Dmitry Podolsky has got his PhD from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He currently works as postdoc at Case Western Reserve University. He is also one of the editors of NEQNET.

Average life expectancy or more on data visualization

In continuation of my series of posts about data visualization (Dynamical maps and Gapminder), let me show you today another cool resource: interactive map of the world StatPlanet. Here is for example a map showing average age in different countries (data from 2006): Russia seems to be rather mature country on this map – average [...]

Two levels of irony of waterboarding

Started here systematically reading “Huffington press” – thinking that maybe it will allow me to develop my language skills a bit… The hot topic there nowadays is waterboarding – can it be really considered torture or not? And if this is torture, is it really acceptable to use torture against enemies of the State – [...]

Deflation and credit compression for dummies

The goal of this post is to explain at maximally comprehensive level why everybody on the other side of Atlantic is currently afraid of deflation. So, here you go. We will start giving the answer to a somewhat simpler question: how do banks make money from air? Suppose you are in possession of 100000 USD. [...]

Nanotechnology in space

Sorry, cannot help sharing it with you (bold below is mine): Pyongyang, May 7 (KCNA) — A spokesman for the Korean Committee of Space Technology issued a statement on Thursday, one month after satellite Kwangmyongsong-2 started its normal operation after being put into orbit. It says: As already reported, scientists and technicians of the DPRK [...]

Nanotechnology for fun and profit: video of the day

This is a 50 min lecture about new nanotechnologies (carbon nanotubes, in particular) by Ray Baughman given at Carnegie Mellon U. As you may know, Russian government plans starting large scale investing into nanotechnology and have already organized a company (Rusnano, formely Rosnanotech) to channel government investments. The head of the company is Anatoly Chubais, [...]

Self-improving artificial intelligence: video of the day

A lecture (colloquium, more precisely) by Steven Omohudro given at Stanford. If you don’t know about the lecturer, the guy has had quite an impressive career: he started as theoretical physicist, but switched eventually to AI and neural networks (among may other achievements on this field, he held an assistant professorship at U. of Illinois [...]

More on IR divergences and decoherence in inflationary universe

I happened recently to dig through a couple of interesting papers by Yuko Urakawa and Takahiro Tanaka about IR divergences that cosmological perturbation theory in quasi-dS space features, namely “No influence on observation from IR divergence during inflation — Single field inflation –” and “Influence on observation from IR divergence during inflation — Multi field [...]

Recent LHC news: video of the day

The CERN podcast from Apr 16 2009. They are finally able to assemble to last magnet among those that were broken during the famous incident in the last September The video features the magnet itself (ever wanted to see one?)

Practical quantum cryptography

As it seems, people from Cambridge were able to overcome difficulties that make quantum cryptography impractical: they have built a network with quantum cryptography-based security that allows 10 Mbit/s broadband speed (although the distances between nodes cannot exceed 10 km) – previous speed record was something like 10kbit/s or so. Open key cryptography In order [...]

Dynamical maps

… in continuation to the Sunday’s post about dynamical visualization – sorry, cannot wait before the next Sunday to post offtopic Just discovered another beautiful tool for a curious mind via Sergey Schegloff – press “Play” and enjoy the movie about the history of religions: As it seems, Islam was always a very serious player [...]