Archive for April, 2007

Charles Ton

Saturday, April 28th, 2007

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“Asci mails dancing together”

For the long Mayday weekend: Amazing Al Minns and Leon James dancing together in this ukrainian Mash-up by the band Танок На Майдані Конґо. I am probably a bit biased due to my fondness for eastern european music — since of course the daft punkmash up and the original version of the Charleston are also very very good.

Mathema Exhibition

Friday, April 27th, 2007

An exhibition on mathematics is planned to open October 08 at the Deutsches Technik Museum Berlin. Fall 08 is still some time ahead but the website is already online:
Mathema exhibition

stadtschloss

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

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The big local news here in Berlin are the mutual consent of the city of Berlin and the federal government of Germany on the financing of the Humboldt Forum – a collection of buildings in the heart of Berlin intended for cultural and scientific interchange.

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Musical chairs

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

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image source wikipedia

new scientist reported about tests performed on a recent conference in which radio networks are used for wireless communication, a feature commonly called cognitive radio.

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An experimental test of nonlocal realism

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

A little excursion to the foundations of quantum mechanics:
Anton Zeilinger and collaborators paper “An experimental test of nonlocal realism” just came out in Nature, luckily there is also a publicly readable preprint version on the archive, the ORF reported about it here (link via Anton Zeilingers blog).

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about unloyal cables

Friday, April 20th, 2007

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A constant nuisance when vacuum cleaning are cables (see above image) since they easily get tangled up and catch dust. I always wondered, why there is no widely available system of e.g. adapters hooked directly to consumer electronics in order to avoid too much “cable spaghetti” – analogous to the solution of a computer blade.
People from IBM made this instructive video in order to display that blades could still include in principle a noble solution.

na-ming ga-ming

Thursday, April 19th, 2007

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This is not this

In their upcoming paper “The emergence of simple languages in an experimental coordination game”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 2007 Reinhard Selten and Massimo Warglien describe an experiment in which the development of languages was evaluated via a bonus system within a game-like environment:

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DIET-tarte

Wednesday, April 18th, 2007

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water on the rocks

This is a belated easter post in which the making of an eastereggsearchtart will be under display.
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Klein Protokolle

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

With a grant from the Clay Math Institute Libraries without walls have scanned notebooks of Felix Klein (at the moment they are still labeled Fritz Klein protokolls there, but it seems obvious that they meant Felix Klein). The protokolls cover the mathematical colloquia he held at Göttingen, Erlangen, Munich and Leipzig and they are truly beautifull documents: You will find handwritten abstracts of many famous mathematicians of that time (the protocols are not course notes taken by a listener but short summaries of the lecures by the speakers themselves).

wirepullers

Friday, April 13th, 2007

Whereto would you like to drag the vertical object?

The idea to the above applet was formed by thinking about salience and 3D user interfaces in conjunction with two coils (a sort of 3D Moiré ).

(Closing the lose ends to two coils and sending an electrical current through one of the coils enables in principle inductance. However, observe that in this perpendicular arrangement of the two coils this gives only a very faint current in the second coil. For a stronger current the coils need to be aligned.)