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The Last Word


Bazza

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You might remember this article:

 

A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics (amplituhedron)

 

amplutihedron_span.jpg

 

Well there is many more (well 2 newer ones). 

 

Betting on the Future of Quantum Gravity

 

and

 

At Multiverse Impasse, a New Theory of Scale

 

I plan to reread the first one, and read the other two when i can, shortly. Maybe by next week. 

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Mind you, we were all Air Force conscript technical NCOs. Peculiar seemed part of the job spec.

I remember reading once upon a time about a Swedish fighter jet called Drakken and thinking that would be a cool name for a superhero.

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Most of these are jokes relating to how hot it is in my hometown. oh well, it does have a point, but...

You know you're in Darwin when:- And don’t laugh, most of it is true…

a.. The best parking space is determined by shade instead of distance. 

b.. Hot water comes out of both taps. 

c.. You learn that a seat belt buckle makes a pretty good branding iron. 

d.. The temperature drops below 32c and you feel a little chilly. 

e.. You discover that in February it only takes two fingers to steer your car. 

f.. You discover that you can get sunburnt through your car window. 

g.. You develop a fear of metal car door handles. 

h.. You break a sweat the instant you step outside at 7:00am. 

i.. Your biggest bicycle wreck fear is, "What if I get knocked out and end up lying on the pavement and get cooked to death?" 

j.. You realise that asphalt has a liquid state. 

k.. Farmers are feeding their chickens crushed ice to prevent them from laying hard-boiled eggs. 

l.. The trees are whistling for the dogs. 

m. while walking back barefoot to your car from the beach, you do a tightrope act on the white lines in the carpark. 

n. you catch a cold from having the aircon full blast while you sleep during the night. 

o. You learn that Casuarina Square isn't a shopping centre it's a temple to worship air-conditioning.

p. Sticking your head into the freezer and taking deep breaths is perfectly normal behaviour.

q. A cup full of ice is considered a great snack.

r. An electricity black out is life threatening because your aircon and your fans no longer work and you are seriously going to be cooked!!

s. You no longer sit on a couch, why would you when you can settle down on the cooling tiles instead.

t. You need a stubby holder to keep the beer cold, not your hands warm

u. No one cares if you walk around with no shoes on.

v. You keep everything in the fridge, including potatoes and bread etc....

w. people have enough left over beer cans to make boats out of and have a whole regatta with...

x. The effort of towelling off after a shower means you need another one right away

y. standing naked under a ceiling fan is an acceptable way to pass time.

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The Connoisseur of Number Sequences:-- For more than 50 years, the mathematician Neil Sloane has curated the authoritative collection of interesting and important integer sequences.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150806-neil-sloane-oeis-interview/
 
Meet the Guy Who Sorts All the World’s Numbers in His Attic
http://www.wired.com/2015/08/meet-guy-sorts-worlds-numbers-attic/all/1
 

NEIL SLOANE IS considered by some to be one of the most influential mathematicians of our time.
 
That’s not because of any particular theorem the 75-year-old Welsh native has proved, though over the course of a more than 40-year research career at Bell Labs (later AT&T Labs) he won numerous awards for papers in the fields of combinatorics, coding theory, optics and statistics. Rather, it’s because of the creation for which he’s most famous: the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), often simply called “Sloane” by its users.
 
This giant repository, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, contains more than a quarter of a million different sequences of numbers that arise in different mathematical contexts, such as the prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11 … ) or the Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 … ).

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Paradoxical Crystal Baffles Physicists: At super-low temperatures, a crystal called samarium hexaboride behaves in an unexplained, imagination-stretching way.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150702-paradoxical-crystal-baffles-physicists/

 

In a deceptively drab black crystal, physicists have stumbled upon a baffling behavior, one that appears to blur the line between the properties of metals, in which electrons flow freely, and those of insulators, in which electrons are effectively stuck in place. The crystal exhibits hallmarks of both simultaneously.

 

“This is a big shock,” said Suchitra Sebastian, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Cambridge whose findings appeared today in an advance online edition of the journal Science. Insulators and metals are essentially opposites, she said. “But somehow, it’s a material that’s both. It’s contrary to everything that we know."

 

The material, a much-studied compound called samarium hexaboride or SmB6, is an insulator at very low temperatures, meaning it resists the flow of electricity. Its resistance implies that electrons (the building blocks of electric currents) cannot move through the crystal more than an atom’s width in any direction. And yet, Sebastian and her collaborators observed electrons traversing orbits millions of atoms in diameter inside the crystal in response to a magnetic field — a mobility that is only expected in materials that conduct electricity.

 

A certain chemistry teacher's next assignment? :D

 

Edit: I want some! 

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