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Submission + - The Milky Way May be 50 Percent Bigger Than Thought (discovery.com) 1

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: A ring-like filament of stars wrapping around the Milky Way may actually belong to the galaxy itself, rippling above and below the relatively flat galactic plane. If so, that would expand the size of the known galaxy by 50 percent and raise intriguing questions about what caused the waves of stars. Scientists used data collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to reanalyze the brightness and distance of stars at the edge of the galaxy. They found that the fringe of the disk is puckered into ridges and grooves of stars, like corrugated cardboard. “It looks to me like maybe these patterns are following the spiral structure of the Milky Way, so they may be related,” astronomer Heidi Newberg, with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, told Discovery News.

Submission + - Strange Stars Pulse to the Golden Mean (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What struck John Learned about the blinking of KIC 5520878, a bluish-white star 16,000 light-years away, was how artificial it seemed.

Learned, a neutrino physicist at the University of Hawaii, Mnoa, has a pet theory that super-advanced alien civilizations might send messages by tickling stars with neutrino beams, eliciting Morse code-like pulses. “It’s the sort of thing tenured senior professors can get away with,” he said. The pulsations of KIC 5520878, recorded recently by NASA’s Kepler telescope, suggested that the star might be so employed.

A “variable” star, KIC 5520878 brightens and dims in a six-hour cycle, seesawing between cool-and-clear and hot-and-opaque. Overlaying this rhythm is a second, subtler variation of unknown origin; this frequency interplays with the first to make some of the star’s pulses brighter than others. In the fluctuations, Learned had identified interesting and, he thought, possibly intelligent sequences, such as prime numbers (which have been floated as a conceivable basis of extraterrestrial communication). He then found hints that the star’s pulses were chaotic.

But when Learned mentioned his investigations to a colleague, William Ditto, last summer, Ditto was struck by the ratio of the two frequencies driving the star’s pulsations.

“I said, ‘Wait a minute, that’s the golden mean.’”

Submission + - Apple Has Lost its Soul 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels—the ones who can drop 10 grand on a timepiece as Robinson Meyer writes at The Atlantic that Apple used to make technology for people who wanted to change the world, not the people who ran it. Today’s messaging is a little different. Most will correctly fixate on the price of the most expensive watch, the 18-karat-gold Apple Watch Edition. Unlike with a traditional mechanical watch, where an increase in price is also typically accompanied by more complex mechanisms and more hand-craft, the Apple Watch Edition is simply shrouded in gold. If you set that case aside, it has the same sapphire glass display, sensors, and electronics as the $549 Apple Watch. That's a mark-up of eighteen times the lower price. "The prices grate. And they grate not because they’re so expensive, but because they’re gratuitously expensive," concludes Robinson. "Instead of telling users to pay up because they’ll get a better quality experience, it’s telling them to pay up because they can, and because a more expensive watch is inherently preferable."

Submission + - Was Linus Torvalds Right About C++ Being So Wrong? (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Perhaps the most famous rant against C++ came from none other than Linus Torvalds in 2007. It featured some choice language. 'C++ is a horrible language,' he wrote, for starters. 'It’s made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it’s much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.' He's not alone: A lot of developers dislike how much C++ can do 'behind the scenes' with STL and Boost, leading to potential instability and inefficiency. And yet there's still demand for C++ out there. Over at Dice, Jeff Cogswell argues that C++ doesn't deserve the hatred. 'I’ve witnessed a lot of 'over-engineering' in my life, wherein people would write reusable classes with several layers of inheritance, even though the reusable class wasn’t actually used more than once,' he wrote. 'But I would argue that’s the exception, not the norm; when done right, generic programming and other high-level aspects of C++ can provide enormous benefits.' Was Linus going overboard?

Submission + - Automatic Translation Without Dictionaries (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by physicsphairy
physicsphairy writes: Tomas Mikolov and others at Google have developed a simple means of translating between languages using a large corpus of sample texts. Rather than being defined by humans, words are characterized based on their relation to other words, e.g., in any language, a word like 'cat' will have a particular relationship to words like 'small', 'furry,' 'pet', etc. The set of relationships of words in a language can be described as a vector space, and words from one language can be translated into words in another language by identifying the mapping between their two vector spaces. The technique works even for very dissimilar languages, and is presently being used to refine and identify mistakes in existing translation dictionaries.

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