Habitable Exoplanets FTW — Variables, Weekly.

This week NASA confirmed the discovery of 7 planets revolving around a Star they’re calling TRAPPIST-1. This star is known as an ultra-cool dwarf with only 8% the mass of our Sun, or about 84 times the mass of Jupiter. So you could say it’s small compared to our Sun. TRAPPIST-1 is located approximately 40 million light years away, and amazingly it crams these 7 planets into space about the same as the distance between our sun and mercury.

An Exoplanet is a planet orbiting a Star outside our solar system.

About 3 planets amongst the seven, from preliminary findings, while being just about the same size as our earth, hold some promise for the development of life. But don’t be scared, you don’t have to worry about Aliens just yet.

Welcome to Variables, Weekly. Let’s get on with it shall we?

Space-time is an ingenious concept in Physics. Since Einstein put to bed the notion of ‘absolute time’ space and time have been married in holy matrimony. In that, regard are the brain’s sense of time and space also intertwined? Wait don’t answer that, read this~ New Clues to How the Brain Maps Time — Link

Patents are supposed to promote innovation, or so it says in theory ~ The CRISPR patent decision: Your six takeaways — Link

How did Europe become the richest part of the world? {One phrase — Accidents of nature} but don’t take my word for it. Please do not. Read this instead — Link (I have books that can explain this better, hit me up and I can get them to you. Question: What do you think about Biology?)

On our obsession with language, rudeness as a form of release and impractical worship of political correctness, but wait, here an interesting excerpt from the blogpost:

The rudeness of these public figures gives pleasure and relief, it is clear, to their audiences. Perhaps what they experience is not the possibility of actual violence but a sort of intellectual unbuttoning, a freedom from the constraint of language. Perhaps they have lived lives in which they have been continually outplayed in the field of articulation, but of this new skill — rudeness — they find that they are the masters.

The Age of Rudeness — Link {Hint: Helps to skip the first half}

The world is reaching unprecedented levels of inequality, is the current economic system nearing collapse? A good percentage of economists outside the mainstream seem to think so. This is an odd take but worth the read~ The Science of Flow Says Extreme Inequality Causes Economic Collapse — Link

What if radical Islamism is the middle east’s answer to the west’s unfettered imperialist expansion of the first half of the 20th century? Is that a stretch of the imagination? Read ~ Trump’s dangerous delusions about Islam by Christopher de Bellaigue — Link

Maybe form your own opinions on the matter.

A female ex uber employee wrote a blogpost about why she left Uber. Are you surprised? I know I’m not ~ Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber — Link

Ask Ethan: Is there a center of the Universe? — Link

A story of near misses and palpable regret ~ The Tangled History of Big Bang Science — Link

Demystifying Putinology (and no I’m not kidding — Putinology is thing) ~ Killer, kleptocrat, genius, spy: the many myths of Vladimir Putin — Link

And I still cannot believe we’re really debating this in 2017, I’,m confident no flat earth truthers read this blog but just in case ~ How flat can a planet be? — Link

That’s all for today guys, see you next time.