I'm reminded of Oliver Heaviside, who refactored Maxwell's equations into the useful and familiar vector notation that has adorned many tshirts of electrical engineering and physics students. Heaviside took an unwieldy set of twenty field equations, and reduced them to four. I do wonder what insights we can potentially learn if the model itself is refactored into an elegant form.

Her PhD thesis: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.091...

The mathematician John Baez has an engaging writing style, and gave an amusing account of octonian numbers (His blog is very interesting BTW): http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/

"There are exactly four normed division algebras: the real numbers (R), complex numbers (C), quaternions (H), and octonions (O). The real numbers are the dependable breadwinner of the family, the complete ordered field we all rely on. The complex numbers are a slightly flashier but still respectable younger brother: not ordered, but algebraically complete. The quaternions, being noncommutative, are the eccentric cousin who is shunned at important family gatherings. But the octonions are the crazy old uncle nobody lets out of the attic: they are nonassociative."

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/...

I spoke to a biochemist from my work about the limits of detection for complex molecules, and me mentioned that you need something like a mass spectrometer to detect mass, and a gas chromatography to detect structure. I just read that curiosity rover has this, but am unsure of it's limitations.

What are the limits to detection in terms of molecule complexity? Any how can you unambiguously tell that they were generated from life?

Could polarimetry be used to detect handedness? I've read that over time, most living things on earth have a right-handed optical activity, but over time it becomes more random as a living thing decays. If you took coal, would the optical activity be 50%50% for right and left handedness?

Foolish of me, I got too excited. I read that you cant extract DNA from from fossil fuel for example. https://www.reddit.com/r/asksc...

It looks like they don't have the instrumentation to detect complex organic molecules - What kind of instruments would we need to detect this?What are the limits of detection, and what can you put on a rover? Would nMRI work? FTIR..? I'd love to read from the perspective of an analytical chemist.

" . When the samples reached 500 to 820C, the rover’s instruments detected a range of so-called aromatic, aliphatic and thiophenic vapours. The science team believes these are breakdown products of even larger organic molecules, similar to those found in coal"

Perhaps the next thing, is to send up molecular biology analysis equipment like a DNA sequencer with all of the appropriate sample prep.

This seems like a perfect application for "shotgun sequencing" to digitally reconstruct the organisms, assuming that other simpler detection methods check out for amino acids, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I wonder how many of them will get duplicate phones, and how hard it is to conceal the real one, or have a duplicate set of SIM cards to mask your identity. Pretty draconian.. This will make people at lot more aware and vigilant about their data security.. I wonder how hard it is to partition your phone such that you have a factory reset on one, and the government spyware app on the other, such that you can easily switch the two. e.g. have the program jump to another address in flash to find an alternative main().. I've done a lot of this kind of work for fail-safe firmware uploading, but don't know much about the flash system/OS of a phone...

An Introduction to Scientific Research

http://store.doverpublications... From the dover-books website :

"This book is intended to assist scientists in planning and carrying out research. However, unlike most books dealing with the scientific method, which stress its philosophical rationale, this book is written from a practical standpoint. It contains a rich legacy of principles, maxims, procedures and general techniques that have been found useful in a wide range of sciences.

While much of the material is accessible to a college senior, the book is more specifically intended for students beginning research and for those more experienced research workers who wish an introduction to various topics not included in their training. Mathematical treatments have been kept as elementary as possible to make the book accessible to a broad range of scientists. Its principles and rules can be absorbed to advantage by workers in such diverse fields as agriculture, industrial and military research, biology and medicine as well as in the physical sciences.

After discussing such basics as the choice and statement of a research problem and elementary scientific method, Professor Wilson offers lucid and helpful discussions of the design of experiments and apparatus, execution of experiments, analysis of experimental data, errors of measurement, numerical computation and other topics. A final chapter treats the publication of research results.

Although no book can substitute for actual scientific work, this highly pragmatic compendium contains much knowledge gained the hard way through years of actual practice. Moreover, the author has illustrated the ideas discussed with as many actual examples as possible. In addition, he has included notes and references at the end of each chapter to enable readers to investigate particular topics more deeply. E. Bright Wilson, Jr. is a distinguished scientist and educator whose previous works include Molecular Vibrations and Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (with Linus Pauling). In the present book, he has distilled years of experiment and experience into an indispensable broad-based guide for any scientific worker tackling a research problem. Reprint of the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York, 1952 edition. - See more at: http://store.doverpublications..."

"Building scientific Apparatus. A practical guide to design and construction" by Moore Davis and Copland - This is book is perfect for the experimentalist - it goes into the basics of mechanical design and fabrication, working with glass, vacuum technology, optics/lasers/detectors, charged particle optics, electronics, measurement and control of temperature, etc. It's a great and easy read.

I'm sure many graduate students have poured over this book to gain insights about how to make their ideas and experiments come to life. I've seen this book in quite a few labs.

Among battery researchers that I know, a key figure of merit is the amount of power you get after the thousandth charge-discharge cycle. There are plenty of great battery ideas out there, but they don't have the lifetimes to be commercially feasible. I wonder how this stacks up.

Among battery researchers that I know, a key figure of merit is the amount of power you get after the thousandth charge-discharge cycle. There are plenty of great battery ideas out there, but they don't have the lifetimes to be commercially feasible. I wonder how this stacks up.

Your group velocity dispersion argument makes sense.

The internet was buzzing about a possible ET contact. Short radio bursts were detected from radio telescopes over multiple antennas over many years that had no natural explanations that researchers claim could only be man made or from an extra-terrestrial:

http://www.newscientist.com/ar... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

The paper from the actual researchers is far more guarded, and suggest that it may be EMI similar to Perytons, which are radio sources that appear to look like a pulsar signature.

From Wikipedia - "In 2015, Perytons were found to be the result of premature opening of microwave oven doors at the Parkes Observatory. The microwave oven releases a frequency-swept radio pulse that mimics an FRB as the magnetron turns off.[2][10]"

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.0524...

Here is a paper on Perytons, and their possible sources: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.5080...

Here is a link on Pulsar physics, including a very basic back of the envelope derivation of the dispersion medium of pulsars. Apparently two pulses from a pulsar are detected a few milliseconds from one another, and stem from the mass difference between the electron and a proton and their interaction with interstellar space. Still trying to get a handle on this.. http://www.cv.nrao.edu/course/...

Dispersion measure variations and their effect on precision pulsar timing: http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.a...

I was on the design team for the MiSeq DNA sequencer at Illumina that can sequence 1 billion bases in one day, doing embedded systems/FPGA/control loop work. I no longer work there, but think they've managed to increase throughput. This particular unit fits on a tabletop, and costs about $100K.

A story was related to me while working there about an outbreak in the intensive care unit in Cambridge England where 7 preemie infants got sick. With this instrument, they could see how the virus mutated on a room-by-room basis, and a day-by-day basis. It was apparently unprecedented. They had one of our instruments on an early trial basis to give feedback on it's usage. The pathology department was pretty excited. This seems like a very useful kind of instrument when tracking the spread of diseases. I'd be curious about the adoption rates for such instruments in pathology labs, the CDC, etc. I understand that Illumina has made a push to have their instruments certified as a medical device, but I don't know the status of it. I'd like our labs to have all the tools they need to rapidly converge on the infectious agent, etc.

One important consideration for portable DNA sequencers is the read error rate of the DNA fragments (akin to bit error rate in a length of magnetic tape). The higher bit bit error rate, the more samples you have to make to reduce the probability of error to a small acceptable level. Even though some instruments on the market may be cheaper to run, you have to read a lot more samples to reduce the error statistics. (the Q scores). Any portable instrument must do this with a low error rate, such that the small sample size is meaningful. Also, the longer the read length of an individual strand the better.

DNA sequencing is sort of like taking a photograph and cutting it up into thousands of pieces, and reassembling it. The bigger the chucks, the more distinctive it is, and the easier it is to fit into a larger puzzle, pieces that are too small, like bits of sky aren't distinctive enough to see how they fit into the larger picture . I still don't think we've been able to completely DNA sequence a human being, because the "sequencing-by-synthesis" method used by Illumina only uses relatively short strands of 100base pairs (more if you do "paired-end" sequencing that pushes it to +250, though my knowledge is a few years old).. There is some small percentage that they can't fit because it's not distinctive enough, and the DNA itself does not break apart uni-formally. Some areas are over represented, and other ares where they're underrepresented..

http://www.edmundoptics.com/te... "Huge opaque disk" seems a lot more confusing then calling it a massive lightweight lens.

I understand that chicken-wire has an extremely high radar cross section, as it's a regularly spaced array. I wonder how hard it is to see behind such a screen. Of course the attenuation varies by the spatial dimensions, A fun bit of calculation would be to find what the right size(s) of chicken-wire you need to block such instruments given their frequency ranges (assuming ISM band?). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

I first read about how strong a return you get from chicken-wire from Stimson's book "Introduction to Airborne Radar" ..which is a pretty easy to read with a lot of colorful graphs, and is mostly targeted to fighter pilots, with blue boxes around the more complicated math for the more interested students. Most books ether have no math/calculus, or are geared toward graduate students. This particular one is a good mix between the two that gives you intuition when reading the graduate books..

I like the windows-7 interface, as well as the XP interface. My big problem however is backwards compatibility.I think we should be able to run programs from 50 years ago. I find it a real shame that it's often hard to get old programs/dev-tools/games/etc to work on a newer operating system. Sure, they have their reasons, but other operating systems have managed to handle this (especially ones that give you the source that you can recompile on a newer machine). Even when using "XP mode" I can run some old dev tools, but I can't run any 3D graphics because my nvidia graphics card only had drivers for windows-7 (on a 3 year old graphics card).

I'm friends with an FAE for a good embedded compiler company that was pretty frustrated trying to make their compiler work that was working fine under windows 7 work under windows 8. It took a long time for their developers to make the transition. I'm not sure what in the development process seems to be making development harder. I have developed for windows professionally, but not in some time. I'd love to hear from a developer perspective. I am currently working in the embedded linux/FPGA world.

Does the whole .NET framework lend itself to future compatibility as the code is compiled at run-time?