Gates pushes for additional H-1B visas, education, funding in testimony
by Yan on 3月 15, 2008
Bill Gates testified before the Science and Technology Committee of the United States House of Representatives on Wednesday, March 12. He advocated increases in funding for research as well as science and technology education.
Gates also emphasized the need for additional H-1B visas, noting that 60 percent of the science and engineering graduates from top U.S. schools are not U.S. citizens and may not be employable in the United States.
“In the past, federally funded research helped spark industries that today provide hundreds of thousands of jobs,” Gates said. “Even though we know that basic research drives economic progress, real federal spending on research has fallen since 2005. I urge Congress to increase funding for basic research by 10 percent annually for the next seven years. I fully support Congress’s efforts to fund basic research through the America COMPETES Act.”
Bill Gates: Testimony before the Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, via: SPIE
公路上车流比较密的时候，常常莫名其妙地不得不停下又启动。因为一旦车流里某一辆车突然慢下来，后面一辆车也得刹车，然后这个“冲击波”会往车流相反方向传播。
堵车“冲击波”模型 15 年前就有，一般都只是计算机模拟一下。有意思的是，日本的研究人员不久前进行了实验研究。呵呵。看下面的视频：
Nature Milestones – 自旋
by Yan on 3月 11, 2008
《自然》杂志推出了一个关于自旋的增刊，它是《里程碑》系列的第六期。
Nature Milestones are special supplements that aim to highlight the ‘milestones’ or remarkable achievements in a given field. Each breakthrough is covered in a short Milestone article, written by editors from the Nature Publishing Group, which discusses landmark discoveries in the context of the prevailing concepts at the time and our current knowledge of the field.
Milestones in Spin − the sixth supplement in the series and the first in the physical sciences − presents key developments in the story of ‘spin’. Spin describes the intrinsic angular momentum of elementary particles, a concept developed in the mid-1920s as physicists sought to explain experimental observations made decades earlier. Since then, the idea of spin has inspired major advances in physics, and has found practical application in chemistry, biology and technology.
……
In addition to the Milestone articles, the supplement includes a Timeline
− a chronology of the earliest papers connected with each Milestone − and a reprinted Collection of relevant articles and reviews from Nature, Nature Materials, Nature Physics and Nature Structural Biology. The Milestones web site also includes an extensive Library of material from the across the Nature Publishing Group.
另外，内容半年内可在网上免费阅读，目前还有增刊全文的 pdf 下载。
Corsair 推荐了 Phun，一个 “2D physics sandbox”，是 Umeå 大学一个硕士生的毕业作品。可以用鼠标画任意形状的物体，或者链条、弹簧之类进去，也可以拖拉，这些物体就会根据力学原理运动起来。很好玩，可用它来做很多有趣的场景。当然也可用它做物理教育工具。
这个是官方介绍视频：
Corsair 也做了两个视频：4WD (2WD…)，不 incredible 的 incredible machine
Phun 可免费下载，现有 Windows 和 Linux 版本，以后还会开源。如果喜欢，还有点时间不防帮作者汉化一下吧。
王鸿飞提到的这个化学元素歌挺好玩的。
The Element’s Song
Lyrics by Tom Lehrer
Music by Sir Arthur Sullivan
There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium
And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.
There’s yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium.
There’s holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium
And phosphorous and francium and fluorine and terbium
And manganese and mercury, molybdinum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium
And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
Tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.
There’s sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium
And also mendelevium, einsteinium and nobelium
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper,
Tungsten, tin and sodium.
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others but they haven’t been discovered.