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ever heard of the Erdős-Bacon number? :-)

and actors probably ask who cares about Erdős :) The network of actors who co-star in movies is a famous one among networks people. Kevin Bacon became famous in that network because of fans of his who could from memory trace the paths of a large number of actors back to him :) see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon#History If you have you publications in http://academic.research.microsoft.com/, it gives you a nice tool to visualize your graph up to Erdős. Apparently I have a path of length 4, and several of length 5: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#36695545&1112639

and for the actors http://oracleofbacon.org/

The famous paradox of Schrödinger's cat starts from principles of quantum physics and ends with the bizarre conclusion that a cat can be simultaneously in two physical states - one in which the cat is alive and the other in which it is dead. In real life, however, large objects such as cats clearly don't exist in a superposition of two or more states and this paradox is usually resolved in terms of quantum decoherence. But now physicists in Canada and Switzerland argue that even if decoherence could be prevented, the difficulty of making perfect measurements would stop us from confirming the cat's superposition.

The famous Mars Rover Simulator was a piece of the Evolution in Robotic Island Ariadna!!!!! But again, its only an algorithm :) whats new?

Go Plymouth!

if you ever wanted to know how the famous MI5 started ... in the mind of a paranoid novelist

I just love this sentence: " He gave in - and MI5 was set up - created in large part by the dreams of a socially excluded novelist, and the paranoid imaginings of the readers of the Daily Mail."

article about famous Lisi paper ...

Very famous name in IT (know RSA? He's the 'A'...) He does not go into any technological details - so I encourage you to watch it in spare time [MaRu]

Wow, you made it to the Zeit - Germany´s most intellectual newspaper!

Thats who we are!!! Intellectuals :)

remember the discussion I tried to trigger in the team a few weeks ago ...

I love the linked article provided by Johannes! It expresses very elegantly why I still fail to understand even extremely smart and busy people in my view apparently waiting their time in playing computer games - but I recognise that there is something in games that we apparently need / gives us something we cherish .... "In fact, half a million players so far have registered to help destroy the 64 billion tiny blocks that compose that one gigantic cube, all working in tandem toward a singular goal: discovering the secret that Curiosity's creator says awaits one lucky player inside. That's right: After millions of man-hours of work, only one player will ever see the center of the cube. Curiosity is the first release from 22Cans, an independent game studio founded earlier this year by Peter Molyneux, a longtime game designer known for ambitious projects like Populous, Black & White and Fable. Players can carve important messages (or shameless self-promotion) onto the face of the cube as they whittle it to nothing. Image: Wired Molyneux is equally famous for his tendency to overpromise and under-deliver on his games. In 2008, he said that his upcoming game would be "such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired." That game turned out to be Milo & Kate, a Kinect tech demo that went nowhere and was canceled. Following this, Molyneux left Microsoft to go indie and form 22Cans. Not held back by the past, the Molyneux hype train is going full speed ahead with Curiosity, which the studio grandiosely promises will be merely the first of 22 similar "experiments." Somehow, it is wildly popular. The biggest challenge facing players of Curiosity isn't how to blast through the 2,000 layers of the cube, but rather successfully connecting to 22Cans' servers. So many players are attempting to log in that the server cannot handle it. Some players go for utter efficiency, tapping rapidly to rack up combo multipliers and get more

why are video games so much different than collecting stamps or spotting birds or planes ? One could say they are all just hobbies

good luck with this....

In 1996 Sokal hoaxed sociologists with his famous nonsense text on political implications of quantum gravity. Can one play a similar game with "researchers" on Boltzmann brains, multiverses, string landscapes or similar? I doubt, this is just reality satire that can't be topped.

Poor Boltzmann ...

waderoush writes "The San Diego Zoo has built a world famous reputation as a tourist destination, for helping to rescue the California Condor, and maybe (if you're old enough) for Joan Embery's appearances with Johnny Carson. Now the zoo is using its expertise to drive innovation by establishing a n...

If you've ever found your iPhone taking control of your life, there may be a good reason. It may think it has free will. That may not be quite as far-fetched as it sounds. Today, one leading scientist outlines a 'Turing Test' for free will and says that while simple devices such as thermostats cannot pass, more complex ones like iPhones might.

I don't know the inventor of that nonsense that the free will should be the result of QM. It's about the only point I agree with the author of the paper: QM is not necessary and doesn't help. What I meant: all these thought experiments done by typical ultra-naive realists (or ultra-naive physicalists, if you prefer) that cultivate the university departments of physics, computer science etc. are put the cart before the horse. First one has to clarify the role of physical theories and its concepts (e.g. causality) and then one can start to ask how "free will" could perhaps be seen in these theories. More than 200 years ago there existed a famous philosopher named Kant who had some interesting thoughts about this. But authors like Lloyd behave as if he never existed, in fact is view of the world is even pre-Platonic!

Henry Kissinger How I'm missing yer And wishing you were here

Is it really possible?

I think the problem is in the boundary conditions... the issue is that if you use and infinite sheet or a cylinder in the equations you always take cyclic boundary condition. If this guys are right then the mass of the quasi-particles in a crystal depends on its topology... this is a major thing...

BINGO!! It's almost like good ol' Kaluza-Klein...

One of the authors of the STL (C++'s Standard Template Library) explains generic programming and slams Java.

"I'd rather not even *think* about developing a web application/webservice/web-whatever in standard C++... is it actually possible?? Perhaps with some weird Microsoft solutions... I bet your bank online services are written in Java. Certainly not in PHP+MySQL :)" Doing in C++ would be awesomely crazy, I agree :) But as I see it there are lots of huge websites that operate on PHP, see for instance Facebook. For the banks and the enterprise market, as a general rule I tend to take with a grain of salt whatever spin comes out from them; in the end behind every corporate IT decision there is a little smurf just trying to survive and have the back covered :) As they used to say in the old times, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". "Industry has chosen Java not because of industrial-corporate marketing bullshit, but because of economics... it enables you develop robustly, reliably, error-prone, modular, well integrated etc... software. And the costs? Well, using java technologies you can set-up enterprise-quality web application servers, get a fully featured development environment (which is better than ANY C/C++/whatever development environment I've EVER seen) at the cost of exactly 0 (zero!) USD/GBP/EUR... Since many years now, the central issue in software development is not implementing algorithms, it's building applications. And that's where Java outperforms many other technologies." Apart from the IDE considerations (on which I cannot comment, since I'm not a IDE user myself), I do not see how Java beats the competition in this regard (again, Python and the huge software ecosystem surrounding it). My impression is that Java's success is mostly due to Sun pushing it like there is no tomorrow and bundling it with their hardware business.

OK, I think there is a bit of everything, wrong and right, but you have to acknowledge that Python is not always the simplest. For info, Facebook uses Java (if you upload picture for instance), and PHP is very limited. So definitely, in company, engineers like you and me select the language, it is not a marketing or political thing. And in the case of fb, they come up with the conclusion that PHP, and Java don't do everything but complement each other. As you say Python as many things around, but it might be too much for simple applications. Otherwise, I would seriously be interested by a study of how to implement a Python-like system on-board spacecrafts and what are the advantages over mixing C, Ada and Java.

Excellent photo gallery.

Thanks for sharing! Most pics are very very nice, but a few are actually pretty mediocre I must say... "Wildlife" photography is always a rather tricky topic, as demonstrated by this famous story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8470962.stm

Some more stuff: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/15359263

nice graphs ... and nice stats

thanks - I was already wondering several times what had happened to this technique that he used at the talk we looked at several times when it was first uploaded ... good that they have made it open source! are they easy to use?

the easiest way to use them is: Google Docs > open/create a spreadsheet > Insert > Gadget > Charts > Motion Chart !! :) You have here a tutorial describing all the steps to get it running.

The effect of gravity on virtual electron-positron pairs as they propagate through space could lead to a violation of Einstein's equivalence principle, according to calculations by James Franson at the University of Maryland. While the effect would be too tiny to be measured directly using current experimental techniques, it could explain a puzzling anomaly observed during the famous SN1987 supernova of 1987.

In the wake of the financial crisis, many started questioning different aspects of the economic formalism. Here a mathematical "dynamic" alternative to economic utility theory (which has also been the target of some famous recent attacks, see prospect theory) is developed and applied to the St. Petersburg coin tossing paradox. A good read at http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/chaos/26/2/10.1063/1.4940236

Simulating the economic state of the Galaxy after the resistance has blown up the Death Stars. See the paper here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.09054.pdf

Love this type of friday afternoon research questions. There is also a now famous scene in the movie Clerks discussing the loss of independent contractors lives as the Death Star was being build.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQdDRrcAOjA

That analysis is quite crappy and is easily demolished in the video's comments.

As I said ten years ago and psychoanalysts 100 years ago. Luis I am so sorry :) Also ... now that the commission funded the project blue brain is a rather big hit Btw Nicolelis is a rather credited neuro-scientist

@ Dario: absolutely agree, the reductionist approach is the main mistake. My point: if you take the reductionsit approach, then you will face the initial and boundary value problem. If one tries a non-reductionist approach, this problem may be much weaker. But off the record: there exists a non-reductionist theory of the brain, it's called psychology... @ Johannes: also agree, the only way the reductionist approach could eventually be successful is to actually grow the brain. Start with essentially one neuron and grow the whole complexity. But if you want to do this, bring up a kid! A brain without body might be easier? Why do you expect that a brain detached from its complete input/output system actually still works. I'm pretty sure it does not!

@Luzi: That was exactly my point :-)

"Just as Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous last theorem in the margins, professional scientists, academics and citizen scientists can annotate equations, figures and ideas and also write in the margins." Interesting way of analyzing research in the 21st century