erroneous thoughts

OK, granted, the first 15 seconds are somewhat… weird, but the rest, is plain awesome:

From /.

Via Que Treta!

The best and most “right to the point” explanation of how science works I’ve ever seen. Enjoy!

It’s a shame that this web page does not elaborate on the details:

Understanding how randomly-moving objects arrive at a certain destination is no secret to scientists today. But no theory, until now, could predict the time it would take for an object to move between given addresses in a complex environment, like through the human body or the World Wide Web. Previous models only explained the passage of time when the event occurred in a homogenous environment, like in a vacuum or in a glass of water.

Could this mean we are going back to a Laplacian universe of sorts?

… and so should be the software used in theorem proving and similar stuff! At least according to some mathematicians (and some of them Field medalists).

I can’t resist to make the following extrapolation: should it not be the same (even if to a lesser extent) in teaching?  After all, students could on occasions learn quite a lot from looking at source code. Now all we need is someone to go tell that to Portuguese politicians…

… when I start posting things like this:

A physicist, a mathematician, and an engineer are sitting around and one of them says “It says here that Professor X has come up with a new theorem that all odd numbers greater than 2 are prime“. Each person present thinks to himself:

Mathematician: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, the rest follows by Mathematical induction.

Physicist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is an experimental error, 11 is prime…

Engineer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is approximately prime, 11 is prime, 13 is prime …

Mechanical engineer: 3 is prime, 4 is prime, 5 is prime, 6 is prime…

Computer engineer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 7 is prime, 7 is prime…

To bed, I now march! (Yesterday’s night was long and today’s early morning was, well, early)

Ok, some things are just weird to be true. Or then again … vide, this:

According to the telegraph, a team of mathematicians from Cambridge considered Jessica Alba to be mathematically perfect.

O_o , …

(funny thing is that I found this when I was reading a post about… go figure, copyright! Wicked!! lol…)

This post is dedicated to a colleague of mine, who is rather fond of rubber ducks

Well, from the bathtub to the Atlantic, rubber ducks to the power!

They were toys destined only to bob up and down in nothing bigger than a child’s bath – but so far they have floated halfway around the world.

The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship 15 years ago.

Since then they have travelled 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, landing in Hawaii and even spending years frozen in an Arctic ice pack.

And now they are heading straight for Britain. At some point this summer they are expected to be spotted on beaches in South-West England.

While the ducks are undoubtedly a loss to the bath-time fun of thousands of children, their adventures at sea have proved an invaluable aid to science.