matterhacker

Cool article over at the New Yorker about how humans process numerics naturally….

Ok so I’ve been contemplating ditching physics for quantitative finance, but wow it is not looking too good in the financial sector recently. A couple stories here and here about the markets taking a major hit today. Oh and I found this informative guide by a headhunting agency for quants in London. Gives a pretty good overview of what it’s like to work in quantitative finance.

Here’s a story on yahoo about an Irish man who had his ssight restored after surgeons implanted his son’s tooth in his eye socket and stuck a lens on it. This cannot be true. Update: Oh hell yes it is! Pretty amazing procedure. I found out a bit more about it. It’s called the Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis (OOKP) procedure. That pdf has all the details and a pictorial description is below:

Great video story from the Bill Moyers Journal episode on the investigation of Congressional ear-marks by the investigative reporters over at the Seattle Times.

A note on using MEX files to execute C/C++ code with matlab.

There was an interesting report (subscription required for non-academics) in Nature today about networking sites for scientists. They mentioned one really interesting site called myexperiment.org. Basically it’s like instructables.com, but for scientists. It has “workflows” that scientists can exchange and tag. These workflows detail the procedures for say protocols you might perform in a bio experiment or the steps to follow to carry out a particular data analysis technique. Pretty cool idea.  The Nature report also mentioned another site nanohub.org, a NSF funded web resource for simulation tools relating to nanotechnology.  Lots of interesting nano-related tutorials and other resources for self-study there.

This story from ABC appeared on the Digg front page today.  It’s about an autistic woman who has proven that autistic persons can communicate quite readily and intelligently.  All that she needed was a method of communication that she could work with.  In this case her parents got together with a psychologist to design a keyboard with pictures and symbols that allowed her to type out what she wanted to say.  Great read!  It reminds me of silentmiaow, her blog and youtube entries.  She too has severe autism and has found typing to be the only way to effectively communicate with non-autistic people.  Amazing to hear the thoughts, emotions and opinions of people with autism.  People that society thought of as unintelligent in the past.

Interesting reality show about life on Wall Street from the perspective of 7 different people working on Wall Street. Where are the quants in this show?  Damn, as I come towards the end of my PhD, the money and cool math of a quant job are seriously tempting. Wow, MOJO’s video codec is really impressive.

Wired has a nice picturesque story about the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC). Cool place. I did some research there at some point in my career. The whole complex is like something out of a James Bond movie. Catwalks and all kinds of crazy electronics all over. It’s probably most useful as a synchrotron source. You can do a lot of really neat stuff with high energy x-rays… especially in relation to structural molecular biology. I probably should have stayed in that line of research. It’s a lot more applicable.

This story popped up on Slashdot today. Two artists have played back the recordings of brainwave activity of people in REM sleep on robots. Essentially the robot will act out the “in-dream” actions of the sleeping person. Pretty cool! Original story is here. A link to the video is below: