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“Complementarity is a very general concept and not easy to define formally, though informally you might say it’s the principle that the wave-like and particle-like aspects of an object can’t be simultaneously observed. More formally you could say that each degree of freedom of a system corresponds to a conjugate pair of observables, which means these pairs (say, position and momentum) can’t both be measured precisely at the same time.”
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Over five million colors were named across 222,500 user sessions. […]
First, a few basic discoveries:
* If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
* “Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.[…]
* A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
* Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.Overall, the results were really cool and a lot of fun to analyze. There are some basic limitations of this survey, which are discussed toward the bottom of this post. But the sheer amount of data here is cool.”
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“The authors point out the important feature that the molecular motion executes the Fourier transform in a mere 145 fs. This is several orders of magnitude faster than devices based on silicon electronics are likely to be able to achieve. This observation provokes an enticing proposition–the idea of high-speed, nondissipative logic operations and algorithms would make for a revolution in physical instantiations of computational devices.”