1,790 research outputs found
The Forces of Life and Death in Roch Carrier\u27s Fiction
Carrier\u27s fiction is based on exaggeration and the grotesque, but it also deals with serious questions: the forces of life and death in the lives of his characters. Death is the subject of La Guerre, Yes Sir! and of several short stories, and it is symbolically present in certain other works. In Le Deux-millième étage and II est par là , le soleil, life in the city is equated with death. None of Carrier\u27s characters live happy lives, and their religion is one of death and sin. As French-Canadians, they are threatened with destruction by the English-speaking world and by American capitalism. Yet they affirm their will to live by clinging to life; they react against their religion of death by blaspheming, and, in some cases, by openly rejecting it. They express their will to live through their sexual activity and by their humour. As a community, they show their will to survive by remembering their past. Jean-Thomas in II n\u27y a pas de pays sans grand-père, by talking of the past, keeps it alive and passes on to his grandson the will to survive as a French-Canadian. Telling stories which others will remember is thus a way of cheating death
Generalizing the running vacuum energy model and comparing with the entropic-force models
We generalize the previously proposed running vacuum energy model by
including a term proportional to \dot{H}, in addition to the existing H^2 term.
We show that the added degree of freedom is very constrained if both low
redshift and high redshift data are taken into account. Best-fit models are
undistinguishable from LCDM at the present time, but could be distinguished in
the future with very accurate data at both low and high redshifts. We stress
the formal analogy at the phenomenological level of the running vacuum models
with recently proposed dark energy models based on the holographic or entropic
point of view, where a combination of \dot{H} and H^2 term is also present.
However those particular entropic formulations which do not have a constant
term in the Friedmann equations are not viable. The presence of this term is
necessary in order to allow for a transition from a decelerated to an
accelerated expansion. In contrast, the running vacuum models, both the
original and the generalized one introduced here contain this constant term in
a more natural way. Finally, important conceptual issues common to all these
models are emphasized.Comment: Version accepted in Phys. Rev. D. LaTeX, 24 pages and one figure.
Slightly extended discussio
Binary Central Stars of Planetary Nebulae Discovered Through Photometric Variability III: The Central Star of Abell 65
A growing number of close binary stars are being discovered among central
stars of planetary nebulae. Recent and ongoing surveys are finding new systems
and contributing to our knowledge of the evolution of close binary systems. The
push to find more systems was largely based on early discoveries which
suggested that 10 to 15% of all central stars are close binaries. One goal of
this series of papers is confirmation and classification of these systems as
close binaries and determination of binary system parameters. Here we provide
time-resolved multi-wavelength photometry of the central star of Abell 65 as
well as further analysis of the nebula and discussion of possible
binary--nebula connections. Our results for Abell 65 confirm recent work
showing that it has a close, cool binary companion, though several of our model
parameters disagree with the recently published values. With our longer time
baseline of photometric observations from 1989--2009 we also provide a more
precise orbital period of 1.0037577 days.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journa
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