Fibonacci Flim-Flam. The Fibonacci Series Leonardo of Pisa (~1170-1250), also known as Fibonacci, wrote books of problems in mathematics, but is best known by laypersons for the sequence of numbers that carries his name: This sequence is constructed by choosing the first two numbers (the "seeds" of the sequence) then assigning the rest by the rule that each number be the sum of the two preceding numbers. Take any three adjacent numbers in the sequence, square the middle number, multiply the first and third numbers. The Fibonacci sequence is but one example of many sequences with simple recursion relations. The Fibonacci sequence obeys the recursion relation P(n) = P(n-1) + P(n-2). A striking feature of this sequence is that the reciprocal of φ is 0.6180339887... which is φ - 1. The ratio φ = 1.6180339887... is called the "golden ratio" or "golden mean". Note: Writers on this subject sometimes concentrate on φ and some on 1/φ as the ratio of interest. It's easy to invent other interesting recursion relations.
Jeb Bush makes his case to Georgia lawmakers — and Ludacris | Political Insider blog Jeb Bush posing with Ludacris during his visit to the Georgia statehouse. Photo: Lori Geary Likely Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush made his formal debut at the Georgia statehouse Thursday, where he waded into a few of the thornier policy debates facing state legislators. The former Florida governor spoke briefly to the House and Senate chambers about the need for broader education reforms that give parents a greater choice in schools. In remarks to a handful of reporters, Bush also gave a tacit endorsement to the push for a “religious liberty” measure. “I don’t know about this law, but religious freedom is a serious issue and is increasingly so,” said Bush. A U.S. “People have a right to do that, just as we need to be respectful for people who are in long-term committed relationships,” said Bush. In his remarks, Bush dismissed talk that he wasn’t conservative enough to win the party’s nomination. “I’m the most conservative governor in Florida’s history.
Public Health Officials Know: Recently Vaccinated Individuals Spread Disease Washington, D.C., March 3, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Physicians and public health officials know that recently vaccinated individuals can spread disease and that contact with the immunocompromised can be especially dangerous. For example, the Johns Hopkins Patient Guide warns the immunocompromised to "Avoid contact with children who are recently vaccinated," and to "Tell friends and family who are sick, or have recently had a live vaccine (such as chicken pox, measles, rubella, intranasal influenza, polio or smallpox) not to visit."1 A statement on the website of St. "The public health community is blaming unvaccinated children for the outbreak of measles at Disneyland, but the illnesses could just as easily have occurred due to contact with a recently vaccinated individual," says Sally Fallon Morell, president of the Weston A. Furthermore, vaccine recipients can carry diseases in the back of their throat and infect others while displaying no symptoms of a disease.13,14,15 The Weston A.
Physics researchers map where to run and hide during a zombie apocalypse If a zombie apocalypse breaks out in the United States, where should the “zombie-fighting headquarters” be located? Oh sure, a zombie survival strategy may not seem important now, but it’s official research that will be much appreciated when the nation is infested with hungry-for-brains undead. Cornell University researchers asked, “If it takes a month to develop and distribute an effective vaccine (or an effective strategy for zombie decapitation), what regions should one locate the zombie-fighting headquarters?” Cornell University researchers presented “You Can Run, You Can Hide: The Epidemiology and Statistical Mechanics of Zombies” (pdf) at an American Physical Society meeting in San Antonio last Thursday. “We all know that a zombie infestation is inevitable, so why not try to understand the effects on the US with a simulation?” Zombie-town USA is a Javascript simulation of the zombie dynamics on the US. Matt Bierbaum
Coming soon: the 'Big Heat' We probably have less than five years before we witness the 'Big Heat' - a supercharged surge of rapid global warming, destabilizing the climate system in deeply unpredictable ways. Forget the so-called 'pause' in global warming-new research says we might be in for an era of deeply accelerated heating. While the rate of atmospheric warming in recent years has, indeed, slowed due to various natural weather cycles - hence the skeptics' droning on about 'pauses' - global warming, as a whole, has not stopped. Far from it. It's actually sped up, dramatically, as excess heat has absorbed into the oceans. In 2011, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tallied up the total warming data from land, air, ice, and the oceans. How to convey this extraordinary fact? Or looked at another way, all the world's coal fired power stations currently have a generation capacity a little under 2TW. Actually, it's worse. So not only is warming intensifying, it is also accelerating. Where's all the heat gone?
New York Times: Those Who Deny Climate Science Are Not 'Skeptics' by Joe Romm Posted on Share this: "New York Times: Those Who Deny Climate Science Are Not ‘Skeptics’" Share: CREDIT: Shutterstock The New York Times has an excellent piece on why the people who spread disinformation about climate change are not “skeptics” — and why it’s no surprise they are called climate science “deniers.” Now that the world’s leading scientists and governments have found that human-caused climate change is already causing serious harm on every continent, denying the grave risk posed by unchecked carbon pollution is no longer an abstract or theoretical issue. And yet we continue to see the sad and ultimately self-destructive spectacle whereby “contrarian scientists testify before Congress and make statements inconsistent with the vast bulk of the scientific evidence, claiming near certainty that society is not running any risk worth worrying about.” It is perhaps no surprise that many environmentalists have started to call them deniers. The disinformers are not skeptics.
Scientists have figured out how to stop the common cold in its tracks The results of a huge project to sequence the traces of DNA left on New York City's subways have given us the first comprehensive look at the bacterial menagerie hosted by one of the world’s most trafficked public transport systems. Cities are just like human beings, in the sense that we both harbour an incredibly rich variety of microbes in our every nook and cranny. The average human, for example, contains about 100 trillion microbial cells, which outnumber human cells by a 10:1 ratio, and make up 36 percent of the active molecules floating through the human bloodstream. We might be the brains of the operation, but our bodies are giant, walking petri dishes full of all kinds of microscopic creatures, living, feeding, and breathing all over us, and without them, we’d die. “We know next to nothing about the ecology of urban environments,” evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen at the University of California at Davis told Hotz. But on to the specifics. Source: The Wall Street Journal
This Robot Is the Best Limit Texas Hold'Em Player in the World The best limit Texas Hold'Em poker player in the world is a robot. Given enough hands, it will never, ever lose, regardless of what its opponent does or which cards it is dealt. Poker being what it is, the robot, named Cepheus after a constellation in the northern hemisphere, will lose if it's dealt an inferior hand, but it will minimize its losses as best as is mathematically possible and will slowly but surely take your money by making the "perfect" decision in any given scenario. Heads-up limit Hold'Em, it can be said, has been "solved." Heads-up limit Hold’Em is a type of poker in which only certain amounts of money can be bet during certain times of the game. Cepheus in action. And it was solved by computer scientists at the University of Alberta who don't actually play the game. "You can play one hand of poker and there are hands that Cepheus will fold, and it loses. That's the key, of course. Image: University of Alberta Still, it's probably not a bad way to make a living.
Past global warming similar to today's: Size, duration were like modern climate shift, but in two pulses The rate at which carbon emissions warmed Earth's climate almost 56 million years ago resembles modern, human-caused global warming much more than previously believed, but involved two pulses of carbon to the atmosphere, University of Utah researchers and their colleagues found. The findings mean the so-called Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM, can provide clues to the future of modern climate change. The good news: Earth and most species survived. The bad news: It took millennia to recover from the episode, when temperatures rose by 5 to 8 degrees Celsius (9 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit). "There is a positive note in that the world persisted, it did not go down in flames, it has a way of self-correcting and righting itself," says University of Utah geochemist Gabe Bowen, lead author of the study published today in the journal Nature Geoscience. Each pulse of carbon emissions lasted no more than 1,500 years. "This new study tightens the link," he adds. Drilling into Earth's Past