It appears that Virgin Galactic's space tourism spaceplane exploded right after its rocket engine was lit during a powered test-flight.

The rocket plane was at about 50,000 feet when it blew up, not long after it was released from its carrier/launcher plane (which wasn't damaged and returned safely). Debris was scattered over a large area. From the looks of the debris, the thing came apart at altitude, losing some of its control surfaces. Witnesses report it tumbling.

Two test pilots were aboard. Reports are one was killed, the other seriously injured and helicoptered to a hospital. Some (not all) witnesses report seeing a parachute, so maybe the injured pilot was able to bail at some point.

My guess is that the whole Virgin Galactic space tourism project might be a fatality as well.  At best it's going to be delayed for years.

EXCERPT: The original 1963 recording of the Doctor Who theme music is widely regarded as a significant and innovative piece of electronic music, recorded well before the availability of commercial synthesisers. Delia Derbyshire (assisted by Dick Mills) of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used musique concrète techniques to realise a score written by composer Ron Grainer.

Each note was individually created by cutting, splicing, speeding up and slowing down segments of analogue tape containing recordings of a single plucked string, white noise, and the simple harmonic waveforms of test-tone oscillators which were used for calibrating equipment and rooms, not creating music. The main, pulsing bassline rhythm was created from a recording of a single plucked string, played over and over again in different patterns created by splicing copies of the sound, with different pitches and notes achieved by playing the sample in different speeds. The swooping melody and lower bassline layer were created by manually adjusting the pitch of oscillator banks to a carefully timed pattern. The non-swooping parts of the melody were created by playing a keyboard attached to the oscillator banks. The rhythmic hissing sounds, "bubbles" and "clouds", were created by cutting tape recordings of filtered white noise.

Once each sound had been created, it was modified. Some sounds were created at all the required pitches direct from the oscillators, others had to be repitched later by adjusting the tape playback speed and re-recording the sound onto another tape player. This process continued until every sound was available at all the required pitches. To create dynamics, the notes were re-recorded at slightly different levels.

Each individual note was then trimmed to length by cutting the tape, and stuck together in the right order. This was done for each "line" in the music – the main plucked bass, the bass slides (an organ-like tone emphasising the grace notes), the hisses, the swoops, the melody, a second melody line (a high organ-like tone used for emphasis), and the bubbles and clouds. Most of these individual bits of tape making up lines of music, complete with edits every inch, still survive.

This done, the music had to be "mixed". There were no multitrack tape machines, so rudimentary multitrack techniques were invented: each length of tape was placed on a separate tape machine and all the machines were started simultaneously and the outputs mixed together. If the machines didn't stay in sync, they started again, maybe cutting tapes slightly here and there to help. In fact, a number of "submixes" were made to ease the process – a combined bass track, combined melody track, bubble track, and hisses.

Grainer was amazed at the resulting piece of music and when he heard it, famously asked, "Did I write that?". Derbyshire modestly replied "Most of it". However the BBC, who wanted to keep members of the Workshop anonymous, prevented Grainer from getting Derbyshire a co-composer credit and a share of the royalties.

[...] The theme has been often called both memorable and frightening, priming the viewer for what was to follow. During the 1970s, the Radio Times, the BBC's own listings magazine, announced that a child's mother said the theme music terrified her son. The Radio Times was apologetic, but the theme music remained....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_theme_music

http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc...277&cn=394

Analytic Philosophy in America And Other Historical and Contemporary Essays, by Scott Soames, Princeton University Press, 2014

Review by Alexandre Declos

EXCERPT: Distinguished philosopher of language and historian of philosophy, Scott Soames presents in his latest book a collection of fifteen recent essays, three of them previously unpublished. Although most of these texts had originally been published separately and in different contexts, they all share a similar goal: to inquire on the origins, history, and actuality of analytic philosophy, still largely preponderant in English-speaking countries.

[...] Although the major part of the book is dedicated to historical essays, it should be noted that they always incorporate critical remarks, echoing Soames' general advocacy of history of philosophy as a normative project, irreducible to any sort of descriptive narrative for its own sake. Indeed, the author does not hesitate to mark out what he considers to be the fundamental insights or defects of the theories under his scrutiny. He also generally makes clear what are the philosophical claims and options he favors: a good example would be his defense of a "cognitive" theory of propositions in the fourth essay. This aspect of Soames' method should be noted, as it has generated some controversy amongst historians of philosophy in the past (see Soames 2006 for a summary of and replies to these attacks). The reader should thus be aware that in addition to the historical picture here provided, there are also -and admittedly- strong claims held by the author.

Overall, this volume will prove useful for anybody curious about the history of analytic philosophy...

http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc...278&cn=394

Death and the Afterlife, by Samuel Scheffler, Oxford University Press, 2013

Review by Peter Stone

EXCERPT: ...The topic of Scheffler's book is the "collective afterlife," or "the continued existence of other people after one's own death". Scheffler contrasts the collective afterlife with the personal afterlife, in which many people (but not Scheffler) believe. Scheffler argues that "the survival of humanity matters more to each of us than we usually realize; indeed...it matters more to us even than our own survival," at least in some respects. Scheffler believes that a fuller realization of this fact might motivate people to care more about the continued survival of the species--a goal that Russell, to be sure, would wholeheartedly endorse. Scheffler further argues that while the collective afterlife is critically important to human life, a personal afterlife, if it existed, would threaten our entire way of being. "Our confidence in our values," he concludes, "depends both on death, which is inevitable and which many of us nevertheless fear, and on the survival of human life, which is not at all inevitable and threats to which most of us do not fear enough"...

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/168

EXCERPT: A controversial theory in which light broke its own speed limit in the early universe joins forces with string theory and loop quantum gravity to solve cosmic mysteries. [...] Good science needs heretics—people who aren’t afraid of seemingly mad ideas that may end up leading us to new truths. Once in awhile, their crazy proposals make the transition from taboo to—if not quite the mainstream—the respectable fringes of physics, with a host of associated offshoots by independent researchers. This is what has happened to cosmologist João Magueijo’s speculation, just over a decade ago, that the speed of light isn’t the physical constant we take it to be. [...] Magueijo, at Imperial College London, UK, and his colleague, cosmologist Andreas Albrecht, a member of FQXi now at UC Davis, first came up with their varying speed of light (VSL) model in early 1997. The idea resolves two of the biggest problems with Big Bang cosmology: explaining the smoothness of the universe’s background radiation that we see today, called the horizon problem, and explaining the dynamics of expansion and the shape of the universe, which relates to its density, known as the flatness problem...

http://geology.com/articles/northwest-passage.shtml

EXCERPT: The Northwest Passage is a sea route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. In the past, the Northwest Passage has been virtually impassable because it was covered by thick, year-round sea ice. However, in the past few years, climate change is allowing commercial traffic to pass through the Arctic Ocean via this once impossible route.

The potential benefits of a clear Northwest Passage are significant. Ship routes from Europe to eastern Asia would be 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) shorter. Alaskan oil could move quickly by ship to ports in the eastern United States. The vast mineral resources of the Canadian North will be much easier and economical to develop and ship to market....

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...102914.php

EXCERPT: A research group led by Anne Dutrey from the Laboratory of Astrophysics of Bordeaux, France, and the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) observed the distribution of dust and gas in a binary star system called GG Tau-A. It was recently discovered that one of GG Tau-A's components is itself a double star. This object is only a few million years old and lies approximately 460 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.

Like a wheel in a wheel, GG Tau-A contains a large, outer disk encircling the entire system as well as an inner disk around the main central star. This second inner disk has a mass roughly equivalent to that of Jupiter. Its presence has been an intriguing mystery for astronomers since it is losing material to its central star at a rate that should have depleted it long ago....

http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/epide...connection

EXCERPT: Many factors, both genetic and environmental, have been blamed for increasing the risk of a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Some, such as a family history of schizophrenia, are widely accepted. Others, such as infection with Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite transmitted by soil, undercooked meat and cat feces, are still viewed with skepticism.

A new study by Gary Smith, professor of population biology and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine, used epidemiological modeling methods to determine the proportion of schizophrenia cases that may be attributable to T. gondii infection. The work, published in the journal Preventive Veterinary Medicine, suggests that about one-fifth of cases may involve the parasite.

“Infection with Toxoplasma is very common, so, even if only a small percentage of people suffer adverse consequences, we could be talking about problems that affect thousands and thousands of people,” Smith said.

In the United States, just over a fifth of the population is infected with T. gondii. The vast majority aren’t aware of it. But there are some populations that need to be concerned....