Hulleye Comes By!

i think bruce lee and chuck norris have some competition in the best fight scene ever category. this is awesome. thanks pat.

PhysicsWeb reports that a team of scientists in Jerusalem has come up with a method for creating self-assembling 3-dimensional models from a single sheet of paper. The ‘chemical origami’ is created by etching a pattern of monomer onto the paper and then heating it. The chemical’s reaction to the heat causes bends of varying degree in the paper, molding the sheet into the patterned model. A professor in the US with no apparent ties to the study says in the article that the technique could be used to create self-assembling prototypes, or even a printer that prints 3D objects.

eric flint published an essay recently which argues that DRM actually causes piracy.

“Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an ‘economic epidemic’ under certain conditions. Any one of the following: 1) The products they want… are hard to find, and thus valuable. 2) The products they want are high-priced, so there’s a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them. 3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with. Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they’re the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises. And… Guess what? It’s precisely those three conditions that DRM creates in the first place. So far from being an impediment to so-called ‘online piracy,’ it’s DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward.”

so koala bears are scandalizing the wildlife community in new zealand.

Female koalas indulge in lesbian “sex sessions”, rejecting male suitors and attempting to mate with each other, sometimes up to five at a time, according to researchers.

The furry, eucalyptus-eating creatures appear to develop this tendency for same-sex liaisons when they are in captivity. In the wild, they remain heterosexual.

Scientists monitoring the marsupials with digital cameras counted three homosexual interactions for every heterosexual one.

“Some females rejected the advances of males that were in their enclosures, only to become willing participants in homosexual encounters immediately after,” say the researchers.

“On several occasions more than one pair of females shared the same pole, and multiple females mounted each other simultaneously. At least one multiple encounter involved five female koalas.

anyone who hasn’t switched from windows to an alternative operating system yet, please go ahead and do so. here’s a beginning guide on learning the unix shell for a rainy day when you wake up and figure out that you should be running ubuntu.

click for clarity. official instructions on how to crap. good luck if you didn’t know already. anyone wondering how to cleanse, go here.

Islamic Artisans Constructed Exotic Nonrepeating Pattern 500 Years Before Mathematicians As early as the 15th century, elaborate symmetrical tile work on medieval Islamic buildings contained patterns straight out of modern math.

Medieval Islamic artisans seem to have developed a procedure for creating jigsawlike mosaics that ultimately led them to an exotic pattern that mathematicians would discover nearly half a millennium later. Researchers report that 15th-century buildings in Iran feature tiles arranged in a so-called quasicrystal, which is symmetric but does not repeat itself regularly.

“Here is evidence it [the pattern] was being used, if not understood, 500 years ahead of when we had any idea what was going on with [it] in the West,” says physics graduate student Peter J. Lu of Harvard University. Lu began poring over photos from Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan after seeing hints of the pattern while traveling in Uzbekistan. The Islamic artisans seem to have spun a wide variety of symmetric traceries from a set of five shapes, according to a report Lu co-authored, published online February 22 in Science.

i previously wrote about daniel tammet as well. here’s another article in the guardian about him.

Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. He can perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations at breakneck speeds. But unlike other savants, who can perform similar feats, Tammet can describe how he does it. He speaks seven languages and is even devising his own language. Now scientists are asking whether his exceptional abilities are the key to unlock the secrets of autism.

Daniel Tammet is talking. As he talks, he studies my shirt and counts the stitches. Ever since the age of three, when he suffered an epileptic fit, Tammet has been obsessed with counting. Now he is 26, and a mathematical genius who can figure out cube roots quicker than a calculator and recall pi to 22,514 decimal places. He also happens to be autistic, which is why he can’t drive a car, wire a plug, or tell right from left. He lives with extraordinary ability and disability. Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn’t “calculating”: there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. “When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think.”

Tammet is a “savant”, an individual with an astonishing, extraordinary mental ability. An estimated 10% of the autistic population - and an estimated 1% of the non-autistic population - have savant abilities, but no one knows exactly why. A number of scientists now hope that Tammet might help us to understand better. Professor Allan Snyder, from the Centre for the Mind at the Australian National University in Canberra, explains why Tammet is of particular, and international, scientific interest. “Savants can’t usually tell us how they do what they do,” says Snyder. “It just comes to them. Daniel can. He describes what he sees in his head. That’s why he’s exciting. He could be the Rosetta Stone.”

keep reading.