According to the the generally accepted scientific understanding of the 18th century, all combustion was attributable to phlogiston, a colorless, odorless, tasteless, massless substance. At the time, the scientific community believed that all flammable materials contained a certain amount of phlogiston. The act of burning the materials was in fact merely releasing the phlogiston into the air. Once burned, the materials were held to be in their "true" form, the 'calx'. Thus the act of burning was known as 'dephlogisticating' a substance.

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Scientists in Singapore have developed a battery that derives its electrical energy from urine. It's used in small urine tests such as for diabetes. That's genius; it is powered by the substance it's testing, so it needs no external power source.

Now if they can just develop a version that is powered by poop, I'll never have to buy gasoline for my car again.

A new bit of AI has been developed which can teach itself new languages. You feed it some text, and it analyzes its structure looking for patterns, and thus learns the language's grammar. Once it has learned it, it can produce new, meaningful sentences in that language. That's a very cool use of two of my big interests—artificial intelligence and linguistics. I couldn't find any more information about this project aside from the single webpage linked above, but I'll have to see if more turns up, because I'm very interested in learning more about how it works. In particular, I wonder how it addresses the issue of vocabulary.

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Man, why is it that reading pretty much any page on MathWorld leads to an immediate feeling of inadequacy and stupidity? It's like someone going way overboard with one of those jokes where they make up technical-sounding words to ridicule the concept of jargon. Except it's all real:

In many cases, the Hausdorff dimension correctly describes the correction term for a resonator with fractal perimeter in Lorentz's conjecture. However, in general, the proper dimension to use turns out to be the Minkowski-Bouligand dimension (Schroeder 1991).

I tend to feel I'm relatively well educated, but reading things on that website makes me feel like an six-year-old stumbling across his older brother's Calculus textbook. I felt the same way watching A Beautiful Mind. I'm so in awe of mathematicians. I can't imagine being conversant in all of those terms and knowing what to do with them. But I'd like to be.

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