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Science

Submission + - Researchers Conquer "LED Droop" (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: Tiny and efficient, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are supposed to be the bright future of illumination. But they perform best at only low power, enough for a flashlight or the screen of your cellphone. If you increase the current enough for them to light a room like an old-fashioned incandescent bulb, their vaunted efficiency nosedives. It's called LED droop, and it's a real drag on the industry. Now, researchers have found a way to grow more efficient LEDs that get more kick from the same amount of current—especially in the hard-to-manufacture green and blue parts of the spectrum.
Mars

Submission + - Bouncing Sands of Mars Blow in the Wind (discovery.com)

astroengine writes: "New analysis of high-resolution images of Mars, taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, show sand dunes in an area known as Nili Patera are shifting as fast as some dunes on Earth — despite a dearth of high-speed winds. Scientists suspect it takes a big wind to get sand particles airborne, but once launched from the surface, they bounce around with ease, thanks to the planet's thin atmosphere and low gravity. "It's kind of like playing golf on the moon — (the sand) goes really high and far compared to what it does on Earth. When it lands it can pick up really large speeds — even with low wind speeds — and splash a whole bunch of other particles to keep the process going," Jasper Kok, with the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department at Cornell University, told Discovery News. This research has strong implications for the understanding of erosion processes on the Red Planet's surface and for future astronauts getting caught in a Martian sandstorm, presumably."
Privacy

Submission + - UK Government Backtracks on Black Box Snooping (slashdot.org)

judgecorp writes: "On the day the so-called snooper's charter was included in proposed UK legislation, as part of the Queen's Speech, it has emerged that the government is already backtracking on the controversial idea of making ISPs install black boxes to collect traffic and pass it to the authorities. The bill is not yet in a draft form, and TechWeek has learnt there is a lot of maneouvring behind the scenes,"

Comment Re:Ordered sets (Score 1) 404

There have been many cultures in which the "uniqueness" of everything is way more important than the idea of grouping like things together in "sets". To then add "ordering" on to that concept would be entirely foreign. A narrative is not an "ordered" set of statements, rather a continuum of expression. I think that "sets" is an idea which requires a "discrete" approach to the world, which does not arise in cultures from "steady state" environments in which every day is the same as yesterday.

Comment Re:Caring ? (Score 1) 404

I for one have not stopped caring about the problem of numbers, and I am sure I am not alone. It's not a problem that sees much in the way of publication, probably because there hasn't been that much progress and it's not a study likely to get your Phd. It's the sort of problem that sits on the back burner until some genius comes up with a new insight.
Part of the problem with this thread is that there are different meanings being attached to the symbol "number". The "1" in 1 sheep is probably intuitive, the 1 in {0,1} is probably not, yet both might reasonably be called "numbers". As for the "number line", I think that "things laid out in a line to see how many I've got" is innate, and may even be so for animals such as cats and birds. Naming the thing at any point in that row by the "number" that I count to get there seems to be a level of abstraction which requires "teaching".

Comment Re:Anyone who has ever taught math knows this (Score 2) 404

That depends on your definition of proof, and of the system of logic being used. A simple (simplistic?) binary logic may produce a domain in which proofs are either true or false but not both, whilst a more interesting logic may suggest that a proof ( or any statement) is either true, false, true and false, neither true nor false, or not determinable. Using such a logic (or any other consistent set of states) is perfectly valid maths, and can give rise to some interesting results, in fact some of these even turn out to be of use to physicists and other students of the "real world", even though a "real" mathematician is disinterested in such mundane matters. Applied maths is just what it says on the box - the (often unwarranted) process of assigning "real world" measurements to mathematical structures and then taking the result of a mathematical operation on those structures and interpreting the values as though they applied to the "real world".
In fact I also disagree with your statement defining maths as an abstract set of axioms and rules, which seems to me to cover only part of the game. There is such a thing as mathematical "elegance", which most mathematicians would recognize as integral to the game, but which I cannot easily define - just that some systems are more "elegant" than others. I suspect that all human maths is "blinkered" by our nature (primates - carbon based - etc.) and would not be surprised if a different kind of mind produced a maths which we could not easily comprehend.
If you are interested in maths, you should really try to read Russel's Principia - but take care - the game of maths is much more addictive than any video nasty.

Comment Re:Where is this? (Score 2) 241

The UK will continue to exist. Scotland will probably not become a republic, but the Kingdom will include two independent countries, one principality and the province of Northern Ireland. The crown was united long before the parliaments.
There would be no problem in creating a shared "British" military, in fact the usual designation is "British armed forces".
Don't forget, once independence is in place, there will be a brand new political landscape in Scotland, without the unifying theme of "independence", the SNP might well fragment over other issues.

Comment Re:Northumbria will be free! (Score 3, Funny) 241

I live about 30 miles south of the border, and strongly believe that we should become part of Scotland until we can re-establish the kingdom of Northumbria with a king at Bamburgh. We will then demand compensation from the english for all the coal and iron they stole and take the Australian Government to court for copyright infringement by the Sydney bridge which is a blatent copy of our bridge over the Tyne.

Comment Re:My Opinion and more of them (Score 1) 315

As I said my opinion is just that an opinion, but your reply illustrates one of the problems I have with alias and especially anonymous postings.
In this case your "facts" are wrong, and it took all of thirty seconds to check out the real story. http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/breaking-news-indonesian-atheist-officially-arrested/492612
Indonesia is not the same country as Thailand and maximum of five years is not execution. I do think that some (a few) situations merit the use of a nomme de guerre, and for an atheist posting in Indonesia would seem to be a practical necessity. However I think that AC posting is overused, and this in fact weakens the impact of those postings which merit the use. I agree with some of the postings above which point out that AC posting inhibits the flow of a discussion, and here I am replying to an AC and hoping for a response ( see my comment about dropping balls), but knowing that such a response would be impossible to identify.
In a separate point, with regard to the use of "handles" - I use one as a way of further identifying the particular owner of a fairly common name but my handle is strongly associated with my name and I do not regard it as an alias - it's a nickname which is not the same thing at all. (I like the analogy with tattoos, even though I wouldn't ever have one of those !)

Science

Submission + - Clues to Species Decline Buried in Pile of Bird Excrement (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: In 2009, while searching for ways to help endangered birds, research technician Chris Grooms heard that a chimney on his university campus used to host a migratory species known as the chimney swift. When he investigated, he found a pile of bird excrement 2 meters deep. The poop lay at the bottom of a five-story-high chimney and had been deposited over 48 years by the birds, which had roosted there until the top was capped in 1992. Now, Grooms and his colleagues have dug into that pile of guano, revealing new clues about why the chimney swift and other species like it have begun to disappear.
Math

Julia Language Seeks To Be the C For Numerical Computing 204

concealment writes in with an interview with a creator of the (fairly) new language Julia designed for number crunching. Quoting Infoworld: "InfoWorld: When you say technical computing, to what type of applications are you specifically referring? Karpinski: It's a broad category, but it's pretty much anything that involves a lot of number-crunching. In my own background, I've done a lot of linear algebra but a fair amount of statistics as well. The tool of choice for linear algebra tends to be Matlab. The tool of choice for statistics tends to be R, and I've used both of those a great deal. But they're not really interchangeable. If you want to do statistics in Matlab, it's frustrating. If you want to do linear algebra in R, it's frustrating. InfoWorld: So you developed Julia with the intent to make it easier to build technical applications? Karpinski: Yes. The idea is that it should be extremely high productivity. To that end, it's a dynamic language, so it's relatively easy to program, and it's got a very simple programming model. But it has extremely high performance, which cuts out [the need for] a third language [C], which is often [used] to get performance in any of these other languages. I should also mention NumPy, which is a contender for these areas. For Matlab, R, and NumPy, for all of these options, you need to at some point drop down into C to get performance. One of our goals explicitly is to have sufficiently good performance in Julia that you'd never have to drop down into C." The language implementation is licensed under the GPL. Lambda the Ultimate has a bit of commentary on the language, and an R programmer gives his two cents on the language.

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