Make It So!

The History of the Floppy Disk - Input Output

The History of the Floppy Disk - Input Output: "In the fall of 1977, I experimented with a newfangled PC, a Radio Shack TRS-80. For data storage it used—I kid you not—a cassette tape player. Tape had a long history with computing; I had used the IBM 2420 9-track tape system on IBM 360/370 mainframes to load software and to back-up data. Magnetic tape was common for storage in pre-personal computing days, but it had two main annoyances: it held tiny amounts of data, and it was slower than a slug on a cold spring morning. There had to be something better, for those of us excited about technology. And there was: the floppy disk."

Scientists bend light the ‘wrong’ way

Scientists bend light the ‘wrong’ way | Fox News: "Materials that bend light in unnatural ways are often touted as the path to futuristic technologies such as cloaking devices and super-powered lenses. But such materials are hard to make, but scientists have now discovered a simpler way using electrons.

At Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, a team of researchers led by Hosang Yoon and Donhee Ham showed that using ordinary semiconductors and confining electrons to a two-dimensional plane they could make a material with a so-called negative refractive index that bends radio waves the ‘wrong’ way, and does so a hundred times better than other methods.

A refractive index is a measure of how much a material bends light. An index of 1 means no bending at all. Diamonds have that nice prism effect because they have an index of about 2.42, whereas air bends light hardly at all. Light – and that includes radio waves – bends because as it travels through anything other than a vacuum it slows down. Most materials always have a positive refractive index. That means that if light is approaching a denser, higher-index material from a lower-index one it gets bent to the right if the denser stuff is on that same side.

This all changes if the material has a negative index – as metamaterials do. In that case, the bend would be to the left. An object surrounded by a metamaterial would scatter the light away from it, making it invisible."

Hans Camenzind, 555 timer inventor, dies

Hans Camenzind, 555 timer inventor, dies: "Hans Camenzind, the Swiss emigre analog guru who invented one of the most successful circuits in electronics history and introduced the concept of phase-locked loop to IC design, passed away in his sleep at the age of 78. The news was reported today (Aug. 15) by Sergio Franco, an emeritus professor of electrical engineering at San Francisco State University in an email.

Camenzind came to the United States in 1960 and worked for several years at some of the storied names of the newly developing semiconductor industry: Transitron, Tyco Semiconductor, and Signetics.

In 1971 he joined the ranks of entrepreneurs by founding InterDesign, a company specializing in semi-custom integrated circuit design. It was there, working under a contract with Signetics, that he invented the 555 timer.  Signetics commercialized the device in 1972, and it went on to become one of the most successful in the industry's history. The device, used in oscillator, pulse-generation and other applications, is still widely used today. Versions of the device have been or are still made by dozens of major semiconductor vendors, including Texas Instruments, Intersil, Maxim, Avago, Exar, Fairchild, NXP and STMicroelectronics. "

U.S. Has Life of Pi as Population Hits Math Milestone

U.S. Has Life of Pi as Population Hits Math Milestone - NYTimes.com: "Figuring out the number of American residents got as easy as pi on Tuesday as the United States touched a rare mathematical and demographic milestone.

The Census Bureau said that the United States reached 314,159,265 residents, or the mathematical ratio pi times 100 million, shortly after 2:29 p.m. EDT (1829 GMT)."

NASA upgrades Mars Curiosity software ... from 350M miles away

NASA upgrades Mars Curiosity software ... from 350M miles away - Computerworld: "Picture doing a remote software upgrade. Now picture doing it when the machine you're upgrading is a robotic rover sitting 350 million miles away, on the surface of Mars.

That's what a team of programmers and engineers at NASA are dealing with as they get ready to download a new version of the flight software on the Mars rover Curiosity, which landed safely on the Red Planet earlier this week.

This photo is part of the first full-color 360-degree image taken by Curiosity at the Gale Crater landing site. 'We need to take a whole series of steps to make that software active,' said Steve Scandore, a senior flight software engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 'You have to imagine that if something goes wrong with this, it could be the last time you hear from the rover.'

'It has to work,' he told Computerworld. 'You don't' want to be known as the guy doing the last activity on the rover before you lose contact.'"

23 Mathematical Challenges And YOU | Armed with Science

23 Mathematical Challenges And YOU | Armed with Science: "It’s the ninth prime number. An Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 3n − 1.  The first prime P for which unique factorization of cyclotomic integers based on the Pth root of unity breaks down.

It’s also the number of mathematical challenges listed here that could land you a spot in the history books (if you solve one – or more – of them).

Discovering novel mathematics will enable the development of new tools to change the way the DoD approaches analysis, modeling and prediction, new materials and physical and biological sciences.  The 23 Mathematical Challenges program involves individual researchers and small teams who are addressing one or more of the following 23 mathematical challenges."

The Chaos Within Sudoku - A Richter Scale

The Chaos Within Sudoku - A Richter Scale: "Sudoku is a fun problem, but how hard is any particular puzzle? Now we have the answer based on measuring the chaos inherent in a grid. This gives a Richter scale for Sudoku. A pair of computer scientists from the  Babes-Bolyai University (Romania) and the University of Notre Dame (USA) have made some remarkable connections between Sudoku, the classic k-SAT problem, and the even more classic non-linear continuous dynamics.  But before we go into the detail let's look at what this means for Sudoku enthusiasts. Maria Ercsey-Ravasz and Zoltan Toroczkai have devised a scale that provides an accurate determination of a Sudoku puzzle's hardness. So when you encounter a puzzle labelled hard and you find it easy all you need to do is to compute its n, a co-efficient that measures the hardness of the problem."

Please Don’t Call It Trash-80

Please Don’t Call It Trash-80: A 35th Anniversary Salute to Radio Shack’s TRS-80 | Techland | TIME.com: "Quick — name the most important personal computer of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Those of you who mentioned the legendary Apple II–that’s fine. I respect your decision. Forced to think objectively in 2012, I may even agree. But if you just named Radio Shack’s TRS-80, you made me smile.

Your choice is entirely defensible. And back in the TRS-80′s heyday, I not only would have agreed with it but would have vehemently opposed any other candidate.

Gadget-retailing giant Radio Shack unveiled the TRS-80 Model I at a press conference at New York’s Warwick Hotel 35 years ago today, on August 3, 1977. (The company didn’t call it the Model I at the time: Like Apple’s Apple I, it only became the I after a II was introduced.)

It wasn’t the city’s biggest news story that day. That would be the bombings of two office buildings by Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN, which killed one man and prompted the evacuation of 100,000 people from other buildings, including the Empire State Building and both towers of the World Trade Center. But it was a big moment in the burgeoning microcomputer industry: The TRS-80, which began shipping in September, was one of 1977′s trinity of early consumer PCs, along with the Apple II and Commodore’s PET 2001."

Historian: Mass violence to erupt in 2020, mathematical pattern suggests

Open Source Community: Historian: Mass violence to erupt in 2020, mathematical pattern suggests: "Historian Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut, has assumed the role of the world's biggest bummer with his recent prediction that widespread violence will erupt worldwide sometime around the year 2020, as profiled in this recent feature in Nature. What has many people worried is that he's backing up this premonition with a mathematical formula, known as cliodynamics.

Turchin is credited with coining the term cliodynamics, which is the study of historical mathematical data like population figures and global economic performance to identify patterns of similar behavior. Turchin's studies point to a cycle in which society at large becomes engulfed in widespread violence every 50 years.

The current pattern dates back at least to 1870, when economic disparity in the U.S. led to urban violence, and follows the 50-year cycle to the anti-Communist fervor and race riots around 1920, followed by the political assassinations, terrorist attacks and domestic violence in 1970, Turchin told Nature. By that logic, Turchin believes we should circle the year 2020 on our calendars as the year when we start locking our doors.

‘I hope it won't be as bad as 1870,’ he told Nature."

A Mathematical View of Track and Field World Records

A Mathematical View of Track and Field World Records | Inside Science: "A mathematician has developed a new model that can estimate which track and field world records are the most likely to be broken.

Brian Godsey, a graduate student in mathematics at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, recently published a paper including computations of the likelihood of record-setting performances in 48 different men's and women's track and field events during this calendar year.

Godsey's paper did not directly address the likelihood of an athlete setting a track and field world record at the 2012 London Olympics, but his analysis suggests that viewers should keep a close watch on the men's 110-meter hurdles and three women's events, the 5,000-meter and 3000-meter steeplechase races, as wells as the  hammer throw. There is a 95 percent chance that the women's steeplechase record will be broken this year, Godsey wrote in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports.

Godsey gives competitors a better-than-10 percent chance of besting the world record in 22 events during this calendar year, 18 of which will be contested at the Olympics. Numerous records, however, seem far out of reach.

This year, no woman has come within 5 seconds of the 3:50.46 record for the 1500-meter run, set in 1993 by Qu Yunxia of China. Godsey predicted a less than one one-hundredth of a percent chance of the record falling in 2012. Most of the event's top historical times are from the 1980s and 1990s. That's also true for numerous other events. Performances from the 1980s currently hold the record in 13 of the events Godsey reviewed."

Flags from Apollo moon landing still standing

Flags from Apollo moon landing still standing, photos reveal | Fox News: "An enduring question ever since the manned moon landings of the 1960s has been: Are the flags planted by the astronauts still standing?

Now, lunar scientists say the verdict is in from the latest photos of the moon taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC): Most do, in fact, still stand.

'From the LROC images it is now certain that the American flags are still standing and casting shadows at all of the sites, except Apollo 11,' LROC principal investigator Mark Robinson wrote in a blog post today (July 27). 'Astronaut Buzz Aldrin reported that the flag was blown over by the exhaust from the ascent engine during liftoff of Apollo 11, and it looks like he was correct!'"