IS SCIENCE EATING ITS YOUNG?

Elevated walkway and visitor centre added to 12th century abbey ruins by Binario Architectes »

50, 100 years down the line, will this be in the history books? Will the "War on terror" be over?

Battle of Mosul begins as forces push toward Islamic State stronghold.

A shooting star over Mount Rainier By Tanner Wendell Stewart

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New Evidence Found which Matches Legendary Founding of the First Dynasty of China

A archaeological team from Beijing University have found new evidence that surprisingly fits the ancient Chinese histories’ accounts of the founding of the Xia Dynasty. Previously, historians had dismissed all accounts of the first, second, and third dynasties as fabrications. They were written to glorify the dynasties which came later, not to document what had really happened. But archaeological findings over the last century provided evidence that the second and third dynasties had really existed. The Shang Dynasty you likely heard about in schools. Yup, we had once thought it was a myth. Now science and archaeology may be confirming the earliest dynasty written about existed as well. Read more

Very important to keep in mind when you've hit a plateau in anything

Improving Your Relationship With the Person in the Mirror - Dance Comp Review

New Post has been published on http://dancecompreview.com/improving-your-relationship-with-the-person-in-the-mirror/

Improving Your Relationship With the Person in the Mirror

Do you hate looking at yourself on film or in the mirror? Are you always focusing on what you need to improve, without taking pride in your accomplishments? If you answered yes to either of the above, you may want to make some changes to how you perceive yourself.

An often overlooked part of learning to dance is the importance of staying conscious, not only of what you need to improve, but also of the progress you’ve made. Without this balance, many dancers develop or reinforce negative beliefs about themselves, which may have no basis in reality.

It’s important to remember that what we see is often coloured by the opinions we already hold about ourselves. A person who believes they are fat for example, is likely to still hold that belief even after loosing 50 pounds. In order to develop a more healthy relationship with yourself, you first need to change these limiting beliefs.

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First: Is the mirror distorted?

Sometimes, it really is the mirror’s fault! A warped mirror can make people appear bigger or smaller, create the impression that they are not balanced well, or make correct technique look strange. Before reading on, try remembering if there is certain mirrors you tend to like dancing in front of more than others, and why.

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Is your perception of yourself distorted?

This is by far the more likely situation. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to improve yourself of course, and you can’t do that without being aware of what you want to correct. But this can work against you when the self-criticism becomes demoralizing, when it starts to hurt your self-esteem and self-perception.

You might have a distorted perception of yourself if:

You receive compliments about your dancing with skepticism.

You find yourself focusing on the flaws in your appearance and technique, and ignoring what looks good.

You complain frequently about how bad a dancer you are.

You often leave a practice feeling sad, depressed, or angry at yourself.

If a performance or competition goes well, you assume you just ‘got lucky’.

You hang around other dancers or people who complain about themselves a lot.

You spend a lot of money on your appearance, and it still doesn’t seem like enough.

You use words like ‘always’ and ‘never’ when critiquing yourself (ex. ‘I always screw up X, I’ll never get it right.’)

You take constructive criticism very personally.

You quickly give up if a practice isn’t going well.

You feel like this article is telling you to stop working hard.

You compare yourself unfavourably to others

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If you want to start creating a more positive (and honest) image of yourself, try these tips:

Find at least one thing you did well after each practice. Thank yourself for doing it well.

Ask your instructor to let you know where you’ve made progress, and trust their opinion! Remember that they are the experts.

Ask yourself why you feel fat, clumsy, etc., and using only hard facts, what you know that backs that up. Compare that to why you might be the opposite.

Imagine yourself as a champion dancer. Think of how this person would walk, talk, feel, and dance. Practice being this person in your daily life.

Write down an empowering sentence about yourself, and repeat it daily. For example: ‘Every day, I am becoming a more skilled and competent dancer.’

Make a plan with your instructor, and set some concrete goals you can measure your progress by.

Smile more! Studies show just by smiling, you can trick your body into feeling happier, which boosts your self-confidence.

Stop comparing yourself to anyone but yourself from 24 hours ago.

Practice letting go of your mistakes, either by making it funny, or quickly refocusing on the next movement.

Reward yourself after doing something well, even if only by allowing yourself to feel a little pride.

Surround yourself with positive people.

These mental hacks will allow you to start seeing yourself in a better light. And that in turn, will help you find the motivation you need to become the dancer of your dreams. Go get ‘em!

Author: Ian Crewe Photography: Pavel Yuryev Exclusively for Dance Comp Review

The Sciences, in Brief

Geology: lick the rock

Psychology: brainception

Genetics: Punett squares and percentages

Chemistry: what is water?

Biology: no math for the love of God

Physics: 1001 ways to throw things

Astronomy: the nerds of the science world

Dolce Far Niente in Dance Sport - Dance Comp Review

New Post has been published on http://dancecompreview.com/dolce-far-niente-dance-sport/

Dolce Far Niente in Dance Sport

It wasn’t that long ago, when I set up a new training schedule for my partner and I: a plan with all the goals, the training sessions and the topics we wanted to improve. To be honest, I was proud of what I created, because it was so thought through along with a lot of things finally falling into place. Well, at least these were my thoughts – until I brought the plan for discussion to a private lesson with our coach…

I am so glad that I had a professional eye to look over this! When he saw the schedule, he nodded and then said: “Good work so far, but there is one crucial thing missing.” It was like a wakeup call when he told me: “I see everything in this plan, except for the time when you do nothing at all”. That was it! I totally forgot to plan the time for regeneration: one of the key components when it comes to successful training.

In a (dance)-society that is (mostly) driven by the words higher, faster, stronger, we all tend to forget that we only get better in the time we leave our bodies to regenerate. This doesn’t mean of course that we will get better by doing nothing at all. It’s all about doing nothing AFTER we have been working hard. For instance, if we want to make our muscles more powerful, they first have to be exhausted and then they need time to rebuild to an even stronger version. But also our brain needs downtime to process new information. If we learn something new, it’s first saved in the short-term memory and then by processing the information, it will probably be stored in the long-term memory. And as we all know, in sleep our brain consolidates memories best.

Active work demands for active recovery from the physical and mental demands, in order to improve what we are doing. This goes for nearly all aspects in life and also perfectly for dancing. What do I mean by “active recovery”? Here is a quick and personal list:

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Low Impact Activities

It’s always great to go on a short, easy 15-minute-walk. You can also do a really low impact Yoga session or stretch a little bit. Everything that makes you feel calm, relaxed and refueled. But don’t overdo it! Really give your body a rest!

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Nutrition

Of course and as always, what you put into your body is crucial. A balanced nutrition is key to your healthy body as well as active recovery. Try to really control the amounts and also the quality of food you are taking in, and your exhausted muscles will thank you. Not to mention, your concentration on the next lesson will be so much better. One really important tip to keep in mind is, that starving your body (in case you are trying to lose weight or you’ve been telling yourself that “you don’t have time to eat”) is not good for your recovery at all. It will stress your system even more and will not let your body improve.

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Sleep

According to the National Sleep Foundation, Serena Williams, a really successful tennis player, enjoys to go to bed at 7pm in order to get enough sleep. I am not telling you, that this would also work for you, but it is worth giving a thought. I used her example to really emphasize on how important sleeping is, even more for people who are physically active. It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself as a serious athlete/artist, or if you are just in it for fun, but getting the right amount of sleep is decisive to your performance and also to your improvement. Adults between the age 18 and 64 need between 6 and 11 hours, while 7-9 hours of sleep are recommended. I understand that this is a lot of time, but, in my opinion, sleeping is not enough of a priority anymore. Find yourself a sleeping schedule and also keep it on the weekends. Turn off electronics, find your ideal light, sound and temperatures in your bedroom and give your system a chance to reboot.

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Let go of the “Coulda Woulda Shoulda”

If you now come to the conclusion that some downtime for yourself is what you need, you also have to let go of all the Rumba Walks you could have practiced in that time. Really! Focus on relaxing, recovering and refueling your energy! And, stop overthinking all the things you could’ve, should’ve or would’ve been able to do then. Just enjoy the famous Dolce Far Niente. And, afterwards – Dance on, even better than before!

Author: Sophia Wedel Photography: Maggiore Fotografico Exclusively for Dance Comp Review

Methodology:

Characters were counted by hand based on UESP quest writeups. Characters were only counted if they were questgivers or involved in multiple quests. Only characters from the main quest or faction questlines were counted. Any expansions or DLCs have not been included.

Due to the incomplete documentation for ESO quests, that game probably has more margin of error than others, though it should be balanced out due to how many NPCs were counted overall. I realize that this is an imperfect process, especially considering the very different ways that each game handles quests. I think the overall patterns hold, though, even if the percentages might be off a few points were someone to repeat the process.

You’ll also notice that Morrowind, Oblivion, and ESO have two main quest graphs. The latter is for including characters who are also encountered in the other parts of the game. For Morrowind this is questlines where you must speak to all the house leaders to become Hortator, in Oblivion it is the Aid for Bruma questline where you must speak to the counts/countesses to gain their support, and in ESO this is the Weight of Three Crowns quest where the faction leaders convene on Stirk. Daggerfall, meanwhile, randomizes most of its quest, and the overall graph counts the main quest and nobles quests.

Sample sizes are as follows: Daggerfall (23 total, 10 main quest), Morrowind (82 total, 16 main quest, 34 with hortator), Oblivion (36 total, 9 main quest, 15 with Bruma allies), Skyrim (59, 11 main quest), ESO (278 total, 6 main quest, 10 with Stirk).

Conclusions and interpretations under the cut.

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The Secret to Small Drone Obstacle Avoidance Is to Just Crash Into Stuff

Small drones bumble through obstacles just like bees

Roboticists are putting a tremendous amount of time and effort into finding the right combination of sensors and algorithms that will keep their drones from smashing into things. It’s a very difficult problem: With a few exceptions, you’ve got small platforms that move fast and don’t have the payload capability for the kind of sensors or computers that you really need to do real-time avoidance of things like trees or powerlines. And without obstacle avoidance, how will we ever have drones that can deliver new athletic socks to our doorstep in 30 minutes or less?

At the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab, where they’ve been working very very hard at getting quadrotors to fly through windows without running into them, Yash Mulgaonkar, Luis Guerrero-Bonilla, Anurag Makineni, and Professor Vijay Kumar have come up with what seems to be a much simpler solution for navigation and obstacle avoidance with swarms of small aerial robots: Give them a roll cage, and just let them run into whatever is in their way. Seriously, it’ll be fine!

This kind of “it’ll be fine” philosophy is what you find in most small flying insects, like bees: They don’t worry all that much about bumbling into stuff, or each other, they just kind of shrug it off and keep on going. Or, if you’re a roboticist, you might say something like, “The penalty due to collisions is small at these scales and sensors and controllers are not precise enough to guarantee collision free trajectories,” so stop trying to solve the collision problem, and just focus on not completely trashing yourself when you hit something. (Swiss startup Flyability was among the first to demonstrate the benefits of collision robustness by equipping a regular-size drone with a gimballed protective cage and flying through forests and ice caves.)

Happy Ada Lovelace day - here's why we should all remember her

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Who's that? Just the first computer programmer. Ever.

Lovelace’s friend Charles Babbage designed a concept for a machine he called the “Analytical Engine” – essentially a mechanical computer that would have relied on punch cards to run programs. He recruited Lovelace to translate some notes from one of his lectures, but while Lovelace was translating she added to the notes herself.

The notes grew to three times their original length, as Lovelace described what many call the first computer program. Because of funding issues, the machine was not built during her and Babbage’s lifetimes.

But Lovelace’s published article on the Analytical Engine later became a source of inspiration for Alan Turing’s work to build the first modern computers in the 1940s.

Women are sometimes considered outsiders in the science and technology fields, but Lovelace and many of the female computer programmers who followed her are proof that this paucity is a function of society, not capability. We forget or never learn about the female “computers” who programmed early mechanical machines in World War II, or that the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan once ran articles suggesting that women were perfectly suited for programming.

If the lack of acknowledgement of women’s contributions to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields grinds your gears, then Ada Lovelace should be one of the first names you go to right that wrong.

Further reading:

Wikipedia profile

10 Things You May Not Know About Ada Lovelace

What if there were more women in tech?

Why we ALL need to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day