A few weeks ago, I was invited to give a talk and share a bit of my crazy thoughts on complexity with some of my colleagues. After the talk the most intelligent question was the following: Would you say that it is our intelligence what prevents us from behaving like starlings in a murmuration? My …
A tall spire was installed atop One World Trade Center, bringing the New York City building to its projected height of 1,776 feet. It makes the building the tallest in the Western Hemisphere and the third tallest in the world. In the last days, North-American stock market indexes also broke through symbolic levels: the S&P 500 closed above 1,600 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 15,000 for the first time in its history.
People spend an estimated 3 billion hours playing on-line games every week(1), which seems a staggering waste of neurological effort. We are creating a massive virtual silo of cognitive effort, emotional energy, and collective attention lavished on game worlds instead of on the real world (Jane McGonigal, “Reality is Broken“) However, games offer the enticing possibility of …
Thomas Herndon, PhD student in Economics, discovered an Excel coding flaw in an oft-cited paper by economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, “Growth in a Time of Debt“, which claims that economic growth plummets when a country’s debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 90%. The Reinhart-Rogoff paper came out just after Greece went into crisis and, in Paul …
This week, three close encounters of the third kind… At the Flanders’ Mechatronics Technology Centre in Belgium, researchers have built a robot which can play badminton: Researchers presenting at 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), showed what happened when they taught their RHex legged robot to jump: Ross Knepper of the Massachusetts Institute … Continue reading »
100 years after Wright Brothers’ first flight, history repeats itself on a miniature scale. Researchers(1) at Harvard create an agile, insect-sized flying robot that flaps its wings using piezoelectric muscles. Continue reading »
Shakuntala Devi, an Indian mathematical wizard known as “the human computer”, died in Bangalore last Sunday at the age of 83. She was one of the world’s most prodigious mental calculators on record, past or present, especially remarkable for the incredible speed with which she performed mental calculations on very large numbers. In 1977, at … Continue reading »
Books are strings of code. But they have mysterious properties — like strings of DNA. Somehow, the author captures a fragment of the universe, unravels it into a one-dimensional sequence, squeezes it through a keyhole, and hopes that a three-dimensional vision emerges in the reader’s mind. The translation is never exact. (George Dyson, “The Universal … Continue reading »
On November 13, 2002, one of tanks of the Prestige burst during a storm off Galicia, in north-western Spain. The Greek-operated single-hulled oil tanker was carrying a 77,000 metric tons cargo of heavy fuel oil. At around 8:00 AM on November 19, the ship split in half and sank, releasing the oil into the sea. … Continue reading »
Alexei Sharov and Richard Gordon extrapolated the rate of biological evolution into the past, and found that life began 10 billion years ago. Since our evidence is that life on Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, life must have started off Earth. Continue reading »
Imagine you’ve got a problem you are incapable of solving by yourself. Hard as you have tried for some time, you don’t have the slightest idea of whether there is a solution at all or not. One day you learn that your next door neighbour has been awarded a Nobel Prize. You summon up the … Continue reading »
