A Neural Network Playground

From tensorflow.org, a beautiful display to show the inner workings of a neural network during learning phase: a neural network playground.

Warning: It may be a bit additive.

Moon landing completely staged! :)

Few nerds at ThamTech, with a little help from others at Wildflower Interactive published this interactive re-enactment (?) of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing:

http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/

Looking at the data and the audio, it is very easy to see that the lunar landing was completely staged. Jokes aside, this page is great; I mean great. You can't get any closer to that moment in history than this. Make sure you let kids around you know about this!

By the way, we are obviously very late to the game; this page won an Webby Award in 2013.

Must read: A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning

If you want a very quick intro to machine learning (decision trees, specifically), this page has great -I mean, great!- content. Quick read with beautiful visualizations.
A must read for engineers and designers.
 
Don't forget to scroll all the way down to read about Stephanie and Tony.

A Visual Intro to Machine Learning: Part 1

Apollo 11 Code

You probably need to be an uber nerd to think this is cool, but here it is: "Original Apollo 11 guidance computer (AGC) source code, in assembly, for Command Module (Comanche054) and Lunar Module (Luminary099)", uploaded by Chris L Garry, an intern, to github.

https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/tree/6e8c67f53145375d48d8a1af8f85384d1b10ec51

Smithsonian Magazine article discussion the details is here.

And, to coders who are trying to fix it. This is blasphemy, stop it! That code worked fine :) It was a fairly successful operation that we haven't repeated in the last 50 years. 

Here is a nice page that lets you 'replay' the whole thing, both audio and video. This one is a nerd fest too:

http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/

New Suite of Solutions to Three-Body problem

After 'discovering' Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem trilogy, I started reading about the original problem and it's solutions. Came across the following article describing a recent set of 13 solution families:

Physicists Discover a Whopping 13 New Solutions to Three-Body Problem

Physicists Milovan Šuvakov and Veljko Dmitrašinović at the Institute of Physics Belgrade, discovered 13 new families of solutions to the problem, adding to the 3 families earlier. So far we have:

• Lagrange-Euler family (1800's)
•  Broucke-Hénon family (1970's)
• Figure-eight family (1993)
• Šuvakov-Dmitrašinović suite (2013)

Recent results are described in 'Three Classes of Newtonian Three-Body Planar Periodic Orbits.'

Related:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem#Circular_restricted_three-body_problem
• Animation of latest suite at http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/WebGL/Suki.html

Water model of Keynesian economics

Rediscovered the 'water model for Keynesian economics' at Nautilus' Facts So Romantic blog, in an article written by Siobhan Roberts.

The nerd in me wants to simulate this in a browser so I can tweak it to see the changes live. Would be a very nice demo for (my) kids.

There has to be a JS library that would make this easy. D3JS maybe?

Nicholas Barr, in A.W.H. Phillips: Collected Works in Contemporary Perspective by Robert Leeson

Related:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC
• http://www.siobhanroberts.com/genius-at-play/
• http://www.siobhanroberts.com/category/articles/

360 Terabytes for 13.8 billion years

Take that Amazon Glacier! :)

There were multiple articles on a new data storage disk technology sometime in February 2016. It is made of glass and hence can hold data much longer without degradation. Articles mention that "A standard-sized disc can store around 360 terabytes of data, with an estimated lifespan of up to 13.8 billion years even at temperatures of 190°C."

The one-inch discs used to encode new texts in 5D

(Image credit: University of Southampton) 

 Kinda cool... Here are some links:

• http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/16/11018018/5d-data-storage-glass
• http://www.sciencealert.com/this-new-5d-data-storage-disc-can-store-360tb-of-data-for-14-billion-years
• http://phys.org/news/2016-02-eternal-5d-storage-history-humankind.html
• http://www.gizmag.com/eternal-data-storage-nanostructured-glass/41951/

However, I do question the decision by some of the editors to pick an image of the disc that will hold for 13.8 billion years a document that claims that earth is (now only) few thousand years old. The same goes for the researchers who selected the documents for their demonstration.