Newtons dog
The English mathematician John Wallis (1616-1703) was a friend of Isaac Newton. According to his diary, Newton once bragged to Wallis about his little dog Diamond.
"My dog Diamond knows some mathematics.
Today he proved two theorems before lunch."
"Your dog must be a genius," said Wallis.
"Oh I wouldn't go that far," replied Newton. "The first theorem had an error and the second had a pathological exception."
USA is no longer king of technology
The US has lost its position as the world's primary engine of technology innovation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.
The US is now ranked seventh in the body's league table measuring the impact of technology on the development of nations.
A deterioration of the political and regulatory environment in the US prompted the fall, the report said.
The top spot went for the first time to Denmark, followed by Sweden. Read more at BBC News...
Interesting news, since I actually live in Denmark.
Jackson Pollock revisited
Thanx to Klaus Johansen for noticing a quite surprising art site! Let's have visual fun: let the mouse run (and click to change colour)...
www.jacksonpollock.org
Sweet music - from the sounds of sugar
How does a swedish sugar refinery sound? And why should this in any way be related to science fiction?
Well, last year I read this in a swedish science fiction-forum: "This is a conceptalbum and also the example of a new music-genre, Industrial Cool.
The images reveal large factory- and machinecomplex and the music is 100% made of sampled industry- and factorysound (one artist per track). Very, very different; very, very suggestive; very, very machineindustrial; very, very futuristic..."
A link was also offered: pleazure.org/ic1/ and there I read: "C1 - The birth of Industrial Cool, an international compilation of tracks based around the given theme of sounds from a Swedish sugar refinery."
The site offered lots of samples, and as I was in the mood for something new, I gave it a try. Indeed, very strange, and also "very, very futuristic". Try listen...
All the way down!
After a lecture on the solar system, philosopher William James was approached by a determined elderly lady with a theory.
"We don't live on a ball rotating around the sun," she said. "We live on a crust of earth on the back of a giant turtle."
James decided to be gentle. "If your theory is correct, madam, what does this turtle stand on?"
"It stands on the back of a second, far larger turtle, of course."
"But what does this second turtle stand on?"
The old lady crowed triumphantly:
"It's no use, Mr. James - it's turtles all the way down!"
Baker, beware...
Here's a story of the curious mathematician versus the dishonest baker:
Henri Poincaré bought his bread every day from the local baker.
It was supposed to weigh 1 kilo, but after a year of record keeping Poincaré found a nice normal distribution with mean 950 gr.
He called the police and they told the baker to behave himself. A year later Poincaré told the police that the baker had not reformed.
The police confronted the baker who said "How could Poincaré have known that we always gave him the largest loaf?
Poincaré then revealed his record for this year: again a bell shaped curve with max at 950 gr. - but truncated on the left side...
Old cheese meets modern physics
"Polish twaróg (curd cheese) has a lot to answer for:
The stuff spread from Poland to Germany, where its name was Germanised to Quark.
As it was considered an inferior sort of thing, Quark came into use in German as a word for "nonsense"
- which seems to have been the inspiration for James Joyce's use of the word and hence its adoption into physics..."
Well, it's the weirdest facts one finds on the net, usually
while looking for something completely different...
Science fiction in Romania
Marian Taralunga: Hi friends, we have opened a new corner on our website - the english section.
Most of you know that few years back we used to run a brother website called "Imagikon".
At that time, we had an important number of contributors from all over the world.
We start off again, embedding the english written novels within our romanian language website.
We`ll try to publish all the stories / poems / essays / articles that were posted on Imagikon
as well as your new contributions from nowadays.
Find us here: www.sferaonline.ro/sectiuni/english
If the section becomes robust enough, we`ll move it under a much friendlier name. Enjoy!
Valley or wall
Yesteryear one of my friends suggested an art expeditition, to an exibition with the promising theme: the real and the fantastic.
I wasn't sure what to think or say most of the time, but then I turned around a corner and was really impressed:
A wall? A fall? It was called "The Valley" I discovered, but I have never seen a valley like this;
a paper installation, many meters high, many meters wide, and incredible etherical...
"The Valley" was created by Marianne Therese Grønnow in 2006.
Einstein dressing - or not
When Einstein's wife told him to dress properly when going to the office he argued:
"Why should I? Everyone knows me there."
When he was told to dress properly for his first big conference:
"Why should I? No one knows me there."
This is not a shadow
This is not a blog
This is not a blog, not at all, and here's why:
Blogs may focus on many different things, but the point of view is usually me, me, me.
Blogs typically have a bloated design; even a single line of text consumes the space of a minor essay.
Finally, blogs are totally automated publishingmachines, made for people who hates code...
Au contraire, this is about the rest of the universe, the layout as compact as possible. And finally, I write all the code myself, using notepad (yes, I'm a nerd!).
This space is rather intended for things too small to be an article, yet too interesting to dismiss.
Expect an unstructured mix of scientific events, art(ificial) projects, surreel ideas, weird news, absurd facts, etc...
NB: It's not that I dislike the blogosphere, I just prefer the novosphere...
If you still want personal comments, visit my personal site:
www.mads-dam-larsen.dk/english.htm
Or, if you want photo/graphics/animations, visit my professional site: www.madsdam.net
Welcome back from Paris..!
Lars Mikkes is a danish multi-artist, who has just returned from 3 months in Paris.
Although he is probably mostly known for his paintings and sculptures, he is,
in my opinion, also a very good photographer.
I can only recommend him - have a look yourself...
The internet is still exploding
It's a too long discussion when the net really started. But the end doesn't seem near either. The whole thing is still exploding, like another Big Bang still in the expansion phase. Some fresh numbers from april 2007 concerning the blogosphere:
* 70 million weblogs have been created (100 times more than in 2003)
* About 120,000 new weblogs appears daily; 1.4 new blogs pr second
* 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
(Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December)
* 1.5 million posts per day, that is 17 posts per second
* Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took only 320 days
* 22 blogs among top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006
(compared to 12 in the prior quarter)
* Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
* English only second at 33%
(which means that 2/3 of all blogs are not in english)
* Chinese still only third at 8%
* Italian fourth at 3%
* Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
* English the most even in postings around-the-clock
* Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
* 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
* 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February
Remember that the blogs are only one part of the internet. New members of fx MySpace or Second Life are not included in the numbers above...
The writing on the floor
Absent indeed
Norbert Wiener was the founder of cybernetics, but also very absent minded. The following story is told about him: When they moved from Cambridge to Newton his wife, knowing that he would be absolutely useless on the move, packed him off to MIT while she directed the move. Since she was certain that he would forget that they had moved and where they had moved to, she wrote down the new address on a piece of paper, and gave it to him. Naturally, in the course of the day, an insight occurred to him. He reached in his pocket, found a piece of paper on which he furiously scribbled some notes, thought it over, decided there was a fallacy in his idea, and threw the piece of paper away.
At the end of the day he went home (to the old address in Cambridge, of course). When he got there he realized that they had moved, that he had no idea where they had moved to, and that the piece of paper with the address was long gone. Fortunately inspiration struck. There was a young girl on the street and he conceived the idea of asking her where he had moved to, saying, "Excuse me, perhaps you know me. I'm Norbert Wiener and we've just moved. Would you know where we've moved to?" To which the young girl replied, "Yes daddy, mommy thought you would forget."
Many years later someone asked his daughter (the girl in the story) about the truth of the story. She said that it wasn't quite true - that he never forgot who his children were! The rest of it, however, was pretty close to what actually happened...
If scifi was hifi, it might sound like this
Walking on the sun
How would the sun look like - if you were walking around on the surface? One of the heliographical attractions would probably be watching sunspots - close up.
This image of the solar chromosphere was obtained on 20 Nov 2006 by the Hinode solar observatory. It reveals the structure of the solar magnetic field rising vertically from a sunspot (an area of strong magnetic field), outward into the solar atmopshere.
The chromosphere a thin 'layer' of solar atmosphere 'sandwiched' between the sun's visible surface (or photosphere) and its outer atmosphere (or corona). The chromosphere is the source of ultra violet radiation.
More...?
Credits: Hinode JAXA/NASA/PPARC