28 February 2010

Counterexamples to Relativity, according to Conservapedia

Taken from Recursivity: It Must be Tough to be a Schlafly

A stupid web site, called "Conservapedia", states:

The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world. Here is a list of counterexamples, and if only one of these is true, then the theory fails:
....
9. The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46-54.

No, this is not a joke. They actually say that Relativity is wrong because of what Jesus allegedly did! This is ridiculous, to say the least. The moron who started this Conservapedia is a lawer callled Andrew Schlafly, who wanted to write an encyclopedia based on Christian conservative principles. A quick look into this gem of a web site will convince you that the project is nonsense. These kind of people are dangerous. We need to tell them so.

23 February 2010

Optimism à la Camus

In his Nobel prize"Conférence du 14 Décembre 1957", given at the University of Uppsala, Albert Camus, referring to a 19th c. American writer, said:
Tant qu'un homme reste fidèle à lui même, tout abonde dans son sens, gouvernement, société, le soleil même, la lune et les étoiles.
As long as a man even remains sincere to himself, all abounds in his sense, government, society, even the sun, the moon and the stars.
And added that this optimism seems to be dead today.

One wonders why...

18 February 2010

Ridiculous expression

I read that a certain university offered an honorary title to a certain mathematician for his
"outstanding scientific research activity and his achievements in a scientific field of mathematics"
This is a translation from the Greek text (the particular phrase appears in yellow here) which itself contains silly grammatical (circled in red) and syntactical errors.

One wonders therefore: the above implicitly implies that the "fields of mathematics" are classified into "scientific" (for which the award was given) and "non-scientific" (for which, presumably, no award will ever be given).

The question is: What are the non-scientific fields of mathematics?

17 February 2010

14 February 2010

From 10-35 to 1027

  1. A very nice zoom-in/zoom-out gadget showing, in a nutshell, what's in the universe at all scales, from the size of the universe itself down to Planck's length. Click here and then on "play" (from 1027 to 10-35).
  2. This one is specific for biological objects (from 10-2 to 10-12).
  3. And here is a zoom-in into Mandelbrot's set 10214 times (this is more exponents than in 1. and 2. above).

(All taken from a Nadder!)



T H E B O T T O M L I N E

What measure theory is about

It's about counting, but when things get too large.
Put otherwise, it's about addition of positive numbers, but when these numbers are far too many.

The principle of dynamic programming

max_{x,y} [f(x) + g(x,y)] = max_x [f(x) + max_y g(x,y)]

The bottom line

Nuestras horas son minutos cuando esperamos saber y siglos cuando sabemos lo que se puede aprender.
(Our hours are minutes when we wait to learn and centuries when we know what is to be learnt.) --António Machado

Αγεωμέτρητος μηδείς εισίτω.
(Those who do not know geometry may not enter.) --Plato

Sapere Aude! Habe Muth, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen!
(Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason!) --Kant