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Power

Altered Organism Triples Solar Cell Efficiency 158

An anonymous reader writes "By harnessing the shells of living organisms in the sea, microscopic algae called diatoms, engineers have tripled the efficiency of experimental dye-sensitized solar cells. The diatoms were fed a diet of titanium dioxide, the main ingredient for thin film solar cells, instead of their usual meal which is silica (silicon dioxide). As a result, their shells became photovoltaic when coated with dyes. The result is a thin-film dye-sensitized solar cell that is three times more efficient than those without the diatoms."
Programming

Twitter On Scala 324

machaut writes "Twitter, one of the highest profile Ruby on Rails-backed websites on the Internet, has in the past year started replacing some of their Ruby infrastructure with an emerging language called Scala, developed by Martin Odersky at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Although they still prefer Ruby on Rails for user-facing web applications, Twitter's developers have started replacing Ruby daemon servers with Scala alternatives, and plan eventually to serve API requests, which comprise the majority of their traffic, with Scala instead of Ruby. This week several articles have appeared that discuss this shift at Twitter. A technical interview with three Twitter developers was published on Artima. One of those developers, Alex Payne, Twitter's API lead, gave a talk on this subject at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, which was covered by Technology Review and The Register."

Comment Re:For precision, repeatability.... (Score 1) 776

Sage is a whole open source mathematics suite that uses Python as its programming language. Has NumPy/SciPy, the GAP algebra system (when you need to get serious), can do differentiation, integration, 2d plots, 3d plots, etc. I much prefer it over mathematica and the rest; mostly because the use of Python makes it so easy to write little scripts to make a lot of computations at once.
Privacy

NSA Whistleblowers Reveal Extent of Eavesdropping 222

ma11achy was one of several readers to write about claims made by two former military intercept operators who worked for the NSA that "Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home." Ars Technica has a brief report as well, and reader net_shaman adds a link to Glenn Greenwald's opinion piece on the eavesdropping at Salon.

Comment Re:Logical positivism to the rescue... (Score 1) 798

In response to the bit about logical positivism: Logical positivism would, more than anything I think, label this question as meaningless. However, my understanding is that logical positivism has been mostly discredited, largely thanks to Quine. His "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" attempts to break down the analytic/synthetic distinction that the verification principle so heavily relies upon. Furthermore, it seems impossible to formulate the verification principle in such a way that it gets rid of metaphysical questions such as "What is math?" and hang on to the terminology required to do science.

Carnap gave up on it, convinced by Quine. Wittgenstein, the often cited father of the movement, completely rejected it in his later years.

However, your point with regards to pragmatism I think is important, though not insurmountable. These questions are important for determining what we consider legitimate mathematics and thus how we should proceed in the study of mathematics. Consider the foundational questions in the first half of the 20th century: Frege's, Russel's, Zermelo's, and Hilbert's programs all had wildly different consequences in terms how one should proceed in mathematics (though they all tried to preserve the main body of it). The most concrete example of this is the bizarre machinery that is required to do calculus: have you ever tried to convince anyone that there are have to be different levels of infinity in order to do that which physics takes as central? When Cantor (and Newton for that matter) first came up with their ideas, they were laughed at! What they showed was not considered legitimate mathematics at first, though it turned out to be crucial for modern science.

Furthermore, these questions help decide what mathematics' place in the world: what exactly are we trying to accomplish with it? What is mathematics studying and what predictive powers should we expect from it?

I don't know if this will convince anyone these questions are worth asking, but hopefully they will make people curious. The deeper one goes, the stranger things become. For instance, the Banach-Tarski theorem says that one can break up a ball into a whole bunch of points, and then reassemble them into two balls identical to the first! And this is a theorem, a direct result from ZFC! Or (and this screwed with my head for a long time) Skolem showed that any first order set theory satisfiable by a nondenumerable model is also satisfiable by a coutable one (note: I made that all jargony so that people unfamilar with set theory won't know what I am talking about; dangerous idea if you don't know/believe Cantor's stuff and very easy to misinterpret if you don't know set theory to an okay extent. Even then, takes a while...)

Second, my answer to the question: Mathematical structure is discovered, but such abstractions do not exist as universals/forms/etc. Mathematics is the study of abstract structure. This structure is inherent in/a result of the causal properties of objects in the universe. There are no forms/universals, just systems of objects and causal relations, and isomorphisms between these systems.

(I'm a trope nominalist when it comes to properties: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tropes/. Further, I believe that the resemblance classes central to the theory are defined by causal similarity. I think this is possible because causal properties ARE qualitative properties. Sorry, just wanted to answer any phil majors up front :).)

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