Tag: harry potter

Bellatrix is Orion’s 3rd-brightest star

The bluish-white shoulder star, Bellatrix, aka Gamma Orionis, has a name that means “female warrior.” Bellatrix is one of the hottest stars you can see without optical aid. Source: https://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/bellatrix-3rd-brightest-star-in-orion…

UK Mathematician Wins Richest Prize in Academia For His Work On Stochastic Analysis

Lanodonal writes: A mathematician who tamed a nightmarish family of equations that behave so badly they make no sense has won the most lucrative prize in academia. Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos…

Microsoft Is Interested In Acquiring Warner Bros. Gaming Unit

According to a new report from The Information, Microsoft is interested in bidding on Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, which is currently a division of AT&T. From a report: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, or WB Games, is known for publishing the “Batman: Arkham” series, “Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor,” many “Lego” and “Harry Potter” games, “Mortal Kombat,” and “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.”…

‘Contagion,’ Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 Thriller, Is Climbing Up the Charts

One of the hottest movies in the Warner Bros. library is a nine-year-old drama that kills off Gwyneth Paltrow in its first 15 minutes. From a report: Fears of the coronavirus have prompted movie fans to re-examine Steven Soderbergh’s star-studded 2011 thriller, “Contagion,” a fictional account of a pandemic that kills 26 million people worldwide. According to Warner Bros., the film…

Bill Gates Gives Reddit User An 81-Pound ‘Secret Santa’ Gift

“A Michigan woman got the Secret Santa gift of a lifetime this Christmas — an 81-pound package from Bill Gates,” reports CNN: The gifts included an original manuscript of “The Great Gatsby,” signed by Gates; books; toys for her cat and Harry Potter and “Twin Peaks” memorabilia, according to her post on RedditGifts.com. It arrived in a box lit up inside…

Baidu Has a New Trick For Teaching AI the Meaning of Language

Baidu, China’s closest equivalent to Google, has achieved the highest score at the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) AI competition. What’s notable about Baidu’s achievement is that it illustrates how AI research benefits from a diversity of contributors. MIT Technology Review explains: GLUE is a widely accepted benchmark for how well an AI system understands human language. It consists of nine…

A real-life deluminator for spotting exoplanets by reflected starlight

Perhaps you remember the opening scene of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” that took place on Privet Drive. A bearded man pulled a mysterious device, called a deluminator, from his dark robe and one by one the lights from the street lamps flew into it. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-12-real-life-deluminator-exoplanets-starlight.html…

Inspired By Harry Potter, 150 Colleges Now Have Quidditch Teams

A reporter for SFGate describes what happened when he tried out for the quidditch team at the University of California at Berkeley: The person throwing me what’s called a “quaffle” (actually a slightly deflated volleyball) looked at me to make sure I’m ready. I gave them a head nod and grip my “broom” (a PVC pipe), ready to run. “GO!” I…