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POPSMath Behind Ancient Islamic Tile Patterns Decoded When Peter J. Lu traveled to Uzbekistan, he had no idea of the mathematical journey that he was about to embark on as well. See the full research article as published in Science . It's a wonderful example of original, multidisciplinary academic research bridging history and mathematics that happens to force us to re-think the sophistication of ancient geometrical knowledge. When Lu looked at photographs of Islamic buildings, he found that he could break the patterns on their surfaces up into the same shapes, even though the shapes often weren't immediately visible. "I couldn't sleep for days," he said. "I skipped Christmas break to work on it."
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POPSCat Flight A Possibility? A study at Bristol’s rest of England University has taken the possibility of cat flying from the realms of Galileo’s used tissue to a real possibility and the clearly excited research team at URE have been running up and down the corridors, stamping, shouting and pointing up at the clear blue sky. “It’s a real breakthrough.” said professor Glynn Martin who has been leading the team since May 2007. Professor Martin went on to show slides(see diagram above) demonstrating velocity, arc, wind speed and the now much talked about ‘rolling patterns’ which appear to be part of the new science which has helped this project leap so gracefully forward. It seems that if a feline subject is ‘rolled’ soon after launching it can achieve a trajectory far in excess of that previously obtained when no rolling has been used.
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POPSOctopus vs Rubik’s cube No one has suggested that any of the octopuses will actually solve the puzzle, but there’s a very slim chance they might. At the risk of re-igniting the now dormant ‘Echinoderms or Molluscs’ blog war, show us a starfish that can do that…
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POPSA Wiring Diagram of the Brain Max Planck Institute for Medical Research scientists developed a new technique to make more fine-scaled wiring maps, using electron microscopy. Starting with a small block of brain tissue, the researchers bounce electrons off the top of the block to generate a cross-sectional picture of the nerve fibers in that slice. They then take a very thin--30-nanometer--slice off the top of the block and repeat the process.
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POPSFlatfish caught evolving, thanks to its roving eye Now Friedman reports finding two different missing links. They are fossil fish with their eyes in different places on the two sides of their skulls - one in the normal position and one closer to the midline (see Diagram). One is Amphistium, a previously described genus found in several fossil deposits in Europe, in which the asymmetry went unnoticed because in fish fossils only one side of the animal is generally preserve. The other is Heteronectes, a new genus. At 10 to 20 centimetres long, the specimens were clearly adults and not larvae in which the eyes were migrating
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POPSFun with Venn and Euler Diagrams "Nothing is any good if other people like it. We’ve just proven it mathematically. I have a theory that the only thing cartoonists bothered learning in math class was Venn Diagrams."
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POPSBiggest Full Moon of the Year Still getting over how good the recent conjunction of the Moon, Venus and Jupiter. Best emoticon I've seen. Now it is an oversize moon. That's a bit suss.
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POPSOur Individual Voices Are More Imporant Than Realized " Three-quarters of the subjects in Asch's experiment gave a "conforming" answer at least once. A third of the subjects conformed more than half the time. Get it so far? People tend to defer to what the herd thinks. But here's the good news: Adding a single dissenter - just one other person who gives the correct answer, or even an incorrect answer that's different from the group's incorrect answer - reduces conformity very sharply, down to 5-10%. Bottom line: Each person's voice has the power to snap entire groups out of their coma of irrational group-think."
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POPSWater, wind, and time This clip is sequential to Alanocu's one http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/C54E068A-A304-475D-9600-3200C5AE1506/
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POPSHow Computers boot up This extensive 3-part post focuses on the linux booting process, from motherboard & chipset to the bootloader & kernel booting process.
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POPSTools for creating ideas More at site. Including, Mind-mapping: Hierarchical breakdown and exploration. Modeling: For the artist in everyone. Morphological Analysis: Forcing combinations of attribute values. Nominal Group Technique: Getting ideas with minimal personal interaction. # PSI: Problem + Stimulus = Idea! Rightbraining: Combine incomplete doodles around the problem. Role-play: Become other people. Let them solve the problem. Reversal: Looking at the problem backwards. Reverse Brainstorming: Seek first to prevent your problem from happening. SCAMPER: Using action verbs as stimuli. Six Thinking Hats: Think comfortably in different ways about the problem. Storyboarding: Creating a visual story to explore or explain. Contradiction Analysis: Use methods already used in many patents. Unfolding: Gradually unfolding the real problem from the outside. # Visioning: Creating a motivating view of the future. Write streaming: Write and write and write until you unblock.
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POPSNew Math For Analyzing Evolutionary Trees "What this tells me is that you don't know what kind of mathematics is going to be useful to biology," Billera says. "It wasn't clear before this that geometry and topology would be useful to biology. Who would think they had anything to do with each other?" Ernst Haeckel's classic hand-drawn diagram is just for fun—it's one of those wonderful diagrams that functions as both science and art.
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POPS"World Trade Has Collapsed... Shipping Lines Have Become Graveyard Archipelagos" Yet all of this is beyond the land, and thus far from sight. Of course, who needs trade when you have a speculative market trading in its own bubble, hitting yearly highs day after day, thanks only and exclusively to the Chairman's printing press. It is a pity these ships can not sail in the sea of hundred dollar bills that is being created each and every day at the Federal Reserve, whose only use these days it seems is to buy junker stocks and to feed the algos that lift whatever offers are stupid enough to float in the equity market." Thousands Of Rusting Ship Hulls Are A Fitting Tribute To The Speculative Market Bubble To view enlarged images please visit website (green indicates operating ship, red denotes a ship out of spot/charter and currently unused) http://www.zerohedge.com/article/thousands-rusting-ship-hulls-are-fitting-tribute-speculative-market-bubble
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POPSRaindrops on roses The team tried to replicate the effect.They put some polyvinyl alcohol onto rose petals and allowed it to set, then peeled off a thin plastic cast of the petal surface.This film had the same properties as the rose petal:the film could hold droplets of between 3-5 microlitres even when held upside down. It seems that the physical shape of the surface is much more important than any chemical properties of the material in creating 'stickiness',says Ronald Fearing, a biomimetic engineer at the University of California at Berkeley. For a rose, this stickiness might come in handy as reflective water drops that glisten in the Sun might attract pollinating insects. In the lab, such materials might be useful for 'lab on a chip' devices that need to hold and shunt around tiny quantities of liquid without leaking or being contaminated by nearby materials. "These findings present many interesting applications in microfluid handling," says Fearing.
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