There will not be a Mark Zuckerberg action figure.
After being told it can no longer sell its Apple CEO Steve Jobs action figure, M.I.C. Gadget has been ordered to kill off its Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg action figure as well. The lifelike Zuckerberg doll was available for $70 online, but now Facebook has had it banned, just like Apple did for the Jobs doll.
This time around, M.I.C. Gadget made a point to call the action figure the “Poking Inventor” and not “Mark Zuckerberg.” It wanted to avoid Facebook getting involved, since Apple threatened it with legal action if it didn’t stop selling the Steve Jobs version.
17 year old kid wins Intel science prize, nets 100 large.
A California teenager who cracked a complex mathematical equation has been awarded the Intel Science Talent Search’s $100,000 first-place prize. Evan O’Dorney, 17, won the prize for “his mathematical project in which he compared two ways to estimate the square root of an integer. [He] discovered precisely when the faster way would work,” Intel announced Wednesday.
He is the first Bay Area student to win what is considered the high school equivalent of a Nobel Prize and the sixth from California since the contest started in 1942. He appears to be the first homeschooled winner as well, according to organizers. Evan, 17, beat out 39 other Intel Science Talent Search finalists from across the country with a mathematics entry summarized as “Continued Fraction Convergents and Linear fractional transformations.”
Check out this new kind of microscope.
In some cases, looking at a living cell under a microscope can cause it damage or worse, can kill it. Now, a new kind of microscope has been invented by researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that is able to non-invasively take a three dimensional look inside living cells with stunning results. The device uses a thin sheet of light like that used to scan supermarket bar codes and could help biologists to achieve their goal of understanding the rules that govern molecular processes within a cell.
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It doesn’t matter how well you can estimate a square root if you have a pocket calculator with a memory function. Any estimate larger than 1 will do for a first approximation.
Put your estimate in the memory M+, enter the number, divide by Recall memory RM, subtract RM, divide by 2, and add to M+.
Repeat until the number you’re adding to memory stops changing from one step to the next, or alternates between two slightly different numbers. The number in the memory is the square root, as close as your calculator can come to it.
I just do that in my head.