Pascale Soleil: artificialNaturewhat we make of lifeIf I only had a brain...- September 28, 2002 ... for math. I had a lively discussion with my brother this morning about Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. He asked me to explain the main concepts. I did my best. As he's quite mathematically adept, I urged him to read the book himself. My brother is a very creative thinker, and I suspect it would inspire him to have all sorts of interesting ideas which I'd like to hear about later myself. In the meantime, the New York Times reviews a book called Strange Matters by Tom Siegfried that...http://radio.weblogs.com/0100595/categories/artificialnature/2002/09/28.html#a331 Now here's a beauty contest I can get behind!- September 24, 2002 Here They Are, Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiments... Most of the experiments which are listed in this month's Physics World took place on tabletops and none required more computational power than that of a slide rule or calculator. What they have in common is that they epitomize the elusive quality scientists call beauty. This is beauty in the classical sense: the logical simplicity of the apparatus, like the logical simplicity of the analysis, seems as inevitable and pure as the lines.http://radio.weblogs.com/0100595/categories/artificialnature/2002/09/24.html#a322 Get out your shades, baby...- September 20, 2002 ...you'll be needing them to see the polarized light from the Big Bang. And that glare is the "star power" of the inflation theory of cosmology getting another piece of evidence chalked up in the Yes column. The New York Times reports on the results announced by astronmers from the Universities of Columbia and California . "We're stuck with a preposterous universe," Dr. Carlstrom said. Two papers describing the work will be posted on the team's Web site, astro.uchicago.edudasi, he said. Other.http://radio.weblogs.com/0100595/categories/artificialnature/2002/09/20.html#a315 The Other Half- September 19, 2002 I love physics. How cool is this Physicists working in Europe announced yesterday that they had passed through nature's looking glass and had created atoms made of antimatter, or antiatoms, opening up the possibility of experiments in a realm once reserved for science fiction writers. Such experiments, theorists say, could test some of the basic tenets of modern physics and light the way to a deeper understanding of nature. This is fascinating, if arcane, stuff. Using an ingenious sequence of.http://radio.weblogs.com/0100595/categories/artificialnature/2002/09/19.html#a313 Giant Earth Fart: Party Prank Gone Horribly Wrong- September 10, 2002 On June 30, 1908, a large segment of the Tunguska forest in Siberia experienced some kind of spectacular explosion. Trees were flattened, and there was a major conflagration. The force has been estimated as the equivalent of a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb. The most popular scientific explanation has been a meteorite impact. (Other theories include aliens and so forth.) Now, in charmingly imperfect English, we read a Siberian scientist's alternate theory. The scientist assumes that the gases...http://radio.weblogs.com/0100595/categories/artificialnature/2002/09/09.html#a296 No more stick-ups- September 3, 2002 Diabetics get sick of needles. Of course they do, they have to stick themselves to check their sugar levels, they have to stick themselves to deliver insulin. It's no fun. Just in time for Generation Y the dayglo low-sugar warning tattoo: The tattoo has been designed Gerard Cote, of Texas A&M University, and Michael Pishko, of the chemical engineering department at Penn State University. It is made of polyethylene glycol beads that are coated with fluorescent molecules. Because glucose...http://radio.weblogs.com/0100595/categories/artificialnature/2002/09/03.html#a289 Circuit to Computer: 'Come in, please!'- September 2, 2002 Using a computer-based genetic algorithm (selecting for an attribute after "mutating" variables), scientists trying to evolve a oscillator circuit managed to create one that turned into a radio receiver... serving up a nearby computer's signal as output. Paul Layzell and Jon Bird at the University of Sussex in Brighton applied the program to a simple arrangement of transistors and found that an oscillating output did indeed evolve. But when they looked more closely they found that, despite...http://radio.weblogs.com/0100595/categories/artificialnature/2002/09/02.html#a287 |