Latest Posts by philosophical-amoeba - Page 8

David Bowie (1947-2016) at Kyoto - Japan - 1980

Photos by Sukita Masayoshi 鋤田 正義

Can you flatten a sphere?

The answer is NO, you can not. This is why all map projections are innacurate and distorted, requiring some form of compromise between how accurate the angles, distances and areas in a globe are represented.

This is all due to Gauss’s Theorema Egregium, which dictates that you can only bend surfaces without distortion/stretching if you don’t change their Gaussian curvature.

The Gaussian curvature is an intrinsic and important property of a surface. Planes, cylinders and cones all have zero Gaussian curvature, and this is why you can make a tube or a party hat out of a flat piece of paper. A sphere has a positive Gaussian curvature, and a saddle shape has a negative one, so you cannot make those starting out with something flat.

If you like pizza then you are probably intimately familiar with this theorem. That universal trick of bending a pizza slice so it stiffens up is a direct result of the theorem, as the bend forces the other direction to stay flat as to maintain zero Gaussian curvature on the slice. Here’s a Numberphile video explaining it in more detail.

However, there are several ways to approximate a sphere as a collection of shapes you can flatten. For instance, you can project the surface of the sphere onto an icosahedron, a solid with 20 equal triangular faces, giving you what it is called the Dymaxion projection.

The Dymaxion map projection.

The problem with this technique is that you still have a sphere approximated by flat shapes, and not curved ones.

One of the earliest proofs of the surface area of the sphere (4πr2) came from the great Greek mathematician Archimedes. He realized that he could approximate the surface of the sphere arbitrarily close by stacks of truncated cones. The animation below shows this construction.

The great thing about cones is that not only they are curved surfaces, they also have zero curvature! This means we can flatten each of those conical strips onto a flat sheet of paper, which will then be a good approximation of a sphere.

So what does this flattened sphere approximated by conical strips look like? Check the image below.

But this is not the only way to distribute the strips. We could also align them by a corner, like this:

All of this is not exactly new, of course, but I never saw anyone assembling one of these. I wanted to try it out with paper, and that photo above is the result.

It’s really hard to put together and it doesn’t hold itself up too well, but it’s a nice little reminder that math works after all!

Here’s the PDF to print it out, if you want to try it yourself. Send me a picture if you do!

Harmonograph, H. Irwine Whitty, 1893

“The facts that musical notes are due to regular air-pulses, and that the pitch of the note depends on the frequency with which these pulses succeed each other, are too well known to require any extended notice. But although these phenomena and their laws have been known for a very long time, Chladni, late in the last century, was the first who discovered that there was a connection between sound and form.”

source here

Tokyo Stock Exchange, circa 1910, on the right.

Once Upon a Time t

Once upon the time t(0) there was a young buck named Butterbean who wanted nothing more than to know his ontological value.  Being familiar with the concepts of quantum mechanics he was sadly aware that this was theoretically impossible, but remained unsatisfied with the notion.

In an undying effort to discover the nature of his own existence he set out on a journey to seek the answer from all those most wise and perceiving.

Clearly the first stop was at the front door of Glad the hippopotamus.    

Glad was of the notion that all things are ultimately mundane and that it is simply a matter of time and “progress” before esoteric conundrums become  simple everyday knowledge.  Surely this most assured creature could derive an unknown variable to discover the true nature of Butterbean himself. They were both of the mind at this time t(realist) that all the probabilistic nonsense was clearly just a cop out for those ninnies who fancied themselves finished with discovering the universe.

Alas after decades, or maybe days (no one can be sure given that time itself is a construct  commonly defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom, and who can really say cesium 133 even exists… really), Glad was forced to admit that he could not tell Butterbean of his ontological state prior to Butterbean’s arrival on his doorstep, nor could he possibly without any reference to his own experience as a literalist hippo,  and was forced to admit that this coveted obscure variable was beyond his abilities of perception.

With a sense of hopelessness Butterbean sought out the comfort and guidance of Ol’ Trusty, the Wire Stripper.  They adventured together for t(hedonist) to t(fundamentalist) without ever committing to any defined notion as after all, how can you find the answer to a paradox, oxymoron much?  

However comfort in ignorance becomes unsettling after you’ve had your fun and Butterbean became restless.  There was one more known avenue he had not yet travelled…

With a renewed sense of wonder and determination Butterbean approached the Oak, which shook its branches excitedly upon Butterbean’s arrival to see such a valiant seeker of answers.  “Oak, what can you tell me about my ontological value?” asked Butterbean humbly.  The Oak remained silent, but a slight breeze rustled loose a few leaves from its massive head which fluttered to the ground and landed lightly at Butterbean’s feet, Butterbean faltered and then turned and retreated thoughtfully sensing that the conversation was over. 

Upon further consideration over Δt(orthodox) Butterbean understood Oak’s lesson— the leaves could change position through many methods all resulting in different outcomes, however before any leaf falls, it has not fallen.  Butterbean had discovered that no matter who or what observes him, there would be an outcome, but it could not be these interactions which defined the whole of himself, surely he must be something inherently like the leaves of Oak’s mane.  

One day, a little time later at approximately t(decision), Butterbean decided to venture forth in search of a method of measurement that excluded observation.  Knowing that the existence of alligators had long been debated among those with a higher understanding of the nature of things, he knew he should seek within the mind of that which may or may not exist; namely an alligator (though a unicorn or manticore could have sufficed, they are not quite as easy to find nowadays).

Unfortunately all alligators are actually just dead trees and Butterbean had to once again rethink his strategy. 

It occurred to Butterbean, after his most recent experiences, that perhaps his disbelief in alligators had caused their value to be null, distracted in hoping that his mind was not quite that powerful Butterbean mistakenly stomped on a daisy which let out a loud squeal, “watch out dummy!”  “OH!” replied Butterbean, “Sorry I didn’t see you there, though come to think of it I’m surprised you even exist as I hadn’t yet observed you my friend.”   The daisy straightened herself and smoothing out her petals scoffed and said jeeringly, “you think that you are the only one who exists, eh?”  “Well,” began Butterbean thoughtfully, “no, but I don’t understand how anything or anyone has any sort of defined nature without something else purposefully interacting with it, after all, how do you know that you exist?” “Oh for goodness sake,” exclaimed young Daisy, “Of course you’ll remain limited as long as you keep collapsing your wave function with all that introspection!”  And she turned her face to the sun clearly dismissing Butterbean and all his angsty questions.  

Butterbean, with all known theories exhausted, was still unsatisfied and longed to know the mystery of his own nature of being and the recent dismissal of the daisy weighed heavy on his soul.  “Why can she be so satisfied just being,” he wondered, “when I spend all of my time dedicated to the mystery and nature of life but still feel so empty and unfulfilled?”  And suddenly it struck him! It had been so obvious all along and basically verbatim the retorts he had only just received from the annoyed flower he had trod on, Butterbean ceased to observe himself and existed infinitely in all possible states of being.

The spread of the word for ‘tea’ across the world.

Singapore Food (in Manga/Anime) Appreciation Post!

(Also: Onion Chopping Ninja Reveals Her Timezone!)

It’s Singapore’s National Day today (9th Aug) and I was going to do a Singaporean-based Recipe, (like Hayama’s Curry Fish Head), but didn’t have time to, so here’s a Singapore Food in Manga/Anime Appreciation Post - from Kuragehime, Shokugeki no Souma, and Addicted to Curry!

The Singaporean food that is usually shown in manga/anime is usually either curry-based or chicken rice. And of course, I don’t usually make them at home because: 1. They’re easier to make in bulk 2. You can get them cheaper outside 3. My version would pale in comparison to the masters’ 4. It requires hours of preparation, except for some of the easier curry dishes in Addicted to Curry. (A manga cap of the recipe is above!)

Addicted to Curry lists Singapore as Curry Central, and I never realized how true that was until I went abroad for a couple of years and missed how we would just drown everything in curry, especially for mixed rice dishes like Chap Chye Png and Nasi Briyani. There was also a huge uproar when McDonald’s ran out of Curry Sauce for McNuggets (they have since started selling it in bottles), and a near-riot when a neighbour complained about the smell of another neighbour cooking curry. Also, Gordon Ramsay can’t beat our laksa, even though I think that particular store he challenged isn’t the best one.

(Not everything is curry, of course, but if there’s no curry, generally, there must be chili. And woe betide those who eat the wrong kind of chili with the wrong kind of food. And here’s a PSA for foreigners - Chili Crab is largely for tourists. Take Black Pepper Crab or Salted Egg Crab instead. It’s possible to live as a weak sauce who can’t take spicy foods here, but less exciting. )

Happy 51st Birthday, Singapore! Here’s to the spread of our food all over the world! And a birthday wish would be for more kinds of our food to be shown in manga/anime. :D - O.C.N.

PS: By the way, Eizan Senpai, you can get Hainanese Chicken Rice for $3, and it is considered Street Food even though there are $30+ versions at hotels. Never eaten one with Jidori Chicken, though.

The song “It’s a long way to Tipperary” was enormously popular in New Zealand as a sound recording sung by Stanley Kirkby, with shops advertising new arrivals of stock from overseas in early 1915. At the same time, a film of the same title was also being shown in cinemas, and sheet music for an orchestral arrangement was available at the “Golden Horn” music store in Vivian Street Wellington. Copies of this Maori postcard with its “Tipirere “ translation were handed out to members of the 2nd Maori Contingent of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force after they marched through the streets of Wellington on Saturday 16 September 1915 (See Evening Post, 20 September 1915, page 8).

[Postcard]. Tipirere. N.Z.M.E.C. Hokowhitu-a-Tu. [ca 1915].    

Eph-B-POSTCARD-Vol-12-003-btm

Isetan Departmental Store opening poster (1933).

Neutrinos Hint of Matter-Antimatter Rift

the same underground observatory in Japan where, 18 years ago, neutrinos were first seen oscillating from one “flavor” to another — a landmark discovery that earned two physicists the 2015 Nobel Prize — a tiny anomaly has begun to surface in the neutrinos’ oscillations that could herald an answer to one of the biggest mysteries in physics: why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe.

The anomaly, detected by the T2K experiment, is not yet pronounced enough to be sure of, but it and the findings of two related experiments “are all pointing in the same direction,” said Hirohisa Tanaka of the University of Toronto, a member of the T2K team who presented the result to a packed audience in London earlier this month.

“A full proof will take more time,” said Werner Rodejohann, a neutrino specialist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg who was not involved in the experiments, “but my and many others’ feeling is that there is something real here.”

The long-standing puzzle to be solved is why we and everything we see is matter-made. More to the point, why does anything — matter or antimatter — exist at all? The reigning laws of particle physics, known as the Standard Model, treat matter and antimatter nearly equivalently, respecting (with one known exception) so-called charge-parity, or “CP,” symmetry: For every particle decay that produces, say, a negatively charged electron, the mirror-image decay yielding a positively charged antielectron occurs at the same rate. But this cannot be the whole story. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were produced during the Big Bang, equal amounts should have existed shortly thereafter. And since matter and antimatter annihilate upon contact, such a situation would have led to the wholesale destruction of both, resulting in an empty cosmos.

Somehow, significantly more matter than antimatter must have been created, such that a matter surplus survived the annihilation and now holds sway. The question is, what CP-violating process beyond the Standard Model favored the production of matter over antimatter?

Many physicists suspect that the answer lies with neutrinos — ultra-elusive, omnipresent particles that pass unfelt through your body by the trillions each second.

To that end, starting in 2010, scientists with the T2K experiment generated beams of neutrinos or antineutrinos in Tokai, Japan, and aimed them toward the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory, a sensor-lined tank of 50,000 tons of pure water located nearly 200 miles away in Kamioka. Occasionally, these ghostly particles interacted with atoms inside the water tank, generating detectable flashes of radiation. Detecting a difference in the behavior of the neutrinos and antineutrinos would provide an important clue about the preponderance of matter over antimatter, perhaps opening up a route beyond the Standard Model to a more complete theory of nature. Already, the strange properties of neutrinos provide a possible outline of that fuller story.

Kamioka Observatory, ICRR (Institute for Cosmic Ray Research), The University of Tokyo At the Super-Kamiokande observatory in Kamioka, Japan — shown here when it was being filled with water in 2006 — neutrinos interact with atoms inside the water, generating flashes of radiation that are picked up by the surrounding sensors.

Primordial Neutrinos

The 1998 discovery that neutrinos switch flavors on the fly “may change our most fundamental theories,” President Bill Clinton said at the time, “from the nature of the smallest subatomic particles to how the universe itself works.”

Neutrino oscillations defied the Standard Model’s prediction that the particles are massless, like photons. In order for neutrinos to oscillate, each of their three possible flavors (electron, muon and tau) must be a quantum-mechanical mixture, or “superposition,” of three possible masses. Quantum superpositions evolve over time. So a neutrino might start out with its three mass components giving it pure muon flavor, but as the components evolve at different rates, electron flavor gradually enters the mixture, and the neutrino will have some probability of being measured as an electron neutrino.

There’s no mechanism within the Standard Model by which neutrinos might acquire their tiny, nonzero masses. Also unknown is why all neutrinos are observed to be “left-handed,” spinning clockwise with respect to their direction of motion, while all antineutrinos are right-handed, spinning counterclockwise.

Experts overwhelmingly favor a double-duty explanation of neutrino mass and single-handedness called the “seesaw mechanism,” whereby the known, lightweight, left-handed neutrinos have much heavier right-handed counterparts, and the known antineutrinos likewise have superheavy left-handed counterparts (the light and heavy masses are inversely related, like two sides of a seesaw). For this seesaw explanation to work, the neutrinos and antineutrinos on each side of the seesaw must actually be the same particle, except for their opposite handedness. Numerous experiments are now hunting for an extremely rare radioactive decay that would confirm this “Majorana” nature of neutrinos, thereby shoring up the logic of the seesaw mechanism.

If the theory is correct, then the heavy neutrinos and antineutrinos would have populated the hot young universe, when there was enough energy to beget beastly particles. They would have since decayed. Physicists wonder: Might their decays have produced the matter-antimatter asymmetry? This is the question to which an answer may be emerging — and much sooner than expected.

Tilted Seesaw

There’s good reason to think that neutrinos violate CP symmetry. The one established instance of CP violation in the laws of physics arises among the quarks — the building blocks of protons and neutrons — whose flavor mixing is described by a mathematical matrix similar to the one for neutrino mixing. In the quark case, though, the value of a numerical factor in the matrix that creates a disparity between quarks and antiquarks is very small. Quarks and antiquarks behave far too symmetrically to account for the universe’s matter-antimatter imbalance.

Lucy Reading-Ikkanda for Quanta Magazine

But the neutrino mixing matrix comes equipped with its own factor by which neutrinos and antineutrinos can violate CP symmetry. (Paradoxically, they can behave differently from one another even if they are Majorana particles, identical except for their opposite handedness.) If the lightweight neutrinos and antineutrinos violate CP symmetry, then the hypothetical heavy primordial neutrinos and antineutrinos must as well, and their asymmetric decays could easily have produced the universe’s glut of matter. Discovering CP violation among the lightweight neutrinos “will boost that general framework,” said Neal Weiner, a theoretical physicist at New York University.

The question is, how large will the CP-violation factor be? “The fear was that it would be small,” said Patricia Vahle, a physicist at the College of William & Mary — so small that the current generation of experiments wouldn’t detect any difference between neutrinos’ and antineutrinos’ behavior. “But it is starting to look like maybe we will be lucky,” she said.

To search for CP violation, the T2K scientists looked for evidence that neutrinos and antineutrinos oscillated between muon and electron flavors with unequal probabilities as they traveled between Tokai and Kamioka. The amount of CP violation once again works like a seesaw, with the rate of muon-to-electron neutrino conversions on one side, and corresponding antineutrino conversions on the other. The larger the value of the factor in the matrix, the greater the seesaw’s tilt.

If the seesaw is balanced, signifying perfect CP symmetry, then (accounting for differences in the production and detection rates of neutrinos and antineutrinos) the T2K scientists would have expected to detect roughly 23 electron neutrino candidates and seven electron antineutrino candidates in Kamioka, Tanaka said. Meanwhile, if CP symmetry is “maximally” violated — the seesaw tilted fully toward more neutrino oscillations and fewer antineutrino oscillations — then 27 electron neutrinos and six electron antineutrinos should have been detected. The actual numbers were even more skewed. “What we observed are 32 electron neutrino candidates and four electron antineutrino candidates,” Tanaka said.

With so few total events, it’s too soon to know whether the apparent tilt of the seesaw, signifying a large amount of CP violation, is real or a statistical aberration. Two other new hints of CP violation, however, strengthen the case. First, the newly running NOvA experiment, which generates a beam of muon neutrinos in Illinois and measures electron neutrinos in Minnesota, found a large number of these oscillations, again suggesting that the seesaw may be tilted in favor of neutrino oscillations and away from antineutrino oscillations. Second, researchers at the Super-Kamiokande observatory detected a similar enhancement of electron neutrinos coming from Earth’s atmosphere. (T2K and NOvA both plan to submit their findings for publication later this year.)

Vahle, who presented NOvA’s new results this month in London, urged caution; even when the T2K and NOvA results are combined, their statistical significance remains at a low level known as “2 sigma,” where there’s still a 5 percent chance the apparent deviation from CP symmetry is a random fluke. The results “do give me hope that finding CP violation in neutrino oscillations won’t be as hard as many feared it would be,” she said, “but we aren’t there yet.”

If CP violation among neutrinos is real and as large as it currently seems, then the evidence will slowly strengthen in the coming years. T2K’s signal could reach 3-sigma significance by the mid-2020s. “It’s a very exciting time as we look forward to a lot more data from both experiments,” said Peter Shanahan, a NOvA co-spokesperson.

It isn’t yet known exactly how CP violation in the light neutrino oscillations would translate into CP-violating decays of the heavy set. But discovering the former would point physicists in the latter’s general direction. “If we are starting to see [CP violation] in the neutrino sector, it is certainly a critical result,” Weiner said.

Story from Quanta Magazine

Visit Nanotechnology World Association for more articles

Categorizing Posts on Tumblr

Millions of posts are published on Tumblr everyday. Understanding the topical structure of this massive collection of data is a fundamental step to connect users with the content they love, as well as to answer important philosophical questions, such as “cats vs. dogs: who rules on social networks?”

As first step in this direction, we recently developed a post-categorization workflow that aims at associating posts with broad-interest categories, where the list of categories is defined by Tumblr’s on-boarding topics.

Methodology

Posts are heterogeneous in form (video, images, audio, text) and consists of semi-structured data (e.g. a textual post has a title and a body, but the actual textual content is un-structured). Luckily enough, our users do a great job at summarizing the content of their posts with tags. As the distribution below shows, more than 50% of the posts are published with at least one tag.

However, tags define micro-interest segments that are too fine-grained for our goal. Hence, we editorially aggregate tags into semantically coherent topics: our on-boarding categories.

We also compute a score that represents the strength of the affiliation (tag, topic), which is based on approximate string matching and semantic relationships.

Given this input, we can compute a score for each pair (post,topic) as:

where

w(f,t) is the score (tag,topic), or zero if the pair (f,t) does not belong in the dictionary W.

tag-features(p) contains features extracted from the tags associated to the post: raw tag, “normalized” tag, n-grams.

q(f,p) is a weight [0,1] that takes into account the source of the feature (f) in the post (p).

The drawback of this approach is that relies heavily on the dictionary W, which is far from being complete.

To address this issue we exploit another source of data: RelatedTags, an index that provides a list of similar tags by exploiting co-occurence patterns. For each pair (tag,topic) in W, we propagate the affiliation with the topic to its top related tags, smoothing the affiliation score w to reflect the fact these entries (tag,topic) could be noisy.

This computation is followed by filtering phase to remove entries (post,topic) with a low confidence score. Finally, the category with the highest score is associated to the post.

Evaluation

This unsupervised approach to post categorization runs daily on posts created the day before. The next step is to assess the alignment between the predicted category and the most appropriate one.

The results of an editorial evaluation show that the our framework is able to identify in most cases a relevant category, but it also highlights some limitations, such as a limited robustness to polysemy.

We are currently looking into improving the overall performances by exploiting NLP techniques for word embedding and by integrating the extraction and analysis of visual features into the processing pipeline.

Some fun with data

What is the distribution of posts published on Tumblr? Which categories drive more engagements? To analyze these and other questions we analyze the categorized posts over a period of 30 days.

Almost 7% of categorized posts belong to Fashion, with Art as runner up.

The category that drives more engagements is Television, which accounts for over 8% of the reblogs on categorized posts.

However, normalizing by the number of posts published, the category with the highest average of engagements per post isGif Art, followed by Astrology.

Last but not least, here are the stats you all have been waiting for!! Cats are winning on Tumblr… for now…

Quick Study of the Maiko’s Furisode Kimono+Undergarments! 

Just a simple little vocabulary dump! Still learning the details (there are many!) and would love any corrections or elaborations to be made!

Hadajuban: The first layer underneath a Maiko’s kimono. It is said that Geiko and Maiko don’t wear underwear because it throws off the line of the kimono; instead, they wear multi-layer undergarments.

Nagajuban: Another garment with sleeves, made of cotton, that goes over the Hadajuban.

Koshihimo: An under-wrap belt that holds the undergarments together in a foundation shape for the kimono over it.

Korin belt: Ties the juban collars together.

Obi-Ita: Stiff padding that will help to hold the obi belt in place.

Obi-Makura: “Pillow” that ties around from the front. This supports the front of the obi belt. I’ve read it’s something only girls wearing kimono use.

Eri Shin: Long strand of cardboard or plastic that serves as a collar stiffener.

Tabi: White, sometimes buttoned up, socks that separate the big toe from the rest of the four toes. Worn along with a Maiko’s Okobo or Zori.

Furisode Kimono: Formal-looking kimono with a characteristic of long, billowy sleeves with the seam connecting the top sleeve to the hanging sleeve visible. This kimono is also a popular formal traditional kimono for unmarried women. Originally, furisode kimono were only worn by children (both boys and girls) from well-off or even wealthy families. This connects the tradition of the Maiko symbolizing “childhood” and “youthfulness”. 

Maru Obi: Primarily used by Maiko (or traditional brides), these especially formal obi belts are heavy, rich with brocade embroidery and very long. Both sides are usually fully patterned; a Maiko wears her obi tied in the back, one end of the belt folded slightly over the other, cascading in a loose-look down to her ankles.  

Obi-jime: A thin braid of stippled silk that wraps around the front of the obi and holds it together with a final touch. The obi clasps are expensive and beautiful bejeweled and are attached to the obi-jime to adorn the front of the kimono.

Please message me if you’d like to add an ingredient to this list! I work with google and the books I have for accurate and complete information, and sometimes I just can’t find all that I’m lookin’ for! Thanks!

( @gion-lady )

Discovering the daily life during jomon period - 縄文人の生活再現 

The code that took America's Apollo 11  to the moon in the 1960's has been published

When programmers at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory set out to develop the flight software for the Apollo 11 space program in the mid-1960s, the necessary technology did not exist. They had to invent it.

They came up with a new way to store computer programs, called “rope memory,” and created a special version of the assembly programming language. Assembly itself is obscure to many of today’s programmers—it’s very difficult to read, intended to be easily understood by computers, not humans. For the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), MIT programmers wrote thousands of lines of that esoteric code.

Here’s a very 1960s data visualization of just how much code they wrote—this is Margaret Hamilton, director of software engineering for the project, standing next to a stack of paper containing the software:

The AGC code has been available to the public for quite a while–it was first uploaded by tech researcher Ron Burkey in 2003, after he’d transcribed it from scanned images of the original hardcopies MIT had put online. That is, he manually typed out each line, one by one.

“It was scanned by an airplane pilot named Gary Neff in Colorado,” Burkey said in an email. “MIT got hold of the scans and put them online in the form of page images, which unfortunately had been mutilated in the process to the point of being unreadable in places.” Burkey reconstructed the unreadable parts, he said, using his engineering skills to fill in the blanks.

  “Quite a bit later, I managed to get some replacement scans from Gary Neff for the unreadable parts and fortunately found out that the parts I filled in were 100% correct!” he said.

As enormous and successful as Burkey’s project has been, however, the code itself remained somewhat obscure to many of today’s software developers. That was until last Thursday (July 7), when former NASA intern Chris Garry uploaded the software in its entirety to GitHub, the code-sharing site where millions of programmers hang out these days.

Within hours, coders began dissecting the software, particularly looking at the code comments the AGC’s original programmers had written. In programming, comments are plain-English descriptions of what task is being performed at a given point. But as the always-sharp joke detectives in Reddit’s r/ProgrammerHumor section found, many of the comments in the AGC code go beyond boring explanations of the software itself. They’re full of light-hearted jokes and messages, and very 1960s references.

One of the source code files, for example, is called BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE, and the opening comments explain why:

About 900 lines into that subroutine, a reader can see the playfulness of the original programming team come through, in the first and last comments in this block of code:

In the file called LUNAR_LANDING_GUIDANCE_EQUATIONS.s, it appears that two lines of code were  meant to be temporary ended up being permanent, against the hopes of one programmer:

In the same file, there’s also code that appears to instruct an astronaut to “crank the silly thing around.”

“That code is all about positioning the antenna for the LR (landing radar),” Burkey explained. “I presume that it’s displaying a code to warn the astronaut to reposition it.”

And in the PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHTS.s file, which is described as “the keyboard and display system program … exchanged between the AGC and the computer operator,” there’s a peculiar Shakespeare quote:

This is likely a reference to the AGC programming language itself, as one Reddit user . The language used predetermined “nouns” and “verbs” to execute operations. The verb pointed out 37, for example, means “Run program,” while the noun 33 means “Time to ignition.”

Now that the code is on GitHub, programmers can actually suggest changes and file issues. And, of course, they have

Why do we love?

Ah, romantic love; beautiful and intoxicating, heart-breaking and soul-crushing… often all at the same time! Why do we choose to put ourselves though its emotional wringer? Does love make our lives meaningful, or is it an escape from our loneliness and suffering?  Is love a disguise for our sexual desire, or a trick of biology to make us procreate? Is it all we need? Do we need it at all?

If romantic love has a purpose, neither science nor psychology has discovered it yet – but over the course of history, some of our most respected philosophers have put forward some intriguing theories.

1. Love makes us whole, again / Plato (427—347 BCE)

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato explored the idea that we love in order to become complete. In his Symposium, he wrote about a dinner party at which Aristophanes, a comic playwright, regales the guests with the following story. Humans were once creatures with four arms, four legs, and two faces.  One day they angered the gods, and Zeus sliced them all in two. Since then, every person has been missing half of him or herself.  Love is the longing to find a soul mate who will make us feel whole again… or at least that’s what Plato believed a drunken comedian would say at a party.

2. Love tricks us into having babies / Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Much, much later, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer maintained that love, based in sexual desire, was a “voluptuous illusion”.  He suggested that we love because our desires lead us to believe that another person will make us happy, but we are sorely mistaken.  Nature is tricking us into procreating and the loving fusion we seek is consummated in our children.  When our sexual desires are satisfied, we are thrown back into our tormented existences, and we succeed only in maintaining the species and perpetuating the cycle of human drudgery.  Sounds like somebody needs a hug.

3. Love is escape from our loneliness / Russell (1872-1970)

According to the Nobel Prize-winning British philosopher Bertrand Russell we love in order to quench our physical and psychological desires.  Humans are designed to procreate; but, without the ecstasy of passionate love, sex is unsatisfying.  Our fear of the cold, cruel world tempts us to build hard shells to protect and isolate ourselves.  Love’s delight, intimacy, and warmth helps us overcome our fear of the world, escape our lonely shells, and engage more abundantly in life.  Love enriches our whole being, making it the best thing in life.  

4. Love is a misleading affliction / Buddha (~6th- 4thC BCE)

Siddhartha Gautama. who became known as ‘the Buddha’, or ‘the enlightened one’, probably would have had some interesting arguments with Russell. Buddha proposed that we love because we are trying to satisfy our base desires.  Yet, our passionate cravings are defects, and attachments – even romantic love – are a great source of suffering.  Luckily, Buddha discovered the eight-fold path, a sort of program for extinguishing the fires of desire so that we can reach ‘nirvana’ – an enlightened state of peace, clarity, wisdom, and compassion.  

5. Love lets us reach beyond ourselves / Beauvoir (1908-86)

Let’s end on a slightly more positive note.  The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir proposed that love is the desire to integrate with another and that it infuses our lives with meaning.  However, she was less concerned with why we love and more interested in how we can love better.  She saw that the problem with traditional romantic love is it can be so captivating that we are tempted to make it our only reason for being.  Yet, dependence on another to justify our existence easily leads to boredom and power games.  

To avoid this trap, Beauvoir advised loving authentically, which is more like a great friendship: lovers support each other in discovering themselves, reaching beyond themselves, and enriching their lives and the world, together.

Though we might never know why we fall in love, we can be certain that it’ll be an emotional rollercoaster ride.  It’s scary and exhilarating.  It makes us suffer and makes us soar.  Maybe we lose ourselves.  Maybe we find ourselves.  It might be heartbreaking or it might just be the best thing in life.  Will you dare to find out? 

From the TED-Ed Lesson Why do we love? A philosophical inquiry - Skye C. Cleary

Animation by Avi Ofer

This is what happens when a carrot is fired at 300 km/hour at an egg, through two sheets of cardboard. 

This is what happens if you separate out the two sheets:

The egg survives! This shows how a Whipple shield works, and is what spacecraft use to protect themselves from micrometeoroid impacts in space. When the projectile (in this case a carrot, but in space it could be a speck of paint, a piece of an old satellite, or a bit of space rock) hits the first layer, it’s moving so fast that it starts to vaporise, because the energy of the collision is enough to break almost every bond in the substance.

It then sprays outwards, spreading the force of impact across a much wider area, meaning the second layer can stop it going any further, keeping your egg (or astronauts) safe.

Watch the full video on our YouTube channel.

FAMOUS AUTHORS

Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.

The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.

Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.

Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.

Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.

Classic Reader: Here you can read Shakespeare, young adult fiction and more.

Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.

Planet eBook: Download free classic literature titles here, from Dostoevsky to D.H. Lawrence to Joseph Conrad.

The Spectator Project: Montclair State University’s project features full-text, online versions of The Spectator and The Tatler.

Bibliomania: This site has more than 2,000 classic texts, plus study guides and reference books.

Online Library of Literature: Find full and unabridged texts of classic literature, including the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain and more.

Bartleby: Bartleby has much more than just the classics, but its collection of anthologies and other important novels made it famous.

Fiction.us: Fiction.us has a huge selection of novels, including works by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Flaubert, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.

Free Classic Literature: Find British authors like Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus other authors like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and more.

TEXTBOOKS

Textbook Revolution: Find biology, business, engineering, mathematics and world history textbooks here.

Wikibooks: From cookbooks to the computing department, find instructional and educational materials here.

KnowThis Free Online Textbooks: Get directed to stats textbooks and more.

Online Medical Textbooks: Find books about plastic surgery, anatomy and more here.

Online Science and Math Textbooks: Access biochemistry, chemistry, aeronautics, medical manuals and other textbooks here.

MIT Open Courseware Supplemental Resources: Find free videos, textbooks and more on the subjects of mechanical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and more.

Flat World Knowledge: This innovative site has created an open college textbooks platform that will launch in January 2009.

Free Business Textbooks: Find free books to go along with accounting, economics and other business classes.

Light and Matter: Here you can access open source physics textbooks.

eMedicine: This project from WebMD is continuously updated and has articles and references on surgery, pediatrics and more.

MATH AND SCIENCE

FullBooks.com: This site has “thousands of full-text free books,” including a large amount of scientific essays and books.

Free online textbooks, lecture notes, tutorials and videos on mathematics: NYU links to several free resources for math students.

Online Mathematics Texts: Here you can find online textbooks likeElementary Linear Algebra and Complex Variables.

Science and Engineering Books for free download: These books range in topics from nanotechnology to compressible flow.

FreeScience.info: Find over 1800 math, engineering and science books here.

Free Tech Books: Computer programmers and computer science enthusiasts can find helpful books here.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

byGosh: Find free illustrated children’s books and stories here.

Munseys: Munseys has nearly 2,000 children’s titles, plus books about religion, biographies and more.

International Children’s Digital Library: Find award-winning books and search by categories like age group, make believe books, true books or picture books.

Lookybook: Access children’s picture books here.

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

Bored.com: Bored.com has music ebooks, cooking ebooks, and over 150 philosophy titles and over 1,000 religion titles.

Ideology.us: Here you’ll find works by Rene Descartes, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, David Hume and others.

Free Books on Yoga, Religion and Philosophy: Recent uploads to this site include Practical Lessons in Yoga and Philosophy of Dreams.

The Sociology of Religion: Read this book by Max Weber, here.

Religion eBooks: Read books about the Bible, Christian books, and more.

PLAYS

ReadBookOnline.net: Here you can read plays by Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and others.

Plays: Read Pygmalion, Uncle Vanya or The Playboy of the Western World here.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: MIT has made available all of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and histories.

Plays Online: This site catalogs “all the plays [they] know about that are available in full text versions online for free.”

ProPlay: This site has children’s plays, comedies, dramas and musicals.

MODERN FICTION, FANTASY AND ROMANCE

Public Bookshelf: Find romance novels, mysteries and more.

The Internet Book Database of Fiction: This forum features fantasy and graphic novels, anime, J.K. Rowling and more.

Free Online Novels: Here you can find Christian novels, fantasy and graphic novels, adventure books, horror books and more.

Foxglove: This British site has free novels, satire and short stories.

Baen Free Library: Find books by Scott Gier, Keith Laumer and others.

The Road to Romance: This website has books by Patricia Cornwell and other romance novelists.

Get Free Ebooks: This site’s largest collection includes fiction books.

John T. Cullen: Read short stories from John T. Cullen here.

SF and Fantasy Books Online: Books here include Arabian Nights,Aesop’s Fables and more.

Free Novels Online and Free Online Cyber-Books: This list contains mostly fantasy books.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Project Laurens Jz Coster: Find Dutch literature here.

ATHENA Textes Francais: Search by author’s name, French books, or books written by other authors but translated into French.

Liber Liber: Download Italian books here. Browse by author, title, or subject.

Biblioteca romaneasca: Find Romanian books on this site.

Bibliolteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes: Look up authors to find a catalog of their available works on this Spanish site.

KEIMENA: This page is entirely in Greek, but if you’re looking for modern Greek literature, this is the place to access books online.

Proyecto Cervantes: Texas A&M’s Proyecto Cervantes has cataloged Cervantes’ work online.

Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum: Access many Latin texts here.

Project Runeberg: Find Scandinavian literature online here.

Italian Women Writers: This site provides information about Italian women authors and features full-text titles too.

Biblioteca Valenciana: Register to use this database of Catalan and Valencian books.

Ketab Farsi: Access literature and publications in Farsi from this site.

Afghanistan Digital Library: Powered by NYU, the Afghanistan Digital Library has works published between 1870 and 1930.

CELT: CELT stands for “the Corpus of Electronic Texts” features important historical literature and documents.

Projekt Gutenberg-DE: This easy-to-use database of German language texts lets you search by genres and author.

HISTORY AND CULTURE

LibriVox: LibriVox has a good selection of historical fiction.

The Perseus Project: Tufts’ Perseus Digital Library features titles from Ancient Rome and Greece, published in English and original languages.

Access Genealogy: Find literature about Native American history, the Scotch-Irish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries, and more.

Free History Books: This collection features U.S. history books, including works by Paul Jennings, Sarah Morgan Dawson, Josiah Quincy and others.

Most Popular History Books: Free titles include Seven Days and Seven Nights by Alexander Szegedy and Autobiography of a Female Slave by Martha G. Browne.

RARE BOOKS

Questia: Questia has 5,000 books available for free, including rare books and classics.

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

Books-On-Line: This large collection includes movie scripts, newer works, cookbooks and more.

Chest of Books: This site has a wide range of free books, including gardening and cooking books, home improvement books, craft and hobby books, art books and more.

Free e-Books: Find titles related to beauty and fashion, games, health, drama and more.

2020ok: Categories here include art, graphic design, performing arts, ethnic and national, careers, business and a lot more.

Free Art Books: Find artist books and art books in PDF format here.

Free Web design books: OnlineComputerBooks.com directs you to free web design books.

Free Music Books: Find sheet music, lyrics and books about music here.

Free Fashion Books: Costume and fashion books are linked to the Google Books page.

MYSTERY

MysteryNet: Read free short mystery stories on this site.

TopMystery.com: Read books by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, GK Chesterton and other mystery writers here.

Mystery Books: Read books by Sue Grafton and others.

POETRY

The Literature Network: This site features forums, a copy of The King James Bible, and over 3,000 short stories and poems.

Poetry: This list includes “The Raven,” “O Captain! My Captain!” and “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”

Poem Hunter: Find free poems, lyrics and quotations on this site.

Famous Poetry Online: Read limericks, love poetry, and poems by Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Lord Byron and others.

Google Poetry: Google Books has a large selection of poetry, fromThe Canterbury Tales to Beowulf to Walt Whitman.

QuotesandPoem.com: Read poems by Maya Angelou, William Blake, Sylvia Plath and more.

CompleteClassics.com: Rudyard Kipling, Allen Ginsberg and Alfred Lord Tennyson are all featured here.

PinkPoem.com: On this site, you can download free poetry ebooks.

MISC

Banned Books: Here you can follow links of banned books to their full text online.

World eBook Library: This monstrous collection includes classics, encyclopedias, children’s books and a lot more.

DailyLit: DailyLit has everything from Moby Dick to the recent phenomenon, Skinny Bitch.

A Celebration of Women Writers: The University of Pennsylvania’s page for women writers includes Newbery winners.

Free Online Novels: These novels are fully online and range from romance to religious fiction to historical fiction.

ManyBooks.net: Download mysteries and other books for your iPhone or eBook reader here.

Authorama: Books here are pulled from Google Books and more. You’ll find history books, novels and more.

Prize-winning books online: Use this directory to connect to full-text copies of Newbery winners, Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer winners.

Harvard has a pigment library that stores old pigment sources, like the ground shells of now-extinct insects, poisonous metals, and wrappings from Egyptian mummies, to preserve the origins of the world’s rarest colors.

A few centuries ago, finding a specific color might have meant trekking across the globe to a mineral deposit in the middle of Afghanistan. “Every pigment has its own story,” Narayan Khandekar, the caretaker of the pigment collection, told Fastcodesign. He also shared the stories of some of the most interesting pigments in the collection.

Mummy Brown

“People would harvest mummies from Egypt and then extract the brown resin material that was on the wrappings around the bodies and turn that into a pigment. It’s a very bizarre kind of pigment, I’ve got to say, but it was very popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.”

Cadmium Yellow

“Cadmium yellow was introduced in the mid 19th century. It’s a bright yellow that many impressionists used. Cadmium is a heavy metal, very toxic. In the early 20th century, cadmium red was introduced. You find these pigments used in industrial processes. Up until the 1970s, Lego bricks had cadmium pigment in them.”

Annatto “The lipstick plant—a small tree, Bixa orellana, native to Central and South America—produces annatto, a natural orange dye. Seeds from the plant are contained in a pod surrounded with a bright red pulp. Currently, annatto is used to color butter, cheese, and cosmetics.”

Lapis Lazuli “People would mine it in Afghanistan, ship it across Europe, and it was more expensive than gold so it would have its own budget line on a commission.”

Dragon’s Blood “It has a great name, but it’s not from dragons. [The bright red pigment] is from the rattan palm.”

Cochineal “This red dye comes from squashed beetles, and it’s used in cosmetics and food.”

Emerald Green “This is made from copper acetoarsenite. We had a Van Gogh with a bright green background that was identified as emerald green. Pigments used for artists’ purposes can find their way into use in other areas as well. Emerald green was used as an insecticide, and you often see it on older wood that would be put into the ground, like railroad ties.”

Source

Ojiya chijimi summer kimono, seen on

This type of kimono is made in Niigata prefecture (old Echigo province). Hemp kimono fabric bolt (tanmono) are laid outside to be whitened by sunlight reflecting on the snow. This process is similar to the one used for yuki-tsumugi kimono, and both are registrered as UNESCO Immaterial Heritage.

This process is depicted in Kawabata’s Yukiguni (Snow country)

The chijimi creased effect is considered very chic. Snow-made fabrics are especially appreciated for summer clothings.

Fructose alters hundreds of brain genes, which can lead to a wide range of diseases

A range of diseases — from diabetes to cardiovascular disease, and from Alzheimer’s disease to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — are linked to changes to genes in the brain. A new study by UCLA life scientists has found that hundreds of those genes can be damaged by fructose, a sugar that’s common in the Western diet, in a way that could lead to those diseases.

However, the researchers discovered good news as well: An omega-3 fatty acid known as docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, seems to reverse the harmful changes produced by fructose.

“DHA changes not just one or two genes; it seems to push the entire gene pattern back to normal, which is remarkable,” said Xia Yang, a senior author of the study and a UCLA assistant professor of integrative biology and physiology. “And we can see why it has such a powerful effect.”

DHA occurs naturally in the membranes of our brain cells, but not in a large enough quantity to help fight diseases.

“The brain and the body are deficient in the machinery to make DHA; it has to come through our diet,” said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a UCLA professor of neurosurgery and of integrative biology and physiology, and co-senior author of the paper.

DHA strengthens synapses in the brain and enhances learning and memory. It is abundant in wild salmon and, to a lesser extent, in other fish and fish oil, as well as walnuts, flaxseed, and fruits and vegetables, said Gomez-Pinilla, who also is a member of UCLA’s Brain Injury Research Center.

Americans get most of their fructose in foods that are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, an inexpensive liquid sweetener made from corn starch, and from sweetened drinks, syrups, honey and desserts. The Department of Agriculture estimates that Americans consumed an average of about 27 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup in 2014. Fructose is also found is in most baby food and in fruit, although the fiber in fruit substantially slows the body’s absorption of the sugar — and fruit contains other healthy components that protect the brain and body, Yang said.

To test the effects of fructose and DHA, the researchers trained rats to escape from a maze, and then randomly divided the animals into three groups. For the next six weeks, one group of rats drank water with an amount of fructose that would be roughly equivalent to a person drinking a liter of soda per day. The second group was given fructose water and a diet rich in DHA. The third received water without fructose and no DHA.

After the six weeks, the rats were put through the maze again. The animals that had been given only the fructose navigated the maze about half as fast than the rats that drank only water — indicating that the fructose diet had impaired their memory. The rats that had been given fructose and DHA, however, showed very similar results to those that only drank water — which strongly suggests that the DHA eliminated fructose’s harmful effects.

Other tests on the rats revealed more major differences: The rats receiving a high-fructose diet had much higher blood glucose, triglycerides and insulin levels than the other two groups. Those results are significant because in humans, elevated glucose, triglycerides and insulin are linked to obesity, diabetes and many other diseases.

The research team sequenced more than 20,000 genes in the rats’ brains, and identified more than 700 genes in the hypothalamus (the brain’s major metabolic control center) and more than 200 genes in the hippocampus (which helps regulate learning and memory) that were altered by the fructose. The altered genes they identified, the vast majority of which are comparable to genes in humans, are among those that interact to regulate metabolism, cell communication and inflammation. Among the conditions that can be caused by alterations to those genes are Parkinson’s disease, depression, bipolar disorder, and other brain diseases, said Yang, who also is a member of UCLA’s Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences.

Of the 900 genes they identified, the researchers found that two in particular, called Bgn and Fmod, appear to be among the first genes in the brain that are affected by fructose. Once those genes are altered, they can set off a cascade effect that eventually alters hundreds of others, Yang said.

That could mean that Bgn and Fmod would be potential targets for new drugs to treat diseases that are caused by altered genes in the brain, she added.

The research also uncovered new details about the mechanism fructose uses to disrupt genes. The scientists found that fructose removes or adds a biochemical group to cytosine, one of the four nucleotides that make up DNA. (The others are adenine, thymine and guanine.) This type of modification plays a critical role in turning genes “on” or “off.”

The research is published online in EBioMedicine, a journal published jointly by Cell and The Lancet. It is the first genomics study of all the genes, pathways and gene networks affected by fructose consumption in the regions of the brain that control metabolism and brain function.

Previous research led by Gomez-Pinilla found that fructose damages communication between brain cells and increases toxic molecules in the brain; and that a long-term high-fructose diet diminishes the brain’s ability to learn and remember information.

“Food is like a pharmaceutical compound that affects the brain,” said Gomez-Pinilla. He recommends avoiding sugary soft drinks, cutting down on desserts and generally consuming less sugar and saturated fat.

Although DHA appears to be quite beneficial, Yang said it is not a magic bullet for curing diseases. Additional research will be needed to determine the extent of its ability to reverse damage to human genes.

Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) seminal vesicle

Dr. Barbara Laurinyecz

Szeged, Hungary

Technique: Confocal, Fluorescence (600x)

(Fig.1. Neuron connections in biological neural networks. Source: MIPT press office)

Physicists build “electronic synapses” for neural networks

A team of scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology(MIPT) have created prototypes of “electronic synapses” based on ultra-thin films of hafnium oxide (HfO2). These prototypes could potentially be used in fundamentally new computing systems. The paper has been published in the journal Nanoscale Research Letters.

The group of researchers from MIPT have made HfO2-based memristors measuring just 40x40 nm2. The nanostructures they built exhibit properties similar to biological synapses. Using newly developed technology, the memristors were integrated in matrices: in the future this technology may be used to design computers that function similar to biological neural networks.

Memristors (resistors with memory) are devices that are able to change their state (conductivity) depending on the charge passing through them, and they therefore have a memory of their “history”. In this study, the scientists used devices based on thin-film hafnium oxide, a material that is already used in the production of modern processors. This means that this new lab technology could, if required, easily be used in industrial processes.

“In a simpler version, memristors are promising binary non-volatile memory cells, in which information is written by switching the electric resistance – from high to low and back again. What we are trying to demonstrate are much more complex functions of memristors – that they behave similar to biological synapses,” said Yury Matveyev, the corresponding author of the paper, and senior researcher of MIPT’s Laboratory of Functional Materials and Devices for Nanoelectronics, commenting on the study.

Synapses – the key to learning and memory

A synapse is point of connection between neurons, the main function of which is to transmit a signal (a spike – a particular type of signal, see fig. 2) from one neuron to another. Each neuron may have thousands of synapses, i.e. connect with a large number of other neurons. This means that information can be processed in parallel, rather than sequentially (as in modern computers). This is the reason why “living” neural networks are so immensely effective both in terms of speed and energy consumption in solving large range of tasks, such as image / voice recognition, etc.

(Fig.2 The type of electrical signal transmitted by neurons (a “spike”). The red lines are various other biological signals, the black line is the averaged signal. Source: MIPT press office)

Over time, synapses may change their “weight”, i.e. their ability to transmit a signal. This property is believed to be the key to understanding the learning and memory functions of thebrain.

From the physical point of view, synaptic “memory” and “learning” in the brain can be interpreted as follows: the neural connection possesses a certain “conductivity”, which is determined by the previous “history” of signals that have passed through the connection. If a synapse transmits a signal from one neuron to another, we can say that it has high “conductivity”, and if it does not, we say it has low “conductivity”. However, synapses do not simply function in on/off mode; they can have any intermediate “weight” (intermediate conductivity value). Accordingly, if we want to simulate them using certain devices, these devices will also have to have analogous characteristics.

The memristor as an analogue of the synapse

As in a biological synapse, the value of the electrical conductivity of a memristor is the result of its previous “life” – from the moment it was made.

There is a number of physical effects that can be exploited to design memristors. In this study, the authors used devices based on ultrathin-film hafnium oxide, which exhibit the effect of soft (reversible) electrical breakdown under an applied external electric field. Most often, these devices use only two different states encoding logic zero and one. However, in order to simulate biological synapses, a continuous spectrum of conductivities had to be used in the devices.

“The detailed physical mechanism behind the function of the memristors in question is still debated. However, the qualitative model is as follows: in the metal–ultrathin oxide–metal structure, charged point defects, such as vacancies of oxygen atoms, are formed and move around in the oxide layer when exposed to an electric field. It is these defects that are responsible for the reversible change in the conductivity of the oxide layer,” says the co-author of the paper and researcher of MIPT’s Laboratory of Functional Materials and Devices for Nanoelectronics, Sergey Zakharchenko.

The authors used the newly developed “analogue” memristors to model various learning mechanisms (“plasticity”) of biological synapses. In particular, this involved functions such as long-term potentiation (LTP) or long-term depression (LTD) of a connection between two neurons. It is generally accepted that these functions are the underlying mechanisms of  memory in the brain.

The authors also succeeded in demonstrating a more complex mechanism – spike-timing-dependent plasticity, i.e. the dependence of the value of the connection between neurons on the relative time taken for them to be “triggered”. It had previously been shown that this mechanism is responsible for associative learning – the ability of the brain to find connections between different events.

To demonstrate this function in their memristor devices, the authors purposefully used an electric signal which reproduced, as far as possible, the signals in living neurons, and they obtained a dependency very similar to those observed in living synapses (see fig. 3).

(Fig.3. The change in conductivity of memristors depending on the temporal separation between “spikes”(rigth) and the change in potential of the neuron connections in biological neural networks. Source: MIPT press office)

These results allowed the authors to confirm that the elements that they had developed could be considered a prototype of the “electronic synapse”, which could be used as a basis for the hardware implementation of artificial neural networks.

“We have created a baseline matrix of nanoscale memristors demonstrating the properties of biological synapses. Thanks to this research, we are now one step closer to building an artificial neural network. It may only be the very simplest of networks, but it is nevertheless a hardware prototype,” said the head of MIPT’s Laboratory of Functional Materials and Devices for Nanoelectronics, Andrey Zenkevich.

A history of note

In 2016 the Bank of England will issue their first polymer (plastic) banknotes. Here’s a brief history of the banknote, from Chinese origins to a worldwide phenomenon.

Paper currency was first used in China as early as AD 1000. It was the Chinese who first printed a value on a piece of paper and persuaded everyone that it was worth what it said it was. The whole modern banking system of paper and credit is built on this one simple act of faith. The Chinese had invented both paper and block printing, and this allowed the printing of paper money.

The Chinese writing along the top of this Ming dynasty banknote reads (from right to left): ‘Da Ming tong xing bao chao’ and translates as ‘Great Ming Circulating Treasure Note’. You can find out more about it here. 

The Ming were the first Chinese dynasty to try to totally replace coins with paper money. After seizing power from the Mongol rulers of China in 1368, the rulers of the Ming dynasty tried to reinstate bronze coins. However, there was not enough metal available for this, and paper money, made of mulberry bark, was produced from 1375. Paper money continued to be issued throughout the Ming dynasty, but inflation quickly eroded its value. The effect of inflation was so devastating that paper money was regarded with suspicion for many years and it was not until the 1850s that paper money was issued again. 

The first banknotes in Europe were issued in Sweden by the Stockholm Banco, set up in 1656 by merchant Johan Palmstruch. It produced its first notes a few years later, in 1661, as an alternative to the huge and inconvenient copper plate money which was then in circulation in Sweden. Though the designs of these early notes were simple, they were carefully printed on handmade paper. They were given official authority by impressions of several seals, including the seal of the bank, and no less than eight handwritten signatures. Johan Palmstruch’s own signature can be seen here at the top of the list, on the left of the note. The Stockholm Banco was a private business, but it had close connections with the Swedish crown and the government. It was very successful at first, but then lent too much money and issued too many notes without proper backing. Palmstruch was blamed for the difficulties and imprisoned for mismanagement. Despite the failure of his bank, he is remembered now for introducing notes which were passed freely as money, just like the banknotes that we use today.

Bills of exchange evolved with the growth of banking in Europe from the 13th century. Paper money like the banknotes we use today was not then part of everyday currency in the West, but bankers and merchants did use written records for settling payments, especially in trade. In their simplest form, bills of exchange were written instructions by one person to an agent, authorising payment to a named individual or firm at a specified future date. They were therefore a convenient way of providing credit or making payments over a distance. In this example, John Emerson in Hamburg has instructed Austin Goodwin, a merchant in Bristol, to pay £380 to Joachim Coldorph in three months’ time. If Coldorph needed money sooner, he might choose to sell the bill to a fourth party at a discounted rate. That buyer would then present the bill for payment in Bristol at the appointed date.

In the mid-19th century, individual banks in the American states issued many different banknotes. This continued during the Civil War (1861–1865), but new paper money issued by the treasuries of the United States in New York and the Confederate States in Richmond reflected the political conflict. In the North, the first public paper money issued under the Constitution of the United States was authorised in July 1861, to finance war with the Confederacy. The back of the notes were printed in green, giving rise to the nickname ‘greenbacks’ for American bills. The colour green was chosen as that colour ink best stuck to the paper. The note shown here is an example of the second issue of 1862. On the front is a portrait of Salmon P Chase, Secretary to the Treasury.

During the First World War (1914–1918) a shortage of coins encouraged towns and regions in several European countries to issue local notes worth small sums. In Germany this Notgeld (‘emergency money’) became popular as a theme for collecting, and by the 1920s these tiny notes were produced in vast numbers with collecting, rather than spending, in mind. Designs on the notes ranged from wartime propaganda to local views or scenes from folklore. This example from the town of Hameln (Hamelin), in bright primary colours, refers to the Pied Piper, the legendary rat catcher who lured the children of the town to their deaths in the 13th century. A whole sequence of notes was issued, each one illustrating a different part of the tale.

The issuing of the £5 polymer banknote, which will bear the portrait of Sir Winston Churchill, means that England joins the growing number of countries who already use polymer technology. The durability and increased security afforded by the plastic notes have made them an attractive proposition to issuing authorities throughout the world from Australia and Nigeria to Brazil and Canada. This image shows a sheet of 32 uncut polymer banknotes printed for Clydesdale Bank in Scotland in 2015.

Discover the history of money in the British Museum’s Citi Money Gallery (Room 68), supported by Citi.

“Brainprint” Biometric ID Hits 100% Accuracy

Psychologists and engineers at Binghamton University in New York say they’ve hit a milestone in the quest to use the unassailable inner workings of the mind as a form of biometric identification. They came up with an electroencephalograph system that proved 100 percent accurate at identifying individuals by the way their brains responded to a series of images. But EEG as a practical means of authentication is still far off.

Many earlier attempts had come close to 100 percent accuracy but couldn’t completely close the gap. “It’s a big deal going from 97 to 100 percent because we imagine the applications for this technology being for high-security situations,” says Sarah Laszlo, the assistant professor of psychology at Binghamton who led the research with electrical engineering professor Zhanpeng Jin.

Perhaps as important as perfect accuracy is that this new form of ID can do something fingerprints and retinal scans have a hard time achieving: It can be “canceled.”

Fingerprint authentication can be reset if the associated data is stolen, because that data can be stored as a mathematically transformed version of itself, points out Clarkson University biometrics expert Stephanie Schuckers. However, that trick doesn’t work if it’s the fingerprint (or the finger) itself that’s stolen. And the theft part, at least, is easier than ever. In 2014 hackers claimed to have cloned German defense minister Ursula von der Leyen’s fingerprints just by taking a high-­definition photo of her hands at a public event.

Several early attempts at EEG-based identification sought the equivalent of a fingerprint in the electrical activity of a brain at rest. But this new brain biometric, which its inventors call CEREBRE, dodges the cancelability problem because it’s based on the brain’s responses to a sequence of particular types of images. To keep that ID from being permanently hijacked, those images can be changed or re-sorted to essentially make a new biometric passkey, should the original one somehow be hacked.

CEREBRE, which Laszlo, Jin, and colleagues described in IEEE Transactions in Information Forensics and Security, involves presenting a person wearing an EEG system with images that fall into several cate­gories: foods people feel strongly about, celebrities who also evoke emotions, simple sine waves of different frequencies, and uncommon words. The words and images are usually black and white, but occasionally one is presented in color because that produces its own kind of response.

Each image causes a recognizable change in voltage at the scalp called an event-related potential, or ERP. The different categories of images involve somewhat different combinations of parts of your brain, and they were already known to produce slight differences in the shapes of ERPs in different people. Laszlo’s hypothesis was that using all of them—several more than any other system—would create enough different ERPs to accurately distinguish one person from another.

The EEG responses were fed to software called a classifier. After testing several schemes, including a variety of neural networks and other machine-learning tricks, the engineers found that what actually worked best was a system based on simple cross correlation.

In the experiments, each of the 50 test subjects saw a sequence of 500 images, each flashed for 1 second. “We collected 500, knowing it was overkill,” Laszlo says. Once the researchers crunched the data they found that just 27 images would have been enough to hit the 100 percent mark.

The experiments were done with a high-quality research-grade EEG, which used 30 electrodes attached to the skull with conductive goop. However, the data showed that the system needs only three electrodes for 100 percent identification, and Laszlo says her group is working on simplifying the setup. They’re testing consumer EEG gear from Emotiv and NeuroSky, and they’ve even tried to replicate the work with electrodes embedded in a Google Glass, though the results weren’t spectacular, she says.

For EEG to really be taken seriously as a biometric ID, brain interfaces will need to be pretty commonplace, says Schuckers. That might yet happen. “As we go more and more into wearables as a standard part of our lives, [EEGs] might be more suitable,” she says.

But like any security system, even an EEG biometric will attract hackers. How can you hack something that depends on your thought patterns? One way, explains Laszlo, is to train a hacker’s brain to mimic the right responses. That would involve flashing light into a hacker’s eye at precise times while the person is observing the images. These flashes are known to alter the shape of the ERP.

Laplace transform table. Source. (I’m obsessed. <3 And figured y’all would like this one, too!)

Samurai armour.

A chart I made showing the names of the various main components of a suit of “modern samurai armour” or tosei gusoku. Tosei gusoku refers to armour worn by samurai that began to appear during the middle of the Muromachi Period (1337-1573) with the introduction of firearms.

A full suit of tosei gusoku as shown in my chart would have weighed in at around 30 kilograms or so including weapons - there is after all a considerable amount of iron plates and lacing!

Lower class samurai such as foot soldiers (ashigaru) would have carried their own rations, bedding, and other equipment, but their armour was somewhat lighter being generally less ornamented.

At this point in time, known in Japanese history as the Sengoku Period or the Warring States Period, the most common samurai weapon was the spear followed by the bow and arrow. The sword at this point in time was a secondary weapon relied upon during close combat.

The sword carried during this period was the longer, gracefully curved tachi and was worn edge down on the left side supported either by it’s own tachi mounting (tachi koshirae) or by using a special leather “sling” (koshiate) if it was mounted without hangers (ashi).

Another shorter sword called a chisagatana - literally “little sword” - was carried together with the tachi at the left hip up until the Momoyama period (1573-1603) when it was abandoned. The chisagatana was originally a throw away weapon reserved for use by conscript foot soldiers (ashigaru), but higher ranking samurai soon took up the carrying of one as a back up weapon. 

Higher ranked samurai, those in charge of troops and generals in particular, also carried a short stout blade called a metezashi at the right hip, with the handle facing forwards. This weapon was designed for extreme close combat and used to penetrate the weak spots in an opponents armour. When swords were crossed, the metezashi could be drawn with the left hand and thrust into the opponent’s armpits. It could also be drawn with the right hand and thrown underarm in an instant to distract and stun an opponent before following up with the sword.

© James Kemlo

Everyday Phenomena: The Maillard Reaction

At first glance, steak, French fries, bread, milk caramel, and soy sauce don’t have very many similarities. However, the preparation of these foods all have one thing in common: browning that occurs via the Maillard (my-YAR) reaction.

The Maillard reaction was first discovered in 1912 by Louis-Camille Maillard, and refers to a long chain of reactions that ultimately leads to browning of food. This chain typically begins with the condensation of an amine (often the amino acid lysine) with a reducing sugar (containing an aldehyde); one example of this Amadori rearrangement is shown above with lysine and glucose.

This Amadori product can react in a variety of different ways, including dehydration and deamination to produce a diverse array of molecules that give browned food a distinctive flavor; a few of these compounds are shown above. At the end of the sequence of reactions that occur during browning is a class of polymeric compounds known as melanoidins, which lend a brown color to the food.

Below about 140°C (280°F), the Maillard reaction does not proceed at an appreciable rate, although alkaline conditions (such as the lye used to make pretzels) can accelerate the process. Without this reaction, many foods we enjoy now wouldn’t be nearly as tasty!

Further Reading: Hodge, J. E., J. Agric. Food Chem. 1953, 1 (15), 928-943 (Full text)

Too much sex causes genitals to change shape, beetle study shows

Sexual conflict between males and females can lead to changes in the shape of their genitals, according to research on burying beetles by scientists at the University of Exeter.

The study, published in the journal Evolution, provides new evidence that conflict over how often mating takes place can lead to males evolving longer penis-like organs and females larger ‘claws’ on their genitalia, within ten generations.

“Our research demonstrates the general importance of conflicts of interest between males and females in helping to generate some of the biodiversity that we see in the natural world. It’s fascinating how genital evolution can happen so fast – in ten generations – showing how rapidly evolutionary changes can occur.”

Paul E. Hopwood, Megan L. Head, Eleanor J. Jordan, Mauricio J. Carter, Emma Davey, Allen J. Moore, Nick J. Royle. Selection on an antagonistic behavioral trait can drive rapid genital coevolution in the burying beetle,Nicrophorus vespilloides. Evolution, 2016; DOI: 10.1111/evo.12938

Platonic solid: In Euclidean geometry, a Platonic solid is a regular, convex polyhedron with congruent faces of regular polygons and the same number of faces meeting at each vertex. Five solids meet those criteria, and each is named after its number of faces.

An Archimedean solid is a highly symmetric, semi-regular convex polyhedron composed of two or more types of regular polygons meeting in identical vertices . They are distinct from the Platonic soilds, which are composed of only one type of polygon meeting in identical vertices, and from the Johnson solids, whose regular polygonal faces do not meet in identical vertices.

In mathematics, a Catalan solid, or Archimedean dual, is a dual polyhedron to an Archimedean soild. The Catalan solids are named for the Belgian mathematician, Eugène Catalan, who first described them in 1865.

The Catalan solids are all convex. They are face-transitive but not vertex-transitive. This is because the dual Archimedean solids are vertex-transitive and not face-transitive. Note that unlike Platonic soilds  and Archimedean soild, the faces of Catalan solids are not regular polygons. However, the vertex figures of Catalan solids are regular, and they have constant dihedral angles. Additionally, two of the Catalan solids are edge-transitive: the rhombic dodecahedron and the rhombic triacontahedron. These are the duals of the two quasi-regular Archimedean solids.

Images: Polyhedral Relations by Allison Chen on Behance.

Are humans the new supercomputer?

The saying of philosopher René Descartes of what makes humans unique is beginning to sound hollow. ‘I think – therefore soon I am obsolete’ seems more appropriate. When a computer routinely beats us at chess and we can barely navigate without the help of a GPS, have we outlived our place in the world? Not quite. Welcome to the front line of research in cognitive skills, quantum computers and gaming.

Today there is an on-going battle between man and machine. While genuine machine consciousness is still years into the future, we are beginning to see computers make choices that previously demanded a human’s input. Recently, the world held its breath as Google’s algorithm AlphaGo beat a professional player in the game Go—an achievement demonstrating the explosive speed of development in machine capabilities.

But we are not beaten yet - human skills are still superior in some areas. This is one of the conclusions of a recent study by Danish physicist Jacob Sherson, published in the prestigious science journal Nature.

”It may sound dramatic, but we are currently in a race with technology—and steadily being overtaken in many areas. Features that used to be uniquely human are fully captured by contemporary algorithms. Our results are here to demonstrate that there is still a difference between the abilities of a man and a machine,” explains Jacob Sherson.

At the interface between quantum physics and computer games, Sherson and his research group at Aarhus University have identified one of the abilities that still makes us unique compared to a computer’s enormous processing power: our skill in approaching problems heuristically and solving them intuitively. The discovery was made at the AU Ideas Centre CODER, where an interdisciplinary team of researchers work to transfer some human traits to the way computer algorithms work. 


Quantum physics holds the promise of immense technological advances in areas ranging from computing to high-precision measurements. However, the problems that need to be solved to get there are so complex that even the most powerful supercomputers struggle with them. This is where the core idea behind CODER—combining the processing power of computers with human ingenuity—becomes clear. 


Our common intuition Like Columbus in QuantumLand, the CODER research group mapped out how the human brain is able to make decisions based on intuition and accumulated experience. This is done using the online game “Quantum Moves”. Over 10,000 people have played the game that allows everyone contribute to basic research in quantum physics.

"The map we created gives us insight into the strategies formed by the human brain. We behave intuitively when we need to solve an unknown problem, whereas for a computer this is incomprehensible. A computer churns through enormous amounts of information, but we can choose not to do this by basing our decision on experience or intuition. It is these intuitive insights that we discovered by analysing the Quantum Moves player solutions,” explains Jacob Sherson. 


The laws of quantum physics dictate an upper speed limit for data manipulation, which in turn sets the ultimate limit to the processing power of quantum computers—the Quantum Speed ​​Limit. Until now a computer algorithm has been used to identify this limit. It turns out that with human input researchers can find much better solutions than the algorithm.

"The players solve a very complex problem by creating simple strategies. Where a computer goes through all available options, players automatically search for a solution that intuitively feels right. Through our analysis we found that there are common features in the players’ solutions, providing a glimpse into the shared intuition of humanity. If we can teach computers to recognise these good solutions, calculations will be much faster. In a sense we are downloading our common intuition to the computer” says Jacob Sherson.

And it works. The group has shown that we can break the Quantum Speed Limit by combining the cerebral cortex and computer chips. This is the new powerful tool in the development of quantum computers and other quantum technologies.

We are the new supercomputer

Science is often perceived as something distant and exclusive, conducted behind closed doors. To enter you have to go through years of education, and preferably have a doctorate or two. Now a completely different reality is materialising. 


In recent years, a new phenomenon has appeared—citizen science breaks down the walls of the laboratory and invites in everyone who wants to contribute. The team at Aarhus University uses games to engage people in voluntary science research. Every week people around the world spend 3 billion hours playing games. Games are entering almost all areas of our daily life and have the potential to become an invaluable resource for science.

“Who needs a supercomputer if we can access even a small fraction of this computing power? By turning science into games, anyone can do research in quantum physics. We have shown that games break down the barriers between quantum physicists and people of all backgrounds, providing phenomenal insights into state-of-the-art research. Our project combines the best of both worlds and helps challenge established paradigms in computational research,” explains Jacob Sherson.

The difference between the machine and us, figuratively speaking, is that we intuitively reach for the needle in a haystack without knowing exactly where it is. We ‘guess’ based on experience and thereby skip a whole series of bad options. For Quantum Moves, intuitive human actions have been shown to be compatible with the best computer solutions. In the future it will be exciting to explore many other problems with the aid of human intuition.

"We are at the borderline of what we as humans can understand when faced with the problems of quantum physics. With the problem underlying Quantum Moves we give the computer every chance to beat us. Yet, over and over again we see that players are more efficient than machines at solving the problem. While Hollywood blockbusters on artificial intelligence are starting to seem increasingly realistic, our results demonstrate that the comparison between man and machine still sometimes favours us. We are very far from computers with human-type cognition,” says Jacob Sherson and continues:

“Our work is first and foremost a big step towards the understanding of quantum physical challenges. We do not know if this can be transferred to other challenging problems, but it is definitely something that we will work hard to resolve in the coming years.”