How we linearized the world

We had a fundamental insight yesterday: If you zoom in enough on nearly any kind of curve (excluding weird curves, like fractals) you'd end up with something that looks like a line. I called it the "linearization of everything" and I am convinced we should publish a Nature article about it ;) Before our discussion we had a look at a Nature paper written by people who work on the same stuff as we do (finding the cell outlines from microscope images). Some of their results look okay, but some images contain data which is just off! And it's in Nature - one of the most prestigious science journals worldwide...

Another research story: The software running on airplanes is "safe" in a way that the airplane can not crush if the hardware or outer circumstances cause it do to so. There's a mathematical proof for that! It formalizes the airplane code and shows that the airplane should not crush. However, the software running on ships is from the 1970s and one of my friends here wrote a modern Matlab code which will be tested on a real ship in about half a year :-) The program takes waves, weather, the entire navigation into account and could pilot the ship!