Two tidbits
A couple of completely unrelated and slightly old, but interesting pieces of news:
- Now that the Nepalese army (hopefully) doesn’t have anyone to fight at home, some Nepalese special forces have been deployed to Darfur as peacekeeping forces. From the International Herald Tribune:
…Thailand would provide the only non-African battalion out of 18 on the proposed force, while Nepal was the only country to offer special forces. Three Nordic countries — Denmark, Sweden and Norway — had offered an engineering unit.
I hope they do well and prove useful, but at the very least, it has earned Nepal a rare positive mention in the international press.
- American-born physicist Garrett Lisi has proposed a new possibility for a Theory of Everything, or in other words, a theory that tries to unify the seemingly incompatible worlds of quantum mechanics (the Standard Model in modern physics parlance), and gravity (in effect, general relativity). Most of the media coverage surrounding his paper has centered around the fact that he is not affiliated with any university and that he spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii (he published his paper on arXiv), so if you really want to look into what the paper says and what the reaction has been like so far, you should first head to Wikipedia.