Nobel Prize in Physics 2011

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae" with one half to Saul Perlmutter and the other half jointly to Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess. 

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2011/press.html

What are type Ia supernova and how they help?
Answer is here...

Saul Perlmutter, U.S. citizen. Born 1959 in Champaign-Urbana, IL, USA. Ph.D. 1986 from University of California, Berkeley, USA. Head of the Supernova Cosmology Project, Professor of Astrophysics, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.
www.physics.berkeley.edu/research/faculty/perlmutter.html

Brian P. Schmidt, U.S. and Australian citizen. Born 1967 in Missoula, MT, USA. Ph.D. 1993 from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. Head of the High-z Supernova Search Team, Distinguished Professor, Australian National University, Weston Creek, Australia.
msowww.anu.edu.au/~brian/
@twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/cosmicpinot

Adam G. Riess, U.S. citizen. Born 1969 in Washington, DC, USA. Ph.D. 1996 from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. Professor of Astronomy and Physics, Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA.
www.stsci.edu/~ariess/

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Simulated Moon Landing Compared with the Eagle's descend to Moon

An   enthusiastic  Apollo fan created a footage using Google Moon and matched it with the video from the Eagle's camera.

Watch the video... it is awe-mazing!



You can download the Google Moon KMZ file for import into Google Moon from:
http://www.mem-tek.com/apollo/Google_Moon_KMZ_files/Apollo_11.kmz
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I'll leave you something to imagine

Symphonyofscience has brought quite an interesting music video (made with the auto tunes).
The latest video is named "The Quantum World".
It examines the nature of the atoms and subatomic particles that make up everything we know. Watch the video, have fun!




They feature the followings:
Richard Feynman - Fun to Imagine
BBC Visions of the Future - the Quantum Revolution
Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman
Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking
Brian Cox TED Talk
BBC What Time is it
BBC Wonders of the Universe
BBC Horizon - What Is Reality

I loved the last punch line...

The Lyrics:

[Morgan Freeman]
So, what are we really made of?
Dig deep inside the atom
and you'll find tiny particles
Held together by invisible forces

Everything is made up
Of tiny packets of energy
Born in cosmic furnaces

[Frank Close]
The atoms that we're made of have
Negatively charged electrons
Whirling around a big bulky nucleus

[Michio Kaku]
The Quantum Theory
Offers a very different explanation
Of our world

[Brian Cox]
The universe is made of
Twelve particles of matter
Four forces of nature

That's a wonderful and significant story

[Richard Feynman]
Suppose that little things
Behaved very differently
Than anything big

Nothing's really as it seems
It's so wonderfully different
Than anything big

The world is a dynamic mess
Of jiggling things
It's hard to believe

[Kaku]
The quantum theory
Is so strange and bizarre
Even Einstein couldn't get his head around it

[Cox]
In the quantum world
The world of particles
Nothing is certain
It's a world of probabilities

(refrain)

[Feynman]
It's very hard to imagine
All the crazy things
That things really are like

Electrons act like waves
No they don't exactly
They act like particles
No they don't exactly

[Stephen Hawking]
We need a theory of everything
Which is still just beyond our grasp
We need a theory of everything, perhaps
The ultimate triumph of science

(refrain)

[Feynman]
I gotta stop somewhere
I'll leave you something to imagine

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Happy g (9.8) day!

Sept 8th is written as (9.8.YYYY).
When I was trying to update my lab-book, I realized that today is 9.8.2011. The first two numbers represent the acceleration due to gravity (g). Since we started celebrating pi day, tau day and what not day... why not celebrate a g day!

In the context of "g", I remember one incident as told by my close friend (happened in Nepal).
He was teaching a lab and one of his strict instruction was to write down the title of the lab report in ALL CAPS!!!!
Then the next day the report came back which read...
A STUDY OF SIMPLE PENDULUM TO ESTIMATE THE VALUE OF G.

Hilarity ensues


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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning @Stanford

Stanford is offering free online classes under computer sciences department.

There are three free online classes being offered this semester. The  online registration is free. With the help of high-speed internet, anyone who is enrolled can watch the lectures and participate in the   assignments, homework, and tests.

• Machine Learning taught by Professor Andrew Ng
• Introduction to Artifical Intelligence taught by Professor Sebastian Thrun and Dr. Peter Norvig
• Introduction to Databases taught by Professor Jennifer Widom

With thousands of students enrolled, this is one of the massive experiment too, which will serve as the stand post for the next generation of education system.

 http://robots.stanford.edu/cs221/



The text books used for the AI classes are:
a