36624613
submission
Advocatus Diaboli writes:
Last week, I read about some morons in UK get all bitchy about an official announcement regarding India plan to launch an unmanned orbiter probe to mars during late 2013. While this project has been known to exist since 2010, most people outside ISRO never thought that it would be followed up so vigorously. This belief is understandable since Indian politicians and bureaucrats, who control the purse strings of government projects, are rightly seen as morons who drive out competent Indian scientists or destroy their dreams. However this post is not about the state of politics and governance in India, which almost every Indian has had considerable experience with. The post is about whether such a probe is feasible and deliverable within the set time-frame, with available funding using available technology. The post also briefly recounts previous unmanned orbital missions to Mars by NASA and the ESA and compares them to the proposed Indian mission.
28504291
submission
Advocatus Diaboli writes:
You might have wondered about the reasons and forces behind a series of poor decisions made by Google within the last two years. From the gaffes of former CEO Eric Schmidt, Chrome OS debacle, Chrome OS netbook debacle, half-assed development of Android OS, building the ghost town known as Google + to its recent change in policies regarding pseudonym use and recent changes in user agreements.
Why would a company which was once so innovative and capable of getting things right lapse into such a pathetic state of affairs?
So let us start..
18781150
submission
Advocatus Diaboli writes:
We no longer live in the era of ‘plantation-type’ movie studios or recording houses. However large private companies still have considerable power over content production, distribution and promotion. Technology has been slowly changing this state of affairs for almost 30-40 years, however certain new technological advances, enabling systems and cost considerations WILL change the entertainment industry as we know it -within 5 years.
11061304
submission
Advocatus Diaboli writes:
I got over 5,000 views (with 24 hours) for a short video I reuploaded on youtube. It shows a chatroulette session (most likely partially faked) of two girls not flashing their boobs to stop a chick from being eaten by a python.
My guess the prerecorded python clip was stopped before the chick gets eaten if the gals flashed their boobs. If they did not, the clip was run till the end and they saw the bird being eaten.
Maybe.. something similar could be done with newborn bunny rabbits and pythons.
Note that I did not promote it beyond facebook, my blog and a couple of other blogs. Most views came from people searching for that clip and forwarding it to others.
Nobody went broke by appealing to the lowest common denominator.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWvj17Rpqdo&feature=player_embedded
8628110
submission
Advocatus Diaboli writes:
I see a future, very soon, where you could use the cell-phone number of a girl to search for self-shot pictures of her at gray information sites. Given the decreasing cost of data storage, access, transmission and computing power combined with the increased use of smartphones, the possibilities are mind boggling.
5932787
submission
Advocatus Diaboli writes:
A group at the Kharkov Institute for Physics and Technology in Kharkov, Ukraine has imaged s,p and d orbitals in carbon atoms. Their most recent work is in Physical Review B (approved Sep 03, 2009). However a previous article from the same group hints at their findings in "Field-Ion Microscopy of Quantum Oscillations of Linear Carbon Atomic Chains" NANO LETTERS, 2009, Vol. 9, No. 2, 774-778 (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/nl803399j)- look at Figure 3 and 5.
They used a technique known as 'field emission electron microscopy' in a very innovative (and technically proficient) manner.
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First Detailed Photos of Atoms
Sep 14, 2009
By Mike Lucibella & Lauren Schenkman
Inside Science News Service
WASHINGTON — For the first time, physicists have photographed the structure of an atom down to its electrons. The pictures, soon to be published in the journal Physical Review B, show the detailed images of a single carbon atom's electron cloud, taken by Ukrainian researchers at the Kharkov Institute for Physics and Technology in Kharkov, Ukraine. This is the first time scientists have been able to see an atom's internal structure directly. Since the early 1980s, researchers have been able to map out a material's atomic structure in a mathematical sense, using imaging techniques.
Quantum mechanics states that an electron doesn't exist as a single point, but spreads around the nucleus in a cloud known as an orbital. The soft blue spheres and split clouds seen in the images show two arrangements of the electrons in their orbitals in a carbon atom. The structures verify illustrations seen in thousands of chemistry books because they match established quantum mechanical predictions.
