Chaos Theory for Beginners; An Introduction Life finds a way beauty of the unpredictable and display it in the most awesome patterns. Nature, when looked upon with the right kind of eyes, presents herself as one of the most fabulous works of art ever wrought. What is Chaos Theory? Chaos Theory is a mathematical sub-discipline that studies complex systems. Complex systems are systems that contain so much motion (so many elements that move) that computers are required to calculate all the various possibilities. But there is another reason that Chaos Theory was born so recently, and that is the Quantum Mechanical Revolution and how it ended the deterministic era! Up to the Quantum Mechanical Revolution people believed that things were directly caused by other things, that what went up had to come down, and that if only we could catch and tag every particle in the universe we could predict events from then on. How Chaos Theory was born and why. Hold that thought (7): The Uncertainty Principle prohibits accuracy. Attractors
10 More Mysterious Conspiracy Theories Mysteries To date we have around seven conspiracy theory lists or lists containing entries related to such. This new list is a welcome addition as it has been some time since our last one and they are always extremely fascinating topics to read about. The world is full of conspiracy theories – many of which contain elements of mystery. This will definitely not be the last list of this type. Theories surrounding the Ararat Anomaly arose from a single black and white photograph taken in 1949 by a USAF recon plane performing routine intelligence gathering of the Ararat massif, which was in an area of military interest at the time. Conspiracy theorists, many of them Biblical literalists, claim that the odd-looking object if Noah’s Ark, which the Bible states “came to rest on the mountains of Ararat” after the Great Flood. The anomaly appears to be a very rounded elongation teetering on the edge of a slope, buried under ice and snow, and it has so roused the curiosity of the U.
TwistedSifter The Document Which Was Formerly Called The MIT Guide to Lockpicking An interesting new lockpicking technique has been making its way around the internet. This technique uses 'bump keys' to open locks in a similar fashion to lockpicking guns but without requiring specialized hardware. You can read about bump keys in this document, and see a news report about them here. --- Presenting ---(drumroll please) I am told that the university which has its' name associated with this document would prefer not to. Fine. I will now no longer refer to it as The MIT Guide To Lockpicking or The MIT Lockpicking Guide. Which is too bad in a way. My original copy of this file was a text file zipped up with several GIF's. If you prefer, the entire thing is available as a PDF file or the original zipped postscript that the PDF was generated from. Nearly half of all the illustrations appear in chapter nine, so if that one takes a little while for your browser to fetch try to be patient. Otherwise, enjoy the file. - Akira - Dave Ferret Ted the Tool February 14, 1992 Distribution
Martin Scorsese's Film School: The 85 Films You Need To See To Know Anything About Film Interviewing Martin Scorsese is like taking a master class in film. Fast Company’s four-hour interview with the director for the December-January cover story was ostensibly about his career, and how he had been able to stay so creative through years of battling studios. But the Hugo director punctuated everything he said with references to movies: 85 of them, in fact, all listed below. Some of the movies he discussed (note: the descriptions for these are below in quotes, denoting his own words). Others he just mentioned (noted below with short plot descriptions and no quotes). Ace in the Hole: “This Billy Wilder film was so tough and brutal in its cynicism that it died a sudden death at the box office, and they re-released it under the title Big Carnival, which didn’t help. All That Heaven Allows: In this Douglas Sirk melodrama, Rock Hudson plays a gardener who falls in love with a society widow played by Jane Wyman. The Band Wagon: “It’s my favorite of the Vincente Minnelli musicals.
Young girl who's best friends with African wildlife Born in Africa to French wildlife photographer parents, Tippi Degré had a most unusual childhood. The young girl grew up in the African desert and developed an uncommon bond with many untamed animals including a 28-year old African elephant named Abu, a leopard nicknamed J&B, lion cubs, giraffes, an Ostrich, a mongoose, crocodiles, a baby zebra, a cheetah, giant bullfrogs, and even a snake. Africa was her home for many years and Tippi became friends with the ferocious animals and tribespeople of Namibia. As a young child, the French girl said, “I don’t have friends here. Because I never see children. Parents Alain Degré and Sylvie Robert documented Tippi’s life and relationships with the African wildlife and transformed those moments into captivating books and movies. Looking past some fairly obvious and natural parental worries, Tippi had the most amazing upbringing.
Self-organization Figure 1: Snow Crystal. In the beginning of quantum mechanics and statistical physics it was believed that a crystalline structure can be calculated by determining the minimum of the free energy. This may be true, e.g. for ionic crystals, such as sodium chloride, or metals. In this case, the Schrödinger equation for the ground state or possibly low lying states must be solved. In general, this requires the solution of a many particle problem. As the example of snow crystals shows, this picture is too narrow. Figure 2: A satellite photograph taken by NASA. Self-organization is the spontaneous often seemingly purposeful formation of spatial, temporal, spatiotemporal structures or functions in systems composed of few or many components. Many objects in our surrounding and daily life such as furniture, houses, cars, TV-sets, computers are man made. History The concept of self-organization was discussed in ancient Greek philosophy (see F. Figure 6: Instability hierarchy in a fluid. Physics
Nikola Tesla Nikola Tesla Pretty much everybody even remotely associated with real-time strategy games has heard the name Tesla before – the Serbian God of Lightning's omnipresent, ever-zapping coils have been ruining the lives of digital Allied soldiers and gibbing U.S. war machines into spare parts since the release of Command & Conquer: Red Alert in 1996 – but surprisingly few people these days are familiar with the life and times of one of humankind's most eccentric, badass, and volumetrically-insane scientific super-geniuses. First off, Nikola Tesla was brilliant. And not just like Ken Jennings brilliant, either - I mean like, "holy crap my head just exploded (from all the awesome)" brilliant. Of course, much like many other eccentric giga-geniuses and diabolical masterminds, Tesla was also completely insane. Tesla also ordered the construction of the Wardenclyffe Tesla Tower, a giant building shaped like an erect penis that would have housed the largest Tesla coil ever built. Tesla in his lab.