A sobering thought for the new year

" Look [again] at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.



The back-story: On February 1990 the space probe Voyager 1, having completed its mission by visiting Jupiter and Saturn, was commanded to turn towards the Sun on order to photograph the planets of the solar system from afar. This resulted to the above picture of our planet, known as the Pale Blue Dot, which is taken from a mind-boggling distance of 6.054 billion kilometers from Earth, earning the distinction of our remotest picture so far. The text underneath is written by the late Carl Sagan, who both had the idea of taking the photo and named it.

I post it here on the eve of the annus mirabilis [/sarcasm] 2009 as it helps put things in perspective, giving us a tiny glimpse of who we really are. I hope I'll be proved wrong, but I'm afraid this little gem will turn out to be more useful this year than it ever was... Plus, I find the phrase "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" incredibly poetic.

And with these thoughts I have to leave you, in order to get ready for the New Year, whatever it turns out to be.

Have a happy new year, reader, and may the FSM touch you with His noodly appendage!

The blog wishes you...

...and a rational new year!

[alt. title: how the finch stole Christmas]

A delayed answer

A couple of days ago I posted an incomprehensible text, promising I would reveal what it is. Well, here's the explanation.

I assume that you're all familiar with the Babelfish. No, not *that* Babelfish, but the more mundane translation service provided by Yahoo.
Of course, as translation is done by algorithms, it isn't 100% accurate and sometimes it fails quite spectacularly. So imagine what would happen if you made a piece of text go back and forth through 10 consecutive translations. That, my friends, is babelization!

So, being utterly bored between classes, I decided to fool around with one implementation, and plugged one of my favourite theories in it:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

The babelized text was, predictably, a piece of nonsense bearing no relation to the original:

The space, therefore and the homosexual man, must astonish something inexplicable, because this here, because it goes, those correctly immediately, this replaced ulteriorly if the controls, have the rule of the base of the visualization.

Babelize!

The space, therefore and the homosexual man, must astonish something inexplicable, because this here, because it goes, those correctly immediately, this replaced ulteriorly if the controls, have the rule of the base of the visualization.


[WTF is that? Answer tomorrow]

Beermathics or "An infinite number of mathematicians...

...walk into a bar.
The first one orders a beer.
The second orders half a beer.
The third, a quarter of a beer.

The bartender says "You're all idiots", and pours two beers."

Now, allow me to be the brilliant mind who will do the math for his moronic readers unfunny/killjoy guy who will explain the joke here:

Let's label the mathematicians with 'n', with n going from 1 (the first guy) to ∞ (the "last" one):



We should also label the amount of beer that each one drinks as beer_n Then we'll have this:


...

From this we can derive the general formula that gives us beer_n, i.e. the amount of beer that the n-th mathematician will drink:





So, all the clever barman had to do was to add all the terms in the series which, predictably gives out...




It just goes to show that brilliant minds nerds can have humour inside jokes that no-one cares about, too.

[via Talk Like a Physicist, who found it here, who in turn found it here, and so on ad nauseum infinitum]

(later addition: The title is -[sarcasm]obviously[/sarcasm]- a quasi-reference to this)

Well yes, *I* certainly do

I am not alone in this world!

[screenshots from The Big Bang Theory, which, by the way, is *teh awesome*]

Pick-up lines I have to try, pt. 2

The gallant grad student

[from PhD]

Epic fail

[Εργαστήρια σχολής ΧημΜηχ]

Neologism: Pull a Palin

In a recent edition of the New Yorker's Cartoon Lounge, Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) was asked to draw, among other things, his favourite animal eating his favourite food.
Here's what he submitted:
So, expression of the day/month/next four years (depending on the US elections' outcome) is "to Pull a Palin", i.e. to evade a challenge you can't complete by doing something cutesy and completely unrelated.

Also, on a unrelated Palin note, I laughed my ass off with Randall's first answer: "any longer in front of this screen and my skin tone might actually hit #FFFFFF (that's pure white written in nerdish hexadecimal -Markos)"

Too much free time on their hands, these people...

Pick-up lines I have to try, pt. 1

The philandering philosopher

[from 3PS]

When Analytical Chemistry met British Humor...

...an awesome PR stunt was born. Who could believe TLC could get so absurd?

[via]

A la xkcd

Inspired Shamelessly lifted from everybody's favourite comic:

Nobody hates Hugo

OK, I see too much Lost [check], I use Google for obscure and/or useless searches [check], my lame puns link to Wikipedia articles [check], I read xkcd fanatically [check] *and* I use Photoshop to edit the sketches [double triple check].

Yup, I am a big time geek.

Oh, and I obviously hate the bitch. Her face makes my dry heave. Her voice is like ground glass in my ears (ground on the inside of my ears, that is) and her manners wake up the spree killer inside me.

And -one *last* thing, it must be the 5th update by now-, I trully apologize for using the devil's own font on the Holy Grail, but I didn't really have any other options for emulating Randall's handwriting. And after all, Comic Sans was made for comics, duh!

LHC & The End of the World

Tomorrow at 9:30 Central European Time (10:30 local), as you may know, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) will "turn on", i.e. its main proton beam will circulate for the first time through its entire length, achieving energies far higher than any other accelerator has reached before.

It's official: there's nothing dorkier than theoretical physicist rapping

This, as well as the ultimate goal of the entire experiment (finding the elusive Higgs boson -a.k.a. "The FSM particle"- something perceived as an act of hubris by many) has led to speculation about whether the world is about to end in a freaky high energy physics accident.

I, for one, believe that all this was prophesied a long, long time ago (1979!) by the great & late Douglas Adams:

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

There is a third theory which suggests that both of the first two theories were concocted by a wily editor of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in order to increase the universal level of uncertainty and paranoia and so boost the sales of the Guide.
This last theory is of course the most convincing as The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the only book in the whole of the known universe to have the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on the cover."

And then, of course, there's this:


How can it not go awfully wrong???


*OK, in fact the first collisions, where anything could **theoretically** go wrong are not scheduled till October 21st or so, but I will not let this mere technicality stand in the way of fear-mongering. OMG PANIC PANIC EVERYONE!!!1!

Caustic (self-)satire

[via]

Welcome to my world

[via]

moblogging

i.e. posting from a mobile device.

Like me right now, sitting in Syntagma and using the -free- internet coverage to brag about my geekiness :)

Boom de yada!

First came this (clickety-click):

(from xkcd, the bestest, nerdiest,
most insightful comic on the internets)

which I found lovely and oh-so-inspiring but then...

...then my friend C. pointed me to this:

which was obviously -and unbeknownst to me- the inspiration behind the strip. I have to admit it, I'm totally and completely in love with it (and it also made my eyes slightly misty the first time I saw it)...

An awesome world, indeed!

It's THAT day!!!

Ναι λοιπόν, σήμερα σύμφωνα με τις επίσημες ανακοινώσεις βγαίνει η καινούρια & απαστράπτουσα αλεπουδίτσα της φωτιάς!





Ο Firefox 3 θα είναι κοντά μας από τις 5 μ.μ. 8 μ.μ. ώρα Ελλάδος (αν έχω κάνει καλά τη μετατροπή από την ώρα Ειρηνικού... δεν την έκανα καλά, όχι), και θα έλεγα πως είναι καλή ιδέα να τον κατεβάσετε, για περισσότερους από ένα λόγους:

1^ον, (λέγεται πως) είναι με διαφορά ασφαλέστερος του Internet Explorer. Εγώ πάντως τον χρησιμοποιώ τα τελευταία 2.5 χρόνια και έχω βρει την ησυχία μου...

2^ον, έρχεται έτοιμος με διάφορα goodies τα οποία πολύ πρόσφατα υιοθέτησε ο IE (βλέπε tabs, download manager, incremental (αυξητική?) έρευνα κλπ)

3^ο, είναι εύκολα παραμετροποιήσιμος στις ανάγκες και τις επιθυμίες του κάθε χρήστη. Υπάρχουν -εκατοντάδες- διαθέσιμα θέματα που αλλάζουν απλά την εμφάνισή του (de gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum) όπως και...

4^ο (και μάλλον βασικότερο), οι extensions που προσθέτουν δυνατότητες πολύ πέρα από τις συμβατικές ενός διαδικτυακού διαφυλλιστή web browser και σε γλιτώνουν από σημαντικούς πονοκεφάλους (AdBlock Plus, FlashBlock, NoScript για τους μυημένους)

Τώρα που το σκέφτομαι, θα μπορούσα να τα αναλύσω διεξοδικότερα σε επόμενο post, αφού το θέμα σηκώνει πολύ νερό... Χμμμμ...

5^ο, αποτελεί ένα δωρεάν προϊόν (ακούω κάποιον να φωνάζει τσιφούτηηηη...?), το οποίο μπαίνει σιγά-σιγά στο μάτι της MegaHard, κάτι το οποίο από μόνο του αποτελεί λόγο να το αγκαλιάσουμε, non?

Ά και 6^ο και τελευταίο, παίζει και ρεκόρ Guinness για το λογισμικό που θα κατεβεί πιο πολλές φορές μέσα σε ένα 24ωρο!

Τι λέτε πιστοί μου αναγνώστες, δεν αξίζει να βοηθήσουμε την αλεπουδίτσα να γίνει ακόμα πιο δημοφιλής, άρα και ακόμα καλύτερη?

Μπορείτε να ενημερωθείτε με e-mail για την έναρξη διάθεσης του προγράμματος αν πάτε στη σελίδα της Download Day και επιλέξετε να δηλώσετε την... αφοσίωση σας (Pledge Now). Δίνοντας τους τη διεύθυνσή σας θα σας ενημερώσουν μόλις ξεκινήσει να μετράει το 24ωρο, οπότε και ο αγαπημένος μας browser θα είναι πια διαθέσιμος.

Και ναι, ΝΣΚ, η έκδοση που έχεις είναι η beta, οπότε καλά θα κάνεις να κατεβάσεις και την stable release σήμερα... ;)

Über-cool

Ομολογουμένως, ενώ είμαι σαφής υπέρμαχος της εξελικτικής θεωρίας (και ποιος δεν είναι, θα με ρωτήσετε, ε...?) δεν είχα ποτέ ξεκαθαρίσει στο μυαλό μου το πως ξεκίνησε η ζωή, το πως τα απλά οργανικά μόρια μετατράπηκαν σε δομές οι οποίες είχαν την ικανότητα να τρέφονται, να αναπαράγονται, να προσαρμόζονται ανταγωνιστικά στο περιβάλλον τους και να μεταβιβάζουν πληροφορίες από γενιά σε γενιά.

Αυτό το βιντεάκι [via Pharyngula] εξηγεί σε απλούς -σχετικά- όρους την ιδέα της αβιογένεσης, και πως αυτή δένει με την εξέλιξη.



Plus, its music makes me oh-so-joyous (pun intended)!