NASA's free 'Visions of the Future' posters

Check out JPL's 'Visions of the Future' page. Download, print and post!

I personally like the style; most of them look like 60's Sci-Fi book cover. One below is probably my favorite (so far): 

By the way, have you visited NASA's main page recently? You should!

Human Face of Big Data

It is a web site, a documentary, a book and an (iPad) app. Check it out; you will end up spending a significant chunk of your day.

Physics, Math and Pi

Tamar Friedmann and Carl R. Hagen,  ar University of Rochester, recently published a manuscript titled 'looked at 'Quantum Mechanical Derivation of the Wallis Formula for π'.'

They have been looking at the variational computation of the spectrum of the hydrogen atom. They start with Schrödinger equation for the hydrogen atom, given by:

H . ψ  =  ( - h².∇² / 2.m  -  e² / r) . ψ  =  E . ψ

and arrive at the famous pre-Newtonian formula for pi, derived by John Wallis in 1655.

360 years after a mathematical derivation of pi, physicists come up with a physical derivation for quantum energy levels that is identical to it. The universe never fails to amaze.

Two pages from the book "Arithmetica Infinitorum," by John Wallis. In the table on the left page, the square that appears repeatedly denotes 4/pi, or the ratio of the area of a square to the area of the circumscribed circle. Wallis used the table to obtain the inequalities shown at the top of the page on the right that led to his formula. Credit: Digitized by Google.

Here are some related links:

• Phys.org article
• Forbes/Science article

Engineering Ethics

Nice article about engineering ethics from Kaiser Fung.

[tl;dr] When Fung reviewed the curricula of data science and analytics degree programs last year, he found only one school that requires an ethics class. That needs to change, or more data scandals will emerge.

KIC 8462852 Redux

There are more interesting news (?) on KIC_8462852 or Tabby's Star this week.

Murthy Nukala posted this, pointing to Phil Plait's article describing latest data (from 1890's :) with a link to the Bradley E. Schaefer's manuscript.

So, what's new? The star in question may have been fading in brightness over a time period of 100 years. What exactly this means? Read more by clicking above links. Nothing conclusive so far, but I am telling you, they are coming :)

 (Graph from Schaefer, 2016)

Also, Wow! Signal Podcast released a new episode titled 'The Slow and Fast Dimming of Tabby's Star' on Jan 14th with Dr. Schaefer. You can listen to him reviewing and commenting on the data.

Again, Dr. Boyajian et al's manuscript that started it all is here.

One-Key form Milwaukee Tools

Milwaukee tools introduced a new system called One-Key that enables users to control, track and manage tools wirelessly.

X-files worthy intro video is below. Visit Milwaukee site for details.

We put a chip in it!

If you are interested in or working on IoT projects, you may also be interested in this tumblr site 'We put a chip in it!' Some of the videos are really funny; potential NSFW content.

We put a chip in it!

In some cases, you will find yourself wondering if the video is a legitimate product pitch or a spoof. There are a few that are very hard to tell :)

(Lifted from tumblr)