Great day already today (3 p.m.). Mailman brought several holiday cards, a book from Amazon, couple of notices from Social Security that brightened the day.

A couple of interesting things I wish to bring up.

The first is Norwegian comedian Daniel Simonsen  on Russell Howard's Good News. A very strange man who is funny as heck. But strange. Did I mention strange?

The second thing is this wonderful picture which has light photons displaying properties both as particles and as waves. So cool.

To quote NanowerkNews: "Early in the year, the first ever photograph of light as a particle and a wave at the same time went viral — but we soon learned the truth was a bit more nuanced than that. Created by a research team led by Fabrizio Carbone at EPFL, the experiment added a twist to the classic photoelectric effect, which explains why, for, instance, UV light hitting a metal target emits electrons. To wit: light exhibits both particle- and wave-like behavior.

This seemed positively revolutionary, since a cornerstone of quantum mechanics is that you just can’t see both particle and wave aspects at the same time. As Ben Stein explained at Inside Science News, the image is actually lots of photons (the elementary particles of light) imaged together, with some acting like particles and others acting like waves. It’s not the same photons exhibiting their dual nature simultaneously. Maybe it wasn’t as earth-shattering a breakthrough as the Internet originally thought, but it’s still a pretty darn cool picture."

And from the Gizmodo website:

Earthly Cities Grow Like Galaxies

"One of the nifty things about a good mathematical model is that it can reveal hidden connections between two systems that, on the surface, appear to be very different from each other. Two cosmologists, Henry Lin and Abraham Loeb, uncovered just such a surprising correlation, demonstrating that the way galaxies evolve from variations in matter density in the early universe is mathematically equivalent to the way cities grow from changes in population density on Earth.

Their analysis centers on a well-known scaling pattern known as Zipf’s law, observed in everything from personal friendships to the population density of cities. As Gizmodo’s Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan wrote, “Basically, the city with the highest population in a country will be twice as large as the next most populous city, and three times as large as the third most populous city, and so on.” The same holds true for galaxies, it seems. Loeb and Lin took a mathematical formula describing how galaxies form and evolve and applied it to the evolution of cities on Earth. The two systems proved remarkably similar. The scientists think that similar mathematical tools could be used to better model the spread of epidemics, among other applications."

How cool is it that we have progressed from hunting animals for food to figuring out that cities and galaxies have similar mathematical characteristics.