Satyajit Ray, Distant Thunder

The thunder of distant Net storms

Computers and routers on the Internet send each other error messages (called ICMP datagrams) to signal conditions such as network congestion or blackouts. While these datagrams are very rare, less than 0.001% of total traffic, they hold very important global information about problems and congestions elsewhere in the Net. A measurement of the flow of such error messages in our local cluster sho...

Realigning Thunder and Lightning: Temporal Adaptation to Spatiotemporally Distant Events

The brain is able to realign asynchronous signals that approximately coincide in both space and time. Given that many experience-based links between visual and auditory stimuli are established in the absence of spatiotemporal proximity, we investigated whether or not temporal realignment arises in these conditions. Participants received a 3-min exposure to visual and auditory stimuli that were ...

Gathering thunder

It’s common to accompany the rollout of a new biomedical journal with an explanation for its coming into being, usually by suggesting there’s an unmet need, despite the panoply of existing journals. I’m not going to do that, at least not exactly. The biomedical literature is almost unimaginably vast already, much more than even the most diligent speed-reading scholar-who-listens-to-science-blog...

X-ray Observations of Distant Lensing Clusters

X-ray observations of three clusters are presented: RXJ1347.5-1145, Cl0939+47, and Cl0500-24. Although these clusters are the in same redshift range (0.32 0.45) and act all as gravitational lenses, they show very different properties. RXJ1347.5-1145 seems to be an old, well relaxed system, with a relaxed morphology, high X-ray luminosity, high temperature, high metallicity and strong cooling fl...

Learning the thunder.