New record for unassisted freediving: 100m!

Yesterday the Kiwi William Trubridge dove to 100m (328ft) unassisted (without weights or fins) at the Dean's Blue Hole in The Bahamas. It took him 4min 10s to complete the round trip. Incredible! Well done! Note the video above is of his previous record dive at the same location.

Hyperion Flyby (moon of Saturn)

Today's Math Joke: Evaluate

Action at the Center of Our Galaxy

If the image above doesn't animate for you go to the source website here. I think its pretty amazing that we can track the motion of stars around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Benoit Mandelbrot passes away at 85, RIP

From the New York Times,

"In the 1950s, Dr. Mandelbrot proposed a simple but radical way to quantify the crookedness of such an object by assigning it a “fractal dimension,” an insight that has proved useful well beyond the field of cartography.

Over nearly seven decades, working with dozens of scientists, Dr. Mandelbrot contributed to the fields of geology, medicine, cosmology and engineering. He used the geometry of fractals to explain how galaxies cluster, how wheat prices change over time and how mammalian brains fold as they grow, among other phenomena.

His influence has also been felt within the field of geometry, where he was one of the first to use computer graphics to study mathematical objects like the Mandelbrot set, which was named in his honor.

“He doesn’t spend months or years proving what he has observed,” said Heinz-Otto Peitgen, a professor of mathematics and biomedical sciences at the University of Bremen. And for that, he said, Dr. Mandelbrot “has received quite a bit of criticism.”

“But if we talk about impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences,” Professor Peitgen said, “he is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years.” "

See also "The Thumbprint of God".

I'm not the only one who doesn't like Big Bang theory

Shaw prize awarded for determining the age of the universe as 13.7 billion years

Last week it was announced that Charles Bennett won the prestigious Shaw prize for his work on WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) which mapped in high resolution the CMB (cosmic microwave background radiation). Bennett had also worked on COBE (COsmic Background Explorer), the first such mapping and is somewhat credited with this facet of Big Bang evidence. To quote an article I came across on this award:

"Bennett's claim to fame, and what some thought might win him the Nobel Prize in Physics this year, was his work on a monumental project called WMAP - the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. The project has been focused for almost a decade on collecting the data necessary for Earth-bound physicists like Bennett to more accurately verify all sorts of statistics about the universe: its age, its composition and even its shape. We now know, for example, that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and that dark energy makes up some 72 percent of it.
Data from the WMAP also verified that the universe started out as a sub-atomic sized pinprick which "exploded" (as in expanded rapidly, not actually exploded, as Bennett was quick and adamant to point out in a phone interview with The News-letter) into an astronomical size in mere fractions (trillionths of a trillionth) of a second." See the full article here.

Those of you who know me well know that I am a staunch believer in a static universe and think that this talk of the "age of the universe" and the first "trillionths of a trillionth of a second" is just nonsense. As far as WMAP, I don't doubt the experiment or the data, but I do strongly doubt some of the conclusions. I think the evidence for the Big Bang is rather weak and can likely be explained in a much simpler relatively static universe. Actually, the low temperature black body CMB spectrum is given as one of the three main pieces of evidence for the Big Bang. Essentially, it is said that the CMB is the after glow of the event that started our universe and thus these photons are the oldest in existence. The universe was supposedly a very hot place as the Big Bang occurred but has cooled off since as space expanded. In the cooling the universe now has an effective temperature (given by the black body spectrum of the CMB) of about 2.7 Kelvins.

Despite my doubts about the Big Bang, kudos to Dr. Bennett. It was a very cool experiment they conducted with he WMAP satellite and regardless of the conclusions you want to make from it, the data is quite fascinating. I remember COBE and recall being very excited about WMAP when they first launched it. It took a couple years to get the data after the launch in 2001 but but it was well worth the wait. The images produced by WMAP are just stunning (see top). I will say that I don't think it would be appropriate at all for the Nobel prize to be awarded for this as the quoted article suggests. To me the Nobel prize in physics should be awarded to theorists and experimentalists who predicted (former) and then proved (the latter) some new physics. The big bang is inherently unprovable. The Big Bang supposedly happened 14 billions years ago so cosmologists must rely on very indirect evidence to make their claims. Further, I think that in 50-100 years we will look back on these times an laugh not unlike how we look back on the Copernican era today and laugh. It would be a sad state of affairs for the nobel prize to be awarded for debunked science. In the next few months I will make my case against the Big Bang and hopefully you will see why some doubt is warranted.

py's proof

Click here if the animation does not play for you.

Underwater Base Jumping (Awesome)

I love google (pacman homepage)

Time Machine

The Sun

The Pale Blue Dot

Anisotropic Strain-Induced Curvature in Type-II CdSe/CdTe Nanorod Heterostructures

My second paper just got published in JACS, here are some images from the paper. If you don't have a subscription to JACS and would like a copy just shoot me an email. The supporting information is available to all for free and contains a lot of info. I'm pretty proud of this work, feel free to ask questions. Enjoy!

Here are some of the curved NRHs:

Here are some linear CdSe/CdTe NRHs for comparison:

"21st century syndrome," epic reddit comment

"Anyone else here feel like they're never fully rested, like there's dead space in your brain? I have lost most of my emotions and the connections between the physical world and my mental state. I have a girlfriend, good friends, a decent job, and my own place. What's wrong with me?"

A response, there's at least a little bit for everyone in there:

"You could be suffering from early 21st century syndrome. Don't bother googling it, I just made it up. But the symptoms you describe are typical of the new malaise. You should be happy. You have fulfilled the requirements of a media driven life. You have your own place. You have a 'decent' job. You have a woman. And yet, underneath it all there is this dissatisfaction. You can't quite place it but it is there nonetheless, gnawing at your brain.

You flick randomly through internet pages for hours after dark. The TV chatters in the background. Every world developement is known to you a few minutes after it happens. You are the master of an external world that appears and presents itself through text and pics and vids.

You go about the business of living as it has been described to you and you can check all the boxes for relative success. And yet it doesn't feel like success. Not the way it does in the movies or on TV. No orchestral music chimes in when you do something good, no ominous montage depicts things negatively when your performance is not up to par. Life itself is removed from you because consciousness itself does not match up to the way 'we' are used to receiving information; that of third person observer through a cam. The P.O.V. first person view is somehow limiting, it limits us to this space and time which is not in keeping with how consciousness can effortlessly cross time when 'connected' to the internet.

Life today in a modern industrial society has an air of rigidness about it. Everywhere you go, you run up against barriers and rules. Speed limits, parking restrictions, decorum, social rules (unwritten but bearing on the mind), myriad exacting laws. All of them supposedly designed for the collective benefit of everyone. But no individual feels like everyone, each individual feels like you. So you end up being oppressed by the collective rules designed to protect you. This is called the "system".

There is nothing "wrong" with you brother.

You are merely suffering from the collective malaise of having all that we are supposed to want. Supposedly, human existence today is the best it has ever been. The 'facts' bear this out. Life expectancy today for the average person is higher than it's ever been, right?

And yet you long for the hunt. The risk. The hunter gatherer life, buried deep somewhere in your hypothalamus, longs for that time when your own ingenuity resulted in food for your group. When you could exploit your human genius for real and direct gain...feeding yourself and your tribe. Going to the office/cubicle today gains you money to obtain these things. But it does not offer the thrill of the hunt. The risk. The adrenaline rush of the successful raid on the enemy camp, the high of the perfect kill.

Homo sapiens sapiens is not a very old species in relative terms. But it is a cunning one and the greatest force this planet has ever seen. But, the amount of time we successfully gathered as hunters (2 million years) is far longer and evolutionary significant in comparison to the existence of human civilisation (8 thousand years). Yet, all cogent information tells you you are better off today than anyone in human history.

And yet, on a quiet walk outside the city, you stare at the moon through leafy glade and can almost touch the truth of a different life. A life you were designed for but no longer is.

There is nothing wrong with you brother, that is not wrong with all of us.

Disregard those corporate entities who tell you your problem is solvable through the use of their 'drug'.

If you need to alter your consciousness self medicate with whiskey or weed. Do not touch the shit the "experts" have formulated to suppress the spirit."