Month: January 2014

A Whitehouse petition that any of us, not just Amercuns, can sign, was published last night. Here’s its mission:

Access to notebooks improves the processes of patenting, inventing & preserving U.S. scientific & medical history. In 2013, OSTP mandated open access for federally funded research articles & data, but excluded notebooks. This petition requests expansion of the mandate. When federally funded research results in a provisional patent application, a digital copy of searchable, full-text notebooks should be required. Why? Without notebooks, recent studies were unable to reproduce journal findings, resulting in serious economic & health implications for products & processes. Notebooks are evidence in patent litigation, so funding USPTO storage prevents fraud. After the life of the patent, notebooks should become public domain with an exclusion allowing transfer of classified materials to NARA.

via Mandate Open Access to Digital Copies of Lab Notebooks Created Through Publicly Funded Research Leading to a US Patent | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government.

A Whitehouse petition that any of us, not just Amercuns, can sign, was published last night. Here’s its mission:

Access to notebooks improves the processes of patenting, inventing & preserving U.S. scientific & medical history. In 2013, OSTP mandated open access for federally funded research articles & data, but excluded notebooks. This petition requests expansion of the mandate. When federally funded research results in a provisional patent application, a digital copy of searchable, full-text notebooks should be required. Why? Without notebooks, recent studies were unable to reproduce journal findings, resulting in serious economic & health implications for products & processes. Notebooks are evidence in patent litigation, so funding USPTO storage prevents fraud. After the life of the patent, notebooks should become public domain with an exclusion allowing transfer of classified materials to NARA.

via Mandate Open Access to Digital Copies of Lab Notebooks Created Through Publicly Funded Research Leading to a US Patent | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government.

UPDATE: I originally posted this item on 9th January just as the buzz started to build. Lots of other websites have since mentioned it in a credulous way, others have been more critical. It is in some senses correct, but the fact that it works in “String Theory” is neither here nor there given that we have absolutely no beyond-doubt physical evidence for Strings, in the first place. But, there is an assumption in the proof shown in the video that effectively proves they’re wrong and that is the statement that:

S1 = 1 – 1 + 1 – 1 + 1 … and so on forever and that this somehow equals 1/2, as if adding up numbers is somehoq equivalent to their mean average…therein lies the “proof’s” downfall as I understand. Once that assumption is debunked the whole edifice collapses.

Anyway, here’s the guts of the original post and the video:

If you could somehow add up all the whole numbers from 1 to infinitty the answer you would get is -1/12 (minus one twelfth), don’t believe me, here’s the astounding mathematical proof and if it seems absurd, then it’s no more absurd than the idea that you could add up all the numbers to infinity in the first place. Bizarrely, string theory seems to hinge on this bizarre notion…which perhaps isn’t the best of advocates for this being a valid proof. ;-)