Interesting Stuff Thread

The Mad Hatter · 20-09-2011 12:26PM

Sarky wrote: »

Orbiting the earth at high speed .gif.

Looks beautiful.

Nice

(Quoting so it gets noticed amongst all the Benford discussion...)

Standman · 20-09-2011 12:40PM

Sarky wrote: »

Orbiting the earth at high speed .gif.

Looks beautiful.

I don't use the word "awesome" much, but here I think it is really the only word to describe it.

Here's the HQ video also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdDEpC0uHWI

Simply beautiful.

5uspect · 20-09-2011 06:08PM

Food for thought for this forum perhaps?

A group of psychologists working at HP's Social Computing Research Group has found that humans are more likely to change their minds when fewer, rather than more, people disagree with them.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-09/20/stubbornness

cavedave · 21-09-2011 10:50AM

The human brain may discriminate touch from pain from 35–37 weeks gestation

robindch · 21-09-2011 02:45PM

More jaw-dropping camerawork from the good folks on the ISS:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14998679

MagicMarker · 22-09-2011 06:16PM

Sub-atomic particles possibly exceeded the speed of light at CERN. :eek:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

The Mad Hatter · 22-09-2011 11:14PM

MagicMarker wrote: »

Sub-atomic particles possibly exceeded the speed of light at CERN. :eek:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

Amazing. Also refreshing to see some non-hyperbolic reporting on science.

smokingman · 23-09-2011 12:11PM

Apparently, it's now possible to make an avi of what you see by scanning your brain activity.
Could be used to record films of your dreams!

http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity

Dave! · 23-09-2011 01:02PM

smokingman wrote: »

Apparently, it's now possible to make an avi of what you see by scanning your brain activity.
Could be used to record films of your dreams!

http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity

Bout time! I'm sick of having to use my imagination when I don't have internet access but want a wánk !

liamw · 23-09-2011 01:55PM

Dave! wrote: »

Bout time! I'm sick of having to use my imagination when I don't have internet access but want a wánk !

And the resolution isn't much worse than most of the free sites either!

ShooterSF · 23-09-2011 02:15PM

smokingman wrote: »

Apparently, it's now possible to make an avi of what you see by scanning your brain activity.
Could be used to record films of your dreams!

http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity

I call bollix. As if a sony product would ever hook up to an apple device.

sponsoredwalk · 23-09-2011 03:55PM

Worth reading on the topic of c < v.

Turtwig · 23-09-2011 03:59PM

MagicMarker wrote: »

Sub-atomic particles possibly exceeded the speed of light at CERN. :eek:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

This depresses me a lot the way people clearly think that this implies something about our text books being useless. If the books were useless we wouldn't be standing on the cusp of potential great progress. Just watched the live confernece and I have to say it sure was some rigourous work they did, it might all be wrong, but in no way is it quackery.It is simply science at its most awesomenest. Also had a chuckle at the collaborators appealing for people to tag their email with something proving they were watching or at the presentation so they can avoid all the science fiction emails that they are simply getting flooded with.

This is xkcd's excellent, nay make that superbly awesome take on this whole affair.

Don't forget to read the mouse over text.

Pompey Magnus · 23-09-2011 11:14PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFJPtVRlI64

recedite · 25-09-2011 10:21AM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WNcjkZ6d0w

Dyson Balloon Accelerator

Sarky · 25-09-2011 11:35PM

It's a trap! miracle!

MrPudding · 26-09-2011 12:36AM

recedite wrote: »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WNcjkZ6d0w

Dyson Balloon Accelerator

That is some expensive fun. Hve you seen the price of those things?

MrP

CiaranMT · 26-09-2011 01:02AM

Balloons?

Seriously though, what the hell are those things??

recedite · 26-09-2011 10:53AM

Its a desktop fan. The circular part is hollow, with the cross section of an aeroplane wing. It's an expensive toy, but a beautiful design all the same. Maybe it will become a design icon, a bit like the Porsche car.

eoin5 · 26-09-2011 10:42PM

They look like they'd be a good way of Quidditch sabotage. While they're all looking for the suspect wiggling their nose or whatever everytime something weird happens its just someone flicking a switch in the goal.

The Mad Hatter · 27-09-2011 08:19AM

Virtual monkeys attempt to write the complete works of Shakespeare, and are getting there:

A few million virtual monkeys are close to re-creating the complete works of Shakespeare by randomly mashing keys on virtual typewriters.

A running total of how well they are doing shows that the re-creation is 99.990% complete.

The first single work to be completed was the poem A Lover's Complaint.

Set up by US programmer Jesse Anderson the project co-ordinates the virtual monkeys sitting on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing system via a home PC.

Mr Anderson said he started the project as a way to get to know the Hadoop programming tool better and to put Amazon's web services to the test.

It is also a practical test of the thought experiment that wonders whether an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters would be able to produce Shakespeare's works by accident.

Mr Anderson's virtual monkeys are small computer programs uploaded to Amazon servers. These coded apes regularly pump out random sequences of text.

Each sequence is nine characters long and each is checked to see if that string of characters appears anywhere in the works of Shakespeare. If not, it is discarded. If it does match then progress has been made towards re-creating the works of the Bard.

To get a sense of the scale of the project, there are about 5.5 trillion different combinations of any nine characters from the English alphabet.

liamw · 27-09-2011 08:40AM

^^ Not really a 'thought experiment' though rather than a fact of the nature of infinity?

In reality, this is not a 'practical test' of anything except his distributed computing tool and EC2...

Sarky · 27-09-2011 08:57AM

I'm not really sure you can have any facts about infinity. It's not exactly measurable.

But if they're that close to completing it, it's a nice confirmation that even randomly pushing buttons to get interesting patterns doesn't take all that long, relatively speaking. I can think of a few people who'll be making special effort to ignore this story.