Saturday, April 30, 2005

Oracle Space??

Today, I came across this oracle web advertisement.

So Oracle is organising a competition to send someone to the outer fringers of space?

Check this out.

Hubble, Tiger

Just a brief introduction to the technology news in this week:

Hubble Telescope Celebrates 15 Years
The Hubble Space Telescope let humanity escape the boundaries of space and time to gaze upon the glories of the universe. After 15 years and over 700,000 observations, Hubble continues to astound all who wonder at the cosmos.
http://hubblesite.org/

Tiger is out hunting for the (not so long) horn
Today, tiger unleashed a major upgrade to its OS X series, Tiger. Tiger features many and exciting new functions and abilities, such as SpotLight, Dashboard and Automator. An impressive array of new programs.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/

Monday, April 25, 2005

Carl Jung

http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/jung.html

Good stuff on Carl Jung and how Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test came about. Also provides some information on Personality Theories.

Sunday, April 24, 2005

YaGoohoo!gle

http://www.yagoohoogle.com/

Another innovative creation from someone who wants to combine the best of both worlds.

Friday, April 22, 2005

$100 Laptop

MIT Media Lab is going to try to develop a $100 laptop, running Linux OS.

If such a breakthrough occurs, it could simply mean that many students in LEDCs will have access to computers, and this will change the equation on the great digital divide between MEDCs and LEDCs.

According to MIT Media Lab, China itself has 220 million students. Assuming that the profit resulting from such a laptop sale is US$10, then a million students buying the laptop will certainly make a remarkable huge profit. Of course, this is without taking into consideration research, development and marketing costs.

For more info, check out http://laptop.media.mit.edu/

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Teleportation

For anyone interested in teleportation, you can check out the paper "Quantum Teleportation with Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Optical Entanglement" by Ping Koy Lam, and Warwick P. Bowen.
Click here to see the paper

Quite an interesting paper that is worth to read. Although the technical terms look hard, you should be able to have a better understanding as you continue to read along.

Sunday, April 17, 2005

Calculating Squares

Here is a "quick" (depends on how quick you are) of calculating squares.

Assume that the number you want to calculate is 47 X 47 [47 times 47].

Then, take 50 times 50 = 2500
minus 50 times 2 times (50-47) = 50 X 2 X 3 = 300
plus (50-47) squared = 3 X 3 = 9

Hence, ans: 2500 - 300 + 9.

You should be able to figure how it works for other numbers...

Saturday, April 16, 2005

35th anniversary of Earth Day, 22 Apr 2005

First celebrated in March 21, 1970; what started as a celebration of the start of the march/ Vernal Equinox, which basically means the start of Spring has turned into a celebration of the natural wonders of mother earth and more recently into a day to reflect on the amount of damage we have inflicted into our planet.

Yes... and thats how earth day came about.

Saturday, April 09, 2005

Giant against Giant

IBM takes on EMC

IBM has made a deal with NetApp (Network Appliance) to sell IBM-branded appliances from NetApp. Its clearly shocking at how intense the competition is... EMC... the traditional storage based company, being challenged by IBM... a PC maker cum research turned server-solutions MNC.

Interesting game...

Friday, April 08, 2005

The Matrix a reality?

Sony takes 3-D cinema directly to the brain
By Michael Horsnell


THE cult sci-fi movie The Matrix might not have such an improbable plot after all.

The first step towards a real-life version, in which cyber-reality is projected into the brains of people via an electrode feed, could be just over the horizon.

Sony, the Japanese entertainment giant, has patented an idea for transmitting data directly into the brain, with the goal of enabling a person to see films and play video games in which they smell, taste and perhaps even feel things, New Scientist magazine says.

The patent is based purely on theory, not on any invention — but they used to say that man would never fly.

In Sony’s patent, the technique would be entirely noninvasive. It would not use brain implants or other surgery. The patent has few details, describing only a device that would fire pulses of ultrasound at the head to modify the firing patterns of neurons in targeted parts of the brain.

The aim, it says, is to create “sensory experiences”, ranging from moving images to tastes and sounds.

New Scientist says in its Saturday issue that it was denied an interview with the unnamed inventor, who is based at a Sony office in San Diego, California.

Elizabeth Boukis, the Sony Electronics spokeswoman, said that the work was a “prophetic invention” and no experiments at all had been performed on it. “It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us,” she told the magazine.

Independent experts said that they did not dismiss the idea out of hand, although they also expressed concern about the proposed method’s long-term safety.

So far, the only non-invasive way for manipulating the brain is crude. A technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation uses magnetic fields to induce currents in brain tissue, thus stimulating brain cells. Magnetic fields cannot be finely focused on small groups of brain cells, but ultrasound pulses could be. As a character in an entirely unrelated sci-fi film film once said: “May the force be with you.”

SCREEN FLOPS
# Smell-O-Vision was initiated in 1960 by Mike Todd Jr, husband of Elizabeth Taylor. Smells were pumped through pipes leading to individual cinema seats, cued by a signal on the film. Only one film, Scent of a Mystery, was made in Smell-O-Vision and Todd lost his investment

# Sensurround was born in 1975 for Earthquake and used intense waves of sound to augment screen action. The process never caught on because it disturbed audiences watching other films in multi-screen cinemas

# 3-D vision involved cinemagoers watching through coloured glasses to resolve images, shot using a special process, into three dimensions

# VistaVision relied on filming essential action in the middle horizontal band of view so that cinemas could project films on to different screen sizes

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Paint.net

Freeware: Enhanced Paint Program

If you use the Paint graphics program built into Microsoft's operating systems, you have probably wished from time to time for an enhanced version. You don't need all the fancy features (or high price) of packages like Adobe's PhotoShop or even Corel's less expensive but still a little pricey PhotoPaint, but you'd like a little more than Paint offers, and you'd like it at no cost. No problem! Some folks at Washington State University got permission and help from Microsoft in making a new version of Paint, which they call Paint.NET. It will do a lot of the things that the commercial graphics programs do. You can even use layers.

http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/

Monday, April 04, 2005

Feynman Craze (Con't)

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is about Mr. Feynamn, the man himself, his childhood days and it provides a glimsp on how his attitude helped him in his schooling years, and then to the Nobel Prize. The book also provides an insight into MIT and Princeton and the differences between these schools.
To sum it up, the book is a memior, although his english is not that perfect. Afterall, its American English.

Sunday, April 03, 2005

Feynman Craze

The book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is a MUST READ. Its a cool book for any asipiring scientists and its filled with laughter.
For the book, see: http://www.gorgorat.com/

Clocky

http://bicillin.media.mit.edu/clocky/

I think its a rather innovative academic research project from MIT media labs...
I think it can sell well. Looks fun anyway.

Dandruff is a major air pollutant!

Stumbled across this article today.
Sounds kinda interesting.
It offers a good food for thought.
Even though you won't think of food when reading this.

---------
[Health News] Washington, Dandruff which causes much irritation by making the scalp flaky and itchy may also account for a much larger proportion of air pollution, than earlier believed, according to a new study.

The study suggests that particles of skin, pollen, fur fibers, and other cell fragments may account for up to 25 percent of the particles in the atmosphere.

Particles suspended in the atmosphere, known as aerosols, play an important role in climate change. But researchers say they need a better understanding of what those aerosols are made of so they can build more accurate climate change models.

Aerosols produced by burning fuel and other human activities have been the primary focus of attention for their contributions to air pollution and climate change. But aerosols from natural sources such as plants and animals, known as "bioaerosols," have been considered a minor source of air pollution until now.

[Health News] In the study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers analyzed aerosols collected from different environments and in different seasons.

They identified a broad array of bioaerosols in the samples, including fur fibers, dandruff, and skin as well as fragments of plants, pollen, spores, bacteria, algae, fungi, viruses, and protein crystals.

In some cases these natural air pollutants accounted for up to 25% of the total particles in the atmosphere.

In spring, the results showed that pollen is more abundant, and in winter, dead skin and other cells are the predominant sources of bioaerosols. (ANI)

News source: http://www.keralanext.com/news/readnext,1.asp?id=171604&pg=2

Friday, April 01, 2005

Google Gulp

Google Gulp - what you really need if you want to be super-intelligent [LOL]
http://www.google.co.uk/googlegulp/index.html
Google April Fool's joke?

Email WAR

Just an hour ago, Google raised the stakes for the email war...
Gmail has launched exactly a year ago... on this very date.
People thought Google has joking, on April Fool's Day when they said they would give 1GB. Now, one year on, with Gmail still in beta, Goggle will offer 2 GB.

2GB is EIGHT times the 250MB Hotmail offers (for US customers) and 1000 times the mere 2 MB Hotmail offers for non-US customers.

Currently the display on my Gmail webpage reads
"You are currently using 89 MB (7%) of your 1286 MB"
So.. what is this ... April Fool's joke from Google? [think of the 2007 Google Labs on Mars... from last year's April Fool's]

With the firm leadership and sound management of Dr. Eric E. Schmidt who was previously CEO at Novell, [one of the world's most famous data management and networking solutions company in the world], Google has seen great leaps and bounds in the last few years. As of August 18 2004, the Google IPO rang... by offering 19,605,052 Shares.

Conclusion: Google is certainly a leader in the IT field, setting trends... and its the number one company to watch... like a hawk [remember www.watchinggooglelikeahawk.com ?].

Google... on and on...