Ma(r)x Planck!?

Yesterday was the 150th birthday of Max Planck, one of the probably most famous physicists. But was his name really Max or was it actually Marx, as Spiegel Online reports. According to an old church book, it appears to be Marx, which is said to be common for the latin name Marcus. Let’s wait what even more experts say… and the Max Planck Society, which reportedly only heard about it by a phone call from Spiegel.

Personally I don’t consider this such a big issue, but a funny story 😉

UPDATE:
Searching the web for “marx planck” or even “marx-planck-institute” gives actually quite a few results from non-german sites/publications mentioning Max Planck institutes. That makes me actually wonder how new this ‘discovery’ even is or if it is just some kind of a typo or something on those sites.

UPDATE II:
The director of the archive of the Max Planck Society comments on the name question in a press release. Really no big issue here.

Aurora

Just got a mail saying that

a fast CME is passing Earth right now.
So there is a good chance to see aurora from now on.

SpaceWeather.com put an “Aurora Alert” note on their frontpage, so everyone have a look…

RSS feeds from arXiv and NASA ADS

I’ve been using a RSS feed aggregator for blogs and news sites for quite a while and I have also been doing the same queries on ADS regularly as well as looking at the updated listings for astro-ph on arXiv.org. So I’m finally using RSS feeds for my standard queries on ADS… simply scroll to the bottom of a result page for your specific search and you will find a link to the RSS feed. On arXiv I’m not using the feed from http://arxiv.org/rss/astro-ph, well I’m actually using http://arxiv.org/rss/astro-ph?mirror=de so that the links point to the German mirror. More info can be found at http://de.arxiv.org/help/rss and http://doc.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs_doc/help_pages/results.html#RSS_Feeds