Scarlet Jewels
The NewsLog of Julie Solheim-Roe

Thursday, January 23, 2003day link 

 Seyfert's Sextet
pictureAstronomy's Pict o the Day
Credit: J. English (U. Manitoba), C. Palma (PSU), et al., NASA

"Explanation: Known as Seyfert's Sextet, this intriguing group of galaxies lies in the head portion of the split constellation Serpens. The sextet actually contains only four interacting galaxies, though. Near the center of this Hubble Space Telescope picture, the small face-on spiral galaxy lies in the distant background and appears only by chance aligned with the main group. Also, the prominent condensation on the far right is likely not a separate galaxy at all, but a tidal tail of stars flung out by the galaxies' gravitational interactions. About 190 million light-years away, the interacting galaxies are tightly packed into a region around 100,000 light-years across, comparable to the size of our own Milky Way galaxy, making this one of the densest known galaxy groups. Bound by gravity, the close-knit group may coalesce into a single large galaxy over the next few billion years."
[ | 2003-01-23 21:45 | 1 comment | PermaLink ]  More >


 Evolution---Life Plastic and Everything
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"If you don't think that something as common as the plastic Visa credit card in your wallet could be part of evolution's plan, consider this:
Visa International ... espouses no political, economic, social or legal theory, thus transcending language, custom, politics and culture to successfully connect a bewildering variety of more than 21,000 financial institutions,16 million merchants and 800 million people in 300 countries and territories. Annual volume of $1.4 trillion continues to grow in excess of twenty percent compounded annually. A staff of about three thousand people scattered in twenty-one offices in thirteen countries on four continents provides ... around-the-clock operation of two global electronic communication systems with thousands of data centers communicating through nine million miles of fiber-optic cable. Its electronic systems clear more transactions in one week than the Federal Reserve System does in a year."
(SNIP)
"The Chaordic Commons (www.chaordic.org), explains this phenomenon in captivating detail. Principally, a chaordic organization is a self-organizing and self-evolving entity, which ends up looking more like a neural network (like the Internet) than a hierarchically-organized bureaucracy in which decision-making power is centralized at the top and trickles down through a series of well-regulated departments and managers. Chaordic organizations do not fear change or innovation. They are, by their very nature, supremely adaptive. They also tend to be inclusive, multicentric, and distributive and, ultimately, strongly cohesive due to their unshakable focus on common purpose and core principles. If you can't quite visualize it, there's a good reason, which Hock will explain in the following interview."
From Transformation by Design/ An Interview with Dee Hock by Melissa Hoffman for 'What is Enlightment' Magazine.
[ | 2003-01-23 20:41 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


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