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You know you have been in Finland too long, when... - 4 views

www.hs.fi/toolong fun humor
shared by Luzi Bergamin on 23 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Luzi Bergamin on 23 Jun 10
     
    How you know you have been to long in xy. The Finnish version. My favorite is 33. You accept that 80°C in a sauna is chilly, but 20°C outside is freaking hot. Quite a lot of them are outdated, esp. about opening hours of shops, and one is definitely missing. Your normal mealtime has shifted to 11am for lunch and 5pm for dinner. But don't worry, it's a really comfy place here, isnt' it Jose??
  • ...4 more comments...
  • Juxi Leitner on 23 Jun 10
     
    well somethings you get used to in a year (like salmiakki or koskenkorva) others don't (seriously, lunch at 11?!?!)
  • Ma Ru on 23 Jun 10
     
    But what stage are you in already, Luzi?
  • Luzi Bergamin on 24 Jun 10
     
    I would say a 50% Finn. I do have lunch at 11am, every working day, an 80 degrees sauna indeed is just a warm room. But I will never get used to salmiakki (which is just literally eating a cleaning agent!!) and you can imagine that "silence is fun" is not really MY motto...
  • LeopoldS on 24 Jun 10
     
    True?? 22. You understand why the Finnish language has no future tense. No, I don't think I ever will understand that one... Finns are quite future-oriented at two particular times of the year. On the day after Midsummer (see above), they say "Well, it's all downhill from now on" and prepare feverishly for winter, and similarly after December 21st they perk up and start thinking about Midsummer - ignoring the fact that they still have to get through January, February and March before the place becomes inhabitable again...
  • Juxi Leitner on 24 Jun 10
     
    ... Finnish language has no future tense. That's true
  • LeopoldS on 25 Jun 10
     
    everything expressed with "tomorrow I go to " or "in one year" etc? what about the distinction between to future events, one conditional on the other?
4More

Destroyed Chinese satellite close to ISS: official - Yahoo! News - 1 views

news.yahoo.com/...lfbGlzdARzbGsDZGVzdHJveWVkY2hp debris
shared by Joris _ on 26 Jul 10 - Cached
  • If the calculations show that the debris is approaching the station at an unacceptably close range, the six astronauts will receive the order to take shelter in the two Russian Soyuz spacecraft which are docked with the ISS
  • it was already too late to carry out a manoeuvre to "divert the station from the rubbish"
  • Juxi Leitner on 26 Jul 10
     
    hmm, is there info on the size of the "rubbish"?
  • Joris _ on 26 Jul 10
     
    I cannot find more info, but maybe they are just making a lot of fuss of it because it is from the Chinese exploded spacecraft. However, it seems to be a catalogued debris, so it is likely to be in the cm range or more
5More

If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too!!! - 3 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ce-climate-emails-code-release open science
shared by Dario Izzo on 09 Feb 10 - Cached
pacome delva liked it
  • Les Hatton, an international expert in software testing resident in the Universities of Kent and Kingston, carried out an extensive analysis of several million lines of scientific code. He showed that the software had an unacceptably high level of detectable inconsistencies.
  • pacome delva on 09 Feb 10
     
    haha. this guy won't have any new friends with this article! I kind of agree but making your code public doesn't mean you are doing good science...and inversely! He takes experimental physics as a counter example but even there, some teams keep their little secrets on the details of the experiment to have a bit of advance on other labs. Research is competitive in its current state, and I think only collaborations can overcome this fact.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Juxi Leitner on 10 Feb 10
     
    well sure competitiveness is good but to verify (and that should be the case for scientific experiments) the code should be public, it would be nice to have something like bibtex for code libraries or versions used.... :) btw I fully agree that the code should go public, I had lots of trouble reproducing (reprogramming) some papers in the past ... grr
  • Francesco Biscani on 10 Feb 10
     
    My view is that the only proper way to do scientific communication is full transparency: methodologies, tests, codes, etc. Everything else should be unacceptable. This should hold both for publicly funded science (for which there is the additional moral requirement to give back to the public domain what was produced with taxpayers' money) and privately-funded science (where the need to turn a profit should be of lesser importance than the proper application of the scientifc method).
  • Dario Izzo on 08 Nov 10
     
    Same battle we are fighting since a few years....
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Why Google makes it easy to leave Google - 2 views

arstechnica.com/...es-it-easy-to-leave-google.ars inf
shared by Francesco Biscani on 01 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Francesco Biscani on 01 Mar 10
     
    Dunno how effective this is, but hey, at least they are doing _something_ for interoperability.
11More

The End Of Gravity As a Fundamental Force - 6 views

science.slashdot.org/...Gravity-As-a-Fundamental-Force phy
shared by Francesco Biscani on 11 Jan 10 - Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • Francesco Biscani on 11 Jan 10
     
    "At a symposium at the Dutch Spinoza-instituut on 8 December, 2009, string theorist Erik Verlinde introduced a theory that derives Newton's classical mechanics. In his theory, gravity exists because of a difference in concentration of information in the empty space between two masses and its surroundings. He does not consider gravity as fundamental, but as an emergent phenomenon that arises from a deeper microscropic reality. A relativistic extension of his argument leads directly to Einstein's equations."
  • ...8 more comments...
  • Dario Izzo on 12 Jan 10
     
    Diffcult for me to fully understand / believe in the holographic principle at macroscopical scales ... potentially it looks though as a revolutionary idea.....
  • pacome delva on 13 Jan 10
     
    never heard about it... seems interesting. At first sight it seems that it is based on fundamental principle that could lead to a new phenomenology, so that could be tested. Perhaps Luzi knows more about this ? Did we ever work on this concept ?
  • Luzi Bergamin on 13 Jan 10
     
    The paper is quite long and I don't have the time right now to read it in detail. Just a few comments: * We (ACT) definitely never did anything in this direction? But: is there a new phenomenology? I'm not sure, if the aim is just to get Einstein's theory as emergent theory, then GR should not change (or only change in extreme conditions.) * Emergent gravity is not new, also Erik admits that. The claim to have found a solution appears quite frequently, but most proposals actually are not emergent at all. At least, I have the impression that Erik is aware of the relevant steps to be performed. * It's very difficult to judge from a short glance at the paper, up to which point the claims are serious and where it just starts to be advertisments. Section 6 is pretty much a collection of self-praise. * Most importantly: I don't understand how exactly space and time should be emergent. I think it's not new to observe that space is related to special canonical variables in thermodynamics. If anybody can see anything "emergent" in the first paragraphs of section 3, then please explain me. For me, this is not emergent space, but space introduced with a "sledge hammer." Time anyway seems to be a precondition, else there is nothing like energy and nothing like dynamics. * Finally, holography appears to be a precondition, to my knowledge no proof exists that normal (non-supersymmetric, non-stringy, non-whatever) GR has a holographic dual.
  • Luzi Bergamin on 13 Jan 10
     
    Update: meanwhile I understood roughly what this should be about. It's well known that BH physics follow the laws of theormodynamics, suggesting the existence of underlying microstates. But if this is true, shouldn't the gravitational force then be emergent from these microstates in the same way as any theromdynamical effect is emergent from the behavior of its constituents (e.g. a gas)? If this can be prooven, then indeed gravity is emergent. Problem: one has to proof that *any* configuration in GR may be interpreted as thermodynamical, not just BHs. That's probably where holography comes into the play. To me this smells pretty much like N=4 SYM vs. QCD. The former is not QCD, but can be solved, so all stringy people study just that one and claim to learn something about QCD. Here, we look at holographic models, GR is not holographic, but who cares... Engineering problems...
  • LeopoldS on 13 Jan 10
     
    is there any experimental or observational evidence that points to this "solution"?
  • Luzi Bergamin on 13 Jan 10
     
    Are you joking??? :D
  • pacome delva on 14 Jan 10
     
    I was a bit fast to say it could be tested... apparently we don't even know a theory that is holographic, perhaps a string theory (see http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9409089v2). So very far from any test...
  • LeopoldS on 14 Jan 10
     
    Luzi, I miss you!!!
  • Luzi Bergamin on 14 Jan 10
     
    Leo, do you mean you liked my comment on your question more than Pacome's? Well, the ACT has to evolve and fledge, so no bullshitting anymore, but serious and calculating answers... :-) Sorry Pacome, nothing against you!! I just LOVE this Diigo because it gives me the opportunity for a happy revival of my ACT mood.
  • pacome delva on 14 Jan 10
     
    haha, today would have been great to show your mood... we had a talk on the connection between mind and matter !!
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mentored by the Advanced Concepts Team for Google Summer of Code 2010 - 4 views

socghop.appspot.com/...advancedconceptsteam pagmo google summerofcode
shared by nikolas smyrlakis on 19 Mar 10 - Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 19 Mar 10
     
    you propably already know,I post it for the twitter account and for your comments
  • ...4 more comments...
  • LeopoldS on 20 Mar 10
     
    once again one of these initiatives that came up from a situation and that would never have been possible with a top-down approach .... fantastic! and as Dario said: we are apparently where NASA still has to go with this :-)
  • Joris _ on 20 Mar 10
     
    Actually, NASA Ames did that already within the NASA Open Source Agreement in 2008 for a V&V software!
  • Joris _ on 20 Mar 10
  • LeopoldS on 20 Mar 10
     
    indeed ... you are right .... interesting project btw - they started in 1999, were in 2005 the first NASA project on Sourceforge and won several awards .... then this entry why they did not participate last year: "05/01/09: Skipping this years Google Summer-of-Code - many of you have asked why we are not participating in this years Summer of Code. The answer is that both John and Peter were too busy with other assignments to set this up in time. We will be back in 2010. At least we were able to compensate with a limited number of NASA internships to continue some of last years projects." .... but I could not find them in this years selected list - any clue?
  • LeopoldS on 20 Mar 10
     
    but in any case, according to the apple guru, Java is a dying technology, so their project might as well ...
  • Joris _ on 21 Mar 10
     
    They participate under the name "The Java Pathfinder Team" (http://babelfish.arc.nasa.gov/trac/jpf/wiki/events/soc2010). It is actually a very useful project for both education and industry (Airbus created a consortium on model checking soft, and there is a lot of research on it) As far as I know, TAS had some plans of using Java onboard spacecrafts, 2 years ago. Not sure the industry is really sensible about Jobs' opinions ;) particularly if there is no better alternative!
2More

UNITED KINGDOM SPACE AGENCY UKSA (fake website) - 3 views

www.uk-space.com space united kingdom fun
shared by nikolas smyrlakis on 24 Mar 10 - Cached
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 24 Mar 10
     
    according to the normal website (http://www.bnsc.gov.uk/): "The UK Space Agency website will officially launch on 1 April 2010. Until then, the BNSC website will be in a state of transition " the guys above i think just take the piss coz theres no official website. Mission statement: TOGETHER WE ARE GOING TO EMBARK ON A JOURNEY INTO SPACE. ..........................THE MISSION IS......MARS................................."
  • Ma Ru on 24 Mar 10
     
    I've just read a blog entry about this on New Scientist, and while the entry itself is not interesting, I learned from it where the UKSA and ESA's UK establishment are going to be based. Answer: it's even more in the middle of nowhere than Plymouth! BTW does anyone (Leo?) know what is the basis on which new ESA establishments locations are chosen (if this info is classified, you can send it on priv ;) [Edit] Esa has released a news item about it... Whatever one can say about the British Space Agency, they certainly have a fantastic logo!
2More

Spaceflight Now | Atlas Launch Report | Air Force spaceplane is an odd bird with a twis... - 3 views

spaceflightnow.com/...100402x37update spaceflight suborbital defence
shared by LeopoldS on 06 Apr 10 - Cached
  • LeopoldS on 06 Apr 10
     
    Juxi are you following this one? any idea on its purpose?
  • Ma Ru on 07 Apr 10
     
    Not that I'm an expert in the field in any way, but there are two things I could think of: 1) possibility of bringing the payload back means that it can collect huge amounts of data which wouldn't be possible to be transferred via radio in reasonable time and/or you can bring back data you don't want to be intercepted by enemy 2) I remember reading somewhere that possibility of re-entry from orbit means you can strike any country without violating the airspace of the neighbouring countries. As the project is now managed by military, a purely civil purpose can be safely ruled out in my opinion.
5More

Novel negative-index metamaterial bends light 'wrong' direction - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...100422153939.htm phy nan metamaterials
shared by pacome delva on 23 Apr 10 - Cached
  • the first negative index metamaterial to operate at visible frequencies
  • By engineering a metamaterial with such properties, we are opening the door to such unusual -- but potentially useful -- phenomena as superlensing (high-resolution imaging past the diffraction limit), invisibility cloaking, and the synthesis of materials index-matched to air, for potential enhancement of light collection in solar cells
  • Luzi Bergamin on 23 Apr 10
     
    I forwarded the link to my experimental colleagues and here is the comment from Sergei (the master himself:) "this is what Igor has been doing - an array of plasmonic nanocables. This basically works as a wire-medium slab. All their epsilon and mu are rubbish." * If Sergei is as strict as in this comment, then it IS rubbish. He's not one of the notorious complainer (as e.g. myself.) * Please DO NOT FORWARD this to anybody else, Sergei's comment is NOT FOR PUBLIC USE!
  • Luzi Bergamin on 23 Apr 10
     
    UPDATE: I had a short chat with Sergei and Pekka, Sergei noticed that there is an increasing number of papers on metamaterials, especially in Nature and Science, which are simply wrong, this one being an example. * The idea is based on a very well known effect of wired media. What appears to be interesting about this paper is that they manage to make an optical analogue with aparently low losses. This could be interesting. * The whole interpretation as NIM, "wrong" refraction etc. is total nonsense.
  • pacome delva on 23 Apr 10
     
    wow, good to know ! But for the privacy you should be aware that this is a public group, so anyone has access to our comments i think !
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How one man tracked down Anonymous - and paid a heavy price - 3 views

arstechnica.com/...mousand-paid-a-heavy-price.ars inf
shared by Francesco Biscani on 10 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Francesco Biscani on 10 Feb 11
     
    HIGHLY suggested read if you are interested in the Anonymous phenomenon.
4More

The Fallout of a Helium-3 Crisis : Discovery News - 3 views

news.discovery.com/...fall-of-a-helium-3-crisis.html helium crisis moon mining
shared by Luís F. Simões on 22 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • So short in fact, that last year when the looming crisis, which reporters had been covering for years, became official, the price of helium-3 went from $150 per liter to $5,000 per liter.
  • The science, medical and security uses for helium-3 are so diverse that the crisis banded together a hodge-podge of universities, hospitals and government departments to try and find workable alternatives and engineer ways to recycle the gas they do have.
  • Luís F. Simões on 22 Feb 11
     
    So, which shall it be? Are we going to increase the production of hydrogen bombs, or can we finally go back to the Moon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Extraterrestrial_supplies) ?
  • dejanpetkow on 23 Feb 11
     
    None of these. Either you recycle, or you take it from natural sources on Earth. Although most people don't know - there is plenty of natural He3 on Earth. It's just nonsens to use it for energy production (in fusion reactors) since the energy belance for getting the He3 from these source on Earth is just negative. Or you try to substitute He3.
2More

How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure, and Abstraction - 4 views

www.sciencemag.org/...1279 AI cognition learning Bayesian probabilistic probabilistic computing
shared by Luís F. Simões on 21 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Luís F. Simões on 21 Mar 11
     
    a nice review on the wonders of Hierarchical Bayesian models. It cites a paper on probabilistic programming languages that might be relevant given our recent discussions. At Hippo's farewell lunch there was a discussion on how kids are able to learn something as complex as language from a limited amount of observations, while Machine Learning algorithms no matter how many millions of instances you throw at them, don't learn beyond some point. If that subject interested you, you might like this paper.
  • Ma Ru on 21 Mar 11
     
    Had an opportunity to listen to JBT and TLG during one summer school.. if they're half as good in writing as they are in speaking, should be a decent read...
7More

Prof. Markrams Hirnmaschine (Startseite, NZZ Online) - 2 views

www.nzz.ch/...s_hirnmaschine_1.10736223.html AI neuroscience SciFi
shared by Luzi Bergamin on 29 May 11 - No Cached
  • Luzi Bergamin on 29 May 11
     
    A critical view on Prof. Markram's Blue Brain project (in German).
  • ...4 more comments...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 29 May 11
     
    A critical view on Prof. Markram's Blue Brain project (in German).
  • LeopoldS on 30 May 11
     
    so critical that the comment needed to be posted twice :-) ?
  • Luzi Bergamin on 30 May 11
     
    Yes, I know; I still don't know how to deal with this f.... Diigo Toolbar! Shame on me!!!
  • dejanpetkow on 30 May 11
     
    Would be nice to read something about the modelling, but it appears that there is nothing published in detail. Following the article, the main approach is to model each(!) neuron taking into account the spatial structure of the neurons positions. Once achieved they expect intelligent behaviour. And they need a (type of) supercomputer which does not exist yet.
  • Ma Ru on 31 May 11
     
    As far as I know it's sort of like "Let's construct an enormous dynamical system and see what happens"... i.e. a waste of taxpayer's money... Able to heal Alzheimer... Yeah... Actually I was on the conference the author is mentioning (FET 2011) and I have seen the presentations of all 6 flagship proposals. Following that I had a discussion with one of my colleagues about the existence of limits of the amount of bullshit politicians are willing to buy from scientists. Will there be a point at which politicians, despite their total ignorance, will realise that scientists simply don't deliver anything they promise? How long will we (scientists) be stuck in the viscous circle of have-to-promise-more-than-predecessors in order to get money? Will we face a situation when we'll be forced to revert to promises which are realistic? To be honest none of the 6 presentations convinced me of their scientific merit (apart from the one on graphene where I have absolutely no expertise to tell). Apparently a huge amount of money is about to be wasted.
  • Luzi Bergamin on 01 Jun 11
     
    It's not just "Let's construct an enormous dynamical system and see what happens", it's worse! Also the simulation of the cosmological evolution is/was a little bit of this type, still the results are very interesting and useful. Why? Neither the whole cosmos nor the human brain at the level of single neurons can be modelled on a computer, that would last aeons on a "yet-to-be-invented-extra-super-computer". Thus one has to make assumptions and simplifications. In cosmology we have working theories of gravitation, thermodynamics, electrodynamics etc. at hand; starting from these theories we can make reasonable assumptions and (more or less) justified simplifications. The result is valuable since it provides insight into a complex system under given, explicit and understood assumptions. Nothing similar seems to exist in neuroscience. There is no theory of the human brain and apparently nobody has the slightest idea which simplifications can be made without harm. Of course, Mr. Markram remains completely unaffected of ''details'' like this. Finally, Marek, money is not wasted, we ''build networks of excellence'' and ''select the brightest of the brightest'' to make them study and work at our ''elite institutions'' :-). I lively remember the stage of one of these "bestofthebest" from Ivy League at the ACT...
7More

Human Brain Project - Goals - 3 views

www.humanbrainproject.eu/goals.html AI bio technology science
shared by LeopoldS on 20 May 11 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 20 May 11
     
    can we contribute in any way to this - or alternatively benefit from this research already now?
  • ...4 more comments...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 20 May 11
     
    Watch out!! I read quite a lot about the contribution by EPFL (apparently coordinator) and their boss, Henry Markram. From what I read, this is not really science, but mainly a PR campaign. The main motor in this project is attracting a lot of money and the main aim to do so is promising a lot of stuff that nobody will be able to deliver. Accordingly, Markram is a very controversial person in the business...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 20 May 11
     
    Oups, sorry! Of course I meant, "the main MEAN to do so...", but the aim justifies the means. Well, that's exactly Markram's motto, I guess.
  • LeopoldS on 21 May 11
     
    interesting info indeed ... I though still think that the overall goal of this project, even if too ambitious for the time being is interesting, no?
  • Luzi Bergamin on 22 May 11
     
    It's not about interesting or not, it's about serious science or not. Also the goal of a fortune-teller is interesting, isn't it? Any description of a good science project is too ambitious, that's normal and not necessarily PR. But personally I think there is a certain limit where a science project becomes a bad SciFi thriller. This one here is a dime novel, I think. But the too ambitious is not the only point I became very doubtful. I have seen quite a number of scientists and engineers from different fields; what I read about the character and attitude of this guy just hints towards the worst case scenario. It's presumptive evidence, I know...
  • LeopoldS on 22 May 11
     
    that bad! wow ....
  • Luzi Bergamin on 22 May 11
     
    You know me, I'm the bullshitter... You remember Kurzweil and his Singularity-nonsense. In a way this was very similar. Though I think Kurzweil and Markram are very different characters (The Singularity essentially is a religion, I can't see anything like that in Markram's claims) they seem to share an important point: they are both complete nerds that apparently never spent a single thought on the limits of science (in its English meaning) in general nor of their particular research field in specific. One may find this excusable, I don't. But even then, they make claims that the nerdest nerd must know that they are completely unrealistic and thus I just have to assume that they claim their nonsense on purpose. The reason in Markram's case clearly seems to be money. But all this does not mean that these nerds cannot produce valuable results.
1More

Physics - Neighborly networks - 0 views

physics.aps.org/...PhysRevLett.103.058701 networks
shared by pacome delva on 05 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Many networks, from the Internet to Facebook, are transitive: neighbors of the same node are probably neighbors of each other, or in social terms, your friends are likely to be friends with each other too. Apart from a few special cases, mathematically modeling such clustered networks is difficult and calculating their properties almost always requires numerical rather than analytical solutions. But as Mark Newman of the University of Michigan, US, reports in Physical Review Letters, it is in fact possible to generalize random graph models to include clustering in a way that allows exact derivations of network behavior.
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"Mexican Sinkhole May Lead NASA to Jupiter" By Ceci Connolly - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2007051300989.html
shared by ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
  • ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09
     
    It may not show up on MapQuest, but NASA scientists are betting that the best route to Jupiter and its ice-crusted moon Europa runs through an underwater cavern in Mexico.
5More

Google's Go: A New Programming Language That's Python Meets C++ - 6 views

www.techcrunch.com/...google-go-language programming tech google
shared by Juxi Leitner on 11 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Juxi Leitner on 11 Nov 09
     
    Big news for developers out there: Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. The company ...
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Francesco Biscani on 11 Nov 09
     
    Ugh... no operator overloading, no efficient generic programming and no lambda expressions... Only time will tell, but I don't understand who the intended audience is: I think that Python guys won't care about the (supposedly) increased performance (and you can interface C/C++ with Python easily) and that C++ programmers (I mean, the hardcore serious C++ Boost-like programmers, no the Java-like whiners :P) won't have their beloved templates pried from their cold dead hands with ease.
  • Juxi Leitner on 12 Nov 09
     
    yeah though I think especially operator overloading is not going to be a main problem, it is as with the JS library though quite thinkable that lots of users will switch or use it (or being put to use it...) because it is done by Google
  • Francesco Biscani on 12 Nov 09
     
    Having Google backing it will certainly help, even though they are presenting it as a "system level" (i.e., hard-core) language, and in that domain it is much more difficult to bullshit your way to a position of relevance. Look at Java: Sun pushed it like hell and it is certainly widely used in many contexts (corporate, web and embedded markets mostly), yet it completely failed to win the hearts of "open-source" developers (or, more generally, of those developers who are not forced to use it by virtue of some management-driven decision).
  • Juxi Leitner on 12 Nov 09
     
    "or, more generally, of those developers who are not forced to use it by virtue of some management-driven decision" completely agree with that!!
4More

Knowledge, networks and nations | Royal Society - 4 views

royalsociety.org/...knowledge-networks-nations
shared by LeopoldS on 29 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 29 Mar 11
     
    nice graphs ... and nice stats
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Luís F. Simões on 30 Mar 11
     
    the graphs are Motion Charts. They were made famous by Hans Rosling's TED talks (http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html). Google eventually bought his software, and made part of it freely available: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/motionchart.html. That's what they are using there.
  • LeopoldS on 30 Mar 11
     
    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?
  • Luís F. Simões on 31 Mar 11
     
    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.
2More

Torsional Carbon Nanotube Artificial Muscles - 0 views

www.sciencemag.org/...science.1211220 BIO NAN carbon muscles
shared by dejanpetkow on 18 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Actuator materials producing rotation are rare and demonstrated rotations are small, though rotary systems like electric motors, pumps, turbines and compressors are widely needed and utilized. Present motors can be rather complex and, therefore, difficult to miniaturize. We show that a short electrolyte-filled twist spun carbon nanotube yarn, which is much thinner than a human hair, functions as a torsional artificial muscle in a simple three-electrode electrochemical system, providing a reversible 15,000° rotation and 590 revolutions/minute. A hydrostatic actuation mechanism, like for nature’s muscular hydrostats, explains the simultaneous occurrence of lengthwise contraction and torsional rotation during the yarn volume increase caused by electrochemical double-layer charge injection. Use of a torsional yarn muscle as a mixer for a fluidic chip is demonstrated.
  • dejanpetkow on 18 Oct 11
     
    I have no access to the pdf, but abstract sounds interesting.
1More

Bacteria Living in 'Cloud Cities' May Control Rain and Snow Patterns : DNews - 1 views

news.discovery.com/...nd-snow-an-unlikely-couple.htm BIO science
shared by Paul N on 23 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Paul N on 23 Aug 14
     
    Some bacteria can influence the weather. Up high in the sky where clouds form, water droplets condense and ice crystal grow around tiny particles. Typically these particles are dust, pollen, or even soot from a wildfire. But recently scientists have begun to realize that some of these little particles are alive - they are bacteria evolved to create ice or water droplets around themselves. old but might be worth a discussion
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