Book Memes

Book memes
* Grab the nearest book.
* Open it to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

“Fibonacci numbers are related to the golden ratio phi and to its conjugate, which are given by the following formulas: phi = (1+sqrt(5))/2, conjugate phi = (1 – sqrt(5))/2″

I’m way too geeky most of my books are mathematics and computer science.

Mt Whitney Hike

I took a long weekend to climb Mt Whitney with my Dad, the photos are at http://picasaweb.google.com/Bryan.W.Bell/MtWhitney

Mt Shasta Climb

I don’t normally post personal items but last weekend I climbed Mount Shasta with my dad, which I was very happy to summit. In July we’d tried to summit but got turned back by some ice.

The photos are at photos

Normal Matter < 5% of Universe

The biggest thing waiting to be discovered in physics and astronomy is the properties of dark matter (exactly what is it?).  Bad astronomy has a post with a summary of the results from WMAP. And the biggest surprise for me was that normal energy and matter are < 5% of the universe. So what, exactly, is the rest of the universe made of? I’m extremely curious about dark matter. The majority of the universe is dark matter and dark energy yet we know virtually nothing about them. It seems spurious for us to speculate on things such as other life in universe when we know almost nothing about what most of the universe is composed of.