An interesting point to note is that one of the world's strongest climbers, who recently put up the hardest problem in Fontainebleau, is Charles Albert, who spends most of his time climbing barefoot: https://www.planetmountain.com/en/news/climbing/charles-albe...
Author here. I often find when working on rich editors that I want to see a graphical representation of the editor dom with the current selection and any hidden or hard-to-see characters. That's what ViewDom does. Unfortunately it still needs some work on mobile devices but I already find it useful.
Author here. I started this when the original comic was released in 2012 but it fell by the wayside. Recently I decided to pick up where I left off. It was interesting to take my own legacy coffeescript code from a time in which I didn't really know what I was doing and try to make it into something fun.
I often tell people that I love my dog more than any human has ever loved a child, but I don't love this study.
The result is fairly obvious to any dog owner, but the study is representative of the type of "pop" science that appears so often in the news but carries little actual significance. 34 dogs total, 17 in each group (humming vs crying), 9 of which respond to humming and 7 of which respond to crying, albeit the latter much faster than the former. Of those 34 dogs, 16 were therapy dogs. While the time difference is large, more dogs respond to humming than crying.
So we have a very small sample size which is biased towards therapy dogs. It is also very susceptible to p-hacking. Why "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"? Was this the song that produced the largest effect out of 20 different songs? Why do more dogs respond to the humming than crying but the dogs that do respond to crying act so quickly? Were the crying sounds much louder than the humming? Why not crying vs yelling, both of which are likely of similar volume? And so on.
As an American living in Europe I would call pastries for breakfast a western breakfast. The idea that the US eats nothing but sugar for breakfast and this is unique in the world is way off base. Among my friends and colleagues, mostly Europeans from many different corners of Europe, it is exceedingly common to eat some form of croissants or pastries for breakfast. I think the difference lies in the portion sizes and density of these pastries.
I'll have pastries once a week when I have breakfast with my wife, but otherwise I tend towards yogurt, bananas, and a handful of cereal. I'm not on the "sugar is evil" bandwagon. I definitely do manage my weight but it is more about calorie control than sugar intake. A serving of yogurt will have between 100 and 220 calories depending on if it is plain or has a bunch of good stuff added (I like both), a banana around 100 calories, and a handful of cereal about the same. I love sugary cereal and don't want to eliminate it from my diet. The difference between how I consume it now and when I was a kid is that I really eat one handful at breakfast time whereas in my childhood would eat one to two large bowls.
Granola is the killer. The crunchy kind of granola has more calories per gram than sugary cereal and unfortunately is more dense. I see many people trying to eat a healthy, low calorie yogurt and granola breakfast only to fill the bowl with granola. Game over.
"Having performed thousands of similar hair examinations over the previous 10 years, the FBI agent told the court, there had been only eight or 10 times when hairs from two different people were so similar that he could not tell them apart"
At worst this is a 1% error rate, at best 0.1%. Scientific validity aside, I find it unbelievable this was not considered reasonable doubt.
What caught my eye was the oscillation in the abundancy graph, there is a tendency for even atomic number elements to be more abundant than odd atomic number elements. Looking at the original Wikipedia article leads to the Oddo-Harkins rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddo%E2%80%93Harkins_rule. There is more discussion on the stability of even vs odd atomic number elements here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even_and_odd_atomic_nuclei. From the latter link, roughly 60% of stable nuclei have an even number of protons and an even number of neutrons. Only 2% have an odd number of protons and an odd number of neutrons.
It would be nice if someone could explain any of the exceptions to the Oddo-Harkins rule, such as the dip at atomic number 44, Ruthenium.
Hi, author here, my statistics abilities are far from perfect so I'd welcome any feedback. I have a feeling there is a much easier way to get to the full answer than the statistical hoops I jumped through.
I think the Drake equation is worth mentioning here. It estimates the number of civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable (https://www.authorea.com/11048). Knowing some of the numbers involved, it can be reduced to approximately:
N ~= 2flfefcL
where fl is the fraction of habitable planets hosting life, fe is the fraction of life-bearing planets that develop an intelligent life-form, fc is the fraction of intelligent life-forms that decide to communicate, and L is the length of time a given civilization is transmitting "visible" communications. Taking ourselves as an example, L is already on the order of 100 years. The original estimates for these values were fl = 1, fe = 1, fc = 0.1-0.2, and L = 1000-100,000,000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation).
Hey, thanks for providing a boxer's perspective. While you're here, I have a couple random questions: Do you always spar with headgear, mostly with headgear, or never with headgear? Can a boxer make a living as a sparring partner? How much is weight an advantage? Is 5 pounds massive, minor, or inconsequential? Finally, have you ever received a liver shot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_shot?
I'm impressed with anyone who will get in the ring. I might try it again one day with headgear. It's a spectacular workout and I'm sure it would be fun if you could get beyond the pain and fear and start using different tactics and strategies.
I've boxed exactly twice in my life. Neither time was against a trained boxer, it just so happened that someone had a few pairs of boxing gloves lying around. My main take away was that getting punched in the face sucks way more than you think it would. Counter-intuitively, if you get punched in the face enough it eventually stops hurting at all. Time slows down. Your arms drop. Your mind drifts to thoughts totally unrelated to boxing. During the first "match" my opponent, also a friend, left me a gentle nudge away from getting knocked out. Although not quite enjoyable, I am glad to have had the experience.
All other sports are now erring on the side of caution when it comes to concussions, especially American football. In boxing the whole point is to give the other guy a concussion. You don't fall down from getting knocked over, you fall down because your body forgets how to stand up. And once that happens, which is some form of minor (or major) concussion, everyone cheers you on, encouraging you to stand back up so that you can get concussed again. Amazing.
I wish 1 pound of beef was only 213 calories. I think you took Google's first result (https://www.google.com/search?q=1+lb+beef+calories) which is actually for 3 ounces (85 grams). You need to multiply that by 16/3 (there are 16 ounces in a pound) which gives 1136 calories/lb.
This is a weird article. What is referred to as the bridge is the pre-chorus, a common element in pop music. Bridges are also common, but generally only happen once in a song (I can't think of any exceptions) and are typically a 'journey' to somewhere else before coming back to the original theme. An example of a bridge is about 2.5 minutes into John Mayer's Find Another You: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QcaHBTfGU8&t=2m38s.
It might not sound like a lot but you need to put it in the scale of the atoms. That is about a 1% change in atomic spacing, which means a 1% strain applied to the sample, which is pretty big (think about how much weight you'd need to hang off of a steel bar to get it to stretch by 1%).
"Among these, the enhancement in the dx2-y2 character of the in-plane electronic structure is likely to favour superconductivity."
They cite two of their past publications, "Optically enhanced coherent transport in YBa2Cu3O6.5 by ultrafast redistribution of interlayer coupling," and "Optically induced coherent transport far above Tc in underdoped YBCuO."
If they had actually unequivocally shown pulsed YBCO to be superconducting at room temperature the title would be more like, "ROOM TEMPERATURE SUPERCONDUCTIVITY YES!!!!!"
The real demonstration of superconductivity is measuring a Meissner effect (exclusion of magnetic field) in the material (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect). I haven't read the articles in detail, but it sounds to me like they have seen some properties that are similar to those found in the superconducting state, but they have not measured a definitive signature of superconductivity.
Although I'm a physicist group theory was one of my favorite undergraduate courses. At the risk of sounding like an idiot to a mathematician, I will attempt to explain one of the cooler parts of an extremely cool subject. There are finite and infinite groups. An example of the former is the modulo3 addition operator over the elements [0,1,2]. The identity element is 0, 0+0=0, 0+1=1, 0+2=2. The inverse of 0 is 0, of 1 is 2 (1 + 2 mod 3 = 0) and of 2 is 1 (2 + 1 mod 3 = 0). Addition is also associative so we have that covered. An example of an infinite group would be addition over the integers.
Anyway, focusing on finite groups, mathematicians spent many years trying to classify finite groups into different types. For instance, every finite group of prime length is a cyclic group (http://groupprops.subwiki.org/wiki/Group_of_prime_order). This is already very cool since it implies that for each prime number, there is exactly one group with that number of elements, anything that looks like another group can be mapped 1:1 with the cyclic group.
There are many other types of finite groups and the vast majority (this is an understatement) can be classified as one type or another. At some point mathematicians realized that although there are an infinite number of finite groups, maybe they could classify all finite groups into one type or another and set about doing so, with the caveat that there is a finite number of exceptions to this classification, and these exceptions are called sporadic groups (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_group).
Here is where my knowledge is the fuzziest but also where things get awesome. Using a form of magic only available to mathematicians, it was predicted that an extremely large sporadic group existed somewhere out there, avoiding classification into one of the standard group types. I am guessing that certain hints to its existence were popping up here and there but have no idea as to what those hints might look like. In physics, particles have been predicted before (and at least one time using group theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_Way_%28physics%29), these predictions usually stem from attempting to explain experimental results. Mathematics lacks these experimental results so these sorts of predictions are all the more impressive.
Anyway, back to this extremely large group. It was given the name the Monster Group and an upper bound was given as to its size. If I recall correctly (I cannot find a citation), this upper bound was considered the largest useful number of all time (any child can name a number larger than a number given to them, but using it in some novel way is not so easy). Eventually the Monster Group was found, fulfilling the prediction, and its size given as 808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000, far below the upper bound but still quite large nonetheless (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_group).