Friday, September 21, 2007
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Iran doesn't like our fashion-sense
Of course women have been, by law, required to cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes, but this law applies also to men.
Women can receive lashes, fines and imprisonment, while barbers can be closed down and permanently lose their licenses for offering "western services".
I guess I don't know what to think of this. I think any law like this is stupid in the first place, but at least they're being less sexist this time?
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Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Earth-like planet in our solar system
HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher) on the ESO 3.6m telescope in Chile has discovered an Earth-like exoplanet roughly 50% larger than Earth and capable of having liquid water. It completes a full orbit in 13 days, and though it is 14 times closer to its sun than Earth is to ours, its sun is smaller and colder than ours. It is estimated that the mean temperature of the planet is between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius.
Now we just need spaceships and we can go make some alien friends, come on guys! I hope they're Greys!
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Thursday, March 22, 2007
Smartest students use heavy metal to beat stress
A study conducted by the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth revealed that while rock and pop are by far the most popular music genres listened to at the University of Warwick, "gifted" students listen to heavy metal.
This is common sense because intelligence is also linked closely to depression, and these kids revealed they use it to "purge [this] negativity".
Go metal!
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Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Most complicated mathematical structure mastered!
The mathematical group called E8 is a complex object described by a numerical matrix of more than 400,000 rows and columns. It is a 57-dimensional solid. Think about that for a sec.
To find someone on the surface of Earth you need two coordinates; latitude and longitude, or at most four if you are locating, say, someone in an apartment building at a certain point in time, but with this object you would need 57 coordinates to define a location, and the group of symmetries has 248 dimensions!
It took 77 hours to compute on a supercomputer and created a file approximately 60GB in size. In comparison, the entire human genome is less than 1GB. The supercomputer obviously was very fast, but what made it able to finally do this massive calculation was that it had tens of gigabytes of RAM, something that has only recently become possible with any computer.
This advancement in mathematics can also be compared with mapping the human genome, as in and of itself it doesn't solve any problems, but it provides a great base. It will allow for breakthroughs in geometry, number theory and (most exciting for me) the physics of string theory.
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Friday, March 16, 2007
Traditional masculinity heals
A new study from the University of Missouri-Columbia confirms correlations between masculinity and recovery from serious injuries.
Traditional masculinity includes being tough and the willingness to see something through to the end (stick-to-it-iveness. wtf who makes these stupid non-words)
It has long been assumed that [these] men are not as concerned and don't take good care of themselves, but what we're seeing here is that the same ideas that led to their injuries help them heal faster.
Totally makes sense! Toughen up you new-age, sissy, chump, girly-men!
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Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Subliminal messages in slot machines
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