As a soldier, I was once involved in riot control in a remote African country. One riot involved me kicking through the window glass of a battered car in order to free the panicked woman inside. That was in 1989. In 2004, a shard of glass worked its way through the skin of my calf. Completely painlessly, mind you; after a couple of weeks, I could gently draw it out between finger and thumb.

The works of the famous painter Mondriaan will fall into the public domain as per February 1, this year.

You are wrongly informed, did not search deeply enough, or maybe simply don't read German ? A team of Austrian archeologists is preparing to start digging, as soon as the weather allows it, i.e. as soon as precipitation and hydrology levels are so low as to let them work without danger of being suddenly flooded. Here in Austria, this would typically be from the end of April to the beginning of November.

Sounds like an idea. It would, however, entail to break the law by getting into the complex in this place. ( Pic featured in this Wikipedia article, in German. ), as well as, literally, walking over a certain public feeling of decency, as this place is a memorial to so many victims from nearby concentration camp Mauthausen, who were forced to work an die here.

"The whole 3rd Reich and occupied territories were tunneled..." is vastly exaggerated. See the overview map provided with this rather well-informed article, which will now need to be updated with the newly found complex in Austria.

And St. Georgen-an-der-Gusen is about a good hour's drive away. I'll certainly visit the place once it is opened up for the public. It is quite amazing what lengths the Nazis went to in order to shelter their weapons production from Allied bombing. Just outside the town I now live in, the Nazis dug out an existing cave complex, which had been a gypsum mine up to WO II, until the volume was large enough to facilitate a complete HE162 jet fighter production line.

If I had a daughter, I would dream of her developing the same courage, and a comparable intelligence. What she ( Malala, not my inexistent daughter ) advocates trumps anything else on the list, however important it may be. Malala should get the prize.

I type on two computers:

- my ThinkPad laptop, which I carry with me around all of Europe and give courses with. I have a Storm CM Mech keyboard that I also lug around, in my suitcase, and always hook up to it. Not only does it draw attention, people also express amazement at how fast and precisely one can type with it. I don't care that it is a gaming keyboard. It is nearly impossible to destroy, can be taken apart because of the aluminium cover fixed with screws, and has Cherry MX red switches for fantastic tactile feedback.

- my Fujitsu Celsius workstation, for when I am at home. There is a Razer Black Widow with Cherry MX blue switches hooked up to it. I can type for an entire day and not grow tired of the loud clickety-click. Of course, that is something not to burden your colleagues with - but then again, the Celsius is in my private work room, at home ( I am independent ).

Going back to the rubber-dome keyboards most people use, when I occasionally must use someone else's computer, e.g. during a course to quickly correct something, feels horrible: mushy, imprecise. Yes, mechanical keyboards have a certain cost, here ( in Central Europe ) about € 70 for a Storm CM Mech to € 120 for a new Black Widow. So what - they'll last me for years, and years, and years. I can guarantee you: once you make the move to a mechanical keyboard, you'll never look back.

is a fake frist psot.

Your glass is half empty. Mine is half full.

...but the text under it:

NASA is quietly, but openly, talking about going to Mars. It means I will be over 60 years old when they finally do it. But I will be there to watch the launch, and will be cheering and crying when they land on Mars. My parents saw the first man walking on the moon, via TV, and barely understood what they say. We *will* understand what we'll see. We will.

offers an interesting look upon what generalizes, and what does not generalize, when you "zoom out" from a system built up of neighbouring spins, replacing groups of neighbouring spins by single-spin blocks. The interesting link with CS is the fact that the arxiv paper considers binary spins. Thinking this through, the paper might indeed offer some explanation for large-scale behaviour ( read: macroscopic ) as composed of small-scale ( read: microscopic ) interactions. Quite interesting, indeed.

You overlook one thing: bending of light by the super-intense gravity of the black hole. The "back" side of the accretion disk, i.e. the side turned away from us, emits light. The black hole's gravity will pull that light around the bh and bend it in all possible ways; see Kip Thorne's results found in simulating the Gargantua black hole for the move "Interstellar", he's actually working on a physics / astrophysics paper with his findings. Bending of the accretion disk's light, which the bh will throw forward to us, will produce a halo effect around the bh. What you'd expect to see would be an intensely black sphere, surrounded by a great glow. ( The glow, btw, would be there in nearly all frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio through infrared and visible light into the hardest X-ray reaches. )

I can not help but wonder at the question: "Will the produced image in any way resemble the black hole depiction in the 'Interstellar' movie ?"