December 2009
179 posts
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'Romeo And Juliet': Just As You Misremembered It →
excerpted:
We all know the story of Romeo and Juliet … or do we? A new off-Broadway production tells the story of the star-crossed lovers without bothering with any of Shakespeare’s hallowed words or intricate plot twists. Instead, it relies on the fuzzy recollections of people who read it in high school.
The show’s creators called unsuspecting people on the phone and asked...
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Are Most People Too Dumb for Physics? →
Nathaniel Lasry, Noah Finkelstein and Eric Mazur. Physics Teacher, 47, 418-422 (2009).
John Abbott College; Univ of Colorado, Boulder; Harvard University
Abstract:
In a recent article in The Physics Teacher, Michael Sobel claims (as do many teachers) that physics is in a “special category of hard” and is usually taken only by a “certain sort of very bright student.” The...
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loveyourchaos:
Wonderwall // Oasis
Judging...
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“I was a Republican until I got to New York and had to live on $18 a week. It was...”
– Julia Child (via apsies)
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“Crash into me” - DMB
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10 beautiful sketch-ups for website prototypes →
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Stanford researchers develop the next generation... →
Excerpted:
A team of Stanford researchers has developed a new generation of retinal implants that aims to provide higher resolution and make artificial vision more natural.
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Retinal implants are arrays of electrodes, placed at the back of the eye, which partially restore vision to people with diseases that cause their light-sensing photoreceptors to die. Typically, a camera embedded in...
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zveneczi:
Fryderyk Chopin: Waltz in e, B 56
...
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What do you get if you divide the circumference of...
roomthily:
nihilnoetia:
tsupii:
Pumpkin pi.
Wow. <3
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Working Paper: Should Copyright of Academic Works... →
infoneernet:
The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have...
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ataxiwardance:
hamtunes:
Bibio - Haikuesque...
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math humor
jmbr:
Q: Why can’t you grow wheat in Z/6Z? A: It’s not a field.
More jokes at Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor
My other favorites:
Q: What’s yellow, linear, normed, and complete?
A: A Bananach space.
Q: What’s a polar bear?
A: A rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.
Q: Why didn’t Newton develop group theory?
A: Because he wasn’t...
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Machine Translates Thoughts Into Speech in Real... →
Model of the brain-machine interface for real-time synthetic speech production. The stroke-induced lesion (red X) disables speech output, but speech motor planning in the cerebral cortex remains intact. Signals collected from an electrode in the speech motor cortex are amplified and sent wirelessly across the scalp as FM radio signals. The Neuralynx System amplifies, converts, and sorts the...
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Is Massively Collaborative Mathematics Possible? →
So normally I think of mathematicians as the purest example of the lonely genius, sitting at their individual desks churning coffee into theorems, to paraphrase Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos. Engineers, on the other end of the spectrum as the masters of applied maths, must collaborate.
But is massively collaborative (pure) mathematics possible? Yes, given that William Timothy Gowers of...
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musicophilia:
moonlitcorner:
Nisi Dominus, RV...
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Scientists aim for musical impact →
excerpted:
The official choir of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known by its French acronym Cern) is to record a song dedicated to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The LHC is the vast physics experiment built in a 27km-long underground tunnel, which runs in a circle under the French-Swiss border.
The ditty has been set to the tune of the Hippopotamus song by Flanders and...
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Do Computers Understand Art? →
A team of researchers from the University of Girona and the Max Planck Institute in Germany has shown that some mathematical algorithms provide clues about the artistic style of a painting. The composition of colours or certain aesthetic measurements can already be quantified by a computer, but machines are still far from being able to interpret art in the way that people do.
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Scientists discover how the brain encodes memories... →
excerpted:
“One of the most important processes is that the synapses — which cement those memories into place — have to be strengthened,” said Kosik. “In strengthening a synapse you build a connection, and certain synapses are encoding a memory. Those synapses have to be strengthened so that memory is in place and stays there. Strengthening synapses is a very...
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“Only one thing in the world could’ve dragged me away from the soft glow of...”
– - Ralphie
best Christmas movie ever…
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