occasional additional music from other mostly Austrian composers. This year’s conductor will be Mariss Jansons.

Interested?

The Vienna Philharmonic

http://www.wienerphilharmoniker.at/index.php?set_language=en&cccpage=newyearsconcert

 

You can buy the CD/DVD here:

https://shop.wienerphilharmoniker.at/en/magazin/NJK_2010

 

71st Vienna Philharmonic Ball:

http://www.wienerphilharmoniker.at/index.php?set_language=en&cccpage=ball

 

Johann Strauss – Waltzer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf365fiF8Z4

On the other hand, if you prefer Arabic [طرب] here’s the lady to follow on New Year’s Eve at Kasr Assoufara in Dbayeh, Lebanon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a2h2TgGUuk&feature=related

Peace & Good Times

 

 

شرم الشيخ

The warm and gentle excitement on the narrow walkways, and close by shores, will fill you with desire to take a swim anytime day or night. If you are with someone even slightly romantic or soulful, the place will bring you at least ten years back to a phase of sentiment and sensuality.

 

The normal tendency of travellers is to visit a variety of chosen places that we find interesting and pleasant. Then there are those of us who spend a number of visits in the same place and keep going back whenever we can – for many of us, Sharm El-Sheikh is such a place.

 

I guess earlier experiences go a long way in shaping our decisions and our reasons will vary; the first is the possibility to visit Sharm in different seasons when we will always find the colors different and the moods also different on every visit.

 

Of course touristic Sharm and surroundings are the same but there is no scarcity of various nice things to do throughout the year – and there is always the sea which is never the same. It offers endless possibilities in all its color and all its beauty. Sharm will definitely change the way we look at the sea. Sometimes cool and colorful, sometimes a little scary with wide varieties of beauty.

 

The walkways in some of the newly built areas [outside Naáma Bay] are calm and very bright in the mornings and supremely elegant throughout the day. You can enjoy making some images of those beautiful places and see them when the mood strikes you.

 

Visitors travel to Sharm in winter, spring, summer and fall. An amazing place to be and has lots of opportunities throughout the year. Local people and visitors alike will always surprise you. They are astonishingly different and pleasant every time you meet them.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

No llores porque ya se termino, sonría porque sucedió –

It only happens a few times during a life to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson in a letter to Sam Ward

Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1928 in the small town of Aracataca, situated in a tropical region of northern Colombia, between the mountains and the Caribbean Sea. He grew up with his maternal grandparent – his grandfather was a pensioned colonel from the civil war at the beginning of the century. He went to a Jesuit college and began to read law, but his studies were soon broken off for his work as a journalist. In 1954 he was sent to Rome on an assignment for his newspaper, and since then he has mostly lived abroad – in Paris, New York, Barcelona and Mexico – in a more or less compulsory exile. Besides his large output of fiction he has written screenplays and has continued to work as a journalist. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1982 was awarded to the author “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, refelcting a continent’s life and conflicts”.

The story One Hundred Years of Solitude is a postmodern novel. It follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied by descendants: his sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano José, Aureliano Segundo, and José Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women–the two Úrsulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar–who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitude does just that. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, with sorrow’s outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of García Márquez’s magical realism.

With the postmodernism feel and the element of magical realism where characters can do things that are not possible in real life. In example of this is Remedios’s ability to fly in the air and go away, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to adapt this novel.

However, we have reached an age where most things are done through TV and cinema. It is unfortunate many people do not read many books anymore. People would rather sit for a few hours in a dark room watching a screen. In my opinion it is necessary for more books to be adapted in films. Some people might argue whether a great book such as Madame Bovary and The Great Gatsby can shine in the same light with a film adaptation. With the film techniques available and the great talent this is very possible. May be watching an excellent movie on Pride and Prejudice or any other literary masterpiece is equal to reading the book, but it’s very unlikely that any film adaptation would do this novel justice… Just as well…

Some quotes to help with solitude:

   Let your heart grow old without bitterness

   A person doesn’t die when he should but when he can

   The uncertainty of the future turns our hearts to the past

   The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed

   Secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude

   One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a life of friendship

 

      

Ελλάδα

Greece is a country with a hallowed past and an at-times turbulent present. Appreciation of the achievements of its classical past has tended to overshadow its development as a free nation since the War of Independence from the Ottomans in 1821. Many people are imbued with a romantic ideal of the Greece of Pericles and the Parthenon are somewhat ignorant that Greece today is a vibrant modern European country. It is equally a land where the languages of recent migrant communities from the Balkans, North Africa and Asia – not to mention the English and German of EU migrants and retirees – contribute to Greece’s status as Europe’s recent multicultural societies.

 

Greece offers a myriad of experiences, landscapes and activities. It is the pulsing life of Mykonos and the ancient beauty of Delos; the grandeur of Delphi and the earthiness of Ioannina and the lush wildflowers of spring. It is the blinding light of the sun, the clear and blue waters, the tang of home-made tzatziki, the gossip in the kafeneia (coffee shops). It is the Parthenon – solitary and pristine – lording it over the hazy sprawl of Athens.

 

As recently as 1983, when it acceded to the EU, Greece was essentially a conservative, agrarian society famous for olive oil, coups, beaches and islands. Its transformation since its induction – has been no less than dramatic. It could once take up to two years to obtain a landline for a home – now Greeks boast more mobile phones than fixed-line phones. Internet hotspots pop up like mushrooms, while car ownership, once the privilege of the affluent few, is now a consumer commodity enjoyed by the majority. While sleeping on beaches was once de rigueur for travellers in the carefree ’70s, tourism is now most definitely pitched to the middle to upper-end markets and sleeping rough is no more the fashion.

 

This has created mixed blessings for visitors: better facilities inevitably come at higher prices; faster and safer sea travel has replaced more romantic slow boat voyages to rocky isles; wholesome, home-cooked food may be hard to find amid the surfeit of tacos, sushi or stir-fried lamb; homey, boxlike rooms tended to with a smile have been usurped by airy, air-conned self-catering apartments and small hostels.

 

So Greece is no longer a cheap country. Prices have rocketed since the adoption of the euro in 2002. Some dramatic price rises, particularly for accommodation and restaurant meals, have been evident in recent years. A rock-bottom daily budget for a solo traveler would be €70. This would mean hitching, staying in youth hostels or camping, and only occasionally eating in restaurants or taking ferries. Allow at least €120 per day if you want your own room and plan to eat out, travel about and see the sights. If you want comfortable rooms and restaurants all the way, you will need a minimum close to €350 per day.

 

Yet, Greece continues to enjoy a steady influx of foreign visitors and that is easy to explain. The Greek people still have the welcome mat out. It is they who, after all, make Greece. Without the indomitable bonhomie of the Greeks themselves, Greece would be a different place altogether. Their zest for life, their curiosity and their unquestioning hospitality to the visitors in their midst is what makes a visitor’s experience in the country inevitably unforgettable. The Greeks may complain too much, curse their luck at times, distrust their politicians and believe ‘oiling’ the wheels of bureaucracy a fact of life, but they maintain their joie de vivre, their spontaneity, their optimism.

So, the job at hand is simple: decide which particular Greece you want to experience; then go find out.

Innsbruck

 

There is something about Central Europe that I find absolutely charming and the city I will write about is exceptionally so.

Innsbruck is the capital of Tyrol in Western Austria; named in 1180 after the bridge over the river Inns-Bruck. Located between four mountain ranges, it is easy to reach by train or shuffle from Munich in Southern Germany. With a population of about 130000, the city boasts many interesting buildings, museums, churches, parks, gardens and fascinating mountain peaks. Some of those peaks are accessible from the city center by cable car. The city has a good history of sporting events including the 1976 winter Olympics, with a fascinating ski jump stadium designed by Zaha Hadid. Due to its location between high mountains, Innsbruck is an ideal place for skiing in winter and mountaineering in summer.

The province of Tyrol is so different from the rest of Austria that you might think you’ve crossed a border when you get there and if you like Central Europe, you’ll find Innsbruck in a class on its own.

Here are the names of some places to visit:

1. Alstadt (old town) and golden dome
2. Hofburg
3. Triumphforte
4. Landesmuseum
5. Schloss Ambras
6. Maria-Theresien-Strabe (Main Street)
7. Bergiselschanze, designed by Zaha Hadid
8. Hafelekar (2256 meters over the city)
9. Wilde Freiger (3418 meters) for climbers.

A special City Bus will take you around to all those places and you could dismount at any one location and then rejoin the bus to another location.

To visit all the above places, you will need 3 to 4 days depending on how many hours you’ll want to walk each day. Even for “lazy” travellers the city and surrounding mountains have so much to offer you’ll barely notice the passage of time.

A note for music lovers: if you like to attend concerts or music festivals for which Austria is famous for, you should know that over 90% of those venues for 2011 are already booked; but you could still find some seats and can make bookings on_line.

If you are not interested in nature, culture, music, good food, wine and bear then you’ll be better off vacationing at another destination.

Book Heaven

Book heaven is for real in Hay-on-Wye

In spite of iPads, Nooks, Kindles and other electronic media readers, I am still in the stone age when it comes to reading books – I prefer a hard cover book that smells of fresh print which I curl up with every evening before I go to sleep, and on which margins I write my simple notes; unless, of course, I have a warm and curly figure I could curl around!

Back to my subject: whether you like or dislike the British [as I do], one must admit that Brits have a great knack for putting on a good show; like the Chelsea Flower Festival going on right now, or the annual literature convention called the Hay Book Festival currently going on at the picturesque Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Any book lover or even an average reader would have a grand time visiting this book festival in Wales which is taking place from the 23^RD May till 1^ST of June. The festival offers any and all kinds of books imaginable plus a number of headline guests that include Nobel Laureates, historians and writers from all walks of literature. All of whom will present lectures, readings and answer sessions including top authors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The present events cover works of Art & Architecture, Comedy, Economics, Entertainment, History & Philosophy, Literature, Music, Politics & Journalism, Religion, Science, also Stage & Screen. Apart from the ongoing festival, it seems the town itself consists of wall to wall second hand bookshops, a reader’s Mecca by any standard.

Sister festivals take place in many cities including Beirut. I would however imagine being in Hay-on-Wye to be a much more enriching experience than anywhere else including Beirut.

“Heaven is other people’s books”

Discovery

The Final Mission:

An amazing achievement and the end of an era

We will never see anything like this again in future 

Space shuttle Discovery lifted off last Thursday on its final mission carrying supplies and spare parts to the International Space Station. The shuttle takes its name from four British ships of exploration named Discovery, primarily one of the ships commanded by Captain James Cook.

The shuttle carried a storage room for the space station, a $100 billion project of 16 nations nearing completion after more than a decade of construction 354km above the Earth.

Discovery also transported a platform to house spare parts outside the station and equipment and supplies. The cargo included a humanoid robot, known as Robonaut 2 that will be set up in the U.S. laboratory for a trial run.

 

The flight was the 39th and final space mission for NASA’s oldest surviving orbiter / shuttles Columbia and Challenger were lost in accidents that claimed the lives of 14 astronauts.

One of Discovery’s most famous missions on 24 April 1990 was the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. The second and third Hubble service missions were also conducted by Discovery. It has also launched the Ulysses probe and three TDRS satellites. Discovery has been chosen twice as the return to flight orbiter, first in 1988 as the return to flight orbiter after the 1986 Challenger disaster, and then for the twin return to flight missions in July 2005 and July 2006 after the 2003 Columbia disaster. Discovery also carried Project Mercury astronaut John Glenn, who was 77 at the time, back into space during STS-95 on October 29, 1998, making him the oldest human being to venture into space.

 

Discovery will have flown 39 flights in over 27 years, completed over 5,247 orbits, and spent 329 days in orbit. Discovery is the orbiter fleet leader, having flown more flights than any other orbiter in the fleet, including four in 1985 alone. Discovery flew all three “return to flight” missions after the Challenger and Columbia disasters in 1988, in 2005, and 2006.

The remaining three ships are being retired due to high operational costs and to free up money to develop new vehicles capable of travelling beyond the space station’s orbit.

 

NASA plans to launch shuttle Endeavour on its final flight in April 2011 and end the programme with a final cargo haul to the station over the summer aboard Atlantis, though funding for that mission has not yet been allotted. This coming flight will be the end of a 30-year programme that achieved much for our world. The five-man, one-woman crew are scheduled to spend 11 days in orbit.

Summary of human spaceflights:

Year of Flt	Russia	United States	China	Total
1961–1970	16	25		41
1971–1980	30	8		38
1981–1990	24	37		61
1991–2000	20	63		83
2001–2010	24	34	3	61
Total	114	167	3	284

 

Russian Culture

Russian culture started from that of East Slavs with their pagan beliefs and specific way of life in the wooden areas of Eastern Europe. Early on, the culture of Russian ancestors was much influenced by neighboring Finno-Ugric tribes and by nomadic,  mainly Turkic, peoples of the Pontic steppe. The Scandinavian Vikings, or Varangians, also took part in the forming of Russian identity and state in the early Kievan Rus’ period of the late 1st millennium AD. Rus’ had accepted Orthodox Christianity from the East Roman Empire in 988, and this largely defined the Russian culture of next millennium as the synthesis of Slavic and Byzantine cultures.  After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Russia remained the largest Orthodox nation in the world and claimed succession to the Byzantine legacy in the form of the Third Rome idea. At different points of its history, the country also was strongly influenced by the European Culture, and since Peter the Great reforms, Russian culture largely developed in the context of the Western culture. For most of the 20th century, the Communist ideology shaped the culture of the Soviet Union, where Russia, or Russian SFSR, was the largest and leading part.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Russian culture is extremely various and unique in many aspects. It has a rich history and can boast a long tradition of excellence in every aspect of arts, especially when it comes to literature^, and philosophy, classical music and ballet,  architecture and painting, cinema and animation, which all had considerable influence on the world culture.

Russian literature is known for such notable writers as Aleksandr Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Platonov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Varlam Shalamov. Russians also gave the classical music world some very famous composers, including Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and his contemporaries, the Mighty Handful, including Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. In the 20th century Russian music was credited with such influential composers as Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, Georgy Sviridov, and Alfred Schnittke. Many more famous Russian people are associated with different aspects of culture.

The book that made me decide to have a closer look into Russian literature was “Anna Karenina,” which I first read a long time back. The thing that appealed to me and constituted its Russianness for me was that it was simultaneously funny and sad. The English also had funny novels, but they weren’t exactly sad, except in the Dickensian, melodramatic sense, with, say, orphans being mistreated. They didn’t have Anna Karenina being run over by a train. French novels had genuine pathos, but their humor lay in a kind of cynicism. They didn’t make you laugh out loud, like in the scene when Oblonsky has to consult Karenin’s medium to find out whether Anna can get her divorce. German novels were all about romanticism and romantic compatibility and questions of how to live correctly – but they wouldn’t have a fatally important scene set among aristocrats at a ball or the opera. And I loved those scenes in “Anna Karenina” – partly because I liked to read about the way people lived at that time, but also because you sense, with Tolstoy, that he sees through all those empty forms as clearly as a French person, but he’s carried away by them all the same.

I don’t know whether it’s good or bad that I am a slow reader. Sometimes I think it’s good because it gives me time to understand better what I read but then again, there is a vast land of literature out there so how much could I cover as a slow reader..!