Links from 2012-04-01

Emmy Noether, the Most Significant Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of - NYTimes.com

Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex. She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson.

Willi Resetarits: »Musiker haben keine Pension« « DiePresse.com

Wie die Ritter der Tafelrunde den Gral sucht der Stubnblues das schönste Lied. Natürlich mit der heimlichen Hoffnung, dass wir es nie finden, stattdessen ganz viele beinah perfekte Lieder. Mit dem Stubnblues gehen wir sehr wohl die letzten Fragen an. Wir ahnen aber, dass wir die Antworten nicht finden werden, also streben wir ein Scheitern auf möglichst hohem Niveau an. Der Augenblick zählt dann oft mehr, als langfristige Konzeptionen.

Apple drops ‘thermonuclear’ patent bombshell • The Register

The patent being asserted by Sewell and his crew is USPTO Patent #1,042,012, first granted to the American Mathematical Society in October 1912, subsequently renewed, then acquired by Apple at an unknown date. The first entry among the patent’s Claims describes „A quadrilateral having all four interior angles of 90°, opposite sides that are parallel, and congruent diagonals that bisect each other.” Yes, Apple is asserting a patent on the rectangle.

javascript game of tron in 219 bytes

With some coworkers, we challenged each other to write the smallest possible game of tron in javascript (an exercice known as javascript golfing). This page explains our final version (219 bytes). We initially worked alone but then exchanged ideas and tricks, so erling & mathewsb deserve most of the credits! our code was originally 226 bytes, but „Cosmologicon” pointed out a way to save three whole bytes, bringing us to 223 bytes. With p01, we then came up with a way to save another 11 bytes (making the game 212 bytes). He also suggested keeping track of score, which takes 9 bytes but is totally worth it! skrounge found a way to save 2 more bytes, brining the game to 219 bytes.

Volvo Ocean Race 2011-2012 | Telefónica survive monster wave double hit

Team Telefónica felt the full force of the Southern Ocean earlier today when they were slammed by two monster waves in over 40 knots of wind on their way to Cape Horn on Leg 5.

IETF attendees re-engineer their hotel’s Wi-Fi network

There was no WiFi signal when on the desk in front of the window in my room, but after some experiments, I discovered that the signal was quite good… on the ceiling of the bathroom,” emailed Marc Petit-Huguenin. „I have a Nexus S phone, so I taped it on the ceiling of the bathroom, and used tethering over Bluetooth to bridge the gap to the desk,” he explained. This is a slow connection, but good enough to send emails over SMTP or use vi [the popular Unix text editor] over SSH.” Working behind the scenes, a team of IETF attendees negotiated with the hotel and were granted access to the wireless network by Sunday night. „[W]e’ve done a variety of configuration tests and changes,” he wrote. „We believe we have improved the situation for most hotel guests. However, there may be instances where our changes (due to some holes in our understanding of where exactly some of the APs are located, for example) have made things worse in specific areas.”

femtolisp - lightweight, robust lisp interpreter built on reusable C libraries - Google Project Hosting

This is what I do for fun, because it is the exact opposite of the kind of thing people will pay for: an obscure implementation of a programming language everybody hates.

femtolisp - lightweight, robust lisp interpreter built on reusable C libraries - Google Project Hosting

This is what I do for fun, because it is the exact opposite of the kind of thing people will pay for: an obscure implementation of a programming language everybody hates.

Löhne: Die Wahrheit über die Ungleichheit

Die Behauptung, die Einkommensschere zwischen Frauen und Männern klaffe bei gleicher Arbeit um von der Statistik Austria amtlich ermittelte 25,5 Prozent auseinander, macht in der Debatte naturgemäß mehr her als der – wesentlich erfreulichere – weit niedrigere Prozentsatz, der den Tatsachen entspricht. Die Klage, wonach Frauen in Österreich im selben Job „um ein Viertel“ weniger verdienen, gehört zum Equal Pay Day wie die Kreuzwegandacht zum Karfreitag. Und das, obwohl viele Studien und Erhebungen längst andere Ergebnisse liefern. Wenn Ministerin Heinisch-Hosek argumentiert, Frauen würden „weniger als Männer verdienen, nur weil sie Frauen sind“, irrt sie. Die behauptete skandalöse Lohndiskriminierung aufgrund des Geschlechts findet so nicht statt. Doch das Festhalten an der Opferrolle erleichtert es Frauenpolitikerinnen aller Couleurs, politische Interessen durchzusetzen.

Not an April Fool - Charlie’s Diary

It’s easy to imagine how we could make something worse than „Girls Around Me”—something much worse. Facebook encourages us to disclose a wide range of information about ourselves, including our religion and a photograph. Religion is obvious: „Yids Among Us” would obviously be one of the go-to tools of choice for Neo-Nazis. As for skin colour, ethnicity identification from face images is out there already. Want to go queer bashing? There’s an algorithm out there for guessing sexual orientation based on the network graph of the target’s facebook friends. It’s probably possible to apply this sort of data mining exercise to determine whether a woman has had an abortion or is pro-choice. … But as I said earlier, the app is not the problem. The problem is the deployment by profit-oriented corporations of behavioural psychology techniques to induce people to over-share information which can then be aggregated and disclosed to third parties for targeted marketing purposes.

Vint Cerf über 20 Jahre Internet Society - Video.Golem.de

Vint Cerf erzählt von der Gründung der Internet Society vor rund 20 Jahren. Der Internetpionier Cerf zählt zu den Gründungsmitgliedern der Organisation.

Kevin Smith on why you, too can be an indie success - Boing Boing

You can’t just put a commercial on TV and expect a bunch of people to show up and see it at the movie theatres. They have too many choices. They can just stay home and surf porn on the internet. Why would you want to go see The Avengers when you can watch like three people having sex from the privacy of your own home? You’re competing for attention, and in a world where you’re competing for attention, you have to figure out ways to make it more interesting for the audience to come out. It’s no longer enough to be like „here’s the movie, come see it”.

Die Angst der Politiker vor der Generation Netz « DiePresse.com

Was das Kernkraftwerk Zwentendorf und die Hainburger Au für die (späteren) Grünen waren, sind internetaffine Themen wie die Vorratsdatenspeicherung oder das Anti-Produktpiraterie-Abkommen Acta für eine neue Generation: „Gerade politisch mäßig oder kaum Interessierte springen auf das Thema an“, sagt Jugendforscher Philipp Ikrath. Auch die Politik springt auf den Zug auf – jedoch verspätet und oft ungelenk. Lange haben die Parteien das Thema mehrheitlich ignoriert. Erst jetzt, aufgeschreckt durch Demos und deutsche Piratenpartei-Erfolge, beginnt das Interesse. Bloß: Warum hat das so lange gedauert?

Tagged as: delicious, links | Author: Martin Leyrer
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