Powers of 10

...I Know Kung-Fu

That's it, the real world is over. Everyone go home now.

If The Matrix really existed, it would probably have to be a quantum simulator. The fictional computer in that story can create virtual worlds indistinguishable from the real one and project them into people’s minds. But the real world includes quantum phenomena, something ordinary computers can’t fully simulate.

Now physicists have created a rudimentary prototype of a machine that simulates quantum phenomena using quantum physics, rather than using data kept in a classical computer. While the new device can't make people fly like the Matrix does, it demonstrates a technique that could enable physicists to create, in the virtual world, materials that don't yet exist in nature and perhaps figure out how to build, in the real world, superconductors that work at room temperature, for example.

Building 'The Matrix'

Love mattress, when with others or by yourself

Sleeping with your arm around a loved one—how sweet. Unfortunately, doing this in a conventional bed is massively uncomfortable. There is simply no place to put the extra arm—and its not like your loved one can just lay on it. If you do that, you might as well go the whole 9 and chop it off because it will be useless in the morning.

Fortunately, Mehdi Mojtabvi's Love Mattress offers a genius solution involving polyurethane-injected foam strips that allow arms and feet to fit snugly in the gaps. Apparently, the latter would be good for those who tend to sleep on their stomachs—but it doesn't take a vivid imagination to think of some other uses for that kind of traction. Too bad it is only a concept at this point.

Gizmodo & Freshome

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." -Albert Einstein

Wasn't that debate squashed in something like the 16th century?

I just came across this interesting article about Memri, the organization that who distributed the video. A bit lengthy, but an interesting read. And if you know your Israeli history, then you know they've been caught planting false evidence against the Arab world.

For some time now, I have been receiving small gifts from a generous institute in the United States. The gifts are high-quality translations of articles from Arabic newspapers which the institute sends to me by email every few days, entirely free-of-charge.
The emails also go to politicians and academics, as well as to lots of other journalists. The stories they contain are usually interesting. (...)

The organisation that makes these translations and sends them out is the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), based in Washington but with recently-opened offices in London, Berlin and Jerusalem.

Its work is subsidised by US taxpayers because as an "independent, non-partisan, non-profit" organisation, it has tax-deductible status under American law.

Memri's purpose, according to its website, is to bridge the language gap between the west - where few speak Arabic - and the Middle East, by "providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew media".

Despite these high-minded statements, several things make me uneasy whenever I'm asked to look at a story circulated by Memri. First of all, it's a rather mysterious organisation. Its website does not give the names of any people to contact, not even an office address. (...)

The second thing that makes me uneasy is that the stories selected by Memri for translation follow a familiar pattern: either they reflect badly on the character of Arabs or they in some way further the political agenda of Israel. I am not alone in this unease. (...)

Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Washington Times: "Memri's intent is to find the worst possible quotes from the Muslim world and disseminate them as widely as possible."

Memri might, of course, argue that it is seeking to encourage moderation by highlighting the blatant examples of intolerance and extremism. But if so, one would expect it - for the sake of non-partisanship - to publicise extremist articles in the Hebrew media too.

Although Memri claims that it does provide translations from Hebrew media, I can't recall receiving any.

Evidence from Memri's website also casts doubt on its non-partisan status. Besides supporting liberal democracy, civil society, and the free market, the institute also emphasises "the continuing relevance of Zionism to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel".

That is what its website used to say, but the words about Zionism have now been deleted. The original page, however, can still be found in internet archives.

The reason for Memri's air of secrecy becomes clearer when we look at the people behind it. The co-founder and president of Memri, and the registered owner of its website, is an Israeli called Yigal Carmon.

Mr - or rather, Colonel - Carmon spent 22 years in Israeli military intelligence and later served as counter-terrorism adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin.

Retrieving another now-deleted page from the archives of Memri's website also throws up a list of its staff. Of the six people named, three - including Col Carmon are described as having worked for Israeli intelligence

Selective Memri

Grains of sand

If our Sun was size of a basketball, the Earth would be the size of a pea. If you placed both in central park, the closest star would be 5000 miles away in Hawaii. So the next time you feel full of yourself, remember you are nothing in reality. All hail Moog Cat. (It's actually an ARP Odyssey)

New tricks are for kids

There’s an old story of a newlywed couple. The wife cooks turkey for dinner and every time just before it goes in the oven, she chops off the two ends. After a while the husband curiously asked why. She said, “I don’t know. It’s tradition. My mother always did it like this. And her mother too.” So they called the grandmother and asked her and she said, “I don’t know my mother always did it. It’s tradition.” Luckily the great-grandmother was still alive and when they asked her why she cut the two ends off the turkey, she replied, “It wouldn’t fit in my pan.” - Josh Wolfe

new shelton wet/dry

Braaaains

Aaron: You know that story, about how NASA spent millions of dollars developing this pen that writes in Zero G? Did you ever read that?
Abe: Yeah.
Aaron: You know how the Russians solved the problem?
Abe: Yeah, they used a pencil.

Many of the suggestions in Teach Yourself Training Your Brain are surprising, such as cuddling a baby, cheating at school, reading out loud and doing your university degree in business studies. Co-authors Terry Horne and Simon Wootton say their recommendations are based on and backed by the latest research by leading experts around the world.

For decades we have thought that the cognitive capacity of our brains is genetically determined, whereas it’s now clear that it’s a lifestyle choice. What we eat and drink, how we learn at school and what type of moods we have are all crucial,’ said Horne, a business lecturer at the University of Central Lancaster and an authority on thinking and learning.

Have eggs, fish or cold meat at breakfast. Stick to protein-based foods at lunchtime such as oily fish with dark green vegetables. Avoid bread, pasta or pizza and drink tea, ideally green or herbal, not coffee. Snack on nuts, not biscuits or other sweet things. Ideally, eat carbohydrates in the evenings only. Avoid caffeine, alcohol and red meat.

guardian.co.uk | read article

'Time' or 'time'?

I love reading about these kinds of things, even if its hard to wrap my head around some of the ideas. I read a Brief History of Time when I was 13, again it was way over my head but it blew my mind.

The trouble with time started a century ago, when Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes. Einstein’s theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny).

Some four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.

“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.” (…)

The possibility that time may not exist is known among physicists as the “problem of time.” (…)

The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.

“It’s quite mysterious why we have such an obvious arrow of time,” says Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT.

The mother of all initial conditions, Lloyd says, was the Big Bang. Physicists believe that the universe started as a very simple, extremely compact ball of energy. Although the laws of physics themselves don’t provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorder—physicists call it an increase in entropy—is driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time.

Time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos. (…) Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks don’t measure something that’s independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all.

“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time. No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”

discovermagazine.com | read article