shapes, figures & forms

1½ micrometers is the wavelength most common to optical telecommunications.

Joannopoulos, Meade, Winn — designing photonic crystals

The Western world has run up massive deficits in an effort to stabilize the markets and economies, but the financial system has not been meaningfully repaired.

Matthias Knab, 2010

(Source: opalesque.com)

The fundamental problem of finance is this: even though debt plays an important role in production and growth, what constitutes ‘safe’ debt for a lender is precisely the opposite of what constitutes ‘safe’ debt for a borrower.

Carolyn Sissoko

(Source: tandfonline.com)

peoplegettingreallymadatfood:

K-groups and L-groups are obstructions to geometric structure in homotopy, via Whitehead torsion and the Wall finiteness and surgery obstructions.

Andrew Ranicki, lower k- and l-theory

(Source: maths.ed.ac.uk)

What I missed in 2011 was the technical fact that the dollar bills that the Fed was creating effortlessly were not in circulation in the broad economy … but were locked up in the reserve accounts of the banks at the Federal Reserve system… . They did not make their way into the broad economy to finance the next inflation.

Jim Grant, on wrong predictions of inflation for the 2010’s

(Source: institutionalinvestor.com)

(Source: my.fit.edu)

hi-res

Reentrant (multi-instance) code is a reusable routine that multiple programs can invoke, interrupt, and reinvoke simultaneously. When you want to reuse code, but associate each instance of the shared code with unique, preserved data, use reentrant code.

(Source: mathworks.com)

“ I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly stopped—not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel...

I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly stopped—not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then suddenly leaving it behind, rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which continued its course along the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed. I followed it on horseback, and overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an hour [14 km/h], preserving its original figure some thirty feet [9 m] long and a foot to a foot and a half [30−45 cm] in height. Its height gradually diminished, and after a chase of one or two miles [2–3 km] I lost it in the windings of the channel. Such, in the month of August 1834, was my first chance interview with that singular and beautiful phenomenon which I have called the Wave of Translation.

—John Scott Russell, 1845

meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, York, September 1844 (London 1845), pp 311-390, Plates XLVII-LVII).

(Source: macs.hw.ac.uk)