The content below is taken from the original (X-Gene 3 in 2016 – no, not a superhero movie. It’s a 16nm FinFET 64-bit ARM chip for servers), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
In-brief Applied Micro has vowed to unleash upon the world the X-Gene 3, a 64-bit ARM-compatible server processor made using FinFET gates.…
The content below is taken from the original (There’s a Hidden Connection Between Pi and Quantum Mechanics ), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Physicists have uncovered a hidden connection between a famous 350-year-old mathematical formula for pi, everyone’s favorite irrational number, and quantum mechanics. At least one mathematician has pronounced the discovery “a cunning piece of magic.”
The English mathematician John Wallis published his formula for calculating pi as the product of an infinite series of ratios in 1655. In a paper published this week in the Journal of Mathematical Physics, University of Rochester physicists announced they had discovered the same formula popping out of their calculations of a hydrogen atom’s energy levels.
Wallis isn’t well known today outside of academic circles, but he rubbed elbows with some of the the greatest names in science in his era. Initially he intended to become a doctor when he started university at the tender age of 13, but he was far more interested in mathematics, and showed a knack for cryptography in particular. It began as just a hobby, but years later, he applied his skills deciphering coded Royalist dispatches on behalf of their political rivals, the Parliamentarians. (The two parties were in the midst of a civil war at the time.) Eventually he became part of the group of scientists who founded the Royal Society of London. There, his love of math blossomed into a bona fide academic pursuit.
Among his peculiar skills: he could perform complicated mental calculations in his head — something he did frequently, given his tendency toward insomnia. One such feat was recorded in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1685: Wallis had calculated the square root of a 53-digits (27 digits in the square root) one sleepless night, and recorded it from memory the next morning.
So, yeah, the guy could do the math. In 1656, Wallis published his most famous work, Arithmetica infinitorum, containing his classic formula for pi. (No less a luminary than Christopher Huygens remained highly skeptical until Wallis walked him through it to show his work.)
“The value of pi has taken on a mythical status, in part, because it’s impossible to write it down with 100% accuracy,” Rochester physicist Tamar Friedmann, lead author of the new paper, told Science 2.0. “It cannot even be accurately expressed as a ratio of integers and is, instead, best represented as a formula.”
Friedmann and his co-author, Carl Hagen, weren’t actually looking for anything remotely pi-related. “It just sort of fell in our laps,” Hagen said in a press release. He was just trying to teach his students a particular technique to approximate the energy states of quantum systems — in this case, the hydrogen atom.
But when he set about solving the problem himself, he noticed something odd about the error bars. It was around 15% for a hydrogen atom’s lowest energy state (the ground state), 10% for the first excited state (which occurs when the atom gets an infusion of energy that bumps the electron up to the next energy level), and then kept getting smaller with each successive higher energy level. That’s the opposite of what this particular technique is supposed to produce: the best approximations are usually at the ground state.
Intrigued, Hagen enlisted Friedmann’s help, and they found themselves going back to Niels Bohr’s model of the hydrogen atom from the earliest days of quantum mechanics, depicting the electron orbits as perfectly circular. “At the lower energy orbits, the path of the electron is fuzzy and spread out,” Hagen explained. “At more excited states, the orbits become more sharply defined and the uncertainty… decreases.”
Apparently it took a mere 24 hours for the journal to accept their paper, which must be some kind of record. “The special thing is that it brings out a beautiful connection between physics and math,” said Friedmann. “I find it fascinating that a purely mathematical formula from the 17th century characterizes a physical system that was discovered 300 years later.”
Reference:
Friedmann, Tamar, and Hagen, C.R. (2015) “Quantum mechanical derivation of the Wallis formula for pi,” Journal of Mathematical Physics 56: 112101.
Top image: Still from Irrational Numbers: Pi and Pies, a ClickView original Mathematics series. Bottom image: Pages from Wallis’s Arithmetica Infinitorum, digitized by Google.
The content below is taken from the original (What’s New in Windows 10’s Big November Update), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Windows 10 gets its first major update today, with a number of features you’ve asked for—like colored title bars, fixes to the Start menu, and (finally!) a better way to activate your Windows 10 license.
The content below is taken from the original (CoreOS Launches Clair, An Open-Source Tool For Monitoring Container Security), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
CoreOS, the company behind the popular lightweight Linux distribution for data center deployments with the same name, has recently made a big bet on containers. Today, the company is launching Clair, an open-source tool for monitoring the security of containers — and it’s also integrating Clair into its paid Quay container registry service as a beta feature (with support for… Read More
The content below is taken from the original (Mainframe computing pioneer Gene Amdahl dies at 92), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Gene Amdahl, a pioneer of mainframe computing, died from pneumonia this week at age 92. Dr. Amdahl is known for is work with IBM, more specifically on the IBM 704, IBM 709 and other projects. He was also the chief architect on the System/360 series, a line of mainframe computers that would become the most successful in IBM’s history. In fact, it’s inner workings would influence computer design in the years that followed. After two stints with IBM, Dr. Amdahl set up the Amdahl Corporation that would directly compete with his former employer in the mainframe market. His machines were less expensive and faster that those of IBM while still being compatible with the company’s mainframe software. He also formulated Amdahl’s law which is used to predict the theoretical maximum speed improvement across multiple processors in parallel computing. Dr. Amdahl is survived by his wife, two daughters, five grandchildren and a brother.
[Image credit: Marcin Wichary/Flickr]
Source: New York Times
The content below is taken from the original (OpenStack Weekly Community Newsletter (Nov., 7-13)), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
OpenStack-powered DreamCompute cloud computing helps keep rural microgrids up and running
Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack executive director, gave a keynote at the OPNFV Summit where he talked about the two communities.
To celebrate the OpenStack community and Liberty release, the Cloudbase Solutions team created a one-of-a-kind printed comic packed with OpenStack puns and references to manga and kaiju literature.
OpenStack is always interested in feedback and community contributions, if you would like to see a new section in the OpenStack Weekly Community Newsletter or have ideas on how to present content please get in touch: [email protected].
The content below is taken from the original (OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest November 7-13), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The content below is taken from the original (NextBank Aims To Be The First All-Bitcoin Financial Institution), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Woe betide traditional banking because Dimitry Voloshinskiy and his team are on the prowl. Voloshinskiy is the founder of the NextBank Project, an attempt to create a truly bitcoin-based bank.
The team has raised $950,000 so far using personal money and angels, and they hope to attract more. Read More
The content below is taken from the original (Microsoft Deepens Its Ties To Linux, Partners With Red Hat), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Microsoft has announced a new partnership with Red Hat that will allow the Linux software to run natively on the company’s cloud platform.
The post Microsoft Deepens Its Ties To Linux, Partners With Red Hat appeared first on Petri.
The content below is taken from the original (Pinterest’s visual search tool can identify items in a pin), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Lots of people turn to Pinterest for inspiration, but it can be a hassle to figure out who makes that whiskey barrel table. Now that the site has buyable pins and shopping pins, it has launched a visual search tool to make it easier to find (and buy) that thing you saw. The tool is dead simple to use — when you see an object in a scene, like the light fixture shown above, you just select the search tool and draw a box around it. If it’s in Pinterest’s database, it’ll show you the name and where to find it, then let you buy it directly from retailers like Neiman Marcus or Macy’s, if available.
Source: Pinterest
The content below is taken from the original (Google open sources machine learning software), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Video Google is helping bring HAL to life by open sourcing its machine learning software.…
The content below is taken from the original (Microbot Push Is A Smart Button For Dumb Devices), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
South Korean startup Naran launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo today for a smart button meant to control analog devices ranging from speakers to your crock pot. Called Microbot Push, the device is a height-adjustable button that clips on to devices and can be programmed to perform a simple press motion when commanded over the internet. For a problem as ubiquitous and technically… Read More
The content below is taken from the original (So. Farewell then Betamax. We always liked you better than VHS anyway), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Sony has finally set a date for the death of Betamax – some 40 years after it first released the ill-fated home video tech.…
The content below is taken from the original (ARM’s latest design brings 64-bit processors to smartwatches), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
It’s no longer hard to find 64-bit processors in smartphones. In smartwatches, though, they’re still a rarity — and ARM wants to change that with its new Cortex-A35 processor design. The architecture promises the most energy-efficient 64-bit mobile chips yet, sipping 32 percent less power than the mid-range A53 even as it outruns the Cortex-A7 it’s meant to replace (6 to 40 percent faster). It’s extremely scalable, too. You can build full-fledged quad-core chips for entry-level smartphones, but you can also strip things back to make tiny chips for watches and activity trackers.
Via: AnandTech
Source: ARM
The content below is taken from the original (Roamers rejoice! Google Maps gets offline regional navigation), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Google has updated its offline functionality for its Maps application allowing wayward or data-bereft travelers the opportunity to download regional maps at WiFi hotspots and receive turn-by-turn navigation without an internet connection.…
The content below is taken from the original (With CodinGame, Learning To Code Becomes A Game), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
French startup CodinGame just raised $1.6 million from Isai for its innovative code learning platform. As the name suggests, CodinGame is all about games — not game development, not gamification, just plain games. The logic behind each exercise is tied to an actual game so that you get visual feedback and an actual reward when you solve an exercise. Read More
The content below is taken from the original (Irish roll out obligatory drone register), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) has announced that from 21 December, all drones (or Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS), as they’re known locally) weighing over 1kg must be registered.…
The content below is taken from the original (Nvidia says its new Jetson board can compete with a Core i7), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Nvidia’s latest Jetson board is here, and they say that it can keep up with Intel’s Skylake Core i7. That’s pretty impressive for a processor that also consumes less than 10 watts of […]
Time passes but memories never fade… A minute to remember!
The content below is taken from the original (HP Inc. Introduces World’s First Thin Client With Native Quad UHD/4K Support), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
HP Inc. announced the world’s first thin client with native quad UHD/4K display support for breakthrough graphics performance. The HP T730 Thin… Read more at VMblog.com.
The content below is taken from the original (OpenStack Weekly Community Newsletter (Oct., 31 – Nov., 6)), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Introduced at the Tokyo Summit, Superuser TV offers community and industry insights, plus educational topics to support the OpenStack community. With content ranging from deployments to diversity, from emerging technologies to cloud strategy, Superuser TV is aiming to provide the community with access to a variety of perspectives and knowledge
60 percent of deployments in production and high rates of adoption of OpenStack’s core services are key findings from the report released by the User Committee. The full report can be downloaded here: http://bit.ly/1NUFU2w
Why embracing this notion is the key to unlock an open data center infrastructure, according to Boris Renski, the co-founder and CMO of Mirantis.
OpenStack is always interested in feedback and community contributions, if you would like to see a new section in the OpenStack Weekly Community Newsletter or have ideas on how to present content please get in touch: [email protected].
Finding your way around OpenStack: professional certification and the project navigator
Your OpenStack questions answered, a block storage battle and mobile eats the world
The content below is taken from the original (VXL’s new CloudDesktop PC Repurposing software provides a unique stepping-stone solution for extending the life of legacy PCs into a virtualized network), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
For organizations looking to switch to a virtualized, cloud-computing environment, VXL Software’s new CloudDesktop PC repurposing software delivers a Read more at VMblog.com.
The content below is taken from the original (Arduino IDE Now Supports Building Software in the Command Line), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
For all its geeky attributes, the Arduino development software, known as Arduino IDE (integrated development environment) has never had a tool for compiling code in the command line. Now, with the release of Arduino IDE 1.6.6, it does.
The content below is taken from the original (Why CenturyLink Doesn’t Want to Own Data Centers), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The content below is taken from the original (How to Turn an Old Laptop Into a Chromebook with CloudReady), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
If you haven’t used a Chromebook in a while, they’ve come a long way . But you don’t need to shell out cash for a new laptop just to run Chrome OS. You can install it on nearly any laptop with an application called CloudReady.