January 2011
R2-D2 Creator Grant McCune Dead At 67 →
CBC reports on sad news for Star Wars fans: “Grant McCune, a special effects artist who earned an Oscar for his work on the 1977 film Star Wars, has died. He was 67. McCune died Monday at his home in Hidden Hills, Calif., of pancreatic cancer. McCune created scenes with miniatures, models and special effects for dozens of movies, including Spaceballs, Ghostbusters II and 2008’s Rambo....
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December 2010
This Year In Science →
hiremebecauseimsmart:
Dudes engineered macro-scale quantum behavior a la Schroedinger’s Cat
Neandertal genome sequenced
AIDS cure on the way?
a dozen rare diseases isolated in genome
quantum simulator — like a quantum processing unit
progress on protein folding
1,000 Genomes
RNA reprogramming
lab rat genomics
This Decade in Scientific Breakthroughs
junk DNA ≠ junk
Do You Have a Brain for Social Networks? →
interestingbehavior:
All the people you interact with on a daily basis may be influencing a structure in your brain - or maybe your brain is influencing how many people you socialize with, new research suggests.
It all comes back to the amygdala, the almond-shaped structure found in the temporal lobe of both hemispheres of the brain. It is connected to almost every other brain region, and...
“Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an...”
– Vladimir Nabokov (via thechocolatebrigade)
That awkward moment when you re-blog something and...
and you sound like an idiot
Disney's "Tangled" and Beautiful Mathematics →
Did I not say that science can be beautiful?
Consider Disney’s latest animated film, “Tangled.” How does one simulate human hair, taking into account sheen and reflection of light, not to mention bending? In the earlier days of animation, these drawings were done by hand by masters of the craft. Now, the images can be generated by computer algorithms. The answer is beautiful...
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the Back to the Future trilogy is on every night...
oh, and by the way, that blues riff is in B♭
The Dullness of 1729 →
One of the best-known anecdotes in the history of mathematics is
about a visit that Hardy paid to Ramanujan in the hospital in 1917.
The latter had been an obscure young clerk in his native India until
just a few years earlier, when he had written to Hardy - then the
world's most famous mathematician - asking Hardy to look at some of
his work. Hardy immediately recognized that the young man...
A little bit of interesting information →
cosmosscience:
The existence of black holes has been theorised for more than 200 years. It is impossible to observe them directly, so astronomers had no way to test their theories until Hubble arrived.
The high resolution of Hubble made it possible to see the effects of the gravitational attraction of some of these objects on their surroundings. Hubble has also proved that black holes are...
The scientist pope who lit up the Dark Ages →
AROUND AD 1000, Gerbert of Aurillac served a brief stint as pope. He was not an especially distinguished pontiff and he didn’t reign for very long, yet he is of perennial interest to both academic and popular historians. Why?
The answer can be found in books such as John William Draper’s 1874 History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. In it, Draper characterised the...
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Watch
Robot solves Rubik’s cube in 15 seconds
A Rubik’s cube is probably not on most people’s Christmas list this year, but it’s still inspiring engineers to create novel ways of solving it. Zachary Grady and Joe Ridgeway, students at Rowan University in New Jersey, built a robotic arm from scratch and created software that can solve the cube in just 15 seconds.
The system...
Life is like a parabola, it has its ups and downs...
Yoko Ono: John Lennon would have loved Facebook... →
and tumblr obviously
Topology as a tool for Postmodern Philosophy →
hiremebecauseimsmart:
The methods of topology, when applied to cultural analysis, provide a rigorous, yet unabashedly humble investigation of the nature of cultural relationships.
A Taste of Its Own Medicine? 4chan Down Due to... →
loveandacough-deactivated201102 asked: How old are youu!?
Lightning photographed by superfast X-ray camera,... →
Good Code vs. Bad Code
dustyprogrammer:
Happy Halloween from fuckyeahcomputerscience!
fuckyeahcomputerscience:
We’ve posted this joke so many times on this blog that I feel like I don’t have to explain the punchline anymore.
and no, I’m not going to explain it either
fuckyeahmath:
May the limit of the function merriment(you) as t approaches Christmas increase without bound!
sleeplesssun:
brandikay:
zombieslutfromhell:
...
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sleeplesssun:
serareal:
...
Pop Culture and Math →
“It is quite sad that our media reinforces the idea that math is unimportant and impossible to master. When our media brings these ideas to the forefront of society, how is our education system supposed to become better? “
sleeplesssun:
Happy Christmas (war is over) by...
