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POPSComplete List of PsychTests and quizzes There are 4 categories, career,I.Q.,personality,and relationships. There are the free tests, and of course many more available to members. I'm not sure of the conditions behind the membership tests, but so far I'm having enough fun with the free ones.
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POPSMusic Reduced to Beautiful Math "You can use these geometrical spaces to provide ways of visualizing musical pieces," Tymoczko told LiveScience. "These spaces give us a much better and comprehensive picture of the space of all possible chords."
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POPSBuilding 'The Matrix' Feynman envisioned, a general purpose, programmable quantum computer could itself carry out quantum simulations. But such machines are still decades away, most researchers say, while machines designed only for quantum simulations may become available sooner.
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POPSThe Shape of Music The shapes of the space of chords we have described also reveal deep connections between a wide range of musical genres. It turns out that superficially different styles--Renaissance music, classical and Romantic music, jazz, rock, and other popular forms--all make remarkably similar use of the geometry of chord space. Traditional techniques for manipulating musical scales turn out to be closely analogous to those used to connect individual chords. And some composers have displayed a profound understanding of the higher-dimensional geometry of musical chords. In fact, one can argue that Romantic composers such as Chopin had an intuitive feel for non-Euclidean higher-dimensional spaces that exceeded the explicit understanding of their mathematical contemporaries.
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POPSThe future of science...is art
"But before any of this can happen, our two existing cultures must modify their habits. First of all, the humanities must sincerely engage with the sciences. Henry James defined the writer as someone on whom nothing is lost; artists must heed his call, and not ignore science's inspiring descriptions of reality. At the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No single area of knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science wrote, "It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach." The struggle for scientific truth is long and hard and never ending. If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions—the questions of who we are and what everything is—we will need to draw from both science
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POPSBig-brained Animals Evolve Faster a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that animals with larger brains, relative to their body size, have more developed skills for changing their behavior through learning and innovation, facilitating the invasion of novel environments and the use of novel resources. Despite the progress, the role of the brain in the adaptive diversification of animals has remained controversial, mostly due to the difficulties to demonstrate that big-brained animals evolve faster. Now, ecologist Daniel Sol of CREAF-Autonomous University of Barcelona and evolutionary biologist Trevor Price of the University of Chicago, provide evidence for such a role in birds in an article in The American Naturalist. Analyzing body size measures of 7,209 species (representing 75% of all avian species), they found that avian families that have experienced the greatest diversification in body size tend to be those with brains larger than expected for their body size.
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POPSStunning Science! Science is SO beautiful! Go to the site and enjoy more of these fantastic visualisations of wave functions, quantum resonances, classical collisions etc. It's absolutely breathtaking.
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POPSPhysicists investigate how time moves forward This provides an orientation, or arrow of time, and it is generally believed that all other time asymmetries, such as our sense that future and past are different, are a direct consequence of this thermodynamic arrow.” In their study, Feng and Crooks have developed a method to accurately measure “time asymmetry” (which refers to our intuitive concept of time, that the past differs from the future, in contrast with time symmetry, where there is no distinction between past and future). They began by investigating the increase in energy dissipation, or entropy, in various arrangements. While time blatantly moves forward in the macroscopic world, the direction of time becomes confusing on the scale of a single molecule
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POPSPhysics Flash Animations The top links, go to the list of 90 Flash Animations with 'view' links. When the view link is pressed. an animation opens up a new tab There are a few direct links to an animation, at the bottom of the clip
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POPS"Artchive" this site is a treasure trove of information regarding art....I have so much to learn & explore here :)
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POPSThe Ancient Mechanics and How They Thought He also majored in astronomy as an undergraduate, and about nine years ago, feeling science-deprived, he joined a multinational research endeavor called the Archimedes Project, based at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. The Archimedes team studies the history of mechanics, how people thought about simple machines like the lever, the wheel and axle, the balance, the pulley, the wedge and the screw and how they turned their thoughts into theories and principles. The textual record begins with “Mechanical Problems,” moves to Rome and then through the medieval Islamic world to the Renaissance. It ends, finally, with Newton, who described many of the basic laws of mechanics in the 18th century. By following the historical record, the Archimedes researchers have discovered that the evolution of physics — or, at least, mechanics — is based on an interplay between practice and theory.
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POPSPhysicists Seek Answers to Quantum Correlations The physicists ruled out several possible classical explanations for the instantaneous communication. For one thing, they showed that the photons did not share information before leaving Geneva, and so they didn´t travel knowing about each other´s properties. In another test, the scientists showed that no communication could have occurred through a different reference frame, as might happen because of the photons´ high speeds. According to Einstein´s theory of relativity, observers moving at high speeds can get different measurements of the same event because they have different reference frames. But, by performing tests over a complete rotation of the Earth, the researchers ruled out this possibility. "We think space and time are important because that´s the kind of monkeys we are,"
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