Omar Abo-Namous

Here is a nice article describing the problems that rise due to the methods used in nowadays computers to calculate simple mathematics. Interesting read.

A poem written in honor of the ever-enlightening Fourier-transform, which is often hated by students, mainly because they don’t know what it means.. Here is to the Fourier-transform:

One day in a land far away
Some mathematicians at play
Found a transform of convenient form
The basis of physics today.

Convolving would wreck people’s brains
Still the advent of Fourier domains
for convolving in one
means multiplication
in the corresponding domain.

Got trouble with an ODE?
Fourier transforms will set you free
When once you would cry,
You now multiply,
by a constant times the frequency.

Fourier transforms backwards and forth
I hope that you now see their worth
For in every domain
Advantages reign
Fourier was the salt of the earth.

by Luke Krieg
Posted to sci.physics, 11 Sep 2000

Thanks to Amara Graps (i was reading on wavelets..).

Wolfram Alpha is finally the computer we were waiting for. Not only does it compute mathematical problems really fast, but it tries to give us everything about the answer, that we would like to find out. It’s like a wikipedia – just with more accurate information. Also, WolframAlpha is able to interpret user input and find out what the user is trying to find out by searching for the terms of a query in a semantic database: Weather in Guatemala, President in Germany or C6H6O.

Below the answer set that WolframAlpha delivers, there is the option for an output as pdf-file and a rather general information of where the information came from.

I just found this nice educational ressource for numeric methods (i was specifically looking into LU decomposition).

Wissenschaftler an der MIT haben herausgefunden, wie Insekten in der Lage sind, unterwasser zu atmen: Sie halten eine Luftblase am Unterleib. Dies wird vor allem durch gut platzierte Härchen ermöglicht, die die Auflösung oder Abkapselung des Bläschens verhindern.

MIT via BoingBoing

In order to be able to breathe underwater, insects hold an air bubble around their body, MIT researchers found out. The respiratory bubble is maintained by an array of hairs on the insects abdomen.

MIT via boingboing