Archive for the “Science” Category
$ curl -O http://lynx.isc.org/lynx2.8.7/lynx2.8.7.tar.bz2 $ tar xjvf lynx2.8.7.tar.bz2 $ cd lynx2-8-7 $ ./configure --with-ssl && make $ sudo make install On Mac OS X, Lynx will then be installed at /usr/local/bin/lynx
Dec
14
2009
 
Gravity is not a force, but the cost to move information around?Posted by Martin in Science
The FFmpeg package requires the following external libraries, which are to be downloaded separately:
e-Health
Every once in a while I have to convince people that statistics is a counter-intuitive and very difficult discipline. Let me give you some intriguing examples that illustrate you should never trust your intuition to estimate probabilities. Remember this article next time you’re tempted to attribute supernatural powers to somebody that knows personal information about you which seems impossible to guess.
Climate change righteously got a lot of attention the past year. Not only by public plea of celebrities Al Gore and Bill Clinton, but also in many scientific journals like Science and Nature. In other words, our climate is a “hot” topic, it is “in the air” and “on everybody’s (albeit sunburned) lips”. So, I decided also to do my part by publishing the 2006 Climate Logbook, i.e. climate related news items collected from various sources.
ID has many followers in the USA. In the Netherlands, there is a small group of protestant scientists (amongst them one Opus Dei member) of various disciplines that support ID. Our minister of education, Maria van der Hoeven, spoke with two of these proponents and now promotes the ID discussion with the idea to unify scientists of different backgrounds.
The other day, my colleague Robbert and I attended a lecture about nanotechnology by Prof. Dr. Cees Dekker (Delft University of Technology). Nanotechology is the technology to display, manipulate and measure single atoms and molecules. “Nano” refers to the nanometer (nm), a unit of spatial measurement that is one billionth of a meter.
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Why is it that certain songs are very pleasant to the human ear? Is there a silver bullet to compose a hit wonder? I remember the first time I heard that famous guitar intermezzo in Mike Oldfield’s “Moon Light Shadow”; it was plain bliss. The human brain must have a fascination for certain patterns that appear in successful melodies. Let’s investigate this a bit more.
The Dutch theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde will soon publish an article about his new interpretation of gravity. He conjectures that the gravitational force that we experience is the consequence of the amount of energy it costs to move information around: gravity is an entropic force.
FFmpeg (http://www.ffmpeg.org) is open source software to record, convert and stream audio and video in numerous formats.
That’s what I used to read in some newsgroups during the 90’s. Back then, the number of usenet postings was already growing exponentially. The bad “signal” to “noise” ratio, i.e. rubbish versus useful postings, led to predictions of the imminent collapse of the net.
Intelligent Design (ID), an alternative to Darwin’s Evolution Theory, is big in the Dutch press at the moment. According to its proponents, research reveals nature is constructed in such an ingenious way that there must be an Intelligent Design (a God) behind it all.
Years ago, I bought a little old book with the mysterious title “An Experiment with Time” (1927) written by a certain J.W. Dunne. I found it by chance in a second hand bookshop. At that time, I scanned its content quickly with the intent of reading it more carefully later. Now I’m halfway through (it’s no easy read) and its contents baffles me. Could this book, obviously written by an intelligent man, have been overlooked? Could the author’s Theory of Time, make any sense? J.W. Dunne was, as I soon found out, a true Homo Universalis, a very versatile man who has been an inventor, a writer, a soldier and an accomplished aeronautical engineer. Why did we never hear about the man?
Last tuesday I attended a lecture about consciousness by Bas Haring, a Dutch A.I. researcher, philosopher, and author of the book “De ijzeren Wil”. What follows are my comments and additions to the contents of his talk.
I’ve recently found out about ADS (Alternate Data Streams), an obscure feature of the Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 file system NTFS. Because NTFS was designed to meet POSIX compliance, streams (”files within a file”) can be added to any file or directory.
” … ultimately, in the great future, we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms all the way down!”
The Voynich manuscript is a 235 page medieval mystery that has attracted USA government crypto-analysts and nutcases alike. Named after antiquarian bookshop owner Wilfrid M. Voynich (1865-1930), a polish emigrant who came to London in 1891, the manuscript has baffled some of the world’s brilliant minds. Wilfrid Voynich discovered the mysterious manuscript, which is written in an unknown language or cipher, in the Villa Mondragone, a Jesuit College near the Italian town Frascati.