[ Metanote: This explanation arose out of a lunch-time discussion with a colleague who claimed a light saber could not exist since the light beam it emits could not just stop in mid-air after 75 cm. I thank this colleague for the challenge. ]
UCSB researcher shows that New Caledonian crows can perform as well as 7- to 10-year-olds on cause-and-effect water displacement tasks
Imagine if a chemist told you offhandedly that the Russians had different chemical elements than we did. Here in America, we use elements like lithium and silicon and bismuth. We have figured out l…
Today another in my ongoing, seldom-updated series of posts about building my own backyard foundry. Today I’ll describe how the final step works: actually melting and pouring the metal. First…
Please forgive me for the lack of new content over the last five or so months. After my most recent post about neural networks and quadcopte...
A multidisciplinary engineering team at the University of California, San Diego developed a new nanoparticle-based material for concentrating solar power plants designed to absorb and convert to heat more than 90 percent of the sunlight it captures. The new material can also withstand temperatures greater than 700…
It's with great sadness that I report that the Goddard Space Flight Center team has determined that we will not be able to regain control of the venerable…
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Using only data from an fMRI scan, researchers led by a Yale University undergraduate have accurately reconstructed images of human faces as viewed by other people.
Watch how IKEA expanded around the world in this data visualisation
Dynamics of shooting machine guns downwards, and the actual forces, velocities and heights that could be achieved. Modeled with Wolfram SystemModeler.
Note: This post departs from the general format used on this blog. That's because the post is not about a specific analysis I've done bu...
It was a dark day when Islam met the loudspeaker. All travelers to the Middle East discover that this normally self-assured religion gets insecure in the small hours of night and feels it has to rehearse its foundational beliefs, in public, at 190 dB.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 was divided, one half awarded to John O'Keefe, the other half jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain"
Harvard stem cell researchers announced a giant leap forward in the quest to find a truly effective treatment for type 1 diabetes, a disease that affects an estimated 3 million Americans.
Randy Olson reviews a research paper that outlines what makes for a stable marriage in the U.S.
Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
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The CD sampling rate has to be larger than about 40 kHz to fulfill the Nyquist criterion that requires sampling at twice the maximum analog frequency, which is about 20 kHz for audio. The sampling frequency is chosen somewhat higher than the Nyquist rate since practical filters neede to prevent aliasing have a finite…
A few posts back I was concerned with optimising the WiFi reception in my flat, and I chose a simple method for calculating the distribution of electromagnetic intensity. I casually mentioned that I really should be doing things more rigorously by solving the Helmholtz equation, but then didn't. Well, spurred on by a…
