Now, two of my favorite things are coming together – Wolfram’s NKS is now available on the iPad.  It’s available at Apple’s iTunes store for $9.99 – far less than the hardback version and certainly much lighter!…  (Hmmm…  Two things coming together – kind of like chocolate and peanut butter in a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup…)

I haven’t purchased an iPad yet, but now I’m really excited to think about possibly maybe starting to look into getting one… (or at least window shopping for one…)

Read more about A New Kind of Science for the iPad on Stephen Wolfram’s blog here…

The constellation Orion’s biggest star is Betelgeuse (pronounced “beetle-juice”), a red supergiant, and it’s one of the brightest stars in the sky - that’s the “what”.  

Will it explode?  Well, according to some observers, the star is not round, and it’s getting smaller.  This could be the signs of Betelgeuse heading toward a supernova phase, but it also could be explained away by large sunspots that fool our observations.

Bad Astronomy seems to think that this is likely an astronomical doomsday rumor.  It may be interesting only because it’s close to the 2012 doomsday date that is the end of the Mayan calendar.  But read the Bad Astronomy article for yourself to get the best information on the topic.

However, this new supernova discovery may shine some light on the darkness.  Apparently, this supernova is spewing calcuim and titanium, and while most reports are focusing on the calcium, it is thought that the much heavier element titanium is the interesting part.  This titanium, which is radioactive and emits positrons as it decays, could be the source of what had previously been attributed to dark matter particles colliding.  If these types of supernovae are creating such an abundance of radioactive heavy elements in the universe, this could help explain the supposed dark matter signatures.

For more info on this subject, here’s a post from Casey Kazan from The Daily Galaxy on the new supernova, and the original post from Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist is here.

I love to read, and I especially love to read nonfiction books that help me understand how the world works.  So, I’m going to be providing reviews of some of the books that I’ve been reading lately, and let you in on why I like (or don’t like) them and what I’m learning.

Recently I picked up a copy of The Perfect Swarm by Len Fisher, Ph.D., which focuses on the science of complexity in everyday life  Dr. Fisher has also written books on game theory in real life (Rock, Paper, Scissors) and the optimal way to dunk a doughnut (aptly named How to Dunk a Doughnut).  It turns out that Fisher was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for the dunking donut work – the award is usually reserved for work that just plain bad, but Fisher has apparently turned his lemon into lemonade…

In The Perfect Swarm, Fisher describes how bees, ants, locusts, and fish use swarm intelligence to guide group movements and to help in the search for food.  Humans use swarm intelligence as well, and Fisher describes multiple interesting ways that we can take advantage of these concepts to make better judgments in everyday life.  Here’s just some of the interesting concepts and principles that come out of his analysis of complexity:

• To move a group in the direction you want (for example, within a company), lead from the inside, but take care not to let other members of the group know what you are doing.  Just head in the direction that you want to go, and leave it to the laws of the swarm to do the rest.
• If you are in a crowd in a dangerous situation, use a mixed strategy for escape; follow the crowd 60 percent of the time, and spend the other 40 percent searching out escape routes on your own.
• If you want to persuade a large group of people, or even start a craze, don’t rely on persuading someone with influence to pass the message on.  It is far better to try for a critical mass of early adopters – people who will take the idea or product up after a single exposure.
• When confronted with a mass of data that you need to use as the basis of a decision, furst use Benford’s Law to check that the data haven’t been faked.
• Avoid the perils of groupthink by escaping temporarily from the group environment, doing some independent thinking, and committing yourself to the conclusions of that thinking before returning to the group.
• Spread your bets evenly.  Instead of choosing one alternative over another, allocate your resources equally to each.

And here’s a really interesting one – especially if you are hiring someone in your company:

• If you want to give yourself the best chance of choosing the very best option in a situation that doesn’t allow you to go back to the options that you have rejected, look at 37 percent of those available, then choose the next one that is better than any of them.  This will give you a 1 in 3 chance of finding the best option, and a very high chance of finding one in the top few percent.

I am incredibly interested in systems that have simple rules yet create complex behavior.  The world can be modeled as a system using simple rules, and Fisher is quite effective in showing us some interesting and useful things that come from looking at these systems.  It’s a good read, interesting to understand the concepts he’s getting across, and, I would say, worth the time.  You can pick up a copy of The Perfect Swarm here…

Here’s the video of his talk, given at a recent TED conference…

Watch and learn!

Here’s a paragraph from Atkinson’s article:

“Astronomers have long known that many surveys of distant galaxies miss 90% of their targets, but they didn’t know why. Now, astronomers have determined that a large fraction of galaxies whose light took 10 billion years to reach us have gone undiscovered. This was found with an extremely deep survey using two of the four giant 8.2-meter telescopes that make up ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and a unique custom-built filter. The survey also helped uncover some of the faintest galaxies ever found at this early stage of the Universe.”

You can read the Universe Today article here…

While the name was announced some time back, it became official only recently.

Wonder how this would look in the periodic table of periodic tables?…

Read the Los Angeles Times article about Copernicium and the other most recently named elements here…

Well, they did it!  The record was officially achieved today, breaking its previous record.

You can read more about the events at CERN here…

Isaac Newton presented his theory of universal gravitation in 1687, and Albert Einstein overthrew that explanation with his theory of general relativity in 1915.  However, the efforts since Einstein, which include combinations of quantum mechanics and superstring theory, has left most of the scientific world wanting.

There is no doubt that quantum mechanics can predict much of the universe’s probabilistic weirdness.  However, string theory demands multidimensional universes to work and predicts basically nothing.

The three physicists highlighted in the Discover article are Andreas Albrecht, Lee Smolin, and Stuart Kauffman.  (I actually like Smolin’s book The Trouble With Physics – worth a read…).  Here’s a mini-snipit from the Discover article:

Physicists should not spin any theories that require the existence of things, such as multiverses, that cannot be disproved.

I couldn’t agree more.  I wrote a previous post on just this subject and, in another post, Sir Roger Penrose is interviewed discussing the same thing.

Take a preview of the April 2010 Discover Magazine here and read the article…

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN

March 30, 2010, marks the date on which the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will attempt to break its own record for achieving energies near what was present at the Big Bang.

Twin beams of protons, traveling with energies of 3.5 trillion electron-volts (TeV), will be directed at each other in the 17-mile round LHC, located underneath the French-Swiss border at CERN.  According to CERN, this will mark the beginning of LHC’s official research program.

I posted their original landmark test here, and you can read more about their upcoming tests here…