Missing Mary Road

2 dimensional projection of an E8 representation

E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says “I think our universe is this beautiful shape.”

Lee Smolin of Perimeter Institute fame deemed it “one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years” and it’s generated a fair deal of controversy in the physics world, as described in the wikipedia article on the theory. An interesting point is that the model can be disproved (but not necessarily verified) by the LHC.

The man behind the theory, A G Lisi, seems to be a genuine surfer dude who has endured a fair amount of criticism for his work. As of mid 2008 his November 2007 paper An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything was the most downloaded paper on arXiv.org. It would be a supreme example of poetic justice should his radical model ring true.

The green dumpster behind Red Lobster was nearly empty when I lifted the lid. Through the effluvium of yesterday’s supper, way down, sat a couple of pretty blue boxes. I hitched myself over the rim, leaned in, and took one.

I am not a regular dumpster diver. I was driven by a hunger for knowledge. Inside the restaurant, where the décor, ambience, soundtrack—all but the smell—reeked of the sea, I asked the server who laid before me the first plate of Red Lobster’s “endless shrimp” where they came from.

“Farms,” she said.

“Where are these farms?” I asked.

“Different places.” She gave a shrug. “Do you want another beer?”

I ate only eight grilled shrimp from Red Lobster’s “endless” supply. Something was stuck in my craw. An hour before, I had been in a community hall in Brownsville, Texas, with forty-three angry, tearful American shrimpers. In a country awash in shrimp, they were going bankrupt. They had gathered to hear more bad news: severe new rules limiting what they could catch.

“What about Red Lobster?” I asked the group.

“Red Lobster!” one man shouted. “They’re our enemy. They haven’t bought a shrimp since the 1980s.”

This Saturday, March 14th, is International Pi Day, a celebration of arguably the most fundamental and important number in history: the number needed to calculate the properties of a circle. It’s been known since the ancient Babylonians, used by the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and still plays a vital role in calculations today.

So, with all that math history, why does a cashier stare at me blankly when I add 17 cents to my payment at the grocery store to round out my change?

Pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, is one of those numbers that illustrates both the power and the limitations of mathematics. It allows you to calculate the area of a circle, something that’s not easy to do because we measure areas in squares, and you can’t fit an exact number of squares inside a circle. You always have to round off corners to make them fit inside the curve. So, the number you get, 3.14159… has no end.

Even the circle itself is a contradiction in mathematical terms. The circumference is defined as an infinite number of points. How can you have an infinite number of points in a clearly closed loop?

And the formula for calculating the area of a circle, Pi r squared, is kind of silly. Everyone knows pies are round.

So, this Saturday at 1:59 pm, (that’s the 3rd month, 14th day, hour 1, 59 seconds- in other words, 3.14159) math enthusiasts will be eating pie, wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the Greek symbol and celebrating the power of numbers.

A man dressed as Batman villain the Joker has been shot dead by police in America after pointing a loaded shotgun at them.

The dead man, who was said to be obsessed with the character, was wearing full costume and makeup when he was challenged by officers in a national park in Virginia, according to legal documents.

Read the whole story. It’s super fun.

He took the elevator, descending two floors underground to a small, claustrophobic room–the vault antechamber. A 3-ton steel vault door dominated the far wall. It alone had six layers of security. There was a combination wheel with numbers from 0 to 99. To enter, four numbers had to be dialed, and the digits could be seen only through a small lens on the top of the wheel. There were 100 million possible combinations.

Power tools wouldn’t do the trick. The door was rated to withstand 12 hours of nonstop drilling. Of course, the first vibrations of a drill bit would set off the embedded seismic alarm anyway.

The door was monitored by a pair of abutting metal plates, one on the door itself and one on the wall just to the right. When armed, the plates formed a magnetic field. If the door were opened, the field would break, triggering an alarm. To disarm the field, a code had to be typed into a nearby keypad. Finally, the lock required an almost-impossible-to-duplicate foot-long key.

During business hours, the door was actually left open, leaving only a steel grate to prevent access. But Notarbartolo had no intention of muscling his way in when people were around and then shooting his way out. Any break-in would have to be done at night, after the guards had locked down the vault, emptied the building, and shuttered the entrances with steel roll-gates. During those quiet midnight hours, nobody patrolled the interior–the guards trusted their technological defenses.
Notarbartolo pressed a buzzer on the steel grate. A guard upstairs glanced at the videofeed, recognized Notarbartolo, and remotely unlocked the steel grate. Notarbartolo stepped inside the vault.

It was silent–he was surrounded by thick concrete walls. The place was outfitted with motion, heat, and light detectors. A security camera transmitted his movements to the guard station, and the feed was recorded on videotape. The safe-deposit boxes themselves were made of steel and copper and required a key and combination to open. Each box had 17,576 possible combinations.
Notarbartolo went through the motions of opening and closing his box and then walked out. The vault was one of the hardest targets he’d ever seen.

• NASA Ames and Cisco Systems Inc. are developing “Planetary Skin” — a marriage of satellites, land sensors and the Internet — to capture, analyze and interpret global environmental data, using a comprehensive sensor network in rainforests around the world.
• Nanotechnology has been used for the first time to destroy cancer cells with a highly targeted package of “tumour busting” genes.
• A male chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo planned hundreds of stone-throwing attacks on zoo visitors, according to researchers. Keepers at Furuvik Zoo found that the chimp collected and stored stones that he would later use as missiles. (ed’s note: 2001 anyone?)
• Russia says it has become the world’s biggest consumer of heroin.

acoustics is the study and science of sound. unfortunately it is a dying science these days with the explosion of digital media. more and more people are readily accepting shitty quality of sound to enjoy their listening. how people enjoy music using their cellphones as a music player is beyond me. ipods and other players are just as much to blame as digital audio files are compressed into such a small file that all good quality audio is sucked right out of it. an audio cd for example has an average track of five minutes which uncompressed goes anywhere from 50 to 100 MB. an mp3 of the same track would be an average of 5 mb. there’s something wrong with that picture.

now it seems like things are getting worse, as people seem to think that the decompression of the audio on the fly (and the “noise” that comes with it) is part of the actual track and they seem to prefer the screechy scratchy sounds in mp3′s.

personally, i don’t feel audiophiles have much to be worried about as vinyl and cd’s aren’t gonna disappear anywhere in the near future, but they are definitely getting harder to find and unfortune as it is, we pay more for shitty sounding music and less for good sounding music.

“Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford, tests his incoming students each year by having them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality, and he reports that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. Berger says that young people seemed to prefer ‘sizzle sounds’ that MP3s bring to music because it is a sound they are familiar with. ‘The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at 128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC),’ writes Berger. ‘To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 — particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time.’ Dale Dougherty writes that the context of the music changes our perception of the sound, particularly when it’s so obviously and immediately shared by others. ‘All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It’s mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won’t be obvious to them.”

have i mentioned criggo here before? it’s hilarious. you should go there now and read up all the archives. it’s unfortunate what passes as journalism. the puns are superb.

which reminds me, there was this guy who wrote in to a pun contest once, and to increase his chances of winning, he sent in multiple entries. unfortunately not even one pun in ten did.

TED conference had a brilliant conference but one of the talks stood out above the rest.

this is fascinating new emerging technology which allows you to do amazing stuff. the features seem limitless.

watch video below on how you can have “the sixth sense” and how this technology is getting to be more and more ubiquitous and available. (ed. note: this is not necessarily a good thing).

the meaning of liff, thhgttg and dirk gently’s detective holistic agency are some of the funniest comedic sci-fi novels ever written. well the meaning of liff wasn’t really a novel. anyway, doug adams was a big fan of the internet and would commonly post to usenet back in the day. here’s his first posting on usenet.

I’ve finally managed to get a convenient connection to the Internet. I opened an account at the Santa Fe Institute earlier in the year, but it was slow and complicated using it from London so I gave up on it. I know there is a ton of accumulated mail on my Santa Fe account, which I will try and get to. I’ll try and post news here from time to time if it seems like it might interest people – for instance, it looks as if the HHGG movie is finally coming after the shelf after 10 years.

A Canadian who demanded courtesy from a U.S. border security guard says he was pepper-sprayed and held in custody for three hours for asking the disrespectful officer to “say please” when ordering him to turn his car off during a search.

“I refused to turn off the car until he said please. He didn’t. And he has the gun, I guess, so he sprayed me,” said Desiderio Fortunato, a Coquitlam, B. C., resident who frequently crosses the border to visit his second home in the state of Washington. “Is that illegal in the United States, asking an officer to be polite?”

Black holes once existed exclusively in the realm of theory, but astronomers have become increasingly adept at spotting the telltale signs of objects that are hard to spot due to the fact that they suck in any light that happens to cross an event horizon. Black holes have fallen into two separate categories: relatively small ones formed by the collapse of massive stars, and supermassive ones, which appear to lie at the hearts of most galaxies. When provided enough fuel in the form of interstellar gas, these black holes power quasars (also termed active galactic nuclei) but, deprived of input, they tend to sit quietly, much like the one at the center of the Milky Way.

The presence of black holes at the center of galaxies has been made a bit more intriguing by the fact that astronomers have reached the conclusion that many galaxies have been built by mergers of smaller ones. This would suggest that once the chaos of the initial collision settles down, the resulting galaxy should contain two black holes, with gravitational attraction potentially prompting a collision. Today’s issue of Nature describes what appears to be the best evidence yet for a supermassive black hole binary, one in which the two objects appear on course for an inevitable collision.

Read the rest of the article at ArsTechnica

Authorities say a Florida woman called 911 three times after McDonald’s employees told her they were out of Chicken McNuggets.

A police report says 27-year-old Fort Pierce resident Latreasa L. Goodman told authorities she paid for a 10-piece last week but was later informed the restaurant had run out.

She says she was refused a refund and told all sales were final. A cashier told police she offered Goodman a larger portion of different food for the same price, but Goodman became irate.