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Saturday, November 15, 2014

Saturday Wrapup

A group calling itself the Russian Union of Engineers has published a photograph, picked up by many news organizations (just picked one, Google it yourself to find more), claiming to show that MH17 was shot down by a Ukrainian fighter plane.

 The interesting thing is the very quick ad hoc crowd sourced debunking of the photograph using tools from Google maps, online photos/data, to their own domain knowledge backed up with the previous information. It would be interesting to understand who the "Russian Union of Engineers" are and why they in particular were chosen to release this information.

 "It's a laughably bad fake
... but speaks volumes about the lack of math or science training amongst reporters to propagate this stuff."

 "For a decent debunking go to the Bellingcat blog [bellingcat.com].

 Also saw some graphic somewhere that clearly showed that the perspective was wrong by an order of magnitude, either the plane was 1 km wide or the satellite was orbiting at 20 km or so.

This fake is so bad, that I think the only target audience is the Russian public, most of whom believe everything that Putin's propaganda machine feeds them.

I have a Russian colleague, whom I normally regard reasonably high, that believes some really strange facts about this incident.

She probably gets all her info from Russian websites."

***

 We discovered a 100 year old 19th century computer that does Fourier analysis with just gears spring and levers. It was locked in a glass case at the University of Illinois Department of Mathematics. 

We rebuilt a small part of the machine and then for two years thoroughly photographed and filmed every part part of the machine and its operation.

 The results of this labor of love are in the video series (short documentary), which is 22 minutes long and contains stunning footage of the machine in action — including detailed descriptions of how it operates. 

The photos are collected in a free book (pdf) .

 The computer was designed by Albert Michelson, who was famous for the Michelson-Morley experiment; he was also the first American to win a Nobel Prize in physics.

***
 
Japan has now put 100 passengers on a Maglev train doing over 500kph

That's well over twice as fast as the fastest U.S. train can manage, and that only manages 240kph on small sections of its route.

 The Japanese Shinkansen is now running over 7 times times as fast as the average U.S. express passenger train. 

500kph is moving towards the average speed of an airliner. Add the convenience of no boarding issues, and city-centre to city-centre travel, and the case for trains as mass-transport begins to look stronger.

***

 Most people wait until they're done with college before taking the difficult exam, but Ayan Qureshi has been playing with computers since he was three so he figured he could handle it. This 5 year old is the youngest person to ever pass Microsoft's professional Exam.


 

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