Until Nikola Tesla's invention of a workable A.C. electrical power system (which was in direct competition with Thomas Edison's D.C. power system), the ability to generate, transmit, and use electricity as we do today was impossible.
George Westinghouse, Westinghouse Corporation
We recommend that the term "impact factor" be abolished and that this measure be renamed in keeping with its actual role, that merely of a time-specific "citation rate index" and nothing more. What is currently called the "impact factor" should not be misused to evaluate journals or to validate the scientific relevance of a particular researcher or research program, especially in decisions regarding employment, funding, and tenure.(from The journal "impact factor": a misnamed, misleading, misused measure by Hecht F, et al.)
Impact Factors reflect the journal not the article, vary with time and correlate only poorly with perceived excellence. Simple comparison of impact factors in different specialties may be misleading. Review journals often have higher Impact Factors than those with original data. Both authors and editors can try to manipulate journal Impact Factors(from Impact factors: uses and abuses by James Neuberger and Christopher Counsell - pdf)
On Einstein's 72nd birthday on March 14, 1951, UPI photographer Arthur Sasse was trying to persuade him to smile for the camera, but having smiled for photographers many times that day, Einstein stuck out his tongue instead. This photograph became one of the most popular ever taken of Einstein, often used in merchandise depicting him in a lighthearted sense. Einstein enjoyed this photo and requested UPI to give him nine copies for personal use, one of which he signed for a reporter.Sulmondo, the nick of the street artists, add only one little detail to the original photo!
Source: Wikipedia
However, the calculation using the shape in an infinite-dimensional space, the amplituhedron, should provide us with completely new perspectives how to look at the dynamics – perspective that is timeless, obscures the location of objects and events in the space and time, and obscures the unitarity (the requirement that the total quantum-calculated probability of all possibilities remains 100%), but it unmasks some other key structures that dictate what the probabilities should be, structures we were largely ignorant about.(Luboš Motl on physics.stackexchange.com)
If the new picture becomes sufficiently generalized, you could perhaps throw away the old books because you will get an entirely new framework to compute these things and to think about all these things. But once again, you don't have to throw them away because the physical results are the same.
The amplituhedron is not built out of space-time and probabilities; these properties merely arise as consequences of the jewel’s geometry. The usual picture of space and time, and particles moving around in them, is a construct.(from Quanta Magazine via Marginal Revolution)
This rich structure is also completely new to the mathematicians.(Jaroslav Trnka - pdf)
Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune’s greedily coveted favours, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity.Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, Preface Part 1.
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He [Rossini] was surrounded to the last by admiring friends; and if it be true that, like so many Italians, he regarded Fridays as an unlucky day and thirteen as an unlucky number, it is remarkable that one Friday 13th of November he died.Now, from an economical point of view, could be interesting the following abstract:
The Friday the 13th anomaly of Kolb and Rodriguez (1987) is revisited in an international context. Drawing on the philosophy of science approach of Lakatos (1978), the paper argues the importance of “anomalies” and the need for triangulation. Using the FTSE world indices over 1988–2000 for 19 countries, it is found that there is some evidence that returns on Friday the 13th are statistically different from, and generally greater than, returns on other Fridays.(1, 2)Lucey's results seem a confirmation of the results of another work by Andrew Coutts:
In recent years much evidence has been documented of the existence of regularities in security price returns. However, one of the least investigated anomalies concerns the socalled ‘Friday the 13th’ effect, where returns on Fridays which fall on the 13th of the month display significantly lower returns than other Fridays. Employing daily logarithmic returns from the Financial Times Industrial Ordinary Shares Index (FT 30) for the period July 1935 through December 1994, we find no evidence of a Friday the 13th effect. Indeed, if anything, we find returns are higher on Friday the 13th than on other Fridays. We then partition the sample into six subsamples each of ten years, again concluding that there is no evidence of a Friday the 13th effect, and that once again returns on Friday the 13th tend to be higher than on other Fridays. Finally, we conclude that our results support the extremely limited evidence documented for the UK market concerning the Friday the 13th effect.So the ancient superstitions could have an influence also in our advanced society:
