Seriously. It is not often that one of the fundamental laws of the universe as we know it is broken.
While studying neutrino oscillations — where particles shift from one type of subatomic particle (muon-neutrinos) to another (tau-neutrinos) — scientists clocked a beam of muon-neutrinos outpacing the aforesaid ray of light by 60 nanoseconds.
In other words, scientists at CERN think (think, mind you) that they just witnessed something moving faster than the speed of light, which everybody believed (most notably Einstein) was simply not possible.Oh. A month later and... never mind.
Surprisingly, spending more money on education is not the most important thing, according to the Economist. The main conclusion of the article seems to be "diversity of approach": Try as many different educational formats as possible and build upon what works best. Oh... and of course, the obvious: Good teachers. Oh... and of course, the also obvious: Good parents.
Here are the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) educational rankings by country for 2008.
I just adore the look of this car, the Fisker Karma, a hybrid sedan (similar to the Nissan Leaf in that the only thing the gasoline engine powers is an electric generator while the only thing powering the wheels are electric engines) designed and built in America. Close to 100 miles per gallon equivalent, they say.
It really is the prettiest 4-door car I've ever seen: A blend of American muscle car and European sedan. A true design triumph that takes the standard sedan shape in a beautiful new direction. No wonder too: Mr. Fisker, according to the article in Car And Driver, "designed the BMW Z8 and the Aston Martin DB9 and V-8 Vantage", which are among the world's most beautiful cars.
What's next? I hear from Autoblog that a bit of a redesign is taking place, where the back end is going to get lifted up a bit to form more of a "flying brake" shape (think "station wagon") similar to the new 4-seater Ferarri FF. UPDATE:
Here is the updated version, called the "Fisker Surf Shooting Brake"... even nicer! Well, I think I would have liked a bit more of a "hatchback", rounded rear than this (again, like the Ferrari FF), but it is still just a gorgeous piece of automotive art.
P.S. Since I've mentioned the Ferrari FF a couple of times, and not many people are familiar with Ferrari's new 4-seater coupé, here is a photo:
I was out at the beach, wading back to shore in about navel-deep water. About 20 feet in front of me closer to the beach was a dark patch of underwater seaweed — of which there is not much on Florida beaches. Then I noticed that the patch of seaweed was being dragged towards me on the undertow, which was strange. In an instant, the dark patch was next to my hip, 8 feet long and as wide as the trunk of an oak tree... brown speckled skin: A manatee. He was past me before I could really react, and had swum on to visit a couple of people standing 20 feet further out. (I had just enough time to shout, "Hey, a manatee is heading for you!") His big snout came up in front of them for a few seconds, then submerged again, and his big rear flipper made a splash out out of the water, and he was gone.
Because I have a lot of readers from other countries who might not know what a manatee is, here is a video below. A manatee is a water mammal, sort of like a gentle walrus. They are vegetarians and hang out normally in canals and inlets where there is underwater vegetation and the water is a bit warmer. Cousin Paul says that they are friendly and curious, and will come up and visit with humans who venture into their habitat (or vice versa, as happened wtih me). However, they are a protected species in Florida, and messing around with them (or chasing after them, especially in water craft) is strictly prohibited.
I'm back in Florida now, having flown right past the hurricane as it was making landfall in North Carolina. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this hurricane's threat to Manhattan is a bit overstated. I doubt that the storm surge will reach street level in the financial district. We'll see.
Photo credit to Talking Points Memo... and whoever they are giving credit to.
It's uplifting to see some American teenagers that are so far beyond normal levels of genius that they enter the realm of "awe-inspiring".
Shree Bose is a high school Junior from Texas. After losing 2 grandfathers to cancer, Shree simply decided to start working on a cure for cancer.
I don't know how she did it precisely, but she started off studying the fairly-common chemotherapy drug, cisplatin. First, she figured out how it worked on cancer cells. Second, she DISCOVERED (yes, discovered) how an intercellular protein commonly found in cancer cells eventually helped those cancer cells develop resistance to the drug. Third, and most importantly, she DEVELOPED (a junior in high school!) a method to manipulate that protein, stopping the cancer cells from developing resistance to cisplatin.
To put it simply: Shree Bose accomplished by herself what would normally require a team of university MD/PhD researchers to accomplish.
I was chatting on the phone with a friend and, while doing so, idly gliding around the United States from a satellite's vantage when I noticed hundreds of square miles of curiously-plowed fields over Western Washington... quite cool. I'll have to find out what crops they are... or if somebody knows, leave a comment.
I've been listening to and recording music like crazy for the last few days. I stumbled upon this gorgeous piece that I heard in (of all places) an episode of Battlestar Galactica.
Now, the question is what is the time signature for this music? I'm pretty sure it is a 3/4, but maybe a 6/4 or 12/4. I've ruled out 6/8 because that is "one-and-a, two-and-a, three-and-a, four-and-a". This is "one-and, two-and, three-and, four-and, five-and, six-and".
There is a second version of the song below that is in that more traditional 6/8 double waltz time I mentioned, and it's actually neat to hear the difference.
Of course, if you want to get really stumped, here is yet a third piece from the same composer that has the first half of each phrase in 6/8 time, and then shifts to 3/4 for the second half:
(If you are having trouble getting all the Grooveshark widgets to load in this blog post, hit the F5 key to refresh the page. That usually works.)
By the way: Grooveshark.com is just a great place to find every obscure piece of music (as illustrated in this blog post). So far, the only song that I haven't been able to find is the 12" version of Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes"... and that's pretty rare. Combine that with Pandora.com, which plays "more of the same" based on your musical preferences, and you have everything you could ever want for listening to music on the internet.
The idea is that the energy, instead of being stored and discharging in the same place, is stored in a liquid form like oil. Then, the movement of the liquid through a membrane creates a flow of electricity: fully charged liquid goes in one side, depleted liquid comes out the other side. (This type of battery design concept has been around for a while, but the MIT team advanced the efficiency of the technology by an order of magnitude.) So, when your electric car runs low on charge, you simply pull into a "gas station", have the old battery fluid pumped out and new battery fluid pumped in. (Like rechargeable batteries, this fluid can be recharged; it is not thrown away. You could drive home with a half-full battery and recharge the fluid yourself as well.)
I've been saying for years that the future of "green technology" relies almost entirely on battery technology: The ability to carry large amounts of stored energy around with us. It is breakthroughs like this that are moving us ever closer to saying goodbye to using oil as an energy source.
This is brilliant stuff. Everybody who has been a true fan of Star Trek has dreamed of (or even attempted, usually poorly) writing and filming their own Star Trek episodes.
But now, a group of Trekkies in the village of Ticonderoga, New York, has (with a reasonable budget, quite professional production, and modern special effects) started to create the never-filmed 4th and 5th seasons of the original ("Captain Kirk") Star Trek.
They're doing it as an act of love for Star Trek, and they've got the support of Trekkies (and lots of actual Star Trek people as well) worldwide.
I've downloaded the first 6 episodes. I think that the acting is a little poor, but the episodes are well-written (and many are actually episodes written for the original cast but never filmed), and the "look" of the show (sets and special effects) is actually better than the original.
I had this happen to me this evening while heating some soup in the microwave: It started to sizzle after about 45 seconds, so I stopped the microwave, opened the door, stuck in a spoon to stir it, and WHOOSH! Ultra hot soup splashed out of the dish. Fortunately, it wasn't very much soup, and not too much hit my hand, but the experience did leave a couple of red spots on my skin.
But yes, lesson learned: With liquids in a microwave, don't ever go sticking a spoon or anything into the liquid, because it can suddenly explode.
(I had heard of this before, but it obviously was not in my mind when I thought to stir my soup!)
I've heard a lot of people say that music is based on mathematical patterns, but I've always found that a bit of a laugh: Nobody determines what notes to put in music by pulling out a calculator. Well, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces of piano music today and subsequently found an article written on the mathematical formula behind it.
Linus Kesson wrote this excellent article deconstructing Arvo Pärt's "Fratres". I hope he will excuse me for borrowing liberally his work, but this is such a great example of mathematical patterns in music, and his illustrations show so well the inherent patterns, that I really can't explain this without using them.
Fratres (the ear-wrenching minute-long violin solo at the beginning notwithstanding) is constructed of 9 "phrases" with a repeating and unchanging "bridge" separating each one. Although each phrase seems quite distinct from the others, it is only a matter of expression: structurally... mathematically they are all equal.
Each phrase is divided into 2 halves. Each half phrase has 3 measures building to a final measure of 8 chords. All chords are of 3 notes each. The first measure is in 7/4 time, and always contains 4 chords: 1 and 2, plus 7 and 8 of the final 8-chord set. The second measure is in 9/4 time, and sticks chords 3 and 6 in the middle to make 6 chords: 1-2-3 and 6-7-8. The third measure is in 11/4 time, and puts in chords 4 and 5, to create the full 1 through 8 chord set. That's the first half of the complete phrase.
For the second half of the phrase, there are 3 more measures in 7/4, 9/4, and 11/4 time. The chords are played backwards... but not as "chords 8 through 1", but instead played mathematically backwards. Keep that in mind.
So playing the 2 halves (the 3 plus 3 measures) as described above makes one of the 9 phrases. (A violin is added as a counterpoint — a narration, I like to say — on top of the phrases, but the mathematical action is always in the chords.)
Now, as mentioned, each of the chords is comprised of 3 notes. The middle note is restricted to the A-minor triad that the piece was written in. The top and the bottom notes work their way through a D-minor scale. (Stay with me on this.)
The circle to the left is the 7 notes of the D-minor scale. What Fratres did was start the bottom note of each phrase at one point of the D-minor scale and work stepwise around the circle 8 steps (arriving back at the original note), while the top note follows it two steps behind. (Halfway through the phrase, the progression skips up or down an octave, depending on which direction it is moving.)
This circle is the middle note of the 3-note chord phrases. It only plays from the triad of the A-minor chord. The mathematical reasoning behind the particular progression of tone choices between "A", "C", and "E" is explained in Linus Kesson's article, but it is bit too detailed to explain on my non-musical blog to my non-musical audience. Suffice it to say that the middle voice of the 3-note chords is always either A, C, or E.
So what you have finally are the 2 circles (the top and bottom notes on the inside, the middle note on the outside) rotating together through each phrase. Again, it is a little complicated as to how Arvo Pärt choose the starting points and the rotational direction for each of the 9 phrases, but the mathematical progression is absolutely precise and does not deviate through the whole piece.
Remember that I said that the first half (measures 1 through 3) of each phrase was chords 1 through 8, and that the second half of each phrase (measures 4 through 6) was mathematically backwards? Now you understand it when I say that the second half of the phrase is created by playing through the circles in the reverse order. Notice that there are 14 notes in the outer circle? When the second half of the phrase begins from its starting point, the middle note plays backwards a different progression of notes than it did going forward.)
Finally, under each phrase, you place a constant left hand "A+E" foundation, and you have the entire piece.
For those of you who can read music, take a look at the first half of the first phrase and the chord pattern as described becomes instantly recognizable: Remember, the final phrase is in the third measure. The first two are the incomplete phrase being filled.
Now we have established that, indeed, composers can create music based on very strict mathematical progressions. But, let's face it: That's an easy thing to do. I can cook dinner on mathematical progressions. The question is: will it taste any good? I can paint a picture with a mathematical progression of colors. The question is: will it look okay? The question with mathematical music is thus: How does it sound?
Well, if you ask me, I don't think a prettier piece of music has ever been written.
From my friend Don, whose Yahoo account also got hacked recently:
The bad guys get a million yahoo.com e-mail addresses. Into those million yahoo addresses, they have a hundred computers that type in one password every hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
It's not the other way around, where one e-mail account is hit with a million different attempts at a password. Nope: These guys just have their computers chugging along with the 5-to-8-letter/number combinations. Every hour, your e-mail address has a random password typed into it. Yes: Your e-mail address. Don't doubt it.
My e-mail account was on that list of one million addresses, and my old Yahoo password (comprised of lower case letters and digits) at some point came up: that exact combination of letters and numbers that I was using was randomly selected to be tried on a million e-mail accounts, and... well, a little "ding" of success sounded in some dingy office in the suburbs of Moscow when the machines got to my e-mail account.
So, for all of you: I thought my password (8 characters of 4 random lower-case letters and 4 random numbers) was secure. It was not. Chances are, neither is yours. The advice: Change your password to something secure: Use both capital and lowercase letters; stick an # or an & in the middle, stick an ! or a : on the end. And, most importantly, 8 characters minimum. Any less than that and you're asking for it.
Also, if you have the option, you really should not use any large e-mail provider which, after having had 3 or 4 incorrect passwords typed into it, does not raise a red flag of suspicion by either sending out a warning, freezing the account, or taking some other action: You can be certain that the hackers don't bother attacking accounts at those e-mail companies. And, in case you are wondering: What is the least suspicious e-mail provider of them all? Yahoo.
I've been reading A Song Of Fire And Ice by George R.R. Martin ("The American Tolkein", as he is nicknamed) and have just started watching the HBO series, "A Game Of Thrones" based on the books. It is really quite good. And I'm not the only one who things so: The general consensus of reviewers seems to be "the excellence you come to expect from HBO".
If you've never heard of "Game of Thrones", it is about the political/ royal/ power machinations of several great families (and several dozen minor ones) in a semi-fantasy/medieval world.
The only problem I foresee is that author Martin has not yet started writing the 6th and 7th books of the series, and it took him 11 years to write the 2 books — the 4th and the 5th books — before that.
My mother has this beer sign from the 1940's, still fully functional. The top is made from glass tubes, filled with fluid that bubbles up lava-lamp style when it is heated. Any appraisal would be appreciated.
I think she should go out to Las Vegas with it and get on Pawn Stars.
Believe it or not, I had pondered of the possibility of a player doing this but figured that since it had never been done, it must be impossible.
But here it is on video: Stuffing the puck, lacrosse style.
Actually, my question is whether the shot will stay legal in the future: It's such a paradigm-changing way of maneuvering the puck that it could be construed as "handling" or "directing" for future reference. If not, man, a goalie's job just got a whole lot more complicated.
This is some amazing stuff: Electrocorticography, or ECoG, is a tool that has been used by doctors to map the brain of epileptics for decades now... determine where the "misfires" are coming from. What ECoG does basically is create a 3-dimensional map of the brain's electrical activity.
That's the premise.
Here's the application: If you increase the number and sensitivity of the ECoG sensors in the brain, and then connect all those sensors to some sophisticated software, you literally get a computer that can read your mind.
Actually, the doctors running these experiments on epilepsy patients are absolutely stunned at how much thought the computer is able to interpret via the electrical signals being put out:
In the video, Schalk is seen working with a young man sitting in a hospital bed at Albany Medical Center, staring at the image of a hand on a computer screen.
Schalk asks him to close the hand. The hand on the screen closes. Schalk asks him to open the hand. The virtual hand opens.
ECoG is also revealing things about how the brain creates speech.
Schalk and other researchers are using the technology to watch the brains of people as they speak out loud and also as they say the words silently to themselves.
"One of the surprising initial findings coming out of that research was that actual and imagined speech [are] very, very different," Schalk says.
When your brain wants you to say a word out loud, it produces two sets of signals. One has to do with moving the muscles controlling the mouth and vocal tract. The second set involves signals in the brain's auditory system.
But when a person simply thinks of a word instead of saying it, there are no muscle signals — just the activity in the parts of the brain involved in listening.
"That seems to suggest that what imagined speech actually really is, it's more like internally listening to your own voice," Schalk says.
So, he says, it should be possible to use ECoG to eavesdrop on that inner voice and decode what we're thinking.
Schalk says he hasn't quite done that yet. But he's close. In one experiment, he says, the ECoG system tried to recognize several dozen unspoken words in the minds of volunteers. It was right about half the time.
The average American with the average job and the average car works 2 hours out of every 8 hour day paying for the ownership and operation of his or her car. Car payments, gasoline, insurance, and occasional repairs eat up 25% of Americans' income.
It's crazy when you think about it.
Working at home, I put $20 of gas in the car every month. Working at home, I have no work clothes or uniforms to buy, no suits or ties to launder. Working at home, lunch is a sandwich from the refrigerator instead of a retail meal. When you add up the money I save by working at home, I've got it pretty good.
The circle to the left is the 7 notes of the D-minor scale. What Fratres did was start the bottom note of each phrase at one point of the D-minor scale and work stepwise around the circle 8 steps (arriving back at the original note), while the top note follows it two steps behind. (Halfway through the phrase, the progression skips up or down an octave, depending on which direction it is moving.)
This circle is the middle note of the 3-note chord phrases. It only plays from the triad of the A-minor chord. The mathematical reasoning behind the particular progression of tone choices between "A", "C", and "E" is explained in Linus Kesson's article, but it is bit too detailed to explain on my non-musical blog to my non-musical audience. Suffice it to say that the middle voice of the 3-note chords is always either A, C, or E.
So what you have finally are the 2 circles (the top and bottom notes on the inside, the middle note on the outside) rotating together through each phrase. Again, it is a little complicated as to how Arvo Pärt choose the starting points and the rotational direction for each of the 9 phrases, but the mathematical progression is absolutely precise and does not deviate through the whole piece.
Remember that I said that the first half (measures 1 through 3) of each phrase was chords 1 through 8, and that the second half of each phrase (measures 4 through 6) was mathematically backwards? Now you understand it when I say that the second half of the phrase is created by playing through the circles in the reverse order. Notice that there are 14 notes in the outer circle? When the second half of the phrase begins from its starting point, the middle note plays backwards a different progression of notes than it did going forward.)
I've been reading A Song Of Fire And Ice by George R.R. Martin ("The American Tolkein", as he is nicknamed) and have just started watching the HBO series, "A Game Of Thrones" based on the books. It is really quite good. And I'm not the only one who things so: The general consensus of reviewers seems to be "the excellence you come to expect from HBO". 
An interesting article here.
