Archive for the ‘science’ Category
A Case for Careful QA
August 22nd, 2010
The unspeakable shame felt here by Asimo’s quality assurance team is the main reason that I don’t want to be a test engineer.
Also, orientation starts tomorrow. Woo!
Powers of Ten
July 27th, 2010
This 1968 film zooms out by powers of ten from a picnic in Chicago to encompass the visible universe, then zooms back in to a proton in a carbon atom. Behold the power of logarithmic scales.
Solar Sailing
July 17th, 2010
The Japanese spacecraft Ikaros successfully deployed its solar sail and it seems to be working! For those of us who misspent our youths reading Clarke and Asimov and Heinlein, this is some exciting stuff.
Social Networking Groups
July 12th, 2010
Google researcher Paul Adams posted a thoughtful presentation critiquing how social networking sites currently model relationships and groups. Executive-summary-summary: poorly.
arXiv vs. snarXiv
June 4th, 2010
Can you tell a real high-energy physics paper from a fake? This game lets you try. Prepare to be embarrassed.
The context-free grammar used by the snarXiv title generator doesn’t always know when to stop recursing, so just picking the shorter title seems to be a reasonably good heuristic.1
This whole project reminds me a little of the Sokal affair, in which a physicist wrote a nonsense paper on postmodern cultural studies and had it accepted at a (formerly) reputable journal. Of course that paper was refereed by a board of alleged experts and these titles are guessed at by simple netizens like you and I, but the concept seems similar.
1 On a related note, Slightly Better Than Random will be the title of my autobiography.
The Turbo-encabulator
April 25th, 2010
Oh, man, I hope the turbo-encabulator can interface with my old DMC-12 flux capacitor.
On an extremely unrelated note:
Don Quixote: the first LARPer?
Brains, man, brains.
April 16th, 2010
A Croatian girl apparently awoke from her coma speaking German.
The girl, from the southern town of Knin, had only just started studying German at school and had been reading German books and watching German TV to become better, but was by no means fluent, according to her parents.
Since waking up from her 24 hour coma however, she has been unable to speak Croatian, but is able to communicate perfectly in German.
Assuming this isn’t just an awesome hoax, we need to figure out how to induce this kind of state artificially.
Hatetris
April 11th, 2010
Hatetris: Like Tetris, but the game will always give you the worst possible piece. So, exactly like Tetris.
Dreaming Rats
April 2nd, 2010
…Wilson and Kenway Louie described the behavior of rats that had been trained to run on a circular track. As expected, running on the track generated a distinct pattern of neural firing in the rat hippocampus, a brain area essential for the formation of long-term memory…
… as before, Wilson kept the electrodes in place while the rats drifted off to sleep… The scientists examined 45 dreams and found that 20 of the dreams repeated the exact same patterns of brain activity exhibited while running in a circle. In fact, the correlation between the dream and the reality was so close that Wilson could predict the exact position of the rodent on the track while it was asleep.
I’m sure you want to read Jonah Lehrer’s article about dreaming.
Numbers Are New
April 1st, 2010
You’ve probably heard of bands of people in Australia or Amazonia whose concept of number is limited to, “1, 2, 3, 4, many.” Here’s a really good article describing that phenomenon in a lot more detail.
One especially interesting result was the notion that people intuitively distribute numbers on a logarithmic scale rather than a linear one. As it turns out, children do this, too.
It is Pica’s belief that understanding quantities in terms of estimating ratios is a universal human intuition, due to the fact that ratios are much more important for survival in the wild. Historically, faced with a group of adversaries, we needed to know instantly whether there were more of them than us. When we saw two trees, we needed to know instantly which had more fruit hanging from it. In neither case was it necessary to enumerate every enemy or every fruit individually. The crucial thing was to be able to make quick estimates of the relevant amounts and compare them; in other words to make approximations and judge their ratios.