London to Brighton by train

Interesting comparison, the 1953 version besides the 1980's:

Atomic disguise makes helium look like hydrogen - physics-math - 28 January 2011 - New Scientist

Atomic disguise makes helium look like hydrogen
Atomic disguise makes helium look like hydrogen - physics-math - 28 January 2011 - New Scientist

18:37 28 January 2011 by Kate McAlpine

In a feat of modern-day alchemy, atom tinkerers have fooled hydrogen atoms into accepting a helium atom as one of their own. The camouflaged atom behaves chemically like hydrogen, but has four times the mass of normal hydrogen, allowing predictions for how atomic mass affects reaction rates to be put to the test.

Endurance Crater, Mars

Fantastic picture of Endurance crater taken by Odyssey:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA13794.jpg

The picture is huge!

Llantrisant and Taff Vale Junction Railway

Interesting article on Wikipedia (quite a lot of which I'm responsible for...especially the map) about the railway line between Pontypridd and Llantrisant as well as the "Barry Railway" branch:

Llantrisant and Taff Vale Junction Railway

Additionally some fantastic pictures of Tonteg Halt and Junction. This was the post 1930 Tonteg Halt station after track rationalisation between Tonteg and Treforest High Level and Llantwit Road, the former Tonteg Halt was further down Maes Mawr road.

P=NP ?

Interesting posting about a solution to the 3-SAT problem which might indicate P=NP.

Paper on Arxiv:

Non-Orthodox Combinatorial Models Based on Discordant Structures

Authors: V. F. Romanov

(Submitted on 17 Nov 2010 (v1), last revised 12 Jan 2011 (this version, v2))

Coelho Gives Away His Books - Newsweek

Very good article at Newsweek on how to deal with piracy...

Coelho Gives Away His Books - Newsweek

Confirming the fact that theless restrictions on usage, the more people will willingly pay instead of pirating it.

Same applies to software, hardware, whatever. If you make it difficult for the legitimate user/owner/reader/listener to use then they will use the priated version. Music and Film companies take note.

The Open University...

...remeber those lectures broadcast late at night on the BBC? Here's a comedy version to bring back some memories:



Of course, this might be completely incomprehensible from a historical and humourous perspective to probably most of the universe.

Must admit Huw Laurie's lecture sounds extremely authentic

*that* Lotus Esprit Turbo

BBC's 5th Gear special:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovXO2vpGOpY&feature=fvsr

Weather forecast

Snow, snow, snow, snow, snow, no snow, snow, snow, snow

Two days without snowing, but .....

Long range weather forecast from Foreca for Sipoo, Finland at 13h00, Dec 30 2010...

Happy Birthday IO Monad

Interesting post from the Haskell mailing list....

[Haskell-cafe] The IO monad is 45 years old

An old (1994) paper on category theory monads and functional
programming included an interesting historical side-note. It turns out
that the RealWorld-passing trick underlying the implementation of the
IO monad, the trick that made it possible to embed truly side-effecting 
operations into pure Haskell -- the trick is 45 years old. It has been
first published in February 1965.

That 1965 paper also anticipated State and Writer monad, call/cc,
streams and delayed evaluations, relation of streams with co-routines,
and even stream fusion.

First, here is the historical aside, cited from 

   Jonathan M. D. Hill and Keith Clarke
   An Introduction to Category Theory, Category Theory Monads,
   and Their Relationship to Functional Programming. 1994
   http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.53.6497

 

 

[Video] THE DIGITAL STORY OF NATIVITY - ( or Christmas 2.0 )

Funny, except we all know that Jesus used a Nokia...

[Video] THE DIGITAL STORY OF NATIVITY - ( or Christmas 2.0 )

I Hate [sic] Math!

I don't and this article by way of NPR might change your mind:

I Hate Math! (Not After This, You Won't)
10:04 am December 16, 2010
by Robert Krulwich

Vi Hart calls herself "a recreational mathemusician currently living on Long Island." She talks faster than a machine gun, loves math, and draws like a dream. Her newest video: "Doodling in Math Class: Snakes + Graphs" is eye-popping.

ps: Maths not Math....

Frequency Annotated Rail Map of France

Really interesting...would like to see something similar for Finland or the UK...

http://membres.multimania.fr/cartesferro/france/france_en.html

Voyager 1

Voyager 1 Has Outdistanced the Solar Wind
by Nancy Atkinson on December 13, 2010

The venerable Voyager spacecraft are truly going where no one has gone before. Voyager 1 has now reached a distant point at the edge of our solar system where it is no longer detecting the solar wind. At a distance of about 17.3 billion km (10.8 billion miles) from the Sun, Voyager 1 has crossed into an area where the velocity of the hot ionized gas, or plasma, emanating directly outward from the sun has slowed to zero. Scientists suspect the solar wind has been turned sideways by the pressure from the interstellar wind in the region between stars.

Eurostar Driver View Timelapse

Cool! Brussels Midi to London St.Pancras time lapse