Rafsanjani into the Breach

Ian Black and Saeed Kamali Dehghan »  

Green activists are setting up Facebook pages to mobilise support for Rafsanjani’s campaign. Mousavi and fellow reformist Mehdi Karroubi remain under house arrest and are banned from political activity.

Mohammed, Karroubi’s son, said Rafsanjani would now win the support of those who voted for change in 2009 but instead got Ahmadinejad for a second term. “The majority of the Green movement feel they now have a voice in this election,” he told the Guardian.

Speaking on Thursday to Tehran University students, Rafsanjani struck a confident note. “I entered the race to perform my religious and national duty given the country’s situation … and its problems at home and abroad,” the Mehr news website reported. “Certain people and movements have resorted to lying and falsification and slurs to discredit others. These people, intentionally or unintentionally, are harming the Islamic revolution.”  >continue<

The Cicada’s Love Affair With Prime Numbers

Patrick Di Justo  |  New Yorker »

Since most predators have a two-to-ten-year population cycle, [any] twelve-year cicadas would be a feast for any predator with a two-, three-, four-, or six-year cycle. By this reasoning, any cicada with a development span that is easily divisible by the smaller numbers of a predator’s population cycle is vulnerable.

Prime numbers, however, can only be divided by themselves and one; they cannot be evenly divided into smaller integers. Cicadas that emerge at prime-numbered year intervals, like the seventeen-year Brood II set to swarm the East Coast, would find themselves relatively immune to predator population cycles, since it is mathematically unlikely for a short-cycled predator to exist on the same cycle. In [Stephen J.] Gould’s example, a cicada that emerges every seventeen years and has a predator with a five-year life cycle will only face a peak predator population once every eighty-five (5 x 17) years, giving it an enormous advantage over less well-adapted cicadas.

To test this hypothesis, researchers from Brazil’s Universidade Estadual de Campinas used a computer simulation, very similar to John Conway’s Game of Life, in which simulated cicadas and predators battled it out in a hundred-by-hundred-cell matrix. They found exactly what Gould had suggested: cicadas with a prime-numbered life cycle had the most successful evolutionary strategy. If we discount those cicadas with life cycles of ten years or fewer (as being too close to predator life cycles), we find that the most successful emergence rates for cyber cicadas are thirteen and seventeen years—precisely what we find in the wild.  >continue<

‘Course, the prime number strategy has been hypothesized to aid in overwhelming GOP obstructionism as well ;p

Corsin Pfister & Stephanie Wehner

“It has been suggested that nature could be discrete in the sense that the underlying state space of a physical system has only a finite number of pure states. Here we present a strong physical argument for the quantum theoretical property that every state space has infinitely many pure states. We propose a simple physical postulate that dictates that the only possible discrete theory is classical theory. More specifically, we postulate that no information gain implies no disturbance or, read in the contrapositive, that disturbance leads to some form of information gain…”

PhysOrg »

Consider the famous Schrodinger’s cat paradox, a thought experiment in which a cat in a box simultaneously exists in two states (this is known as a ‘quantum superposition’). According to quantum theory it is possible that the cat is both dead and alive – until, that is, the cat’s state of health is ‘measured’ by opening the box.

When the box is opened, allowing the health of the cat to be measured, the superposition collapses and the cat ends up definitively dead or alive. The measurement has disturbed the cat.

This is a property of quantum systems in general. Perform a measurement for which you can’t know the outcome in advance, and the system changes to match the outcome you get. What happens if you look a second time? The researchers assume the system is not evolving in time or affected by any outside influence, which means the quantum state stays collapsed. You would then expect the second measurement to yield the same result as the first. After all, “If you look into the box and find a dead cat, you don’t expect to look again later and find the cat has been resurrected,” says Stephanie. “You could say we’ve formalised the principle of accepting the facts”, says Stephanie.

Corsin and Stephanie show that this principle rules out various theories of nature. They note particularly that a class of theories they call ‘discrete’ are incompatible with the principle. These theories hold that quantum particles can take up only a finite number of states, rather than choose from an infinite, continuous range of possibilities. The possibility of such a discrete ‘state space’ has been linked to quantum gravitational theories proposing similar discreteness in spacetime, where the fabric of the universe is made up of tiny brick-like elements rather than being a smooth, continuous sheet.

As is often the case in research, Corsin and Stephanie reached this point having set out to solve an entirely different problem altogether… >continue<

Paper

Symptoms of Benghazi Syndrome

Richard Cohen  |  Washington Post »

…It is not a crime either to make a mountain out of a molehill, but this particular one is constructed of a fetid combination of bad taste and poisonous politics. Dig down a bit and it becomes clear that some — many? — Republicans suspect that Barack Obama and-or Hillary Clinton are capable of letting people die to cover up a terrorist attack. Either that, or this is what they want us to think.

In the end, it all comes down to an irrational and absolutely rabid dislike of Obama that so clouds judgment that utterly preposterous statements are uttered, usually within the precincts of the Fox News studios. This, as you might have guessed, is classic Benghazi Syndrome. There is no known cure.   >continue<