sitzmar! do what now?

Watch and Learn Everything About the Amazing Placebo Effect [Video]

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The placebo effect is so strange and mysterious, how can fake pills trick ourselves out into feeling better? This video explains all the interesting properties of a placebo, like how one placebo can be half as effective as aspirin while another placebo can be half as effective as morphine. Watch it. [Laughing Squid] More »

This Is How Geniuses Live Forever [Video]

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It stands to reason that anyone with an online presence will enjoy some level of immortality long after their gone. But for the old-school? You had statues and you had nouns. And language is much cooler than sculpted stone. [ Vimeo via Geekosystem] More »

Pablo Padilla: Time Chef

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October 09, 2011

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Kelly is running an "Adventures of Women in Science" panel at Geek Girl Con in Seattle tomorrow! Check it out!

Visualization of the Week: The Collatz conjecture

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The German mathematician Lothar Collatz first proposed what's now known as the Collatz conjecture in 1937. It says that you can repeatedly take any number n and divide it by two if the number is even, or multiply by three and add one if n is odd, and eventually, no matter what number you started with, the conjecture says you'll get to 1.

The Collatz conjecture does remain just that — a conjecture. But one approach to proving it is to consider its reverse. In other words, rather than proving that all numbers lead to 1, prove that 1 leads to all natural numbers.

Toward that end, Jason Davies has created a visualization of the Collatz graph in reverse. It shows the orbits of all numbers with a length of 18 or less.

Visit his site to watch the graph grow.

Found a great visualization? Tell us about it

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring visualizations. We're always looking for leads, so please drop a line if there's a visualization you think we should know about.

Web 2.0 Summit, being held October 17-19 in San Francisco, will examine "The Data Frame" — focusing on the impact of data in today's networked economy.

Save $300 on registration with the code RADAR

More Visualizations:

• Rise of the deleted city
• The classroom seating chart
• Running for a year
• Mapping U.S. job losses
• More Visualizations of the Week

When You Drop a Slinky, It Floats in Midair Like Magic [Video]

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Slinky's, one of the cosmos' perennial enigmas, has one amazing propert you've probably never noticed. But that's okay. Our mortal eyes aren't quick enough to notice—but this slow-mo camera is. It looks like magic! But it's awesome physics. More »

Increased Performance In Linux With zRam (Virtual Swap Compressed in RAM)

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I decided to give it a try, and the result on my desktop with a quad-core CPU and 2Gb of RAM was fantastic: instead of freezing after running out of RAM, the system worked like nothing happened. I didn't notice any difference at all. It looked just like adding more RAM! Surprisingly, I got almost the same results on a 6-year-old laptop with Pentium M and 1Gb of RAM! So, I've improved the script to automatically adapt to the amount of memory in the system and automatically scale across several CPUs or CPU cores, packaged it in .deb and uploaded to PPA.

- Sergey Davidoff

To install Sergey's script in Ubuntu 11.04 or 11.10, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shnatsel/zramsudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install zramswap-enabler

Update:

• For Fedora 15+ (which uses systemd instead of upstart), see: Enable Zram in Fedora
• For Arch Linux, see THIS comment (script converted to rc.d).

More about compressed caching for Linux:

• http://code.google.com/p/compcache
• http://weirdfellow.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/compressed-ram-with-zram/

October 04, 2011

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I HAVE CONQUERED OGEEKU.COM AND SET UP MY OWN SITE.

This Fluid Fly-By Video Is the Most Astonishing View of Earth I’ve Ever Seen [Video]

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This weekend NASA published an awesome time-lapse flyby of planet Earth taken from the International Space Station. Awesome, but jerky—until now. Someone interpolated the original frames to achieve this smooth as silk motion film. It'll leave you stupefied. More »

Yahoo! Releases Official Flickr App For Android

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If there weren’t already enough ways for people to share and browse photos on the web, then Yahoo! just filled the gap with the release (finally) of their very popular Flickr service in form of an Android application. Users can upload or snap new photos directly into the app, comment on others, view friends’ activity, and then share it all with the world.  We are still trying to figure out why this took so long to create, but we are happy to see it arrive.   

Features:

• Share photos only with the people you want to with easy privacy settings.
• Full screen browsing and slideshows for your photos, your contacts photos or any of the public photos from the global Flickr community.
• Share the story behind your photo with titles, descriptions, comments and tags.
• Keep your track of where you took your photo by keeping your location data automatically through    geotagging.

Market Link (Free)

Cheers Anish!