• All posts tagged with "science"
ם Linkdump.
Posted on May 29, 2008 at 11:17 pm
- I love Isabella Rossellini. For the Sundance Film Festival, she wrote, produced, directed, and starred in a series of shorts called Green Porno. In each short, she dresses up like some bug, and then explains and simulates their reproduction. It is, in a word, fantastic. Potentially NSFW, if you work in an office full of insects.
- Like the Internet? Watch Weezer’s new video for their single “Pork and Beans” and see how many Internet memes/YouTube sensations you recognize to check your pop-nerd-cred.
- Side effect of the Weezer video: discovering the Daft Hands video and assorted spinoffs.
- Lastly, the geek in me must share this article about Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine, complete with this spectacular anecdote:
We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard walked in, saluted, and said, “Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss, what’s my assignment?” The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students was astounded.
After a hurried private discussion (”I don’t know, you hired him…”), we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems.
“That sounds like a bunch of baloney,” he said. “Give me something real to do.”
So we sent him out to buy some office supplies.
That is all.
ם My Future
Posted on November 17, 2006 at 1:14 am
It’s that time of the semester again: class registration time!
Naturally, I had to do some credit-counting to figure out the remainder of my college career. And what did I realize? I’m graduating in 2 semesters (one semester early) with a major and two minors (Mathematics, Pre-Business Studies, and Computer Science, respectively).
And the kicker: I’ll be graduating roughly ten days after my 21st birthday. That is, needless to say, terrifying.
Eesh.
On a lighter note, here’s a video of a guy juggling inside an eight foot tall inverted plastic cone. I like to call it “Bohr’s Model of a Juggler.” (Hooray atomic physics jokes!)
ם Breaking News
Posted on August 22, 2006 at 12:30 pm
A follow up to the previous post: Grigory Perlman has indeed won the Fields Medal for his possible proof of the Poincaré conjecture, but has declined the award.
Wow.
(Earlier: Nancy Drew and the Disappearing Mathematician)
In the most mysterious piece of math news this year, an eccentric Russian mathematician who “looked like Rasputin, with long hair and fingernails,” showed up out of nowhere, solved the century-old Poincaré conjecture, and disappeared again, leaving behind a $1 million cash prize, a Fields Medal, and mathematical immortality.
If you feel like this is over your head, here’s the takeaway message from the article:
A sphere, a cigar, and a rabbit’s head are all the same.
(More on the Poincaré conjecture.)
ScienceNews Online has written up an article about math jokes in The Simpsons, including such nerdy gems as two “near miss” solutions to Fermat’s Last Theorem.
The most interesting part is that of the head writers, one has a master’s degree in computer science, one a Ph.D. in computer science, and another a Ph.D. in applied math. I guess there is hope for my math degree after all.
One last math joke that’s not mentioned in the article is the Powers of Ten couch opening, which ties in nicely with my post from yesterday.
ם Powers of Ten
Posted on June 11, 2006 at 2:43 am
Some kind soul has put my favorite movie of all time on YouTube: Charles and Ray Eames’ “Powers of Ten”.
My neighbor and I would sit around for hours just watching this on loop, and we once even edited the Wikipedia entry to state, “This is the most amazing film ever produced in the history of movie-making. Ever.” (This was quickly edited out by someone less awesome, but it lives on in the history!)
The sound on the YouTube version is unfortunately a bit out of sync, but luckily I have my own copy. Contact me if you’d like a nicer quality version.
Science has settled one of the greatest questions of all time. Unified field theory? Nope. Polynomial time factoring? Guess again! Which came first?! You got it! Answer: the egg, naturally.
A geneticist, a philosopher, and a chicken farmer have come together (thanks to the power and funding of Disney) to settle the eternal debate of “firstness” between chickens and eggs, and these “eggsperts” unanimously agree that the egg unequivocally came first.
However, this study does rest on some key assumptions that should be noted:
“If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg.” (According to Professor David Papineau, philosopher)
I guess I’ll just have to wait for a study that’s based on some more solid assumptions. I’m still waiting on that polynomial time factoring method, too.
In one of the strangest stories I’ve encountered in a while, a very daring author has written up his guide to curing asthma and hayfever using hookworm (a note to the extremely faint of heart, proceed with some caution; there are a few slightly disgusting parts of his tale).
It’s an interesting idea, although I’d prefer to hear some results like this from a more sanitary and controlled test. Condensing the treatment to some form of pill might also be a more convenient method than flying to Cameroon to walk around barefoot in natives’ excrement.
Researchers in the UK and the US theorize that they will be able to make a Harry Potter invisibility cloak within the next two years.
I’m just confused why they decided to figure out how to make the disgustingly flavored jelly beans from Harry Potter before they worked on this.