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If you’re ever lying on a beach...

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:32:42 +0800

If you’re ever lying on a beach with
80 billion grains of sand beneath you,
700 thousand ocean waves before you,
60 million stars stretched out above you,
and you’re still not at all impressed,
I want you to think about this:
The light you see reflecting from the stars is over one million years old.But then, just before you start to feel like a mere blip
in the gigantic scheme of things, please remember this:
Yes, you are small, but you’re also irreplaceable
and invaluable and miraculous.
Those stars don’t have anything on you.

Unknown

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Confession!

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:39:10 +0800

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iPhone 4 at $888 and $1048

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:26:08 +0800

While the telcos have yet to reveal pricing, Apple said the online store will sell the iPhone 4 for $888 for the 16GB model, and $1048 for the 32GB version. — PHOTO: APPLE

BESIDES being on sale through the three telcos in Singapore, the much awaited iPhone 4 will also go on sale this Friday through Apple’s online store.

While the telcos have yet to reveal pricing, Apple said the online store will sell the iPhone 4 for $888 for the 16GB model, and $1048 for the 32GB version.

The bumper cases used to address antenna issues which has plagued the device, will also be made available to the phones bought online, but details have not been released yet.

In a statement last week, Apple said that while the popular iPhone 4 black models are not affected, the white models will not be available until later this year, due to manufacturing issues.

Apple also said that a new iPhone 3GS 8GB will be sold at $748.

via straitstimes.com

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US says Wikileaks could 'threaten national security'

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:03:28 +0800

The United States has condemned as “irresponsible” the leak of 90,000 military records, saying publication could threaten national security.

The documents released by the Wikileaks website include details of killings of Afghan civilians unreported until now.

Three news organisations had advance access to the records, which also show Nato concerns that Pakistan and Iran are helping the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has denied claims its intelligence agency backed the Taliban.

The huge cache of classified papers - posted by Wikileaks as the Afghan War Diary - is one of the biggest leaks in US history. It was given to the New York Times, the Guardian and the German news magazine, Der Spiegel.

In a statement, US National Security Adviser Gen James Jones said such classified information “could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk”.

He said the documents covered the period from 2004 to 2009, before President Obama “announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan”.

via bbc.co.uk

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HAHA 0.8 percentile for Chinese! And no it ain't me

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:57:17 +0800

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Results/SSP

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:18:31 +0800

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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HAHAH gosh gotta love my dad!

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 01:40:45 +0800

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HAHAH gosh gotta love my dad!

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 01:39:40 +0800

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Red car obsession in ACJC :D

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:36:50 +0800

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Footage of Perhaps the Most Badass Bank Heist Ever

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:16:51 +0800

via gizmodo.com

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irplanes / Brick By Boring Brick Cover [Amazing]

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:13:33 +0800

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Top Secret America - an inside look

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:08:22 +0800

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

via projects.washingtonpost.com

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Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:37:20 +0800

via ted.com

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Top Beijing student fails to get place in US

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:52:12 +0800

Li Taibo will always remember last December in Beijing - and not just because it was one of the coldest winters the city had experienced.

It was the winter when Li would sit on the balcony of his school’s dorm with his laptop, pounding away on essays and feeling his fingers grow numb from the cold.

The 18-year-old high school student was applying to 11 universities in the United States at the time and wanted to ensure the essays - he was working on two - would be completed on time.

Li had been living with his parents in the Fengtai district of South Beijing, a one-hour bus ride from his school in the northern part of the city. With the deadlines for the applications nearing, Li decided to stay in the school’s dorm, which had a midnight lights-out regulation.

“I didn’t want to disturb my room mates so I took my laptop to the balcony to complete the application essays,” Li said. “It was so cold that my fingers almost froze.”

But all of Li’s applications to 11 US universities - including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford and MIT - ended up being rejected, despite the fact that Li topped the national college entrance examination for science in Beijing this summer and would easily gain admission to any university in China.

His failure to gain admission to study in the US has triggered a debate about China’s education system among students, parents and educators.

Educators are questioning whether the ability to gain admission to a top US university should be the sole standard to evaluate the quality of a student. Some Chinese students who studied overseas, meanwhile, are talking about the disadvantages of China’s education system.

Shen Xianzhang, vice-principal of Li’s high school, said: “The standard used by the US is very different from that in China and we respect that. However, it does not mean the US standard is the world standard. Being rejected by universities in the US does not mean Li is not an accomplished student.”

Zhang Xueke, a high school teacher in Beijing, said Chinese students have been so obsessed with US universities that their efforts in student activities and volunteer work seem to be resume-driven.

“As a result, Li’s resume may seem too perfect to be true,” Zhang said.

» Next: Education system stifles creativity and innovation

via news.asiaone.com

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Untitled

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:41:26 +0800

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Gravity doesn't exist

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:55:25 +0800

But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?

So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.

Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.

Dr. Verlinde’s argument turns on something you could call the “bad hair day” theory of gravity.

It goes something like this: your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. Forget curved space or the spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton’s equations well enough to let us navigate the rings of Saturn, the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder.

Some of the best physicists in the world say they don’t understand Dr. Verlinde’s paper, and many are outright skeptical. But some of those very same physicists say he has provided a fresh perspective on some of the deepest questions in science, namely why space, time and gravity exist at all — even if he has not yet answered them.

“Some people have said it can’t be right, others that it’s right and we already knew it — that it’s right and profound, right and trivial,” Andrew Strominger, a string theorist at Harvard said.

“What you have to say,” he went on, “is that it has inspired a lot of interesting discussions. It’s just a very interesting collection of ideas that touch on things we most profoundly do not understand about our universe. That’s why I liked it.”

Dr. Verlinde is not an obvious candidate to go off the deep end. He and his brother Herman, a Princeton professor, are celebrated twins known more for their mastery of the mathematics of hard-core string theory than for philosophic flights.

Born in Woudenberg, in the Netherlands, in 1962, the brothers got early inspiration from a pair of 1970s television shows about particle physics and black holes. “I was completely captured,” Dr. Verlinde recalled. He and his brother obtained Ph.D’s from the University of Utrecht together in 1988 and then went to Princeton, Erik to the Institute for Advanced Study and Herman to the university. After bouncing back and forth across the ocean, they got tenure at Princeton. And, they married and divorced sisters. Erik left Princeton for Amsterdam to be near his children.

He made his first big splash as a graduate student when he invented Verlinde Algebra and the Verlinde formula, which are important in string theory, the so-called theory of everything, which posits that the world is made of tiny wriggling strings.

You might wonder why a string theorist is interested in Newton’s equations. After all Newton was overturned a century ago by Einstein, who explained gravity as warps in the geometry of space-time, and who some theorists think could be overturned in turn by string theorists.

Over the last 30 years gravity has been “undressed,” in Dr. Verlinde’s words, as a fundamental force.

This disrobing began in the 1970s with the discovery by Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University, among others, of a mysterious connection between black holes and thermodynamics, culminating in Dr. Hawking’s discovery in 1974 that when quantum effects are taken into account black holes would glow and eventually explode.

In a provocative calculation in 1995, Ted Jacobson, a theorist from the University of Maryland, showed that given a few of these holographic ideas, Einstein’s equations of general relativity are just a another way of stating the laws of thermodynamics.

Those exploding black holes (at least in theory — none has ever been observed) lit up a new strangeness of nature. Black holes, in effect, are holograms — like the 3-D images you see on bank cards. All the information about what has been lost inside them is encoded on their surfaces. Physicists have been wondering ever since how this “holographic principle” — that we are all maybe just shadows on a distant wall — applies to the universe and where it came from.

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via nytimes.com

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C-130 "Fat Albert" Jet Assisted Take Off (JATO)

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 20:20:40 +0800

via youtube.com

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Gravity doesn't exist

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:52:24 +0800

But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?

So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.

Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.

Dr. Verlinde’s argument turns on something you could call the “bad hair day” theory of gravity.

It goes something like this: your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. Forget curved space or the spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton’s equations well enough to let us navigate the rings of Saturn, the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder.

Some of the best physicists in the world say they don’t understand Dr. Verlinde’s paper, and many are outright skeptical. But some of those very same physicists say he has provided a fresh perspective on some of the deepest questions in science, namely why space, time and gravity exist at all — even if he has not yet answered them.

“Some people have said it can’t be right, others that it’s right and we already knew it — that it’s right and profound, right and trivial,” Andrew Strominger, a string theorist at Harvard said.

“What you have to say,” he went on, “is that it has inspired a lot of interesting discussions. It’s just a very interesting collection of ideas that touch on things we most profoundly do not understand about our universe. That’s why I liked it.”

Dr. Verlinde is not an obvious candidate to go off the deep end. He and his brother Herman, a Princeton professor, are celebrated twins known more for their mastery of the mathematics of hard-core string theory than for philosophic flights.

Born in Woudenberg, in the Netherlands, in 1962, the brothers got early inspiration from a pair of 1970s television shows about particle physics and black holes. “I was completely captured,” Dr. Verlinde recalled. He and his brother obtained Ph.D’s from the University of Utrecht together in 1988 and then went to Princeton, Erik to the Institute for Advanced Study and Herman to the university. After bouncing back and forth across the ocean, they got tenure at Princeton. And, they married and divorced sisters. Erik left Princeton for Amsterdam to be near his children.

He made his first big splash as a graduate student when he invented Verlinde Algebra and the Verlinde formula, which are important in string theory, the so-called theory of everything, which posits that the world is made of tiny wriggling strings.

You might wonder why a string theorist is interested in Newton’s equations. After all Newton was overturned a century ago by Einstein, who explained gravity as warps in the geometry of space-time, and who some theorists think could be overturned in turn by string theorists.

Over the last 30 years gravity has been “undressed,” in Dr. Verlinde’s words, as a fundamental force.

This disrobing began in the 1970s with the discovery by Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University, among others, of a mysterious connection between black holes and thermodynamics, culminating in Dr. Hawking’s discovery in 1974 that when quantum effects are taken into account black holes would glow and eventually explode.

In a provocative calculation in 1995, Ted Jacobson, a theorist from the University of Maryland, showed that given a few of these holographic ideas, Einstein’s equations of general relativity are just a another way of stating the laws of thermodynamics.

Those exploding black holes (at least in theory — none has ever been observed) lit up a new strangeness of nature. Black holes, in effect, are holograms — like the 3-D images you see on bank cards. All the information about what has been lost inside them is encoded on their surfaces. Physicists have been wondering ever since how this “holographic principle” — that we are all maybe just shadows on a distant wall — applies to the universe and where it came from.

1

2

Next Page »

via nytimes.com

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Crazy landing (Extremely high approach)

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:15:48 +0800

via youtube.com

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Listen to your hEARt

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 22:53:33 +0800

via icanread.tumblr.com

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