Donut Math

Program in C code, shaped like a donut, renders a 3D donut shape in ASCII, originally put together in 2006 by Andy Sloane:

At its core, it’s a framebuffer and a Z-buffer into which I render pixels. Since it’s just rendering relatively low-resolution ASCII art, I massively cheat. All it does is plot pixels along the surface of the torus at fixed-angle increments, and does it densely enough that the final result looks solid. The “pixels” it plots are ASCII characters corresponding to the illumination value of the surface at each point: .,-~:;=!*#\$@ from dimmest to brightest. No raytracing required.

More technical discussion can be found here
The code itself is posted here

Early Transistors developed at Bell Telephone Labs

9gag:

The first avenger

Young Guglielmo Marconi, circa 1890s. Marconi was awarded the Nobel Prize in in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun for “recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy”.

I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.
 — Carl Friedrich Gauss (via scienceisbeauty)

Quantum Photon Properties Revealed in Plasmon

For years, researchers have been interested in developing quantum computers — the theoretical next generation of technology that will outperform conventional computers. Instead of holding data in bits, the digital units used by computers today, quantum computers store information in units called “qubits.” One approach for computing with qubits relies on the creation of two single photons that interfere with one another in a device called a waveguide. Results from a recent applied science study at Caltech support the idea that waveguides coupled with another quantum particle — the surface plasmon — could also become an important piece of the quantum computing puzzle.