Group items tagged

Follow the link to PLoS and watch the video.

the link to the videos : http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0058509#ack

So... who is in?

nice comment Johannes ... if you add a bit of Kleopatre, e.g. why bathing in milk helped her fool Marcus Antonius, your comment would be fully interdisciplinary :-)

you mean it would include History or Psychology? I would understand why Marcus Antonius might get fooled by a bathing beauty - but milk? DONKEY MILK?!? That's just wrong... :-[

How many shapes can be obtained by folding a paper and applying just one straight cut? You'll be surprised...

"The theorem is that every pattern (plane graph) of straight-line cuts can be made by folding and one complete straight cut. Thus it is possible to make single polygons (possibly nonconvex), multiple disjoint polygons, nested polygons, adjoining polygons, and even floating line segments and points." - So the you can cut any assembly of polygons but not a single curved edge (with a finite number of folds (points don't count)): useless. :-P

The square wheel!

Neat.

"If it could be proved that two plus two is five, then it could be proved that five is not five, and then there would be no claim that could not be proved, and math would be a lot of bunk."

Fantastic!!!

Nice gif...

Oh No! The Quarterly Repooooooooort... :D

Continuing the museum theme... today's Wikipedia Picture of the Day. This might be *the* ultimate test of the knowledge of Dutch... can you name any of them? On the more ACT-like note: I wonder how the contemporary version would look like? P.S. Yes, the proverbs are listed on Wikipedia and yes, lots of them involve herring.

An African or European Swallow?

Another Star Trek technology :) Might have an positive psychological effect if astronauts on long term missions could virtually escape their confinement - walking through a labyrinth with the blue sky above them. Ok, ISS does not provide enough space, but on Moon or Mars...

Is there not a risk that while walking in circles this way the cable I keep dragging behind will eventually strangle me?

Amazing! :-D Makes you forget how hard it is to detect individual atoms at all.

While amazing indeed, it makes me wonder how much longer we will still have to wait until all this nanotechnology stuff will deliver something actually useful (say super-efficient/super-small transistors in my cell phone, camera, computer, etc.)? So far it seems to excel mostly in marketing...

It does not only give you superhuman abilities... it also makes you look hideous beyond human imagination :-P Nonetheless, it seems really interesting to bring all these separately existing technologies together in a single augmented reality device.

Let's all start up some crazy space companies together: harvest hydrogen on Jupiter, trap black holes as unlimited energy supplies, use high temperatures close to the sun to bake bread! Apparently it is really easy to do just about anything and Deep Space Industries is really good at it. Plus: in their video they show Mars One concepts while referring to ESA and NASA.

hmm aside from the technological feasibility, their approach still should be taken as an example, and deserve a little support. By tackling such difficult problems, they will devise innovative stuffs. Plus, even if this doom-to-fail endeavour may still seem you useless, it creates jobs and make people think... it is already a positive! Final word: how is that different from what Planetary Resources plan to do? It is founded by a bunch of so-called "nuts" ... (http://www.planetaryresources.com/team/) ! a little thought: "We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond" - Proust

I don't think that this proposal is very different from the one by Planetary Resources. My scepticism is rooted in the fact that - at least to my knowledge - fully autonomous mining technology has not even been demonstrated on Earth. I am sure that their proposition is in principle (technically) feasible but at the same time I do not believe that a privately funded company will find enough people to finance a multi-billion dollar R&D project that may or may not lead to an economically sensible outcome, i.e. generate profit (not income - you have to pay back the R&D cost first) within the next 25 years. And on that timescale anything can happen - for all we know we will all be slaves to the singularity by the time they start mining. I do think that people who tackle difficult problems deserve support - and lots of it. It seems however that up till now they have only tackled making a promotional video... About job creation (sorry for the sarcasm): if usefulness is not so important my proposal would be to give shovels to two people - person A digs a hole and person B fills up the same hole at the same time. The good thing about this is that you can increase the number of jobs created simply by handing out more shovels.

Performance. Feedback. Revision.

I'll just leave this here :) They only cut corners on the lens - which allegedly should be a Nikkor 8mm F8.0, but the latter is rare and much more expensive than the final product itself (if you manage to find one used, that is)

Nice point of view on the evolutionary arms race

A new application for the quadcopter to feed the ACT?

"Australia's Royal Air Force has been left red-faced after a job ad asked applicants to solve a complex math problem was revealed to be unsolvable. Bosses posted the puzzle in a bid to attract the country's best minds to its ranks"

Qapla'!