I made Fillerati because I grew tired of reading "Lorem ipsum..." on every new design I was working on.

And so we don’t want the cover to disappear. And yet the cover as we have known it is disappearing, rather quickly (nearly eradicated on hardware Kindles). This doesn’t mean it won’t be replaced. Whatever it’s replaced with, however, will not serve the same purpose as the covers with which we’ve grown up.

This romanticism is curious, if only because the cover of whose loss we lament is a recent invention.

‘Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.

Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.’

‘Apple’s design guru Jonathan Ive, who receives a knighthood today for creating products such as the iPad, tells Shane Richmond why this country’s industrial heritage lies behind his success.’

Your request for eighty dollars I do not think it best to comply with now. At the various times when I have helped you a little you have said to me, "We can get along very well now"; but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again. Now, this can only happen by some defect in your conduct. What that defect is, I think I know. You are not lazy, and still you are an idler. I doubt whether, since I saw you, you have done a good whole day's work in any one day. You do not very much dislike to work, and still you do not work much merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it.

Let me just close with this quick thought: Tesla wasn’t an ignored god-hero. Thomas Edison wasn’t the devil. They were both brilliant, strong-willed men who helped build our modern world. They both did great things and awful things. They were both brilliantly right about some things and just as brilliantly wrong about others. They had foibles, quirks, passions, misunderstandings and moments of wonder.

In other words, they were both human.

Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

Writing is the connective tissue that creates understanding. We, as social creatures, often better perform rituals to form understanding one on one, but good writing enables us to understand each other at scale.

Recursive Drawing is an exploration of user interface ideas towards the development of a spatially-oriented programming environment.

Proven lies show why official spokespeople should be named by journalists

Convert to proper title case

‘"Sleeper" establishes Woody Allen as the best comic director and actor in America, a distinction that would mean more if there were more comedies being made. Without making a count, I'd guess that a dozen action movies get made for every comedy, which says more about our taste than our comedians. Mel Brooks only seems to get geared up every three years or so, but Allen is prolific as well as funny.’

‘There are the personal lives of your 1000 closest friends, on display, every day. Here is the news of the world, the whole world, not just what used to fit in the newspaper. And over there is every book ever published, every scientific discovery, every fringe political candidate.

Suddenly, it's a lot more difficult to know a little about a lot. It's tempting to spend ever more time pursuing that goal. That doesn't mean, I think, that you should give up knowing a lot about a little in order to devote ever more time to the noisy mosaic that's on your doorstep, nor does it mean you ought to give up and dive back into your hole. We've redefined worldly, but being an expert remains just as tough and important as it used to be.’

“Ernest Hemingway at his standing writing desk on the balcony of Bill Davis’s home near Malaga where he wrote The Dangerous Summer.” — Life Magazine, Jan. 1, 1960

In reality, it was during a meeting of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society that the nuclear age was announced, on Tuesday, 7 March 1911, by Professor Ernest Rutherford, the 39-year-old head of physics at Manchester University. Rutherford was born in 1871, in Spring Grove, New Zealand. Descended from Scottish emigrants, it was from this scattered rural community on the north coast of the South Island that Rutherford's aptitude for science and maths led in 1895 to a coveted place at Cambridge. There, under the direction of JJ Thomson, Rutherford established a reputation as a fine experimentalist with a study of X-rays.

The Master of Suspense describes his idea of happiness.

This course tries to connect quantum computing to the wider intellectual world. We'll start out with various scientific, mathematical, or philosophical problems that predate quantum computing: for example, the measurement problem, P versus NP, the existence of secure cryptography, the Humean problem of induction, or the possibility of closed timelike curves. We'll then examine in what ways, if any, quantum computing affects how we should think about the problem. To keep things grounded, each session will end with a concrete puzzle that students will be expected to have thought about (if not solved) by the next session. The class format will strongly encourage participation, discussion, and debate.

But publications are only part of the story, and Willetts intends to focus on the rest of the research—the underlying data, things that don't get published, etc. He intends to set up a portal that will list every government funded research, and provide access to their papers, any databases they've created, etc. To make sure the information is easy to maintain, modify, and share, the UK is setting up a group that will be advised by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales.

Lest the publishers think they can wait this one out, Willetts had a rather stark warning for them: adapt, or bad things will happen. "To try to preserve the old model is the wrong battle to fight," Willetts said. "Look at how the music industry lost out by trying to criminalize a generation of young people for file sharing. It was companies outside the music business such as Spotify and Apple, with iTunes, that worked out a viable business model for access to music over the web. None of us want to see that fate overtake the publishing industry."

Sometimes I want to write a function that has some required inputs and some optional trailing arguments. If the arguments are specified by their order, and not by parameter-value pairs, there is a nice way to accomplish this take advantage of varargin.

Take, for example, the argument over humans vs. robots. Given the success of the robotic missions to Mars and other bodies, many people ask why we should bother to send people to any of those places. Tyson himself estimates the cost of sending a human to be around fifty times the cost of sending a robot, and says that "if my only goal in space is to do science, and I'm thinking strictly in terms of the scientific return on my dollr, I can think of no justification for sending a person into space." But then, he turns around and tries to justify it on fairly standard grounds: that humans are more flexible, while a robot can only "look for what it has already been programmed to find." Having humans on the scene would enable faster and more "revolutionary" discoveries.

This is an argument that sounds fairly convincing on a surface level, but on closer inspection it breaks down in two ways: it's too generous to humans, and too hard on the robots.

Consider the process of writing the Readme for your project as the true act of creation. This is where all your brilliant ideas should be expressed. This document should stand on its own as a testament to your creativity and expressiveness. The Readme should be the single most important document in your codebase; writing it first is the proper thing to do.

PageSpeed Online analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster. Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.

Things to think about:

What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

To get a 70ns delay out of a loose fiber optic would require... I'm not sure what, exactly. Probably some sort of detector nonlinearity, such that the reduced intensity from a misaligned fiber would give an electrical output pulse that rises more slowly for a low-amplitude optical input than a high-amplitude one. That's a possibility, particularly if they're dealing with fairly weak pulses to begin with, but it's not in the top ten of things I'd think to check when looking for a timing issue.

(I also suspect that "loose" is the wrong word here, because while I know intellectually that it doesn't make any difference, I reflexively check the tightness of fiber optic connections all the time, as if they were regular wires subject to capacitive issues. I suspect that "misaligned" is a better word-- somebody put the connector on slightly wrong, so that it was to all appearances screwed down tight, but was slightly crooked. This would also explain how it managed to stay consistently wrong for a period of more than three years.)

Is it true – and Small Talk advises you to explain this question – that you celebrated Liverpool's Champions League win in a shower cubicle with the former Liverpool chairman David Moores? Yeah, that's right. He didn't want to give me a cigarette because I'd left mine in the hotel but eventually he obliged but we needed to go somewhere a bit more private.

So you were just stood opposite each other, inches apart, puffing away? Yeah, we were just stood in the shower shaking. He was shaking because his nerves were shot and I was shaking because I couldn't believe what had happened. It was a fantastic moment to share with him because he was such a loyal fan to the football club. It was a perfect ending to the perfect game.

And the results? Advisers made flattering remarks about the clients’ portfolios and then proceeded to try to change them in exactly the way that would tend to generate commissions. The gap between flattery and action was particularly stark in the case of the diversified low-cost portfolio; advisers were more likely to praise it, but more than 85 per cent of them tried to change the strategy.

Almost a third of advisers refused to give any advice at all until the client agreed to transfer control of their portfolio to the adviser, which makes it almost impossible to rate the quality of the advice. And a curiosity: this behaviour was substantially more common when the mystery shopper was a woman.

Most people don't know the basic scientific facts about happiness — about what brings it and what sustains it — and so they don't know how to use their money to acquire it. It is not surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about wine end up with cellars that aren't that much better stocked than their neighbors', and it should not be surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about happiness end up with lives that aren't that much happier than anyone else's. Money is an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that people routinely squander because the things they think will make them happy often don't.

So why am I awestruck? Simple. In most of physics—and, indeed, in all of science—we rely on theory to understand our results. We build mathematical models and fit them to our results. But usually there are some parts of the system that remain unknown, or are too complicated to model, so we approximate the parts we can't model and leave the unknown parts as free parameters. Then, when the results don't fit, we vary the free parameters to make them fit.

We don't do that arbitrarily; we have some idea of what these parameters should be and what they cannot be. And we have other experiments to provide a sanity check, so this isn't a bad thing we are talking about here. But it is... unsatisfactory. The good people doing work with ultracold atoms don't have this problem. They know every value that needs to go into their models. No free parameters, no guess work, and no excuses. If the model doesn't fit, there is nothing to play with to save you.

And the amazing thing is that they do fit. Experiment and theory in its purest form, overlapping one another beautifully. That is what makes the work on ultracold atoms awesome.

The number of scientific publications per year is steadily increasing. This makes it difficult to keep up with the latest developments in larger areas of science.

Papercore is a public read-write database, which aims at helping scientists to cope with this development. Papercore collects summaries of scientific papers, in particular in physics, where this database is optimized to. Note that a summary is not just an abstract: A summary should contain the core information of a paper, including a little introduction, basic definitions, outline of methods and key results of a paper, such that a specialist in the field does not have to look into the paper anymore, basically. The rule of thumb is that a summary should be 1/10 of the length of the corresponding paper, the compression factor is automatically computed by Papercore for each summary.

Parents may themselves be unaware of their own implicit associations between gender and stereotype.  If you don’t believe you personally suffer from this, try taking one of the Implicit Association tests I have mentioned before on this blog (for instance here and here).  Even most practicing female scientists, myself included, still find an unconscious tendency to associate words associated with science more with men than women. Every time I do the test and find I still  do this, I get dispirited. I feel it is no surprise if random members of the population do this if I do, despite my deep-seated belief that women and science really do mix.

Passes in hand, Rothstein and Vroom flew for business. They flew for pleasure. They flew just because they liked being on planes. They bypassed long lines, booked backup itineraries in case the weather turned, and never worried about cancellation fees. Flight crews memorized their names and favorite meals.

Each had paid American more than $350,000 for an unlimited AAirpass and a companion ticket that allowed them to take someone along on their adventures. Both agree it was the best purchase they ever made, one that completely redefined their lives.

In the 2009 film "Up in the Air," the loyal American business traveler played by George Clooney was showered with attention after attaining 10 million frequent flier miles.

Rothstein and Vroom were not impressed.

"I can't even remember when I cracked 10 million," said Vroom, 67, a big, amiable Texan, who at last count had logged nearly four times as many. Rothstein, 61, has notched more than 30 million miles.

Science photographer Felice Frankel is a research scientist in the Center for Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Working in collaboration with scientists and engineers, Felice’s images have been published in over 200 journal articles and/or covers and various other publications for general audiences such as National Geographic, Nature, Science, Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials, Materials Today, PNAS, Newsweek, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, and New Scientist among others.

We aim at gaining theoretical insights into the often complex dynamics of such gases. One of our objectives is to exploit this understanding for a selective manipulation and control of the system dynamics.
Our research is driven by computational as well as theoretical approaches and also benefits greatly from close collaborations with leading experimental groups in the field.

To borrow a metaphor from the philosopher of science Ronald Giere, theories are like maps: the test of a map lies not in arbitrarily checking random points but in whether people find it useful to get somewhere.

But do ideas in social science really get brutally crushed under immediate empirical tests? That picture certainly doesn't fit economics, where ideas often linger even when empirical tests show them to be unfounded. For example, the rational-choice view of human behaviour remains the workhorse of economics, even though, as one economist has noted, its empirical disconfirmation “appears to be one of the few really robust results achieved by the human sciences.”

You could sum up Jason Fried's philosophy as "less is more." Except that he hates that expression, because, he says, it still "implies that more is better." Fried prefers "less is less." It's a core principle of 37Signals, the Chicago-based company he launched in 1999 with Ernest Kim and Carlos Segura. The company started as a Web design firm. Then, in 2003, Fried hired David Heinemeier Hansson, a Danish programmer, to write software to keep the company's design projects organized. Soon, clients began requesting the program, and by 2005, software development eclipsed design in both revenue and focus. Today, 37Signals, which is run by Fried and Hansson, has a staff of 16 and more than three million customers who use the company's Web-based applications, such as Basecamp and Campfire, to collaborate and manage projects. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is the company's only investor. Fried, 35, isn't afraid to do things differently or to express his opinions. He condemns traditional corporate office culture, with its 40-hour workweeks and constant meetings, and shoots down many of his customers' suggestions. And he's not opposed to a little goofing off in the afternoon.

The most important thing about buying a suit is that it should have a floating canvas and not a fused canvas. You can tell quite easily if you take the front of the jacket and feel around the buttons on the inside and the outside: you can feel canvas between them. A cheap suit will have that fused - glued to the outside of the jacket - and a good one will have that floating so it's just been stitched around the edges within the two pieces of cloth. That has lots of advantages: it means it will mould much better to the shape of the chest, making it feel much more personal and it lasts much better. Cheap fusing if you get it wet tends to bubble around the lapels, which isn't good.

Figuring out how clothes should fit is one thing; figuring out whether they suit your personality and character is something else entirely. That part requires a lot of self-discovery, honesty, and time. Unfortunately, when it comes to the task of finding clothes that suit your character, you can easily be distracted by barrage of blogs and magazines telling you what’s cool this season, what’s big in Japan, or how to pull off that “Italian sprezzatura” look that everyone is raving about. Couple that with professional product shots and good looking models, and you can be drawn to certain clothes for all the wrong reasons. 

One thing I’ve found helpful is to be conscious of whether you’re buying something just because it’s well designed. Remember that there are hundreds of good looking pieces every season. Indeed, there’s rarely a week that goes by where I don’t see at least five or six things that I think look great. However, just because a piece of clothing is well designed, and perhaps even fits you well, doesn’t mean you should buy it. You should stick to the task of developing a focused, coherent wardrobe that clearly express who you are, not just build a collection of good looking clothes. 

Again, this is a nice argument for funding science in general. But really, it's an argument for funding a wide range of different areas of research, not an argument for funding space travel per se, or any other kind of Big Science project. I suppose you could use this to argue that the space program is particularly useful in that it brings people from multiple different fields together to work on a single larger project, but by that logic, the best thing for scientific progress would be to start a war with Germany and Japan-- the payoff from wartime operations like the Manhattan Project and research into radar, and aircraft design, and all the rest is vastly greater than anything that can be traced to the space program. For that matter, it probably ought to include all the advances claimed for the space program, given that the space program got its start with wartime research.

Often, our instinct is to make the current bump in the road far more urgent than it actually is. It focuses our attention and rallies those around us to take immediate and deliberate action.

After all, if this is the big one, of course we should drop everything and deal with it.

Missing from this equation is the cost of dropping everything. The short-term herk and jerk that is delivered by an organization that responds to those that amplify problems into catastrophes inevitably leads to poor performance in the long run.

The May, 2003 issue of Astronomy Now magazine included an article I wrote on CTR Wilson, the Ben Nevis Observatory (BNO) and Wilson's role at the inception of the study of cosmic rays. People in various parts of Scotland have heard me speak on these topics. Here are some resources and links that may interest anybody who enjoyed that story.

To its many fans, Apple is more of a religious cult than a company. An iToaster that downloads music while toasting bread would probably get the same kind of worldwide attention.

Don't let that fool you into thinking that it matters. The big competitors in the mobile-phone industry such as Nokia Oyj and Motorola Inc. won't be whispering nervously into their clamshells over a new threat to their business.

The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. In terms of its impact on the industry, the iPhone is less relevant.

At one point in pondering this list, here's what I thought I would do: I would simply start all over with ten new films. Once any film has ever appeared on my S&S list, I consider it canonized. "Notorious" or "The Gates of Heaven," for example, are still two of the ten best films of all time, no matter what a subsequent list says.

I decided not to do that--trash the 2002 list and start again. It was too much like a stunt. Lists are ridiculous, but if you're going to vote, you have to play the game. Besides, the thought of starting with a blank page and a list of all the films ever made fills me with despair.

So there must be one new film.

It will stretch any image to fit the page, and will automatically resize as the window size changes. Images are fetched after your page is loaded, so your users won't have to wait for the (often large) image to download before using your site.

I have decided to let your family make me rich! It turns out they are wonderful material for a film. A quite serious one, although one of the three sisters is a fool and a clown. (I think you can guess which, ducky!) I didn’t send you a big letter, because you’re coming to Paris soon. I wonder if your observations about my family clock them as weirdly as I see yours? Do you have insights into my father & mother? I can imagine. The blind perceiving the blind. Last night I had a tender dream about me & my mother. First dream of her in years. Wonder why? I wept in the dream & ate my laundry. Just kidding—I ate her boiled chicken which tastes worse.

Those with a desire to see a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels could do worse than to buy up reserves, according to a paper published this month. Researcher Bard Harstad argues that buying and holding extraction rights to fossil fuels is a more effective means of curbing their use than legislating to reduce demand.

At first glance it looks like a novel approach, though perhaps an obvious one when you think of it. For example, coal left in the ground cannot emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, so the more you buy and leave there, the more emissions are prevented. But tempting as it is to present the research in these terms, Harstad's argument is actually rather more subtle, and involves influencing fossil fuel markets—and not necessarily by buying in bulk.

For a short stretch of the city centre it’s possible to bypass the crowds and the traffic and to walk across several pedestrian areas and finally down a series of alleyways. In fact you can walk almost traffic-free from Victoria station all the way to Lloyd Street, and in doing so you might spot some rather unusual artwork.

"When they signed him I said: 'Madre mía, we're going to be flying,'" Xavi has recalled. "I swear it. He's a perfectionist. If Pep decided to be a musician, he would be a good musician. If he wanted to be a psychologist, he would be a good psychologist. He is obsessive; he would keep going until he got it right. He demands so much from himself. And that pressure that he puts on himself, those demands are contagious – it spreads to everyone. He wants everything to be perfect. He is a pesado." Heavy. Hard-working. Intense.

That intensity has led Guardiola to become the most successful coach in Barcelona's history. He has reached four consecutive Champions League semi-finals and won 13 trophies. Two have evaded him in a week in which Barcelona were knocked out of the Champions League by Chelsea and beaten by Real Madrid in the clásico, leaving them seven points behind with four games to play and conceding the title. But there is still a Copa del Rey final to come at the end of the season. Win that and he would have won 14 of 18 competitions.

Feynman diagrams are the embodiment of what Tufte teaches about analytical design: "Good displays of data help to reveal knowledge relevant to understanding mechanism, process and dynamics, cause and effect." We see the unthinkable and think the unseeable. "Visual representations of evidence should be governed by principles of reasoning about quantitative evidence. Clear and precise seeing becomes as one with clear and precise thinking."

The master of clear and precise thinking meets the master of clear and precise seeing in what I call the Feynman-Tufte Principle: a visual display of data should be simple enough to fit on the side of a van.

Indeed, the semantics of the term pedestrian would be a mere curiosity, but for one fact: America is a country that has forgotten how to walk. Witness, for example, the existence of “Everybody Walk!,” the “Campaign to Get America Walking” (one of a number of such initiatives). While its aims are entirely legitimate, its motives no doubt earnest, the idea that that we, this species that first hoisted itself into the world of bipedalism nearly 4 million years ago—for reasons that are still debated—should now need “walking tips,” have to make “walking plans” or use a “mobile app” to “discover” walking trails near us or build our “walking histories,” strikes me as a world-historical tragedy.

Part II: Advanced Quantum Mechanics - course webpage
Ben Simons

In a letter to Hans Mühsam dated July 9th, 1951, an elderly Albert Einstein observed:

One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike — and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

In his recent New York Review of Books piece on Margaret Wertheim’s Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything, Freeman Dyson offers:

All of science is uncertain and subject to revision. The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, widely regarded as the father of modern anthropology, articulated the same idea in 1964 in the first volume of his iconic Mythologiques collection of cultural anthropology:

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.

In the fantastic A General Theory of Love, psychologists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon give this beautiful definition:

Science is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the natural world.

In 1843, on a bright October day, William Rowan Hamilton, the greatest Irish Mathematician of all time, discovered the numbers called Quaternions.

For many years he had been trying to find a satisfactory way to multiply points in three dimensions, in such a way as to allow division. The idea of using four dimensions instead, and the way to do it, came to him in a flash, as he walked with his wife by the Royal Canal. Since it is one of the few major mathematical discoveries which is precisely located in time and circumstances, the event is very well-known in the international mathematical community, and people from all over the world know about "Hamilton's Bridge". When he made the discovery, Hamilton paused under Brougham (or Broom) Bridge, took out his penknife, and scratched the fundamental formula:

i2 = j2=k2=ijk=-1
into the stone.

The day was the 16th of October, 1843. No trace of this can be found today, but in 1958 a plaque was erected on the site, commemorating the discovery and displaying the formula.

Hamilton lived and worked at Dunsink Observatory, and was on his way into Dublin to attend a meeting at the Royal Irish Academy.

Of other such incidents, the outstanding ones are perhaps Archimedes' discovery while bathing, and Poincare's while stepping off a bus. The relative durability of the Royal Canal and its stonework makes the scene of Hamilton's discovery unique, and has led a steady trickle of mathematicians to make the pilgrimage to Broom Bridge.

Because I love words, I want to love eBooks. I want to buy lots and lots of eBooks. But unless the publishers are willing to treat eBooks with the same respect and care that they give to their printed books – and most importantly of all, adjust their pricing to reflect the brave new economy of bits, and not an antiquated economy of atoms – they're destined to eventually suffer the same fate as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Imagine a large dataset, say something like a list of every country and its population.

Chances are, the leading digit will be a 1 more often than a 2. And 2s would probably occur more often than 3s, and so on.

This odd phenomenon is Benford's Law. If a set of values were truly random, each leading digit would appear about 11% of the time, but Benford's Law predicts a logarithmic distribution. It occurs so regularly that it is even used in fraudulent accounting detection.

I am not suggesting any kind of ban. It’s the idea of the ban that’s problematic. A new article by economists Jeremy Bulow and Paul Klemperer analyses the advantages to consumers of rationing schemes rather than simply raising the marginal price. The bottom line: the advantages are typically illusory. Rationing reduces supply, relative to what could be provided if prices were higher. It also misallocates resources – there’s no reason to expect that the people who get the scarce product are the ones who value it most. And rationing encourages all kinds of fun and games to try to get around the rules.

A single principle lies at the heart of all these suggestions. When you're engaged at work, fully engage, for defined periods of time. When you're renewing, truly renew. Make waves.

‘There's a good reason for this, based on the basics of scientific writing, namely that the Introduction should give the reader a rough guide to the complete work-- exactly what you're going to say, before you go on and say it. In order to do a good job with the Introduction, you need to have a very solid idea of the shape of the finished product, and exactly what you need to mention up front for everything to hold together.

Which is why the Introduction is pretty much the last section I write. If you try to write it first, you're setting yourself up for a miserable slog, because you don't know just what you need to say in that section, and so you end up typing and retyping the same vague blather over and over, or frittering away hours on researching stuff that you may or may not actually need, because you don't know yet whether it will be relevant to the whole thing.’

The mayor has a beautiful daughter. The men grow morose as they reflect how in this district she will not find the life she deserves. They are also sad as many men are when regarding a woman too beautiful for them to hope for. The mayor complains that he cannot get funds for a new morgue. The young people all leave. The old people die, and the young people want to come home for the first time in years to view them. But bodies do not keep well in the old morgue, and they start to smell.

How does this sound to you? I'm told we movie critics praise movies that are long and boring. I can imagine many people finding this movie an ordeal. That depends on how easily they can be drawn into the story that is taking place under the surface and within these minds. A life has been taken. A bureaucratic procedure is being followed.

I am a physicist at the Curie Institute/CNRS and the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences; I also periodically visit Cambridge.
I use statistical mechanics to study complex systems in physics and interdisciplinary fields. My research interests are discrete dynamics, complex networks and fundamental laws of biology.

I have also written two popular books: The Man's Book, an almanac for men; and The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie, a book about ties and tie knots.

I've done a Ph.D. thesis, a bunch of papers and grant proposals, several popular articles, and two popular books, and in every case, I was fiddling with the wording right up to the end.I even went past the end, in some cases-- when I was reviewing page proofs for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, I had to restrain myself from trying to "fix" tiny infelicities of phrasing. And when I did a reading at Boskone, reading from a finished copy of the final book, there were a couple of spots where I cringed internally-- "How could I say that thing that way?"

When I was writing the thesis, one of the post-docs in the group said something that I thought summed it up really well: Your thesis is never finished, but at some point it's just done. That is, you could fiddle with it forever, tweaking this and that, changing a word here and a word there. At some point, though, you just need to hand the thing in, tiny imperfections and all, and move on with your life.

‘Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome. You have arrived at the file repository and web site of Fredrik Jonsson. Here you may find my published scientific works, patents and a set of the computer programs I have written. Available here is also the complete series of Lecture Notes on Nonlinear Optics, which resulted from the course that I in 2003 gave at the Royal Institute of Technology.’

’Every Woody Allen Movie: The Full List‘

In this video you can see two 8mm NdFeB N52 gold plated magnet spheres floating over a high temperature superconductor made of Yttrium-Barium-Copper-Oxide (YBCO). The superconductor was cooled down to -196°C with liquid nitrogen and is covered with ice and mist. To hold the magnet spheres absolutely upward an additional lifter magnet was used which is not visible in the images.
It can be observed that droplets of liquid oxygen, which is paramagnetic, are attracted by the magnet spheres and evaporate abruptly on the surface of the lower sphere. The liquid oxygen accumulated on the surface of the superconductor while experimenting and was not additionally added.
Furthermore you can see the mist vortexes which built up on the lower side of the magnet sphere. These vortexes consist mainly of water mist and evaporating nitrogen.
This experiment shows a complex combination of superconduction, paramagnetism, diamagnetism, magnetism, thermo-dynamics and fluid dynamics.

Oracle now (actually, since Oracle9!) supports the ANSI date literal, which means that you can assign a value to a date as follows:

DECLARE
l_date DATE;
BEGIN
l_date := DATE '2011-02-15';
END;

In other words: the keyword DATE follows by a literal string in the form ‘YYYY-DD-MM’. You have no choice in this format; it cannot be changed by changing NLS settings. In addition, the ANSI date literal contains no time portion.

Often, procrastinators are “extremely concerned about what other people think of them,” said Joseph R. Ferrari, a psychology professor at DePaul University and author of "Still Procrastinating? The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done."  

These people would rather be accused of lacking effort than lacking ability; the idea is: “If I never finish, I can never be judged,” he said. And there can be a fear of success, too: “If I do well, you might expect more from me next time, and I don’t know if I can come through,” he said.

An accomplice of procrastination is perfectionism. Waiting until the last minute gives perfectionists the perfect excuse: they just didn’t have enough time, Ms. Morgenstern said. Perfectionists often tend to need the pressure of the deadline to force themselves to finish.

“The most productive people tend to focus on progress over perfection,” said Mr. Vaden, author of “Take the Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving True Success.” Remember, he said: “Success is messy.”

'The I.B.M. researchers are building quantum computer components out of electronic circuits containing superconductors, materials that carry electricity without electrical resistance. When cooled to a hundredth of a degree above absolute zero, the circuits act as qubits.

The problem is that a qubit becomes scrambled in short order, and the information it carries turns into gibberish. When physicists started experiments a little more than a decade ago, a qubit lasted only a few billionths of a second. (An alternate approach, trapping ions in electric and magnetic fields, can produce longer-lived qubits. But the superconducting circuit approach takes advantage of current computer chip technologies.)

In the latest I.B.M. results, which build on a technique developed by Robert J. Schoelkopf, a physics professor at Yale, a qubit lasted as long as one-10,000th of a second.'

Excellent textures resource.

‘In June of 1945, Arline Feynman — high-school sweetheart and wife of the hugely influential physicist, Richard Feynman — passed away after succumbing to tuberculosis. She was 25-years-old. 16 months later, in October of 1946, Richard wrote his late wife the following love letter and sealed it in an envelope. It remained unopened until after his death in 1988. ’

'The trio's inspiration came from the planet Jupiter and its 4000 or so Trojan asteroids. These sit at the two so-called Lagrange points in Jupiter's orbit – one 60° ahead of the planet and the other 60° behind it – and rotate in lockstep with the planet.
Similarly, Eberly and colleagues showed that the role of Jupiter could be played by a rotating external electromagnetic filed. As a result, it should be possible to create Lagrange points in a Rydberg atom, creating stable, localized electronic orbitals and bridging the divide between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics.
Until now, however, producing such a system in a laboratory has proven to be extremely difficult. In the new research – a collaboration between experimentalists at Rice University in Houston, Texas and theorists at Vienna University of Technology and Oak Ridge National Laboratory – a laser is used to excite the lone outermost electrons of potassium atoms to principal quantum numbers above 300. The researchers then apply a circularly rotating electromagnetic field, which combines several nearby orbitals to create "Trojan wave-packets".'

'Tech news has become the kind of party you show up for filled with corporate drones where no one is really having fun, and leave as soon as is socially acceptable to go find good trouble and get weird at the dirtiest bar you can stand on the bad side of town. Sometimes you find other refugees at the far end of the counter. But few have the sense or guts to act differently at the party and get crazy and honest about it at work.

If something important happens, I'll read about it on twitter from one of the smart editors I follow or someone will call me. I won't know about it instantaneously, but I will know about it.

I also stopped reading twitter and facebook regularly, because most of my online acquaintances are nice, but I like to think about these experiences as shallow and yes, also I don't give a shit about 99% of people I interact with online. I've met some great friends online, but once I find them I would prefer to spend that time and energy with the few I would do anything for. Also, clicking the like button 1 billion times will never give you an orgasm or a hug or a high five.'

''Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,'' says Steve Jobs, Apple's C.E.O. ''People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.''

'Mallory, so the celebrated story goes, told a New York Times journalist who asked why he kept trying to climb Everest "Because it's there". This throwaway line – words that he might not have actually spoken – has been elevated into the nutshell philosophy of climbing. But Davis doesn't believe it. The real impetus behind these men's obsession, he finds, was not a macho need to prove themselves, still less a jingoistic push to plant the union flag atop the unsullied mountaintops, but an aching sense of loss. As he tells the story of the 26 men – and it must be said that this is a very male tale – who made the three assaults on Everest culminating in Mallory's last climb, Davis repeatedly traces the root of their endeavours to the horror of the trenches.

Most of them had been through the worst of the war. Six had been seriously wounded. Three as army doctors had coped as best they could with unimaginably grotesque injuries. Two had nearly died of disease. Two more had lost their brothers. One had gone through the trauma of "shell shock", and all had been marked and seared, suffering from the guilt of surviving a catastrophe that had consumed their generation, their class and their country.'

'The experiment comprises two 2 nm-thick iron layers sandwiched between two platinum mirrors. The mirrors themselves are 45 nm apart and the cavity they create supports a standing wave of X-rays. One of the iron layers is positioned at a peak of the standing wave and the other at a trough. The layers are made of the isotope iron-57, which has a two-level nuclear transition at an energy of 14.4 keV. This corresponds to the absorption and emission of a hard X-ray photon. In the standing wave, however, the upper level of the nuclei in the peak is shifted relative to the upper level of the nuclei in the trough – thereby providing a three-level system.
The team confirmed that the system is suitable for EIT using 14.4 keV X-ray pulses generated by the PETRA III synchrotron at DESY. The researchers looked at two different configurations. In the first, the pulses enter the cavity and then pass through the iron layer in the trough of the standing wave, followed by the layer in the peak. In the other configuration, the pulses pass through the peak layer first. In the latter situation, much of the intensity of the pulse is reflected back from the system – which is what is expected from a process called nuclear resonant scattering that is related to the transition at 14.4 keV.
However, in the configuration where the pulse strikes the trough layer first, there is a sharp dip in the reflectivity – which means that, together, the two iron layers have become transparent to X-rays that they would normally reflect. This, according to Röhlsberger and colleagues, is evidence of EIT.'

'This handbook is designed to provide a selection of the most important and frequently used atomic spectroscopic data in an easily accessible format. The compilation includes data for the neutral and singly-ionized atoms of all elements hydrogen through einsteinium (Z = 1-99). The wavelengths, intensities, and spectrum assignments are given in a table for each element, and the data for the approximately 12,000 lines of all elements are also collected into a single table, sorted by wavelength (a "finding list").'

‘Last year, Google published a booklet of 21 problems, called the Google Labs Aptitude Test. Readers of several technology magazines were asked to mail in their answers and promised that Google would get in touch with them if they scored well.’

‘If you were exposed to just 0.1 per cent of the risk and reward of a £1bn company, you’d be facing a £1m risk – a 10 per cent drop in the share price would hit you by £100,000. And yet you would still enjoy only 0.1 per cent of any gains you created for the company, which is surely not enough to discourage you from stealing paper clips. There is a trade-off between providing proper incentives and exposing workers to excessive risks. I don’t think shares or share options provide a happy medium between the two.

Are you saying that employee-owned companies perform poorly?

No, I’m not aware of any evidence for that. A study by Alec Bryson and Richard Freeman of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics found that employee ownership was positively correlated with productivity; it was also positively correlated with other measures of performance-pay and worker autonomy. What exactly causes what is a nice question, but there’s certainly little evidence of harm. Mr Bryson and Mr Freeman also surveyed other studies and conclude that none found any negative impacts of employee share ownership and some found positive effects. In any case, the theoretical case for the popular alternative – companies with highly dispersed shareholders – is also rather troubling. Adam Smith predicted that “negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company”. None of these things works in theory; whether they work in practice is another question.’

‘Lo, in the twilight days of the second year of the second decade of the third millennium did a great darkness descend over the wireless internet connectivity of the people of 276 Ferndale Street in the North-Central lands of Iowa. For many years, the gentlefolk of these lands basked in a wireless network overflowing with speed and ample internet, flowing like a river into their Compaq Presario. Many happy days did the people spend checking Hotmail and reading USAToday.com.

But then one gray morning did Internet Explorer 6 no longer load The Google. Refresh was clicked, again and again, but still did Internet Explorer 6 not load The Google. Perhaps The Google was broken, the people thought, but then The Yahoo too did not load. Nor did Hotmail. Nor USAToday.com. The land was thrown into panic. Internet Explorer 6 was minimized then maximized. The Compaq Presario was unplugged then plugged back in. The old mouse was brought out and plugged in beside the new mouse. Still, The Google did not load.’

‘As we are just minutes from where it all began, I want to know what drew him to bookselling. “It really wasn’t very much more complicated than that I was extremely young,” he replies with what I will soon realise is characteristic self-effacement. Daunt, the son of a diplomat, had studied history at Cambridge before spending four years working for JP Morgan, first in New York and then in London. “I’d stopped the banking, not because I had any difficulty with the job – in fact I loved it – but because it just wasn’t working from a personal point of view. I thought if I’m not going to do that office job, which was about as good as an office job as I could imagine, then I had to do something else. And I like travelling and I like reading and it really wasn’t more sophisticated than that.”

Was it something in his family, I wonder? I am intrigued by what I have read of his forebears, who include generations of clergymen in County Cork called Achilles Daunt, the most famous of whom won a prize for poetry in 1851. He smiles: “Well, it’s news to me ... ” At that moment our starters arrive and Daunt concedes: “It’s one of those families that managed to sit more or less in their singular place and do absolutely nothing for century after century, contribute the odd churchman and, yes, maybe win the odd poetry prize, but basically they were modestly prosperous.” This is only good manners, of course, but still one can read a certain ancestral pride in the fact that Waterstone’s is now registered at Companies House under the directorship of Achilles James Daunt.’