Continued from part 1…
(Note: Asteroids which move about close enough to Earth to potentially impact it are also known as NEOs, or “Near-Earth Objects”)
If an asteroid larger than a certain threshold hits the Earth, not much will be normal anymore. It will take tens to hundreds of years to recover from such an impact.
What can we do? How could we protect ourselves?
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Swine flu, nuclear war, changing climate, VEI-8 level eruption of a supervolcano and LHC-generated mini black holes are not the only things which threaten the existence of humanity.
An interesting paper by Mr. Jason G. Matheny, called “Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction” (last draft) notes that there is so far no analysis done of the cost-effectiveness of reducing human extinction risks. He provides a method of analyzing the cost-effectiveness of protecting against a mass-scale catastrophic event, using as an example case the threat of an asteroid impact.
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My friend came to me about a great new idea he had. I shall paraphrase our discussion:
-”Yo. Why is reality so hard?”, he asked.
-”I’ve no idea. Why is reality so hard?”, I replied.
-”It’s because there’s too many things to keep track of. I have a solution: micro-feng shui.”
-”Micro-feng shui? But isn’t micro less?”
-”Everything micro is good. For example: microchips. Very good.”
-”OK, so how does it work?”
-”Step 1: reduce spatial complexity. From now on, view the world as a planar space and ignore all height differences. That’s 30% less complexity. Then, step 2: happiness.”
Considering what’s published nowadays in various self-help books, packaging this idea into a 400-page book would probably reach New York Times bestseller list very fast. Not to mention the creation of some sort of a pseudo-religious movement, enabling my friend to be showered in non-Zimbabwean paper currency.
Iran is currently undergoing riots and violent demonstrations as a result of irregularities in the recent presidential vote. Thus Iran is all over the news, in good and in bad.
Recently Nokia-Siemens Networks got some (unwanted?) publicity from many sources after having sold “network snooping equipment” to Iran.
The sad thing is that while people are so pumped up by evil ayatollahs oppressing the people of Iran, they mistakenly think that spying on the citizens is something so terrible that it can only happen in some sort of backwater evil clerical dictatorship, and that such snooping is not even possible to do elsewhere.
That is false. This kind of functionality exists today in basically ALL GSM networks, in ALL countries you can think of. Yes, this means also your country.
It has got to be “Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle“. If only it was in German, it would reach perfection!
Nowadays a lot of music is in digital format. One of the most popular digital encoding methods is MPEG-1 Audio Layer III, aka. “MP3“. Typically an MP3 file takes around 1/10 the size of the uncompressed original (depending on quality), thereby saving storage space.
MP3 uses a form of lossy compression. This means that the original sound can not be perfectly recovered. What is recovered (sound you hear) is some kind of approximation of the original.
MP3 does this lossy compression by removing the sounds which a human ear cannot distinguish, using so-called “perceptual coding“. The sounds which are removed are specified by a psychoacoustic model, which is created using human input, for example listening tests.
In other words, this means that many people are all the time listening to music with “something missing”. But what is this something, what does this something sound like?
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Here are two videos of absolutely cool human-computer interface systems; Jeff Han’s touchscreen, and Pattie Maes’ & Pranav Mistry’s “Sixth Sense” system.
My prediction is that in 15-25 years ubiquitous computing will be an everyday reality in the way Mark Weiser envisioned it to be – computing devices will blend into the environment and “disappear”, letting you do whatever it is you need to do without having to consciously use a computer. And then, when you see people doing their slow tai-chi like movements in the park, instead of exercising, they just might be accessing their data with the help of body-motion detecting wearable computing and reality-augmenting contact lenses.
And, perhaps, William Gibson is the next Jules Verne.
Stay tuned!
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union built the Polyus (aka 17F19DM), an orbital weapons platform. It never actually made it to orbit, but had it done so, it would have been straight out of Star Wars (the movie). The equipment list included radar/optical guided recoilless cannon (!), barium cloud generation system (!!), launcher for nuclear space mines(!!!) and a laser communication link for radio silence.
All this with a fashionable matte-black paint job and golden rims for the booster rocket.
Some more information on this engineering marvel can be found from here or here.
The multinational insurance giant AIG reported massive losses for Q4/08: 61.7 billion US dollars.
If that looks like a big number, think again: AIG has already received 150 billion USD, plus is about to receive 30 billion USD extra as bail-out/rescue/emergency funding. All in all this is 180 billion USD, almost three times the losses.
That’s… massive. But how much money is it, really?
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How and where to obtain good music? There’s a whole spectrum between “buying a CD from local shop” and “downloading the latest yet unreleased album from some random internet person”.
Price and quality varies, but the interesting thing is that those are not correlated in any way. You can find high quality music both for absolutely no price whatsoever or for normal price, both from enthusiasts and multi-billion corporations.
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