There’s a thermodynamic cost to storing information about the past that has no predictive value for the future, Still and colleagues show. To be maximally efficient, a system has to be selective. If it indiscriminately remembers everything that happened, it incurs a large energy cost. On the other hand, if it doesn’t bother storing any information about its environment at all, it will be constantly struggling to cope with the unexpected.
Pratt, working on the larger Euro page, locks himself into a 12-panel grid for the most part. Here’s the thing about a consistent use of a grid, that’s been kind of forgotten over the years. You use it when you want the panelling to become invisible.
A 2-D projection of a Calabi-Yau manifold, one popular method of compactifying the extra, unwanted dimensions of String Theory. The Maldacena conjecture says that anti-de Sitter space is mathematically dual to conformal field theories in one fewer dimension. (Wikimedia Commons user Lunch)
Ask Ethan: Where Is The Line Between Mathematics And Physics?