I am just linking this small page about the evolution of Earth. You may see when the planet formed, how the moon appeared, the different geological eras, major meteor impacts and extinctions, the evolution of species and some information about the impact humans have on the environment lately.

I've told a lot of people about this, but forgot to blog about it. Shame on me, because this revolutionary concept can change the way we think of sound.

Audio Spotlight enters the category of directional sound systems, more precisely it creates sound from ultrasound. The result is that you can direct a single speaker towards a certain area, and only people in the area can hear the sound.

There are drawbacks, as obstacles getting in the way of the sound beam block the sound from reaching further on. There are limitations to the frequency response and the dispersion pattern. I also don't know if the system can create loud sounds as this would probably need high power ultrasound and I don't know how healthy that would be.

But, even so, the idea is marvelous. As you can see from the animation from the Audio Spotlight site, you can attach a sound to a picture in a gallery, and the sound will only be heard by the people in from of the picture. Imagine that in a museum. Or think about having a restaurant with audio spotlight above the tables, playing whatever music they want and not bothering the other people. Combine it with some form of sound barrier between tables and you get a classy private place with no walls and a lot of people. Or think of a disco where you can separate the sound of each instrument and play it in a slightly offset area so people can dance to the music equalized however they like it. Or even a club where people can hear the music loud on the dance floor and really weak at tables, so they can talk.

This invention comes (of course) from MIT, more precisely from Dr. Joseph Pompei while he was a student at the MIT Media Lab, himself son of another distinguished doctor, Dr. Francesco Pompei.

Update:
However, with great power comes... ah, forget Spiderman! Anyway, there are voices expressing concern on the evil use of such technology. Like this link here, expressing the opinions of Barry Blesser, one of the most respected names in digital audio.

Now, I guess that the best invention ever would be directional earplugs! :)

Caught in a desire to be more scientist-like I've borrowed the book "I Am a Mathematician" by Norbert Wiener from a friend of mine. While being a rather old book (written in 1956), it was exactly what I was looking for: a book that described in layman's terms what the life of a true scientist is like and how he thinks.

I think the book itself was rather boring, but the world described and the way this guy was thinking really opened my eyes to things I wish I understood in my early teens. He sees, for example, the way sciences come together in one big thing called science. Even if he was a mathematician, he worked in physics, psychology and electronics, because he saw the way they worked together, not as separate unconnected subjects. He was thorough, focused and science minded. He went to the beach and thought about equations to define the movements of waves as they break against the shore.

My conclusion is that it is a wonderful insight in the mind of a scientist. It is not a popular science book, it is an autobiography, so it might get a little boring, but it also puts everything into context.

I just finished watching a very cool documentary, called The Human Behavior Experiments, that I highly recommend seeing. It describes some of the mechanisms of the human mind that make us behave inhumainely, or iresponsibly and the experiments to expose them. I found very interesting the information on Wikipedia about these experiments and I will post a list of links below.
Doing the research, I've stumbled upon sites that describe (or plainly show the pictures) of the Abu Ghraib tortures. Those links I will not publish, but you can easily use Google to find them yourselves. It is incredible that after those things got published, people still support any war or detention center at all. The movie I was telling you about explains how things like blind obedience or difussion of responsibility function in most of us, ordinary people.

Links:
The Human Behavior Experiments
The Milgram Experiment
The Stanford Prison Experiment
Das Experiment
Abu Ghraib abuses
The Bystander Effect
Asch conformity experiments
Depersonalisation
Responsibility diffusion

It appears NASA has used the metric system extensively since 1990, but now they've decided to not use anything else. NASA finally goes metric, so what a good oportunity to rant this is.

How about the funding? In 2002 the entire NASA funding was less than 15 billion, in 2006 it reached 16.5 billion. The total cost of the war in Iraq is 350 billion and climbing, with an estimated 600 billion in 2010. The International Space Station seems lost in bureaucracy limbo, and this site suggests the highly inflated figure of its cost reaches 100 billion. So what does that mean? That we could have skipped the Iraq war altogether and build six space stations instead? I am sure this is not the case. Because actually building six stations instead of one would have used only once the cost of design, aproximately the same people and each part would have been built cheaper than the ones before. Critics say that the cost of the ISS goes well above the first cost estimations and compare it to MIR, which has cost only 4.3billion. Well, that may be true, but doesn't that mean that we could have skipped the war in Iraq altogether (well, actually not all of it, Kuweit still had to be liberated) and build over 100 MIR stations?! Or finance 30 years of NASA budgets!

Well, had to be done. I feel much better now. Thank you, I will pay for the damages.

Learn how to multiply any two numbers (preferably with small digits) by drawing lines on paper.

Also check this out: Another Graphical Multiplication Trick

I've spent my last two days watching popular science shows. I've started with the very bad and time wasting "What we still don't know" and ended up with the marvelous "Stephen Hawking's Universe". I've always had this fantasy of doing something that matters, maybe become proficient in the things I really like, but rarely do, like writing, or science. And, in the good old trandition of Sierra games, I've thought of a "So you want to be a ..." series, where average everyday people like myself could be shown how to become something they always wanted, in the shortest time possible. Something like a career guide on speed.

Well, I am certainly not the only one to have come up with this idea: Dr. Michio Kaku wrote an article about becoming a physicist. Well, he basically tells you you cannot become a physicist if you've already lost the train. But I disagree. If you really want something, you can achieve it, at any age, only you can't do it with support from others.

So, what do I want to become? I've written in my todo list to check out calculus, topology and noncommutative geometry. That is almost certain not to go well, but at least I plan to try (trying). Damn, I like to think of stuff and never do anything about it. I only like whinning more! But the question is: what do you want to become? Don't waste your time. And I am not talking about carrers, I am talking about the things that makes one define himself on. Like for me, I am a C# programmer. That defines me at this moment. I certainly am glad there is more to add to that, like other achievements or "I am a good person" or "I have felt true love", but I still wish I could add more. Maybe being a part time garage cosmologist wouldn't hurt. Dreams ARE important and they are surely unachievable only when you don't even try to achieve them.

Hey! I have internet at home, at last! I dedicate this entry to the Titannet guys :)

Browsing the web I stumbled about this almost incredible story, one that shows in no ambiguos terms that evolution does run continuosly and that it can happen very fast: The superlions marooned on an island.

Long story short, a group of lions were marooned on an isolated island for 15 years. Instead of dying out they've adapted to a new prey (the buffalo), becoming swimmers, more intelligent pack hunters and stronger as individuals. They have become a lion subspecies in 15 years flat.

In 2001, July, a strange phenomenon in the form of red rain occured in southern India. While the official explanation of this is that desert dust has been brought by winds and brought down by rain, Dr. Godfrey Louis, a proffesor of physics for the Cochin University of Science and Technology thinks otherwise: it's all about alien microbes that arrived here by riding a comet.

The story might seem a bit far fetched, but even BBC News wrote about it. And this guy released a science paper about it after what appears to be five years of study. Take a minute to read it, it's only 18 pages long. What seems odd to me is that, even if he maintains that the red rain particles are biological in nature, he doesn't mention anything about reproduction, nor of any attempt to revive them.

Anyway, it seemed interesting enough to blog about it. There is a more down to Earth and detailed article about it in Wikipedia. You can also find here is the transcript of a news report together with animations that talks about Cardiff University scientists confirming the presence of some sort of DNA in the seemlessly devoid of nucleus cells.

Just now I watched a little youtube.com video that explained the two slit experiment. Basically, what happends is that a pattern emerges if you use waves and another when you use particles. Then you fire electrons in the thing, and wave patterns emerge, even if you fire one electron at a time, therefore the single electron is interfering with itself! But even stranger, when you put an observer to see what slit the electron goes through, the pattern changes into a particle pattern. This proves that observation changes what we observe.

Wait a minute! But isn't science supposed to be based on observation? This very experiment has been observed, for crying out loud. So what does it mean? If you demonstrate something by scientific experimentation, therefore using observation, doesn't that mean you only demonstrate what happends when you look at something, rather than what that something is? Since the same experiment has been observed using eyes and it behaved differently when they use a finer tool, then it means the type of observer alters the result. Would things start behaving differently if an alien was to come on Earth? This is mind boggling.

Links:
YouTube video -< it was removed from YouTube
Another YouTube video
Wikipedia on the double slit experiment
Cool java applet on wave interference