Malcolm Gladwell spoke last night at this event (Daily coverage is here) about the role of serendipity in drug discovery, focusing on the story of Synta, a biotech company in Boston.

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Lick Observatory, pictured above, is situated in the mountains east of San Jose, and when it was constructed in 1887 it was the world’s largest refracting telescope (a title it held for about 10 years).  Its benefactor, James Lick, made his fortune buying up real estate during the California Gold Rush (and incidentally, was the one who convinced his Peruvian friend Ghirardelli to move to California and start selling chocolate).  According to the historian-in-residence, the 40-tonne telescope itself is so finely balanced that it can be turned around by hand.  Though to reach the eyepiece, you need to move up the entire wooden floor surrounding the base of the telescope, a feat that’s possible through a mechanical water elevator.

The observatory also recently dug up the only known seismogram of the 1906 California earthquake recorded in North America:

As it turns out, 2009 marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope (though he wasn’t the first to invent one - historical evidence suggests that honor goes to either Hans Lipperhey or Zacharias Janssen).  The progress of astronomy over time could be measured by tracking the resolving power or light-gathering ability of telescopes built:

“A telescope’s ability to detect fine detail in object at distance is known as resolution or resolving power… resolution is inversely proportional to the size of a telescope’s primary mirror.  A 5-inch telescope… could distinguish two quarters placed an inch apart from 3 miles away.  A 1.3-meter telescope could distinguish heads from tails on the quarters.  A 10-meter telescope could read the letters on the quarter spelling out ‘in God We Trust’… bigger telescopes can also see fainter objects.  The light-gathering ability is determined by the area of the primary mirror.” - Robert Duffner, the Adaptive Optics Revolution

Based on the list here, you can see the progression over time:

One should note that most of the new telescopes achieve their apertures through either segmented mirrors (a bunch of small mirrors put together) or optical aperture synthesis (mirrors separated by some distance joining to create a single image through interferometry) - simply because it’s prohibitively expensive to make large, smooth, light-weight concave mirrors with the accuracy demanded by telescopes (the mirror surface for one of Keck’s telescopes required ion milling to within a few nanometers).  Even with all this, if it weren’t for adaptive optics, the huge telescopes would be generating blurry images due to atmospheric turbulence (which is why astronomers tried to bypass this by creating Hubble and launching it into space).  It was originally thought of by Horace Babcock in 1953, developed by DARPA at the Starfire Optical Range, and improved by Will Harper’s sodium waveguide laser concept.  Modern telescopes also use liquid-nitrogen-cooled CCDs (which increases their sensitivity to photons) to capture digital images of the stars.

What’s next?  The 30-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, the Giant Magellan Telescope (a description of how they make their mirrors), the James Webb Space Telescope (the successor to Hubble).  In addition, alternative designs using liquid mirrors and membrane mirrors are being developed.

When you take as many notes as I do over the course of the day, you end up spending a rather inordinate amount of time trying to organize them.  Over the course of the years as my requirements have changed, I’ve switched from using WikidPad to OneNote to TiddlyWiki, but there still wasn’t anything out there that was just right - so I decided to create it, and after two months of on-and-off development, fumarole is the result.

I was enthralled when I saw a research poster that a number of students had put together describing the optimal strategy for playing Monopoly.  As it turns out, people have tried to figure this out before (here and here), but this one looked like a much clearer technique and presentation.  I thought I’d share their results, after a blurb about their technique:

“If the monopoly board had only 40 property spaces, the probability of landing on any given space would be a uniform 2.5%.  However, because of chance cards, community chest cards, and the existence of jail, these otherwise uniform probabilities are skewed.  To figure out the new board probabilities, we created a probability matrix that answered the scenario: given that we are on square X, what is the probability that we came from square Y?  This matrix corresponds to a system of 40 linear equations with 40 variables, which we can then solve in MATLAB to determine the steady state probabilities of being on any given square.  To make sure that our steady state solution is applicable to our problem, we also used Excel to dynamically generate the board probabilities for a given turn, given that we start on Go.  Our analysis shows that we approach steady state by turn 30, well within the bounds of a typical monopoly game.”

These are the probabilities of landing on any given square (boards derived from Wikipedia graphics):

or if (like me) you’re more used to the British version:

and here’s a spreadsheet with more data on the properties by group:

It turns out they define the “best” monopoly in terms of the profit, which is a function of the length of the game and the number of players.

JB Straubel, the CTO of Tesla Motors, gave a talk to a packed Stanford CarLab forum a few days ago. Some of the interesting tidbits from his presentation:

• the battery pack in a Tesla roadster costs around $25,000
• battery technology is improving at 8% per year in terms of gravimetric or volumetric energy density
• there are approximately 12,000 fuses in the battery pack
• in terms of well-to-wheel efficiency, electric cars can currency reach 85% efficiency.
• hydrogen systems eke out 32% efficiency, through combined losses from electrolysis (70% efficient), hydrogen compression during storage (90% efficient), and fuel cells (50% efficient)
• an acre of solar cells can take a car 36x the distance than an acre of ethanol
• quoted Sheikh Yamani, a former Saudi oil minster stating “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

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