10,000 Year Clock construction is moving forward

Via slashdot


And if you are reading this blog and havn’t read Anathem yet, you should give it try :)

Randomness: our brain deceive us

Here two points distribution : one is random, and one is not:

Which is which ?
The thing is that left image is not random, and right is.
Sean Carroll from Cosmic Variance write:
“Humans are not very good at generating random sequences; when asked to come up with a “random” sequence of coin flips from their heads, they inevitably include too few long strings of the same outcome. In other words, they think that randomness looks a lot more uniform and structureless than it really does. The flip side is that, when things really are random, they see patterns that aren’t really there. It might be in coin flips or distributions of points, or it might involve the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, or the insistence on assigning blame for random unfortunate events.”

Sorry, no warp drive

Star Treck-esque warp drive – Alcubierre Drive was a mathematical curiosity in the General Relativity Theory, which allowed for faster than light travel inside of the bubble of warped space-time. Of cause it had some problem, like that bubble of space-time could have been created only if some matter was already moving faster than light, and it required exotic matter, and it required three solar masses to transport a single atom. Now it looks like quantum mechanics finally put it out of misery. Exploring mechanism of creaton of warp bubble out of the flat space-tiem , using semiclassical approach Spanish-Italian team shown that energy of the front edge of the warp bubble would grow exponentially with time, which mean that warp drive would be unstable.
Via Slashdot