angrynerds

angrynerds spoof

atlassian (the home of confluence and jira etc) seem to be a really great company, atlassian culture like 37signals, google or netapp

...perhaps they will get it for blackberry??

Super-Heisenberg scaling

Spanish scientists have produced more precise measurements [with interferometers] than those predicted by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.....big woop?

This does not remove deities(s) with dice, it just shows reduction in certian cases(in this case a "beam of photons to measure the small magnetic field produced by a gas made up of a million ultra-cold rubidium atoms".)

link to newscientist

link to paper at nature

...not really related, however, I remember during quantum electro dynamics lectures my professor saying that the Gyromagnetic ratio was the most accurately measured constant and the best confirmation of QED to date, that was 15 years ago...

Data Science Toolkit

http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/

free tools and a VM you can use in AWS/EC2 or your own hardware to...

Geodict
Text to Places
IP Address to Coordinates
Street Address to Coordinates
Coordinates to Politics
File to Text
Text to Sentences
HTML to Text

HTML to Story
Text to People

Mostly webby type tools to scrape data from sites or logs - file2text looks OK (OCR text from images)

screenr session recorder

I'm often looking for ways to record desktop sessions, for example

I mostly use Xvidcap or Istanbul(ogg format can be iffy to convert to mpeg/avi for YT upload (need transcoder - I use ffmeg ) Anywho.... this is a great idea >> SCREENR <<

Starts a java applet in any OS and records the session to their site, I guess the kick back is traffic to the site...

A few things to try and avoid at a prospective employer....

Here is a wordle of traits I think I should try and avoid at a prospective employer

BAD-STUFF

In a nushell its all Capability Immaturity Model CIM stuff

Rules over results type thinking....

CIM -1 : Obstructive
Processes, however inappropriate and ineffective, are implemented with rigor and tend to obstruct work. Adherence to process is the measure of success in a Level -1 organization. Any actual creation of viable product is incidental. The quality of any product is not assessed, presumably on the assumption that if the proper process was followed, high quality is guaranteed.
Paradoxically, Level -1 organizations believe fervently in following defined procedures, but lacking the will to measure the effectiveness of the procedures they rarely succeed at their basic task of creating...

Agile in its many forms seems to be on the money with this culture and values to get stuff done eg http://agilemanifesto.org/

if you get this you get it...no biggie

\funny a coffee stain for your next (or 1st) scientific paper


http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349

there is also \goofy \homer from simpsons for LaTeX too

http://ctan.unsw.edu.au/usergrps/uktug/baskervi/4_4/

word lens

As I get older and closer to death, more and more things seem like they have a bit of magic in them - this is one of them
WORD LENS


Arthur C. Clarke : Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The building block of a quantum photon switch

Matthew A. Hall, Joseph B. Altepeter, and Prem Kumar from the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing at Northwestern University in Illinois have constructed a switch which fulfills these requirements and characterize its performance at the single photon level; it exhibits a 200-ps switching window, a 120:1 contrast ratio, 1.5 dB loss, and induces no measurable degradation in the switched photons entangled-state fidelity -less than 0.002

In other words the basic building block for a quantum photon switch

paper is here

Physical review letter is available to buy here

Diagram of the experimental apparatus and summary is here

Ultrafast ten to 200 picosecond switching of photonic entanglement

Solution to Erdös' Distinct Distances Problem has been found

Poincaré conjecture was proved [and confirmed in 2006] and now another of mathematics' holy grails falls by the way side.
While not one of the Millennium problems its very significant none the less...

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/17494.html

Actual paper is here

Information converted to energy

Physicists in Japan have (kind of) built a Maxwell's daemon ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon ) that (kind of) converts information into energy

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/44385

This does not violate the second law of thermodynamics as far more energy is used in the supporting apporatus than is gained in the experiment.