Peering Into Our Future

Boston.com - May 1, 2011 by Graeme Wood

The Royal Institution of Great Britain has stood on the same site since 1799, and on most days it would seem one of the older and fustier buildings in central London. But on April 6, time did a funny thing: The institution’s 212 years of existence suddenly contracted, and went from seeming unimaginably long to unimaginably short.

“Our sun formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more before the fuel runs out,” Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, told the audience seated among the busts and weathered books of the institution’s second-story library. “It won’t be humans who witness the sun’s demise: It will be entities as different from us as we are from a bug.”

The occasion for Rees’s mind-bending assertion was his acceptance of the 2011 Templeton Prize, an annual cash award of $1.7 million, payable to individuals who have made “an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension” — in Rees’s case, by looking millions of years into the future and venturing a guess as to what might be waiting.

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Games becoming more real, faster than ever

Singularity, as a concept, is based on the premise of the accelerating pace of technological change. Since we humans are so adaptable, we get used to new things very quickly, so when you can see the pace of change speeding up for yourself, it's worth noting.

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Electrons are Round! Who Knew?

Cosmic Log - by Alan Boyle

The most precise measurements of the electron ever made suggest that it's perfectly spherical to an accuracy of less than 0.000000000000000000000000001 centimeter — a tiny, tiny number that physicists say can make a big difference in the nature of the cosmos.

In this case, we're actually talking about the "shape" of the electron's interactions with electric fields rather than whether it's a non-spatial point particle or a tiny vibrating string. Those concepts are fine in other contexts, but for the laser experiment conducted by researchers at Imperial College London, size (and shape) matters. The measurements, which were 10 years in the making, are reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

If the physicists had seen an irregularity in the electric dipole moment — that is, the orientation of the electron as it spins in an electric field — that would have lent support to some of the non-standard models in particle physics. One example is the idea that an extra supersymmetric particle (a.k.a. "sparticle") exists for every particle we know about in the standard model. Another example is the view that the interactions involving matter are just slightly different from interactions involving antimatter ... which would explain why we see virtually no antimatter in the universe around us.

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Why a multiverse just makes sense

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Battling Financial Market Algorithms

PopSci - May 13, 2011 by Clay Dillow

Trading Places More computers than people. Rafael Matsunaga via Wikimedia

Theft of trading ideas has long been a proud tradition on trading floors across the world. There was a time when smart traders would hang out in the same restaurants, bars, and flophouses as their institutional counterparts trying to catch a hint about tomorrow’s dealings or to manipulate another trader with some skullduggery--and then try to take advantage of the trade. These days it’s common knowledge that computers do a lot of our financial dealing, but a somewhat frightening article in the London Review of Books describes how the algorithms have now taken up the trader’s practice of trying to fool each other.

Most trading algorithms execute simple tasks. Say a large institution wants to purchase a large chunk of stock in a company: the program will seek out shares and buy them in many, many small quantities so as not to send the price soaring with a massive order--and to stop other traders from seeing what they’re up to and getting in on the deal. Called VWAPs, they’re fairly benign.

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Self-Driving Cars Coming to Nevada First?

New York Times - May 10, 2011 by John Markoff

Google, a pioneer of self-driving cars, is quietly lobbying for legislation that would make Nevada the first state where they could be legally operated on public roads.

And yes, the proposed legislation would include an exemption from the ban on distracted driving to allow occupants to send text messages while sitting behind the wheel.

The two bills, which have received little attention outside Nevada’s Capitol, are being introduced less than a year after the giant search engine company acknowledged that it was developing cars that could be safely driven without human intervention.

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You Won't Find a Phone Thinner Than This!

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