I’m Reading…Wonderful news today coming out of NASA today:
NASA took the first concrete step toward returning human beings to the moon Thursday, successfully launching the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on a mission to find the best place to build Earth’s first off-world colony.
The 19-story-high, two-stage rocket and spacecraft launched at 2:32 p.m. PDT. As the huge [...]
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Interesting milestone this week. My very first patent granted.
USPTO: Patent #7,490,056
Filed: November, 2004
Granted: February 10, 2009
Ironically, I wouldn’t have known about it except for a promotion catalog I got in the mail today with a list of plaques I could buy to commemorate this patent from some souvenir company in Florida. Yes, I know. Weird.
This [...]
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This news is from tomorrow’s New York Times:
Scientists in Germany Draft Neanderthal Genome
It’s about 63% complete at this point. We live in magical times, scientifically. Unbelievable.
Some nice tidbits from the article:
The Neanderthal genome, when fully analyzed, is expected to shed light on many critical aspects of human evolution. It will help document two important sets [...]
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From Science News:
Here’s a number to savor: 243,112,609-1.
Its size is mind-boggling. With nearly 13 million digits, it makes the number of atoms in the known universe seem negligible, a mere 80 digits.
And its form is tidy and lovely: 2n-1.
But its true beauty is far grander: It is a prime number. Indeed, it is the largest [...]
Filed under: Science, Silicon Valley | Tagged: Largest Prime, Math, Mersenne Prime, NASA Ames, Prime Numbers | Leave a Comment »
There are so many reasons to love the Dutch, and MythBusters has just provided another.
Many thanks to Rob Go for providing the link to this 4-minute clip, which shows that it is, in fact, impossible to pull apart two interleaved phone books, even with the use of automobiles…
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Remakes are all the rage in Hollywood, and what better original material is there than the Old Testament?
If you are not familiar with the Burj Dubai, it’s the tallest building in the world, and the construction isn’t even finished yet. It currently stands about 2,275 feet tall, but they are keeping the final height a [...]
Filed under: Real Estate, Science | Tagged: world's tallest buildings | 1 Comment »
This is from over a month ago, but there was a wonderful article for all the closet material scientists out there in the New York Times on Glass a few weeks ago.
Here is an except:
It is well known that panes of stained glass in old European churches are thicker at the bottom because glass is [...]
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I’m a big fan of distributed systems – complex networks of an extremely large number of independent entities governed by simple and transparent rules. Not surprising, really, that I work professionally on next-generation products and services based on the Internet, one of the most successful man-made distributed systems in existence.
As a result, it’s not surprising [...]
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I’ve had the growing realization over the past few years that something may be amiss with the universe. As a fan of the various modern theories of quantum cosmology, it’s occurred to me that I may have accidentally ended up jumping out of the theoretical universe of maximum probability into another quantum variant.
I think the [...]
Filed under: Apple, Science | Tagged: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod, iTunes, Quantum Cosmology, Quantum Gravity | 3 Comments »
Very interesting blog post on The Spitoon, the blog of 23andMe, the hip Google-backed, personal genetics company.
A quick excerpt:
The place of Neanderthals in the story of human evolution has been hotly debated for decades. A distant cousin to our species, Neanderthals had already been in Europe over 250,000 years when Homo sapiens first arrived there [...]
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This is too good not to share, from the same artist who wrote my previous blog favorite, Code Monkey.
This one is called Mandlebrot Set, but the key line, at around 2:05, is “A Bad Ass Fucking Fractal”. Yes, this is now a PG-13 blog post.
The most interesting thing about Jonathan Coulton’s work is that he [...]
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This one was too good not to share. See below for a graph mapping out the correlation between the number of Starbucks and the margin of victory/defeat for Obama vs. Clinton. From the Urbanspoon:
Is there really a connection between sipping your double tall breve and voting for Obama? We’ll leave political analysis to the professionals, [...]
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Looking at my first blog posts has a certain charm to it. One of the first posts on this blog that ever drove a significant amount of traffic was a post about the decision to demote Pluto as a planet at the IAU conference in 2006.
Pluto is a Planet
Scientific American has a nice article out [...]
Filed under: Science, Space | Tagged: Pluto | 1 Comment »
You be the judge. Many thanks to Boing Boing and Haha.nu for this one.
Here’s a snippet:
Statement by a round-earther physicist: When you watch a ship sailing towards the shore, all you see at first is the mast. Then you see the bow, and eventually the entire ship.
Fadhel Al-Said: When you [...]
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Today, I discovered “The Spitoon“, the blog from 23andMe, the company dedicated to personal genomics. Really interesting material. I found this article particularly eye-catching:
SNPwatch: One SNP Makes Your Brown Eyes Blue
I’m curious about this, of course, because while I have green eyes, my wife Carolyn & my two sons have blue eyes. It seems that [...]
Filed under: Family, Science, Silicon Valley | 2 Comments »
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Adam Nash Sunnyvale, CA |
