Latest Entries
They are coming

They are coming

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 »

Yet Another Beautiful Mind

Yet Another Beautiful Mind

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

Books are Strings of Code

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 »

Rogue Narratives

Rogue Narratives

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 »

May I Use Your Brain?

May I Use Your Brain?

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 »