Move over Feynman!

I have just come across Motion Mountain, Christoph Schiller's online physics text book and am deeply impressed.  Think of the Feynman Lectures in Physics re-done by a Donald Knuth and then released as a free PDF file.  To quote John Baez:

It's an enormous feast of ideas - romantic, wildly ambitious, and still not finished at 1459 pages.  Using a bare minimum of math, it conveys an enormous amount of physics, all focused on the question "what is motion?" This question is very deep.  We have made tremendous progress towards answering it, but are nowhere near done.

I have put a copy on my laptop and will be probably spending much of 2008 working my way through it on the train to and from work.  I do hope it eventually comes out as a proper book.

Swan

Enjoying the winter Sun on the middle lake in Whiteknights Park this afternoon.

Spice Girls Reunion Concert

Well, actually the Dance of Death from a copy of the Nuremburg Chronicle at the Morse Library, Beloit College.

Affinity Fraud

I have long felt that the extreme gullibility of many religious people leaves them wide open to exploitation by fraudsters who pretend to share their faith.  Well, today I found out that this kind of fraud is so widespread that it actually has a name: affinity fraud.  A definition from wisegeek.com:

Affinity fraud refers to different scams perpetuated on a group of people who are specifically connected to each other by race, religious background, occupation, family, gender or age.  The person or people perpetuating affinity fraud exploit these connections, and in using the commonalities of a particular group, create a scheme that will be most appealing to that group.  The end goal of the criminal is to steal money from participants, and it's an unfortunate and frequent occurrence in many parts of the world.

The term is often used in relation to financial investments.  A search on Google will reveal many sites giving more details (such as here and here).   From these sites you might get the impression that it is a relatively new phenomenon but I suspect that affinity fraud must be as old as religion itself.

Wood Duck

A wood duck (Aix sponsa) on the large lake in Reading University grounds, Reading, UK. Photo taken on 2007-11-03.