World leader sumit, blah blah blah

Forget the story, check out the picture in this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7492451.stm

those are Japanese Police?! We’re pretty behind!

3d Landscapes

Some Awesome Computer Generated Art. -found via digg:
http://cg-pixel.com/3d-landscape.html

Farside Sunspots Gone

Gone again. We’re back to a blank sun:
http://www.spaceweather.com/images2008/02jul08/midi_farside_blank.gif?PHPSESSID=ej3c5k2lq5uvgqg93auejioeb0

Super Elements Turn Table upside down.

No idea what they’re talking about,  but that machine in the picture looks awesome.

(it’s something about how they can now make elements heavier than they should be which results in new properties, but it’s not really new because they’ve always been able to do it, just not so purely)

Countless-Core

Yep, that’s my term: Countless-Core. That’s what I use to describe the Future CPUs.

Programming in the future will be inherantly different, it seems. With the recent news of Intel announcing hundred, or even thousand core CPU technology, programmers of the future will approach problems from a new angle.

Currently most CPU’s have a range of 1 to 8 cores. The reason for this is that we’ve reached the maximum CPU speed we can get using modern transistors, and still have an economical way to keep the processor cool. So instead of pushing limits further to their maximum limit, engineers simply added more cores. Which allows the CPU to theoretically reach higher speeds because it can do several things at once. Traditionally computers process things one at a time. If a cpu were to have 1000 cores running at 1gigahertz, suddenly you can process 1000 times 1gigahertz, or 1 terahertz! That’s an immense amount of processing power.

The downside is that it’s much more difficult to take advantage of. How do you code a program to utilize all the processors all of the time? That is the question engineers are facing right now. I would say it will be some time before all Operating systems and software are prepared to run on Countless Core systems.

To serve, or to run the server?

Chicago is now ranked second among the cities which tip the highest. Almost makes me want to abandon the IT world and start waiting tables…

http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/food/1041039,CST-NWS-tips05.article

It’s the moon, Over

Something that’s being blogged about alot is It’s the Moon, Over.

Basically it is the story about A man in Wales who sees an unidentified bright luminous object in the sky over the mountains, and calls the police about it. The police decide to investigate the mystery and discover that the unidentified object is really just the moon. Darn! I was hoping they’d get down there and see, you know, an alien spaceship. <sarcasm> what did they think it was?! Oh well, can’t blame them for doing their job.

But you also cannot ignore the blatent stupidity that started the whole ordeal! A person who cannot identify the moon either has such a hectic life that they can’t associate objects anymore, or they had such a terribly isolated childhood that they never learned what it was. I’m surprised they could call 911 and describe that they saw in English!

But perhaps the person is your normal average everyday Joe. And maybe this is a sign in the deacreasing interest in the skies as Stuart points out in his blog.

A better theory on the Cooler Climate

As I’ve blogged about in the past, this year has been unseasonably cooler. (it seems) Instead of blaming the condition on lack of sunspots, it could potentially be because Earth is at Aphelion. (or maybe it’s the two combined.) Aphelion is when Earth is furthest away from the Sun; Perihelion is when Earth is closest. Unless you’re a second grader, you probably know that this is not what causes the seasons. That is caused by the precession of the Earth – or Earth’s wobble. The hemispheres receive more or less warmth from the sun because they tilt and the light becomes dispersed over those regions (or concentrated when it tilts towards the Sun at the opposing hemisphere).

So if the Earth is at its closest to the Sun, it must not have a perfectly circular orbit, right?  Correct. It makes an ellipse around the sun with the closest distance at 148 million Km and the furthest at 152 Km. Which makes us at the 152 Km presently. If the Apelion lands on winter and Perihelion lands on summer we would have an extra hot winter, and an extra hot summer. However it will supposedly be several thousand years before the two will actually co-incide. For now we have summer co-inciding with the apelion. Which would, as common logic suggests, give us a cooler summer. But this is by no means exact science.

Supposedly the difference between aphelion and perihelion is  only 5% sunlight. Which can be big if one were to calculate the difference in power received in each region.  But I’m simplifying things.

Of course, if the Earth is never the same distance from the sun, how did they come up with an Astronomical Unit(AU)? Well they simply took an average, which turns out to be 149,597,870,691 ± 30m or roughly just 150 million KM. (wikipedia)

Sources:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/07/04/does-the-sun-look-smaller-to-you/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit

Shun the Web Mail – A solution to Spam?

While registering for an account on a forum, I received a message explaining they do not allow the use of web-mail accounts for their registration:

• CadillacOwners.com does not accept registrations from non-ISP (free) email accounts like Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etcetera. These accounts are:
• 1. Constantly used to spam our forums
• 2: Rarely ever checked by their owners because they’re simply used to sign up at forums and then get abandoned
• 3. Almost always suspended for non-use or run out of storage space (see #2) and bounce back and forth, causing high server load

I don’t use the ISP provided mail. In fact I forgot my login 2 years ago. To actually sign up for the account, I had to dig up an email address I have which is Hotmail (yet doesn’t actually have the hotmail domain name)

They have made the realization that web mail is usually spam, and it becomes a dead account after so long. It seems true enough. Web-mail is a menace. If it were ruled out of the equation, we’d have a very small spam problem. The only problem is that I use web-mail, My friends use web-mail, Everyone uses webmail. It’s convienient and accessable from everywhere. While my ISP does offer the same thing: who says I’ll have this ISP forever? Changing email addresses is a pain in the ass when it comes to getting everyone up to speed.

In any case, it’s releiving to know that cadillac forums will be, for the most part, free of vacant users and spamming morons. I just hope all the expert mechanics who only had web-mail were able to still somehow sign up.

Possible Sunspots

Several Possible Sunspots on the Suns farside. Link:
http://www.spaceweather.com/images2008/01jul08/midi_farside_blank.gif?PHPSESSID=j6inp97sk3t6ip8fvniblfi1h7