I feel so neglectful. Here’s what my day was like today.
Fox sits down at computer, piece cake in hand. Paw, rather. “Ah, today’s XKCD provides an excellent platform on which to launch a discussion of the nature of Mathematics. … But, if I move already filtered strings to a seperate list, this will prevent them from being filtered multiple times and thus decrease the net time the program spends on filtering…” Fox wanders off in thought, coding madly in his head before sitting down and spending the next few hours banging out yet another version of the project, cake and philosophy forgotten, one of which is promptly eaten by BrotherFox. Damnit.
Anyway, before I get back to serious math writing, some points of interest.
Carl Zimmer is one of my favourite science writers, and here he discusses one of the more interesting experiments I’ve seen in a while. Researchers grew/cultured/observed a single colony of e. coli over 20 years, periodically freezing samples, so they could observe changes over time. And recently, their e. coli developed the ability, through random mutation and natural selection, to digest a completely new type of food. Now, e. coli have been observed in nature with this digestive ability, but it has always been due to plasmids, sections of genetic code that the organism snitched from others. But this represents an actual genetic change to the e. coli itself. And because of the way they froze samples over time, the scientists were able to look back, and see exactly how and when the bacteria developed this ability. It’s very exciting stuff. Carl Zimmer expresses all this in much more detail and far better than I ever could. Go read. Go, go!
Following the sort of ‘biology’ trend, next we have from the BBC a video of a live whale birth. I’m not sure if it’s awesome, or terrifying.
Then, also from the BBC, something more physicsy. This is old stuff, I think, but interesting and worth a mention. Scientists (I love using the general ’scientists’ – it’s as though there’s just a building full of scientists somewhere, just thinking stuff up and doing it) think they can predict earthquakes up to two weeks in advance. The geologic activity that leads up to the actual quake, so the theory goes, results in this massive release of electrons that make their way to the surface, resulting in a detectable change in infrared radiation over the area about to be hit. This is very exciting because current earthquake detection systems give you minutes warning. So I hear.
And then, still on a physics bent, but incredibly more mindbending, scientists have evidently shown that reality doesn’t exist when you’re not looking at it. Of course, the fact of the matter is far more complex than that. In short, they had two competing theories about measuring the polarization of light, one based on quantum mechanics, the other based on the idea that light had some fixed polarization before it was measured. And as it turns out, the results were several orders of magnitude away from what was predicted assuming a pre-measurement polarization. In shorter short, the polarization seems to have not existed before they attempted to measure it. It’s all very philosophical. And stuff ^^
Stuff to think about!
