Alice's adventures in algebra: Wonderland solved

(via)

What would Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland be without the Cheshire Cat, the trial, the Duchess's baby or the Mad Hatter's tea party? Look at the original story that the author told Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day during a boat trip near Oxford, though, and you'll find that these famous characters and scenes are missing from the text.

...

The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the missing scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.

Delaunay tetrahedralisation ...?

(via wired)


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Gadget Lab Hardware News and Reviews

Amazing Software Turns Cheap Webcam Into Instant 3D Scanner"

We ALL have to do this!!!

An interesting offer from ASPEX



I had my doubts about this; I got an offer from ASPEX corporation to let people get free scanning electron micrographs of just about anything. They make a desktop SEM, and all you have to do is fill out a form and mail it in with your sample of a dead bug or a microchip or bacon, and presto, within a few weeks they'll have it scanned in and the image available on their website.

I asked them if they knew how many readers I have, and they said no problem, they can handle it.

Huh.

Well, you heard them. Scavenge your trash cans, dig into your local sources of vermin and oddments, and send them in. I'm thinking this could be really fun for any school teachers out there — you could have the whole class looking for interesting specimens to zoom in on. You can see their current galleries for ideas.

Even if you don't like spiders ...

you have to admit this guy (Phidippus princeps) is pretty cute. Many more on the
Jumping Spiders of Oklahoma Flickr site.

The Consequences of Plagiarism...

Man! SIAM is PISSED.

This page reports on the results of an investigation of alleged plagiarism of an article published by SIAM. The evidence leaves no doubt that the plagiarism did indeed occur. Moreover, we have learned of multiple other cases of plagiarism appearing under the names of the same plagiarizing authors.

PLAGIARIZED ARTICLE
M. Sreenivas and T. Srinivas. Probabilistic Transportation Problem (PTP). International Journal of Statistics and Systems, v. 3, n. 1, pp. 83-89, 2008.
Plagiarized from
James Luedtke and Shabbir Ahmed. A Sample Approximation Approach for Optimization with Probabilistic Constraints. Preprint posted to Optimization Online and submitted to SIAM Journal on Optimization, 15 September 2007. Revised version published in SIAM Journal on Optimization, v. 19, n. 2, pp. 674-699, 2008.

Auto-tuned scientists (Sagan, Feynman...) sing.

Science is a Verb Now shirt

TED talk: Margaret Wertheim on the beautiful math of coral reefs

Things I wish I had thought of (cont.)

From The Laughing Squid

PhD comics take on Science and Nature

Among greatest graphics ever

This is a short economic history of the world, color-coded by continents.
Link to Gapminder.org for animation.

probability

gotta love this

Predator X

Proof of massive sea monster

Apr 3 - Just 800 miles (1287 km) from the North Pole, paleontologists believe they have found the fossilized remains of a massive sea monster that lived 150 million years ago.

Predator X -- a new species of a Pliosaur -- is said to have been the most dangerous creature to have lived under water.

The creature was about 50 feet (15 meters) long, had a head ten feet (3 meters) long and jaws armed with teeth the size of cucumbers.

Dr. Jorn Hurum, and his team of paleontologists discovered Predator X in northern Norway last October and says the new species of a Pliosaur was more fearsome in power than the land-based Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Greatest. Headline. Ever.

Astronomers find Milky Way 'could taste of raspberries'

If Scientific American says it, it must be true

If Scientific American says it, it must be true

amazing Socotra island

http://bigpicture.posterous.com/socotra-island

How's this?

Note picnic umbrella!

we need to update to a springtime photo!

View Larger Map

How we walk

Go to Biological Motion Lab, Queens College, Ontario
for interactive animation.

Help make the publishing world more science 2.0 friendly

User generated content survey: lazyweb, please help!
( from Nature)

Got a sec? If you can read and understand a scientific abstract then we need you to help make the publishing world more science 2.0 friendly. Thirty seconds, five minutes, half an hour - whatever you can spare would be great.

Please visit ploscomments.appspot.com and categorize the comments left on papers in PLoS ONE up to Aug '08.

PLoS ONE were one of the first journals to allow online commenting and (I think) the first to allow blog trackbacks and inline annotations. Last year PLoS's community manager Bora kindly put together some spreadsheets to let people see the stats behind this reader generated content. Deepak Singh and Cameron Neylon checked out the numbers.

I agree with Deepak's assessment:

Is the commenting on PLoS One at a level that we hoped it would be? Not quite. Is it as bad as some might like to believe? Not quite.

... in the best possible way. Considering how alien the concept of commenting on a paper online is to most scientists PLoS should be pleased with their efforts.

By categorizing comments we should be able to better understand what kind of comments get left and responded to and hopefully we can get a better idea of how they should be encouraged and presented. I'll make the results publicly available once they've all been processed.

Thanks in advance - and have fun!

Well, maybe not fun. It's actually quite hard work which is why I'm hoping the blogosphere will help out. I promise that we'll use the results for good.

The Most Awesome Science Video About DNA Ever Made

The Most Awesome Science Video About DNA Ever Made

Grand Unified Weekly

Three items a week of more or less droll science news, from Slate. Archive.

Biology Rocks with Concert Posters for Academic Lectures

(via io9.com)

Somebody over in the Biology Dept. at University of North Carolina understands that science just freakin rocks. That's why they commission a local indie poster designer to create flyers for their lectures.

These posters were all created by North Carolina's The Merch, a group of designers who usually create party invites, band posters, and awesome t-shirts. Above you can see four of UNC's recent events, advertised on posters that look like they should be plastered on the wall outside a venue where The Decemberists or Death Cab for Cutie are playing. I especially love the one about early mouse development - that mouse embryo really looks post-grunge in its stark freakiness. And how about "Human Pheromones and Olfaction"? That is totally Le Tigre's new album, if only Le Tigre were still making albums.

No word on whether these are all-ages shows, or if you have to be 21 to get into one of UNC's ultra-cool science concerts. Erm, I mean lectures. Collect all the posters.

Biology Posters via BoingBoing