Новости за 21.10.2016

Entertaining review of Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems, about the struggle among physicists to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics. “A university student attending lectures on general relativity in the morning, and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon, might be forgiven for concluding that his professors are fools, or that they haven’t talked to each other for at least a century”. Rovelli thinks, implausibly, that his own theory of quantum gravity is the answer

IKEA consumes 1% of the world’s timber, and may well have achieved the scale needed to deter all competitors, since it has none. Compare IKEA catalogues over the years, and you see evolution at work. This is “survival of the fittest” for furniture. Products survive from decade to decade only if they achieve the scale needed for their cost of manufacture to fall sharply. Thus the Poäng chair sold for the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $300 in the early 1990s; now it costs $79

Google security chief tests “fabled” Chinese-made platform for cheating at poker using marked cards and smartphone. “I decided to follow the trail of this device to see if people were indeed cheating at poker using devices that would fit naturally into a James Bond movie. Without spoiling too much of the rest of this post, let’s just say that the high-end cheating device that I was able to get my hands on far exceeded my expectations and it really is an outstanding piece of technology”