brothers......sisters......

Many Billions of Rocky Planets in the Habitable Zones around Red Dwarfs in the Milky Way

A new result from ESO’s HARPS planet finder shows that rocky planets not much bigger than Earth are very common in the habitable zones around faint red stars. The international team estimates that there are tens of billions of such planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and probably about one hundred in the Sun’s immediate neighbourhood. This is the first direct measurement of the frequency of super-Earths around red dwarfs, which account for 80% of the stars in the Milky Way (the most common kind of star in the Milky Way . These stars are faint and cool compared to the Sun, but very common and long-lived, and therefore account for 80% of all the stars in the Milky Way).

As there are many red dwarf stars close to the Sun the new estimate means that there are probably about one hundred super-Earth planets in the habitable zones around stars in the neighbourhood of the Sun at distances less than about 30 light-years.

"The habitable zone around a red dwarf, where the temperature is suitable for liquid water to exist on the surface, is much closer to the star than the Earth is to the Sun,"

(Data from the European Southern Observatory. http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1214/#5)

Education XXIII, open mindness

The more I look at myself and look at people around, I realize that to acquire knowledge is relatively simple: to experience, study, read, practice, effort, will.....quite straightforward. But there are other more subtle qualities that seemed to me higher in nature, like to be open minded.

Is it possible an education that is conducive to be open minded?. To be open minded, it seems to me, first of all one has to question one's own conditioning: social, educational, family....even genetic conditioning.
But I am sure there are other things, like for instance: a mind that is open cannot rely in one's own opinions to have security...
And what else?

(picture by iqoncept)

Prejudice II

Researchers from ETH Zurich have been exploring the question of whether prejudices might be rational under certain conditions.
Using game theory, they created various scenarios and played them fifteen million times.
The researchers have now reached a conclusion: those who are prejudiced are soon at a disadvantage, as they learn nothing new and miss many opportunities.

(Thomas Chadefaux, Dirk Helbing. The Rationality of Prejudices. PLoS ONE, 2012; 7 (2): e30902)

freedom

I always felt intuitively that "things are not as they are but as we take them to be", and today reading about Epictetus, he said: “It does not trouble us what happens, but what we tell ourselves that is happening” .

Then I read more about Epictetus.

"Epictetus (AD 55 – AD 135). He was born a slave at Hierapolis (present day Turkey), and lived in Rome until he got his freedom from being a slave.

Philosophy, Epictetus taught, is a way of life and not just a theoretical discipline. To Epictetus, all external events are determined by fate, and are thus beyond our control, but we can accept whatever happens calmly and dispassionately. Individuals, however, are responsible for their own actions, which they can examine and control through rigorous self-discipline.

Suffering arises from trying to control what is uncontrollable, or from neglecting what is within our power. we are a part of the universal city that is the universe...." (Taken from Wikipedia).

It is quite a beautiful story. A human being that was born a slave, but became free inwardly and then outwardly......