Category: Hellraisin’
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The top posts of 2007: number 4
Over the holiday period, the physics arxiv blog is re-running the most popular blogs (by page views) of 2007. Einstein and the greatest scientific fraud of the 20th century 24 September In 1926, when the scientific world was still a-puzzling and a-wondrin over the wave-particle duality of light, Einstein asked a pal, Emil “Hurry” Rupp,…
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The top posts of 2007: number 5
Over the holiday period, the physics arxiv blog is re-running the most popular blogs (by page views) of 2007. Mathematics: the foundation of reality 2 October “Our universe is not just described by mathematics — it is mathematics.” That’s the conclusion of Max “Peg Leg” Tegmark, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But…
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The curious case of the CMB cold spot
Astrobods have found a cold spot in the the cosmic microwave background radiation. Now that’s a problem cos there shouldn’t be no cold spot up there. And this has set them a-frettin’ and a-worryin’ about how to explain it away. Today Pavel Neselsky at the Niels Boh Institute at the University of Copenhagen and…
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WiFi worms: the next generation of virus
If the next generation of malware targets our WiFi routers, it’s gonna spread like wildfire, taking out 37 per cent of routers within two weeks of infection That’s the conclusion of Steve Meyers and buddies, computer security experts at Indiana University in Bloomington. They say that the density of WiFi routers within our cities has…
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The terrible truth about extremism
Why is our way o’ living threatened by extremists? A natural question for anybody a-fretting and a-worrying about the state of world order. But the answer ain’t gonna please ya’ll. It’s looking increasingly as if extremism is an ordinary emergent property of societies like ours that we can’t do nothing about. Andre Martins at the…
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Studying the tunnel of death
The Lefortovo Tunnel runs underground for 3 kilometres on the outskirts of Moscow. The deep tunnel has three lanes which are equipped with traffic sensors every 60 metres. These have provided a rich vein of traffic data for Boris Livshits and pals at Moscow Technical University who have been a-mining and a-crunchin it. B Livshits…
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A load of Pollocks
In 1999, Richard “Drippy” Taylor at the Univesity of New South Wales in Australia announced that he was able to tell a painting by the American abstract expresisonist Jackson Pollock by analysing the fractal patterns made by the paint on the canvas. He claimed that the fractal signature Pollock made as he dripped paint onto…
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The galactic foxtrot revisited
A coupla months back, Michael “Bongo” Longo at the University of Michigan announced that he’d been a-starin’ and a-studyin’ some 200,000 elliptical galaxies up there in the heavens and had noticed something strange about ’em: they is all pointing in the same direction. The physics arXiv blog dutifully reported the story but it now turns…
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More on Moon measurements
Ya’ll heard about lunar laser ranging last week: them laser legends can now bounce enough photons off the moon to calculate its distance to within a few millimetres (we’re still waitin’ to hear how many millimetres it is) This week, Victor “Brum” Brumberg at the Institute of Applied Astronomy in St Petersburg, Russia, and chums…
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How your name reveals your age, sex, nationality, social status, religion…
What’s in a name? Quite a lot, it turns out. Researchers are working out how to extract data such as ya sex, nationality, age and even ya social and economic status by looking at nothing but yer name. This week, Stasinos “King” Konstantopoulos at the National Center for Scientific Research in Athens, Greece gives us…