Looking into a black hole

"Using new data from ESA's XMM-Newton spaceborne observatory, astronomers have probed closer than ever to a supermassive black hole lying deep at the core of a distant active galaxy." [The picture is an artist's illustration, not a photo.]

Shift 4 and Amberial Axis

Shift 4 and Amberial Axis, two major games, have been released! Enjoy! Photo: here.

King's Canyon Star Trails

[Click the image for the full effect.]

Movie cost per second vs revenue per second

I like this discussion of movies in terms of costs versus revenue per second.

Record (slow) Marathon Time

"Shizo Kanakuri disappeared while running the marathon in the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm. He was listed as a missing person in Sweden for 50 years — until a journalist found him living placidly in southern Japan.

Overcome with heat during the race, he had stopped at a garden party to drink orange juice, stayed for an hour, then took a train to a hotel and sailed home the next day, too ashamed to tell anyone he was leaving.

There's a happy ending: In 1966 Kanakuri accepted an invitation to return to Stockholm and complete his run. His final time was 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 8 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds — surely a record that will never be broken."

Via: FutilityCloset

Freebase

Freebase is an interesting Internet resource:
"Freebase is an open database of the world’s information. [...] Wikipedia arranges information in the form of articles, while Freebase lists facts and statistics. Freebase information is good not only for people who want to research facts, but also for people who want to use those facts to build other websites and applications. Information in article form can’t be reused in the same way, though it is great for other purposes."

I has a lot of data in it- for example, 25,064 topics devoted to computer games!

Image from Valleywag

Three related announcements?

I am starting to notice a lot of development on large-scale, well-funded attempts to make computers answer questions posed in ordinary language. Three in particular are of note:

i) IBM's 'DeepQA' Project: "IBM has unveiled the details of its plans to build a computing system that can understand complex questions and answer with enough precision and speed to compete on America's favorite quiz show, Jeopardy!."

ii.) Stephen Wolfram's Wolfram|Alpha: "Although it’s tempting to think of Wolfram|Alpha as a place to look up facts, that’s only part of the story. The thing that truly sets Wolfram|Alpha apart is that it is able to do sophisticated computations for you, both pure computations involving numbers or formulas you enter, and computations applied automatically to data called up from its repositories." (From the Wolfram|Alpha Blog)

iii.) The Large Knowledge Collider Project: "The aim of the EU FP 7 Large-Scale Integrating Project LarKC is to develop the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC, for short, pronounced “lark”), a platform for massive distributed incomplete reasoning that will remove the scalability barriers of currently existing reasoning systems for the Semantic Web."

Will we soon see a leap forward in computer intelligence? Stay tuned! These are exciting times!

[Image from The Large Knowledge Collider Project]

The mathematics of love

Neutron star crusts are insane

"Exhibiting extreme gravity while rotating as fast as 700 times per second, neutron stars are massive stars that collapsed once their cores ceased nuclear fusion and energy production. The only things more dense are black holes, as a teaspoonful of neutron star matter would weigh about 100 million tons."

From Eureka via Crunchgear via Gizmodo. Everyone likes this.

Nicolo Tartaglia

Nicolo Tartaglia was the first to find the general method for all types of cubic equations, which include an unknown that is cubed. Tartaglia did not understand, however, that the full solution to these equations requires one to take the square root of a negative number.
Thanks to David Reid for suggesting this link.

FoldIt

FoldIt is a game with a useful purpose: trying to figure out how proteins fold. Proteins are made of chains of small molecules called amino acids. Figuring out the shape the chain will fold into is a very difficult problem for scientists to solve, so they invented this game to get people to try it. Make the world a better place while you play!