Wikipedia has a nice picture of the mechanism behind the evolution of Pig Flu, the so-called antigenic shift.

An interesting article on BBC about what individual actions actually matter in the fight against climate change/global warming.

Professor David MacKay advocates normalizing energy use into kilowatt-hour (kWh). Using this metric, he then compares the amount of energy saved as a result of various “green” actions. To give you an idea of the kWh-metric: in Great Britain, an average person consumes energy worth 125 kWh per day (for transport, heating, manufacturing, and electricity).

Among the perhaps not-so-surprising findings: turning off your phone charger makes no difference whatsoever, electrical cars are way better than hydrogen cars, heat pumps are a good way to save energy, wind micro-turbines on roofs are basically useless, etc. Check it out.

Update: Thanks to “eagle-eye” Jaska for spotting a bug in the units. Our physics teacher used to rant and rave against falling for that common error and of course I fell for it! “Kilowatt-per-hour” is wrong, it’s “kilowatt-hour”. Duh.

Occasionally I check what my favorite cryptologists are up to. This morning I checked Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen’s page again. Nothing new this time, except eventually I did spot something old which I had not seen before.

Behold, the Krypto-Kekkonen. How cool is that? (Very. But it’s a rhetorical question.)

(Note for foreign readers: Urho Kekkonen was a very photogenic president of Finland back in the days, keeping the Soviet Union at bay by (among other things) outboozing their leaders.)

It has got to be “Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle“. If only it was in German, it would reach perfection!

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.

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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Congratulations to Mr. Barack Obama, who became the new President of the USA. He promised change as his message, and sure enough, the robots.txt of Whitehouse.gov underwent major changes already (among other things).

Anecdotical? Perhaps.

Getting rich for its own sake will look as stupid as bodybuilding does at that point when the neck gets thicker than the head, and the thighs and biceps look like four plastic kit-bags full of tofu. And on the men it looks even worse.

Read “A prediction that’s a safe bet”, by Mr. Clive James.

Recently I saw this superbly good quote from Mr. Raymond Blanc in a BBC News article called “Food needs ‘fundamental rethink’”:
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