Probably no signs of gravitational waves, signs of dark matter but not a discovery. That is the word from this first day of the American Physical Society's meeting in Denver Colorado. 

 In the plenary keynote session of the meeting today, I asked a question of Lloyd Knox of the PLANCK collaboration. My question regarded the B mode polarization data and what it may show. He said that this data would be officially released next year. He also expressed the professional opinion that the data may not show a strong gravitational wave signal. This would be significant since the simplest models of inflation predict a strong gravitational wave signal. Dr. Knox went as far as to state “the simplest models are probably ruled out” (not quite verbatim.)

Results from Planck and AMS-02, but also the way they are often presented, have created a very exciting situation. Its exceptional character has led me to quickly write an article, Planck data, spinorial space-time and asymptotic Universe, and to make it public for open discussion.

The adage that 'there is a sucker born every minute' has always been true. Organic food? Homeopathy? Social psychology?  I am cool with all of those unless poor people who think they are accepting science are being exploited for financial gain.

And so if a company claims they will name an asteroid after you for five bucks, or a star, and you don't want to do the creative design work of making your own certificate and printing it off, I suppose that's harmless enough, but if you ask I will still tell you how meaningless it is.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/27/hacking-the-mainframe_n_2958380...

Actually it should have read, "What David Stephens and HuffPo got wrong".

There's only one response possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSra6ML4wI0

There have been other attempts in the past, so this is not strictly a new idea. However I found the interactive web page at http://htwins.net/scale2/ extremely well constructed.

It is a graphical display of the largest and smallest structures from galaxy superclusters down to quarks and the Planck length. By moving a scroll bar left or right, you can get a very clear sense of scale of the different things. And in so doing you learn the relative size of different objects, from planets to stars, or from stars to galaxies; or vice-versa, from cells to molecules and atoms.

I highly recommend it!

In my previous blog post, How I Solved My 555 Timer IC Frequency and Built a 555 Guituner, even though I tried several different combinations of resistors in series, I was unsuccessful in finding the correct combination of resistors to achieve the elusive 440Hz. I had to come up with a kludge. I inserted an adjustable resistor (potentiometer) and was able to turn the knob on the potentiometer to tune the circuit to 440Hz to my electronic keyboard.

The problem is mostly likely to do with the tolerance of the resistor. The resistors I used had gold bands and that means they have a tolerance of 5%.

After the scramble to get out of jail, here are some questions about imprisoned shapes!

In my last question, we came across parts of the so-called harmonic series 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 ... 1/n. Now, this series is divergent; it does so very slowly, but as n tends towards infinity so does the sum. However, the sum of the squares of each term is convergent.

So, numerically, if we add together the areas of squares with sides of 1/2 units, 1/3 units and so on, we will tend towards a finite limit. However, is it possible to geometrically fit these squares inside a square of 1 unit side without any of them overlapping?

Depending on how much light is scattered and transmitted, clouds assume different colors. And be rest assured that whether clouds are perceived to be purple, gold, white, grey or ominously dark, most people will use the appropriate word for the color in question. Ditto for pillows, shirts, cars or even bananas, which are said to be green, yellow or brown.

A couple of news stories related to NASA. One is that there will be money in the NASA FY14 budget to send astronauts to an asteroid and bring it back to (?) Earth. The other study is that NASA Administrator Bolden boldly stated:

http://www.spacepolitics.com/

The solution to the Jailer’s Revenge question is fairly lengthy, so I think it warrants a separate blog entry. Please refer to the original question as it too is fairly long.

Let’s firstly simplify the problem with smaller numbers, then scale it back up to 100 lockers and 100 prisoners. Let’s start with just 10 lockers and 10 prisoners.