Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness

Swap-a-Skill.com Learn The History Of Physics In 4 Minutes Aristotle was wrong. He claimed that heavier items fell faster than lighter items. Had he actually tested the theory, using a high-tech tool as sophisticated as a ladder, a ledge, or a cliff, he’d have immediately realized that it couldn’t possibly be true. Because Galileo did test the theory, and he found that balls of various mass fell at the exact same rate. And then he skydived off the Leaning Tower of Pisa in celebration just to rub it in Aristotle’s wrong dead face. Well, at least that’s what happened according to this fantastic animation directed by Åsa Lucande for BBC Science. [Hat tip: neatorama]

Chicago Booth Blog: Fault Lines by Raghuram Rajan - Fault Lines by Raghuram Rajan CHICAGO – To understand how to achieve a sustained recovery from the Great Recession, we need to understand its causes. And identifying causes means starting with the evidence. Two facts stand out. Persuasive explanations of the crisis point to linkages between today’s tepid demand and rising income inequality. Rising house prices gave people the illusion that increasing wealth backed their borrowing. This emphasis on anti-worker, pro-rich policies as the recession’s primary cause fits less well with events in Europe. So consider an alternative explanation: Starting in the early 1970’s, advanced economies found it increasingly difficult to grow. Greater competition and the adoption of new technologies increased the demand for, and incomes of, highly skilled, talented, and educated workers doing non-routine jobs like consulting. The short-sighted political response to the anxieties of those falling behind was to ease their access to credit. The alternative narrative has more to say.

Methane Made with Solar Power Will Power Audi Vehicles Gas maker: SolarFuel operates this 250-kilowatt demonstration plant that produces methane from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Audi is building a plant that will use solar and wind power to make methane from water and carbon dioxide. The plant, which will use technology developed by Stuttgart, Germany-based SolarFuel, is scheduled to start operation later this year. SolarFuel’s process uses excess renewable energy generated as a result of Germany’s push to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. SolarFuel says its approach may be a solution to one of the biggest challenges with renewable energy—its variability. To make the methane, SolarFuel combines two existing technologies. SolarFuel’s chief customer officer, Stephan Rieke, says that the amount of excess renewable energy in Germany grew, in two years, from 150 gigawatt-hours per year to 1,000 gigawatt-hours per year. SolarFuel can’t compete directly with the wholesale price of natural gas.

"Fast Food’s “Ethnic Insights”" by Andrew Billo Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – There is no denying the fast-food industry’s contribution to America’s obesity epidemic. Now, Asians and Asian-Americans could follow on this path, as major fast-food chains like McDonald’s target them disproportionately. Although Asian-Americans amount to only 6% of the United States’ population, the marketing magazine Advertising Age reports that for every nine focus groups that McDonald’s organizes, two (22%) are Asian-focused, while another four center on other minorities. At the Asia Society’s Diversity Leadership Forum earlier this month in New York, McDonald’s Director of Ethnic Marketing Vivien Chen described how the company has focused its marketing on the ethnic consumer. Chen claims that its strategy – called “Leading with ethnic insights” – shows the company’s commitment to the Asian-American consumer. In fact, this link represents the scope of Asia’s incipient obesity problem.

3D solar panels can produce 20 times more energy than flat panels We see the trend in 3D technology everywhere: Movie theaters, home theaters, game consoles, 3D printers. But researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently discovered that creating a 3D-inspired solar panel not only help to keep up with the trends, it could draw in 20 times more energy than flat panel designs. Traditional solar panels lay flat on a surface or rooftop, facing the sun to collect energy. “I think this concept could become an important part of the future of photovoltaics,” said Jeffrey Grossman, the Carl Richard Soderberg Career Development Associate Professor of Power Engineering at MIT and one of the project’s leaders. The accordion-style arrays also work better because they receive solar energy from all angles rather than in just one direction. Researchers also say the tower style panel helps save space by standing vertically, and the design will be easier to manufacture than the cubes.

"Rio’s Unsustainable Nonsense" by Jagdish Bhagwati Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – If George Orwell were alive today, he would be irritated, and then shocked, by the cynical way in which every lobby with an axe to grind and money to burn has hitched its wagon to the alluring phrase “sustainable development.” In fact, the United Nations’ Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development is about pet projects of all and sundry – many of them tangential to the major environmental issues, such as climate change, that were the principal legacy of the original Rio Earth Summit. Thus, the International Labor Organization and trade-union lobbies have managed to insert “Decent Jobs” into the seven priority areas at the Rio conference. I would love for everyone, everywhere, to have a decent job. No one should pretend that we can magically offer decent jobs to the huge numbers of impoverished but aspiring workers in the informal sector. In the end, therefore, water availability cannot properly be called a “right.”

2 : La Physique Quantique : vers la recherche d'un absolu… Bien des physiciens croient que la meilleure façon de décrire le monde de l'atome demeure le modèle mathématique, et qu'à travers les équations nous pouvons entrevoir la façon complexe dont le monde microscopique est ordonné. Mais un orage souffle sur la physique du vingtième siècle, faisant trembler ses fondations et jetant la confusion sur la nature même de ses concepts les plus ultimes. Véritable révolution qui vient jeter un pavé dans la mare pourtant si tranquille de nos croyances acquises jusqu'alors, la physique quantique se révèle une théorie sans commune mesure avec tout ce qu'on croyait savoir au sujet du monde atomique. La théorie quantique décrit un monde étrange, où l'on découvre que la matière qui constitue tout notre univers, et qui semble pourtant bien localisée dans l'espace est en fait « étendue » quelque part.

"Labor’s Paradise Lost" by Robert Skidelsky LONDON – As people in the developed world wonder how their countries will return to full employment after the Great Recession, it might benefit us to take a look at a visionary essay that John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936, equipped governments with the intellectual tools to counter the unemployment caused by slumps. In this earlier essay, however, Keynes distinguished between unemployment caused by temporary economic breakdowns and what he called “technological unemployment” – that is, “unemployment due to the discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.” Keynes reckoned that we would hear much more about this kind of unemployment in the future. But its emergence, he thought, was a cause for hope, rather than despair. At the same time, “technological unemployment” has been on the rise.

La physique quantique (Philippe Grangier) - Université de tous les savoirs Transcription* de la 574e conférence de l'Université de tous les savoirs prononcée le 17 juin 2005 Par Philippe Grangier: « La physique quantique » La Physique Quantique est un sujet extrêmement vaste, et je n'aurai pas la prétention d'en présenter tous les aspects dans cet exposé. Dans mes exemples, je parlerai beaucoup du photon, vous savez aussi que c'est le « Licht Quanten », le quantum de lumière qui a été introduit par Einstein en 1905 dans un article extrêmement célèbre qui fête cette année son centenaire. Je vous parlerai donc d'idées et de concepts, mais aussi d'expériences, et en particulier de celles que nous avons faites à l'Institut d'Optique à Orsay. Qu'est ce donc que la physique quantique ? Donc la mécanique quantique est une construction intellectuelle tout à fait grandiose, je pense que c'est un candidat valable au titre de plus grande aventure intellectuelle du 20ème siècle, c'est-à-dire plus grande que la relativité, le marxisme, ou la psychanalyse.