ragdoll physics n.— «There are a lot of details in games that slightly improve the overall-feel, but that doesn’t change the gameplay. Things like being able to look at your feet in FPS games adds to the impression players get but isn’t a...
memristor n.— «The four passive components of electronics are the resistor, capacitor, inductor and the memristor, which was discovered only a few months ago. Memristors (from memory-resistors, geddit?) are resistors whose resistance...
fluent n.— «Chang and Cohen’s program, called Adversarial Continuous Time and Space Search, (ACCTS), represents collections of interacting combatants (units) by what are called “fluents,” a concept close to the time-space operators...
monster n.— «Frampton’s team argues that the extra entropy is generated by the random nature of quantum physics. This should sometimes allow a collapsing ball of matter to spontaneously transform into something called a...
witness mark n.— «The laminations can be designed to accommodate flipping, or alternation as noted above, to average out asymmetries. The design should incorporate a “witness mark” so that the pattern of alternation is evident...
ambulance chasing n.— «In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call “ambulance chasing.” He heard a rumor, while spending a year at Stanford, that...