Category: Calculatin’
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The secret of world class putting
Watch professional golfers putt and you’ll eventually notice three common features about their style, says Robert Grober, an expert on the physics of golf at the Yale University. First, the putter head always moves at a constant speed when it hits the ball. Second, the length of time the putting stroke takes has little impact…
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Ptarithmetic: reinventing logic for the computer age
In the last few years, a small group of logicians have attempted the ambitious task of re-inventing the discipline of formal logic. In the past, logic has been thought of as the formal theory of “truth”. Truth plays an important role in our society and as suchm a formal theory is entirely laudable and worthy.…
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Econophysicists identify world’s top 10 most powerful companies
The study of complex networks has given us some remarkable insights into the nature of systems as diverse as forest fires, the internet and earthquakes. This kind of work is even beginning to give econophysicists a glimmer of much-needed insight in the nature of our economy. In a major study, econophysicists have today identified the…
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Glider guns created in chemical Game of Life
If you’ve ever played Conway’s Game of Life, you’ll be familiar with cellular automata and, more importantly, glider guns. So get this: a team of British chemists and computer scientists have created a chemical cocktail that behaves like a cellular automata and which reproduces this behavior: chemical guns firing chemical gliders across a chemical grid.…
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Rule breakers make traffic jams less likely
Rules are a good thing when it comes to road traffic: drive on the wrong side of the highway and you’ll cause chaos, if you live. If that seems forehead-smackingly obvious, then an analysis by Seung Ki Baek at Umea University in Sweden and pals my come as a surprise. They say that a small…
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Harvesting energy from the airwaves
Antennae are the most fundamental energy harvesting devices that we know, says Sung Nae Cho at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in south Korea. So why aren’t they more widely used? Turns out that helical antennae are already used to harvest energy and most of us probably own one already in the form of…
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Why Saturn’s rings are so sharp
Here’s a conundrum for you: why do Saturn’s rings have such sharp edges? It’s question that has puzzled planetary scientists for many years. Various ideas have been put forward but none adequately explain the structure we see today. To understand just how sharp the edges are consider this: pictures from Cassini show that the density…
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How chaos could improve speech recognition
If you’ve ever used speech recognition software, you’ll know how often it fails to work well. Recognition rates are nowhere near what is needed for anything but the simplest applications. So a new approach for analysing speech by Yuri Andreyev and Maxim Koroteev at the Institute of Radioengineering and Electronics of the Russian Academy of…
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How chaos could improve speech recognition
If you’ve ever used speech recognition software, you’ll know how often it fails to work well. Recognition rates are nowhere near what is needed for anything but the simplest applications. So a new approach for analysing speech by Yuri Andreyev and Maxim Koroteev at the Institute of Radioengineering and Electronics of the Russian Academy of…
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Calculating the probability of immortality
How likely is it that a given object will survive forever? With many groups predicting that human immortality is just around the corner, you could say we all have a vested interest in the answer. A t first glance, the odds are not good. As David Eubanks of Coker College in South Carolina puts it:…