The Atomic Nucleus by mrkism on Flickr.
The video is fucking amazing, visualizes perfectly the elementary interactions between particles…
- 70X - Inexcusable
- 701 - Meh
- 702 - Emacs
- 71X - Novelty Implementations
- 710 - PHP
- 711 - Convenience Store
- 719 - I am not a teapot
- 72X - Edge Cases
- 720 - Unpossible
- 721 - Known Unknowns
- 722 - Unknown Unknowns
- 723 - Tricky
- 724 - This line should be unreachable
- 725 - It works on my…
Homework is important, but I made this powerpoint instead you know?
![neurolove:
Since my last post about stress, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what all stress does to the brain. Stress has a lot of big, widespread effects on both the nervous system and the body.
Stress increases production of the hormones epinephrine (aka adrenaline) and norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline) and enhances activity of the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for “fight or flight” responses systemically and increases heart rate, dilates the lungs (so you can get more oxygen), increases blood pressure, etc. All of the things your body would need to do to be able to run away quickly or put up a good fight. It also decreases activity in parts of the body that aren’t as necessary to conserve energy- for instance, it decreases metabolism and the immune system.
When all of these things happen short term, it’s actually good- you can put all your energy towards solving the problem that is making you stressed and respond to emergency situations better. Long-term stress means you will put on more weight (due to decreased metabolism), be more prone to illness (due to suppressed immune system), have high blood pressure, etc. This isn’t to say you want to prevent stress- it’s all about managing stress so that your body can use it appropriately.
[Image Source]
good to know](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly00uzo2cp1qb6etto1_500.jpg)
Since my last post about stress, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what all stress does to the brain. Stress has a lot of big, widespread effects on both the nervous system and the body.
Stress increases production of the hormones epinephrine (aka adrenaline) and norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline) and enhances activity of the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for “fight or flight” responses systemically and increases heart rate, dilates the lungs (so you can get more oxygen), increases blood pressure, etc. All of the things your body would need to do to be able to run away quickly or put up a good fight. It also decreases activity in parts of the body that aren’t as necessary to conserve energy- for instance, it decreases metabolism and the immune system.
When all of these things happen short term, it’s actually good- you can put all your energy towards solving the problem that is making you stressed and respond to emergency situations better. Long-term stress means you will put on more weight (due to decreased metabolism), be more prone to illness (due to suppressed immune system), have high blood pressure, etc. This isn’t to say you want to prevent stress- it’s all about managing stress so that your body can use it appropriately.
[Image Source]
good to know
All About ACTA
It’s not over yet. #SOPA and #PIPA are one thing. The international version is #ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The agreement has been signed, while existing mostly in secret, by most of the world, with notable exceptions including the EU.
The act is an attempt to create international standards for intellectual property rights enforcement.
You can look at what is assumed to be the current final form of the agreement, which has been leaked, here. The text has otherwise not been made public; in the US, a Freedom of Information Act request has been denied on the basis of classification for national security. Of course this information was not too classified for those who had a hand in creating the act, a group representing US-based multinational corporations which include International Intellectual Property Alliance (coalition of seven trade associations), The Gorlin Group (Washington “consultancy”), Time Warner Inc. (media company), Eli Lilly and Company (pharmaceutical company), Cisco Systems, Inc. (consumer electronics), The U.S.-China Business Council (nonprofit org), Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. (beer), Merck & Co., Inc. (healthcare), National Foreign Trade Council, Inc. (business organization), Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood LLP (representing the biotechnology industry), Entertainment Software Association (computer and video games), CropLife America (crop protection and pest control products), Global Intellectual Property Strategy Center (consulting service representing gauge-manufacturers Thomas G. Faria Corporation), Recording Industry Association of America (recording industry trade org), IBM Corporation (technology), Intellectual Property Owners Association (trade association for owners of patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets), Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (movies), John Wiley and Sons, Inc. (publishers), General Motors Corporation (automobiles).
And that was just the Industry Trade Advisory Committee On Intellectual Property Rights that was involved. There are three other other committees, totaling 93 other members of the business elite who have access to the “classified” details of the act we as citizens are not allowed to see, for our own security.
This video is a chart.
The reblog
With films like A Beautiful Mind, about the far less eventful life of John Nash, it’s a little surprising that no one’s run with the idea of a biopic about Évariste Galois, whose life ticks all the boxes in the “romanticized mathematician” schema. The real story is so good that it seems unnecessary to fictionalize it further, but there are more myths about Galois than about pretty much any other scientist or mathematician. October 25 will mark the bicentenary of his birth (I guess there’s still some time until the bicentenary of his death).
Galois was born in 1811 in France. These were tumultous times in French politics, and he would soon get caught up in the events. Napoleon was finally beaten at Waterloo in 1815, and Louis XVIII became king. Galois’s parents were liberals, and he inherited their political disposition. Galois didn’t discover mathematics until he was sixteen, but quickly became consumed with it; at twenty, he was killed in a duel, most likely over a woman, and left behind what was to become Galois theory, an important step forward in mathematics. The young Évariste was an eccentric fellow, and he showed little regard for things outside of mathematics and politics. Although he was clearly brilliant, he failed to pass the entrance exam to the elite university École Polytechnique twice, once because he didn’t bother to prepare, the second time, apparently, because he considered the interviewer to be stupid and refused to play by the rules. Just days before his second attempt at the exam, his father committed suicide. Évariste’s father had been mayor of Évariste’s home town of Bourg-la-Reine, and the town priest, a political opponent, had forged slanderous letters in Galois’s father’s name.
Outside of his original research in the theory of equations, Galois was a devoted republican and couldn’t seem to keep out of trouble. During the 1830 revolution, while he was still in school, Galois (and other fellow students) wanted to join the rebellion in the streets, but the school detained them. Galois wrote a letter denouncing the school director. The letter got him expelled, and Galois joined the Artillery of the National Guard, a branch of the militia composed mostly of republicans. At a dinner celebrating the acquittal of nineteen National Guard officers who had been accused of planning to distribute cannons to the people, Galois proposed a toast to the king, holding a dagger over his cup. His toast was met with applause, but the next day, he was arrested and thrown in jail, where he continued researching cutting-edge mathematics. During his time in prison, there was reportedly also an episode where fellow inmates goaded him into downing liquor, after which he made a drunken suicide attempt.
Galois would be released, arrested and once again released before his death. Although his research suffered during his political involvement, Évariste did attempt to publish his revolutionary findings. The traditional story says that he was a misunderstood genius and that was the reason why he wasn’t recognized until after his death; closer readings seem to indicate that a combination of bad luck and Galois’s own eccentricity and lack of discipline also played a part. An example of his bad luck: he submitted an important paper to the Academy of Sciences, represented by its secretary Joseph Fourier. Fourier died before the paper could be published, and the original couldn’t be found in his papers.
Finally, we come to the tragic end: the duel on May 31, 1832. Much has been written about it. Much is false. Some have suggested that he was killed by the government, but circumstantial evidence suggests that his killer was a fellow republican, and that the duel was about a girl’s honor. (Duels were not uncommon at the time.)
The night before the duel, Galois, certain that he would die, furiously scribbled down notes and wrote letters to his friends; according to the legend, he finally put down into words his revolutionary findings, while in fact he only annotated papers he had already submitted elsewhere. In his letters to friends, he wrote that he was sorry he couldn’t die in service of his country and its ideals. Galois was shot in the stomach, and died of the wounds. Reportedly, two or three thousand republicans attended his funeral, and the government feared riots would erupt.
As for the nature of Galois’s actual mathematical research, it’s not very accessible to laymen. Like Fermat’s theorem, the solution is really hard, but the problem that motivated it is simpler to state: why can we solve all polynomial equations of degree four or lower using only arithmetic and radicals (square roots, cube roots, fourth roots etc.)—but not fifth-degree polynomials and higher? The answer, Galois realized, has to do with a group of permutations related to the polynomial. The theory he developed to account for this is today known as Galois theory. (I won’t pretend that I’m qualified to explain it to you. I’m not. But Galois’s story is really interesting.)
More about Évariste Galois’s life story and the legends surrounding him, here. If you’re a braver person than I, and want to truly understand Galois theory, this might be a place to start.
The Euthanasia Coaster is a concept for a steel roller coaster designed to kill its passengers. In 2010, it was designed and made into a scale model by Julijonas Urbonas, a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. Urbonas, who has worked at an amusement park, stated that the goal of his concept roller coaster is to take lives “with elegance and euphoria”. It is a ride to the death. The seven loops or ‘inversions’ put the human body under such stress that it causes the brain to be starved of oxygen, as the heart simply cannot push blood against the enormous g-forces. Even if it kills you, it is designed to still be a fun death. An honourable thought, if rather macabre.
Planets are not cube-shaped. There’s no physical mechanism that would allow a cubic planet to form naturally, certainly not one the size of Earth, and even if you somehow built one, gravity would eventually turn it into a sphere. This is nothing more than a light-hearted thought experiment. But assuming you had a cube-shaped Earth, what would it be like?
If you were dropped in the middle of one of the six faces, you’d be standing in an ocean, because that’s where all the water would go, in the middle. If you move out of the ocean, you’d face a very, very steep climb up one of the mountains that form the corners, jutting out of the planet’s atmosphere. If there was life on this planet, it would most likely evolve independently on each face, separated by impossibly high mountains. On top of one of the corner-mountains, you’d have a spectacular view:
On the plus side, the view is like none on earth, or on any planet anywhere. You can sight down one edge of the cube to a far corner, a distance of some 6,400 miles. Even more strikingly, you see all the atmosphere and water has been concentrated by gravity into a blob in the middle of each face, with the corners and edges poking out into space. You realize your cubical planet isn’t one world but six, each face’s segment of the biosphere isolated from the others by the hopeless climb.Too bad none of this could happen in reality.
I’m getting tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. I’m tired of fucking Earth Day, I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world save for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. They don’t care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun?
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles…hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages…And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet…the planet…the planet isn’t going anywhere. WE ARE!
We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
You wanna know how the planet’s doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet’s doing. You wanna know if the planet’s all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilowaia, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic…asshole.
So, the plastic is here, our job is done, we can be phased out now. And I think that’s begun. Don’t you think that’s already started? I think, to be fair, the planet sees us as a mild threat. Something to be dealt with. And the planet can defend itself in an organized, collective way, the way a beehive or an ant colony can. A collective defense mechanism. The planet will think of something. What would you do if you were the planet? How would you defend yourself against this troublesome, pesky species? Let’s see… Viruses. Viruses might be good. They seem vulnerable to viruses. And, uh…viruses are tricky, always mutating and forming new strains whenever a vaccine is developed. Perhaps, this first virus could be one that compromises the immune system of these creatures. Perhaps a human immunodeficiency virus, making them vulnerable to all sorts of other diseases and infections that might come along. And maybe it could be spread sexually, making them a little reluctant to engage in the act of reproduction.
Well, that’s a poetic note. And it’s a start. And I can dream, can’t I? See I don’t worry about the little things: bees, trees, whales, snails. I think we’re part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron…whoooa. Whoooa. Whoooa. It doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, it doesn’t judge at all. It just is. And so are we. For a little while.
George Carlin (via bouncingbabyuniverse)
this is worth an epic reblog
