Lots of interesting details about the state of fusion research. The most interesting part for me is the fact that for less than the cost of a Hipstamatic per year, fusion research could be funded above the “At this rate it will be 50 years away, forever” level it’s currently at.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions
Here’s a question for the #hivemind : What do people use to do server-side processing of html? I generally use BeautifulSoup with Python, but I’m about to start a new project and am curious to see what else is out there. Java, Python, and Go are potential language choices for me (most of this will run on Google Appengine); Any suggestions?
Tautochrone curves
Drop a ball on this curve and it’ll reach the bottom in the same amount of time, no matter where you drop it.
A tautochrone is the curve for which the time taken by an object sliding without friction in uniform gravity to its lowest point is independent of its starting point. The time is equal to π times the square root of the radius over the acceleration of gravity.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautochrone #math #physics
I think I need to do some of these things.
The Google Books Ngram Viewer (http://books.google.com/ngrams) lets you graph and compare phrases from 5.2 million books (that’s half a trillion words!) digitized by the Google Books team over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years.
Recently one digital humanities researcher turned to the Ngram Viewer to answer a question that’s piqued the interest of many a pop-culture fan lately: just how historically accurate is the dialogue of Downton Abbey, anyway?
Read more on what he found:
http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/02/making-downton-more-traditional.html
BEHOLD: The Female.
P.s. That’s not a fin on her left side…
A Pun Involving Travel 