Not so fundamental anymore, now are ya?
July 31st, 2009
So apparently the electron is not indivisible after all. Except, this is actually old news? What exactly is going on here?
Archive
Archive for July, 2009
Who says computer scientists don’t know how to have fun?
July 30th, 2009
Who says computer scientists don’t know how to have fun? As a counterexample, consider a new post over at Gödel’s Lost Letter that was obviously the result of some Wednesday-night festivities and intoxication.
I think, in a sense, we are the accelerators. As we smash ideas together sometimes we discover the further structure of our fundamental particles—our complexity classes.
Duuuuude.
The Fresnel integral
July 29th, 2009
Here’s a deceptively simple-looking integral:
.
At first glance, it’s not even obvious whether the above converges.
On the other hand, it is easy to see that 
does not exist (at least not in in the traditional sense) and is analogous to the alternating sequence { 1, -1, 1, -1, … }. But what of squaring the x? The function 
alternates between positive and negative as well, so one might be tempted to say that its integral also diverges.
But before jumping to conclusions, let’s take a look at its graph:
