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The New York Times published an article in its magazine about one of the greatest mathematicians living today, Terry Tao. The first paragraph should whet one's appetite for the rest of the article:
This April, as undergraduates strolled along the street outside his modest office on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, the mathematician Terence Tao mused about the possibility that water could spontaneously explode. A widely used set of equations describes the behavior of fluids like water, but there seems to be nothing in those equations, he told me, that prevents a wayward eddy from suddenly turning in on itself, tightening into an angry gyre, until the density of the energy at its core becomes infinite: a catastrophic ‘‘singularity.’’ Someone tossing a penny into the fountain by the faculty center or skipping a stone at the Santa Monica beach could apparently set off a chain reaction that would take out Southern California.
There are some people who are just too smart, and this guy is one of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2015, @12:54AM
I thought that the author, Gareth Cook, did a pretty good job of writing about math -- not the easiest topic. Looked back and found another article by him on mapping neuron connectivity,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/magazine/sebastian-seungs-quest-to-map-the-human-brain.html [nytimes.com]
which I also enjoyed.
He clearly puts time in, interviewing his subjects in person. I'd be happy if SN posted links to all his science/tech articles automatically.
Cook might not be John McPhee (look him up -- science/tech chronicler extraordinaire), but I think he's OK.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2015, @03:57AM
We could possibly arrange that. There are bots connected to the SoylentNews IRC [soylentnews.org] server that have the ability to read feeds and make submissions.
Currently submissions can be made from IRC manually (stories submitted by "exec" for example) but it would be possible to adapt the scripts to automate submissions from a popular RSS feed (or a scrape with change detection). Would need to be tested fairly thoroughly on the SN dev server first, but if it's something you'd like to see, consider hopping onto SN IRC and getting involved in the process.
There is also a couple of feed channels that popular sources are monitored from, so initially you could suggest adding a feed.
http://logs.sylnt.us/#rss-bot/index.html [sylnt.us]
http://logs.sylnt.us/#feeds/index.html [sylnt.us]