P is not equal to NP

My friend  Joachim Strömbergson posted on his blog today that there is an article on arxiv.org by the Swedish researcher Sten-Åke Tärnlund claiming that P != NP!

If this proof is correct it will have a huge impact on mathematics and  some cryptographic algorithms. This proof is considered so important that  the Clay Mathematics Institute has named it a Millennium Prize Problem and offered a $1 million USD price for the first correct proof.

This is big and there will be some interesting weeks ahead to see if the proof stands up to a peer review!

Good resource on modern physics

The other day i found a nice resource on modern physics. It is the perimeter institute, PI (By the way for a while ago it was a  rumours that Stephen Hawking was considering  joining them.) who has published a series of introductions to their different research fields.

So if you have even the slightest interest in Cosmology, Superstring Theory, Quantum Gravity, Quantum Foundations, Quantum Information or Particle Physics check these tutorials out. They are informative and also very up to date. And if you want to study any of the fields in detail they link to a lot of lectures in the end of each tutorial.

If you have pointers to more good lectures like this, please tell me about them in the comment field below.

Swedish scare about cancerogenous substances in wine

Today in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet there is an article about cancerogenous remnants from pesticides in wine.  The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SSNC) have tested 40 different types of wines sold in “systembolaget”. (“Systembolaget” is the only off license shop in Sweden, strange country it is…)  and found remenants of pesticides in all 34 conventional wines and in 1 of the 6 tested biological grown wines.

Well that doesn’t sound good does it? Well when an organisation with a stake in the outcome of a test publishes results i normally get very suspicious… This time i didn’t have to dig very deep, Aftonbladet actually had a companion article with some comments from the national food administration. It turns out that the levels of pesticide is a lot less than the allowed amount. For example the level of pyrimethanil is a thousand times less then the level allowed and considered safe…

In my humble opinion not much to be scared about. And if you are scared, be very scared! I would bet that you could find this level of substances in just about everything you eat. But then i prefer beer so i’m not really in the danger zone.

By the way you might ask why i even read the tabloid in the first place?  Well i have been testing out running Minefield (the next developers generation of firefox) under FreeBSD and wine. But more about that later.

british ufo archive released

The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet wrote today that the British minister of defense now have released a lot of material regarding UFO sightings in the UK. What they missed to tell is that the archives also contain correspondence with the public regarding UFO sightings. So if you are into UFO’s or are interested in what the public think about UFO’s have a look here at The National Archives.

UPDATE:

Those of you interested in UFO’s might also be interested in the news that a Scottish astonomer have created a modified version of the Drake equation. (The Drake equation approximates the number of advanced civilisations in our galaxy.)  His modified equations include the possibility to compare different  models of civilisation creation, but also a huge increase in precision in the models. So how many advanced civilisations are there in our galaxy according to these models? Depending on which model you have for civilisation creation inbetween 361 and 37964.

More information about the modified Drake equations  is at “the physics arXiv blog”.