Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Music

Toyota Robot Violinist Wows At Shanghai Expo 121

kkleiner writes "The Shanghai World Expo got a special treat this past week in the Japanese pavilion, when Toyota's famed violin-playing robot thrilled the crowd with a rendition of the Chinese folk song Mo Li Hua (jasmine flower). The bipedal artificial violinist hasn't been seen much since its debut back in 2007. Now we have footage of the Toyota bot playing Mo Li Hua in Shanghai as well as its original rendition of Pomp and Circumstance from 2007."

Comment Re:Meaning of "Solved" (Score 2, Informative) 104

What they really proved, at long last, is that gaseous systems are stable for small perturbations.

In layman's terms: the Butterfly Effect is bogus. It takes a very large perturbation to convert a stable portion of atmosphere into a storm, and the flutter of a butterfly's wings is not significant to tipping the balance.

What they really proved, at long last, is that gaseous systems are stable for small perturbations.

In layman's terms: the Butterfly Effect is bogus. It takes a very large perturbation to convert a stable portion of atmosphere into a storm, and the flutter of a butterfly's wings is not significant to tipping the balance.

Uhm, no. You do not understand what systems are modelled by the Boltzmann equation, what Lyapunov exponents are nor what "global in time solutions" actually are. Lets pretend that the Boltzmann equation is a good model, on it's own, for atmospheric dynamics. This paper proves global existence of various norms of the solution, so that says that there is no time T less than infinity at which those norms become unbounded. Solution trajectories that start arbitrarily close are allowed to diverge exponentially in time. That is, there can be exponential sensitivity to initial conditions (ie. butterfly effect) with no violation of these results. Someone above mentioned the example y' = y^2, y(0) = 1 which has solutions which become unbounded as t approaches 1 from below. These results rule out that behaviour but not behaviour like y' = y. Solutions here are bounded as t goes to infinity but are bounded for all bounded times. Please, go back to grad school for a few years before claiming to understand what you clearly don't.

Comment Re:Good and bad (Score 1) 352

"Scientists" scared of goofy analysis are priests, not scientists. Take their funding away and use their PhD parchment for toilet paper.

Nonsense. I have much better things to do, like reading and posting on slashdot, than respond or deal with every crack pot who has an axe to grind but has no real idea how to do it. Seriously, you want to analyze the data? Go collect it yourself.

Comment AB&C (Score 1) 630

Ants, Bikes and Clocks is a wonderful introduction to applied mathematics via problem solving. Most of the material is calculus free. Students can learn an immense amount about how to approach problems and why they should study math at University. I use this as a supplement in a 200 level modeling class as well as the main text for a section I teach to math high school teachers. I also leave the book with high school classes I visit. It is very well written, approachable and filled with great problems and some hints on how to solve them. Enjoy!

Slashdot Top Deals

Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.

Working...