Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Crazy and funny

Another great presentation at this conference!! Plus I always wanted to enter the numerical computations of orbit around black holes.... with Luzi we had a project on formation flying around black holes .... revolutionary idea (of course we did not do it!!!)

nice movie, and song :) we should definitely implement GR orbits in pagmo !

I agree Marek, yet was it practical for Apollonio to study conic sections more than 1500 years before Kepler found his three laws? And here is a good paper to start with: http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v77/i10/e103005, making an analogy between the periodic table and the taxomony of all orbits around a black hole.

Sounds good!

well of course money is trust, and even more loans and credit and even more stock and bond markets. It all represents trust and expectations. However since the first banks 500 years ago and the first loans etc. etc., and as well the fact that bonds and currencies bring down whole countries (Greece lately), and are mainly controlled by large financial centres and (central) banks, banks have always been on the winning side no matter what and that isn't going to change easily. So if you are talking about these new currencies it would be a new era, not just a new currency. So should Greece convert its debt to bitcoins ;P ?

well, from 1936 to 1993 the central bank of france was owned by the state and was supposed to serve the general interest...

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but - wait for it - to academic publishers.

fully agree ... "But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more." very nice also: "Government bodies, with a few exceptions, have failed to confront them. The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive. But Research Councils UK, whose statement on public access is a masterpiece of meaningless waffle, relies on "the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies". You bet they will. In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating - along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin's Freie Universität - a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers. The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us."

It is a really great article and the first time I read something in this direction. FULLY AGREE as well. Problem is I have not much encouraging to report from the Brussels region...

wow - how comes that after so many years there are still some hidden "patterns" in primes? does however not seem to help for predicting where to discover new higher prime numbers, correct?

increase of federal science and research spending in the US as part of stimulus package ...

Neat idea...

... proof that humanity is good?

"The dataset contains practically all actions of all players of the MMOG Pardus since the game went online in 2004 [18]. Pardus is an open-ended online game with a world- wide player base of currently more than 370,000 people. Play- ers live in a virtual, futuristic universe in which they interact with others in a multitude of ways to achieve their self-posed goals [22]. Most players engage in various economic activities typically with the (self-posed) goal to accumulate wealth and status. Social and economical decisions of players are often strongly influenced and driven by social factors such as friend- ship, cooperation, and conflict." quite impressive ...

Physicists have exploited the laws of quantum mechanics to generate random numbers on a Nokia N9 smartphone, a breakthrough that could have major implications for information security

Scientists at MIT have traced 13 billion years of galaxy evolution, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present day. Their simulation, named Illustris, captures both the massive scale of the Universe and the intriguing variety of galaxies - something previous modelers have struggled to do. It produces a Universe that looks remarkably similar to what we see through our telescopes, giving us greater confidence in our understanding of the Universe, from the laws of physics to our theories about galaxy formation. "Simulation is the future of innovation"

NASA validates the EmDrive (http://emdrive.com/) technology for converting electrical energy into thrust. (from the website: "Thrust is produced by the amplification of the radiation pressure of an electromagnetic wave propagated through a resonant waveguide assembly.")

I have to join the skeptics on this one ...

5.8 GHz wireless power transmission for mainstream gadgets ...

Proximity to the transmitter impacts power delivery as follows: 4W delivered to 4 devices simultaneously within 0-5 feet 2W delivered to 4 devices simultaneously within 5-10 feet 1W delivered to 4 devices simultaneously within 10-15 feet How to make a piecewise approximation of one inverse square law for commercial purposes

:-) - which also tells us that these are not measured values but estimations it seems to me ...

Amazing engineering feat: 1 nm transistor. Besides we can argue Moore law is still OK, dennard scaling is gone and with it the performance boost, as alluded subtly. Link article: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6308/99.full