Lavonardo

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider goes online tomorrow.

And gets to business of “high-energy collisions” eleven days later - the intervening week and a half being spent on dry runs and testing.

PhDComics has a nifty explanation about what’s really going on in the 27 kilometer long tunnel.

The Cosmic Variance blog did a thorough analysis on the odds of world-eating black holes or strangelets, and has now embarked on liveblogging the startup.

Me? I’m trusting the odds don’t play out, and will keep peeking at the blog entry every now and then.

Cosmic Variance has published a nice list of things the soon (official word is 10.9.2008) to be started Large Hadron Collider in CERN may discover and/or cause.

The Higgs boson weighs in at 95% probability, while proof of string theory and generation of black holes are not so likely.

Charles Stross is one of the authors whose works I’ve found very pleasant recently, and his blog provides good, thoughtful reading occasionally as well.

Two recent entries have been exceptionally good, and come heavily recommended to all.

The one on recent research on Fermi paradox appeals to my inner cosmologist. If universe is indeed infinite, shouldn’t there be an infinite amount of advanced civilizations. Not really, as Drake equation famously uses multipliers to whittle down the number.

The other, on the diminishing bang/buck ratio of web pages just explains how awkward things have recently evolved. To ship out a six kilobyte article, the web page is bloated to 950 kilobytes (including an amazing twenty-two separate javascript files). OK, the disease is obviously not ubiquitous, but the case study of Salon probably is a good approximation of the common norm.

Popular Science has put together a list on the top twenty of implements of destruction. Not all of the weapons included made it to the battlefields, and the ridiculous nature of some that didn’t obviously doesn’t mean that nuclear warfare would be a laughing matter.

And I’m still kinda surprised that “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads” didn’t make it to the list - it’s at least as credible as couple of the items that got millions and millions of DARPA money.

The thus far failing perpetual energy machine has a blog devoted to following the progress.

Sweet. This means that tidbits no longer need to be sought out amongst the regular news.

I’ve raved about Charles Stross‘ books for a couple of years now.

Not only is he a prolific author, but manages find time to to publish interesting and lengthy articles on his blog as well. Such as the ones on viability of space colonization and future (especially the latter is very much worth the read).

As the newest chapter in the ongoing saga, Steorn issued a press release today in which they postpone their demostration of free and limitless energy until further notice.

Perpetual energy will not be demonstrated today.

Not an entirely unexpected announcement.

It’s now been almost a year since the bold claims on infinite energy by Steorn.

Tomorrow their Orbo technology will be revealed in London. To a skeptical audience, I’d expect.

The other bit of dodgy technology from last summer (also referenced in the original article), the limitless data compression technology from Meliavolume seems to have disappeared, more efficiently than the company’s web presence.

Another glorious astronomy picture of the day.

This time of a solar eclipse as viewed from the moon.

[ via pinseri. ]

Didn’t miss the weekend’s big astronomic event on account of playing table hockey and refusing to smoke cigars. No, missed it on account of plentiful clouds.

Fortunately, the skies were actually clear somewhere, and this amazing animated .gif of the eclipse is the healing salve for us deprived of seeing the moon descend into the darkness of umbra.

Today’s headlines from Link City Bugler:

• Shark Pictures. The variety among the species is great (and got incidentally discussed at length today on a non-coffee break).
• Cross-platform widgets. Something to look into once I finish my first.
• Shadow of the Colossus. Yet another quality wikipedia article. Yet another game I haven’t even started.
• Lunar eclipse. A full lunar eclipse. At night. On a weekend. March 3rd, visible in Finland. Count me in.
• Slimline Classics. For the busy reader who wants to test the waters beyond Jackie Collins/Clive Cussler/Jari Tervo.
• What’s so special about this number? Many things, as the 400+ kilobyte page explains (and restricts itself to the first ten thousand numbers).

Randomly selected surfing destinations for the selective traveller.

• An amazing collection of geographically alternate earths. A lot of science, very little fiction, pretty maps. Worth a peep.
• If nothing else, Joel Kotkin launches half a dozen new words in his article on superstar cities.
• A nice selection of textbook disclaimers (yes, this is an anti-intelligent design page).
• Kickassclassical, for those awkward moments when you cannot recognize a piece if classical music featured in media (odds are 2.21 to 1 that it’s Carmina Burana anyway).
• JPG magazine, looks like best-of-flickr on paper. Which is not a bad thing at all.
• Angry Alien produly presents: 30 second editions of popular movies, as acted by animated bunnies. The hotel room wrestling scene of Borat is deeply disturbing even in this format,
• Boo hoo, bad microsoft, allegedly turning e-mail back five years by replacing the HTML-renderer in Outlook. Here’s a clue: no HTML in e-mail. Have two, actually, they’re pretty small.

For those about to click.

• IBM has published a gentle introduction of the wonders of virtualization.
• The collected wisdom of lifehackery is out in book form.
• The D programming language, somewhere beyond C, but not in the same direction as C++.
• Tony vs. Paul (which goes to show that stop motion is still a viable technology).
• Map of Gotham City, straight off the pages of Batman.

<
li>A truly scary article on ultra-right wing mercenaries running wild in Iraq.

• The weather in Helsinki sucks, we’ve established that much recently. Space weather is much more interesting.
• Of the 365 days of 2006, the Internet Explorer was unsafe for 286 of them.

Jason Kottke has listed the cream of the crop of his 2400 links remaindered last year. Most still as interesting as on the day of posting.

A small batch this time:

• Searchblog, John Battelle’s take on things.
• Bad Astronomy, good blog, and interesting articles.
• Blake Ross, the man behind firefox.

A recent announcement by an irish company called Steorn has raised lots of eyebrows. They claim that they have accomplished nothing less than the invention of an eternal source of energy. In their own words:

We have developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy. This means never having to recharge your phone, never having to refuel your car. A world with an infinite supply of clean energy for all.

Quite a bold statement, right?

To back up their invention, they have now issued a challenge to the science community at large to pick their proposed microgenerator-based idea apart. In public. The challenge was issued in this week’s economist, and it has brought in the crowds - both of scientists and lookenpeepers in general. Ought to be entertaining.

On the other hand, the finnish company claiming to have invented an universal compression algorithm has been met with appropriate disbelief. The whole exercise smells like a guerrilla marketing stunt that got out of hand.

[ Steorn-link via kasa. ]

First batch of links for august.

• Onion has a great Wikipedia-spoof. Obviously, july 25th was the 750th anniversary of the US independence.
• Stephen Colbert, a Daily Show sidekick, famously graduated to have his own show (with a slight
  right-wing bias). After coining the term “truthiness”, he’s now beginning to use wikiality as a new tool to advance the incoherent agenda.
• Turns out that there are cheaper alternatives to the almighty Photoshop to play around with high dynamic range images. As pointered by pinseri, hdrsoft’s products sure merit taking them out for a spin.
• Panography is something I haven’t tried out yet. Apart from a four-to-six image single direction panoramas with the aid of Canon’s photostich-application. But that’s obviously just a sliver of the cake, as shown in the relevant flickr-group.
• Just discovered: a finnish blog of nothing more than book reviews, and they’re looking for additional authors.
• Ok, ok, so blogging and journalism both intersect AND differ, perhaps these five things no longer need to be repeated. Or perhaps they will. Over and over again.
• The Los Angeles Times is not a newspaper I’ve read, on paper or on the web. But they sure seem to have an interesting series about the state of the oceans ongoing. Props to Matti for the link. Definitely interesting, and the article seems unencumbered by any DRM (unlike the New York Times, sadly).
• The annual O’Reilly-organized Open Source Convention is over in Portland. And, as usual, the presentations can be downloaded right now.

To contrast the featherweight (but certainly enjoyable) books read lately, grabbed Martin Rees’ Just Six Numbers to finally read. Owned the book for several years, but thus far it has eluded attempts to read.

As per its title, it concentrates on “just six numbers”. Six numbers that define the fundamentals of the universe (like the ratio between strong and weak electromagnetic forces). Six numbers that have been tagged with specific symbols. Six numbers, of whose explanations I expect to miss a decent chunk.

Also, the author has one of the coolest titles. An Astronomer Royal is just so much more expressive than a “Chief Scientist” employed by NASA.

Or a mojito, if you’re so inclined.

• William Gibson’s Alien III-script. Which, obviously, wasn’t used.
• An annotated list of non-errors in the english language. Now I finally understand what “splitting an infinitive” really means.
• An interesting article on community sites as games.
• Kyle MacDonald traded up his one red paperclip, and now owns a house. In Saskatchewan, Canada, but a house nonetheless.
• This year’s annual transhumanism-conference will be organized in Helsinki.
• On the very same weekend as Finncon 2006, the biggest finnish speculative fiction-occasion.
• Minutes from the very first Linux file system workshop are available (and now for free at lwn.net).
• A Chinese company claims that it has cracked the Skype protocol.