Thoughts, ramblings and other stuff

The forecast yesterday promised snow or freezing rain and as expected we got the worse option. This morning all cars were encased in ice and it also covered all the over the air walkways. It's hilly here so they often connect the buildings to streets. I was sliding on mine to the pavement and then pulled myself by the railing to the building I work in. Later they put a cone with a note - very slippery on it. Good thing it melted by noon because there'd be a full blown disaster here. Although it is supposed to drop below zero again tonight so we can repeat all this tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile I replaced one of the hard drives on my laptop - the non SSD one - as the old one fell victim to my Christmas clumsiness. The new one is bigger so I did what I always promised myself to do and installed Linux on part of it. I also finally got a printer and installed it. I don't need it much so it's a cheap, monochrome one but it has NFC so I can print directly from my phone. I realised I need it because I had a lot of documents to process in a past month and sometimes wished I didn't have to go to work to get something reprinted. It's all done now - I have new visa and I'm staying for a while longer (no thanks to the incredibly slow HR department - the process started almost a year ago and it ended up being last minute due to their mistakes and incredible slowness) but there will be other things I'd like to be able to print instantly.

This is how one orbit lap looks like from the space station - the sun going the full round. This one was going parallel to terminator so the sun never sets/rises. It just makes the full loop.

This is so awesome - real space videos always are.

Venus the least welcoming of our rocky neighbours as runaway greenhouse effect turned the place into hell - almost 500 ^oC and clouds of sulphuric acid that hard to survive by even the most advanced of our equipment. The Venera program manage to put the probes there after few first got crushed by the incredibly dense atmosphere. Now the Venus Express probe will start a series of dives into the Venus atmosphere - something it'll probably won't survive - to record conditions in a largely unstudied region. It already has served as Venus weather satellite and now it will give us information about the atmosphere from the inside.

We made a new type of rock - plastiglomerate. It is made of solids of volcanic origin, sand, shells and plastic. It's most likely the plastic that got to close to the fire on beaches, melted and bound the beach minerals together. The new substance appears to be persistent, destined to stick around for a long, long time. I hope you are all proud of yourselves.

There is a first chatbot that managed to convince 1 in 3 judges that it was a 13-year-old non-native-English-speaking Ukrainian boy. I'm not sure if that's really passing the Turing test as everyone says but it shows the programs are getting better at this. Soon all your porn chats will be completely human free.

Today is 100 anniversary of Alan Turing's birth. Now, 100 years after he was born he's a hero. He's lauded as a man who broke the Enigma code (although this was not something he did alone and, as a Pole, I cannot not mention it was first broken by Polish cryptographers - Turing made a machine broke the second generation Enigmas). He is considered the father of computer programming and everyone who dip into it learn his programming basics. The Turing machine concept ies what made computers as we know them today possible. He is known to science fiction fans because of the Turing test (the basic test for Artificial Intelligence when it's considered to be AI if a human is unable to tell the difference between human and AI in a blind test conversation). He did all this and he could've done so much more - the whole computer age before him. However his career was cut short what it was discovered he was homosexual and he was forced to choose between prison and chemical castration and eventually pressure was to much and he committed suicide (although some believe it might've been accident). I remember the first time I heard about it and thought about how unfair, stupid and what and incredible waste it was. British government finally officially apologised for this in 2009 (at least it took them less the Catholic Church to apologise to Galileo).

Now Alan Turing is celebrated - io9 has a great collection of articles and resources about him and Google made a great puzzle Doodle for him (if it's still 23 June where you are just go to your local main google page - if not you can watch one version being solved). I played it first last night after the midnight and again today (it was different every time). It helps if you know the programming logic rules he invented but you can figure it out even without it. Have fun with Alan Turing. You do it using his ideas everyday.

I just became eligible for phone upgrade so I decided it's time to finally get a smartphone and I did. Before I decided which phone I want I thought about which OS I want. I already know I like Android because I have a tablet. I though about Windows phone but the platform is new and has little support outside Microsoft (yet). So I decided to see if I can like iOS.

From the wording you've probably guessed that I thought I won't. It's true. From what I've seen it is extremely pretty and the design speaks to that part of me that likes beautiful things. I don't think anything can match Apple in design (both on mobile devices and computers) right now. However, pretty is not enough for operating system.

My biggest problem with iOS has always been the close control Apple has over it. It's like you don't really own the device as you are only allowed to use it in certain ways. It's like living in a beautiful, well kept garden. It's awesome but you can only walk on paths and never go outside the fence. It's not that I would do any of those things (at least not very often) but knowing I cannot just makes me want to. Jump over the fence. Walk on grass.

Of course, most of the Android phones are closed systems as well but you can see the difference in attitude in how the breaking out is called. In iOS it's jailbreaking and in android it's rooting your phone. On my tablet rooting instructions were officially linked on manufacturer's page.

But the most important thing is that I hate iTunes. I installed it only because I had to to even see the device. It reminded me about my first mp3 player - a Thompson Lyra. I bought it in 2000 and back then the technology was so new you downloaded the music on the Flash card through a cord connecting to printer port. It was pretty good device and I still compare new ones to it. You could even make a custom playlist out of the songs on it. But it's biggest fault, the one that led to it's demise, was it's dependency on RealPlayer to download music on the card. When the RealPlayer stopped supporting it I could no longer get anything on it. It just didn't recognise files that were simply copied on the card without the program.

It's the same with iOS. The device is not even visible on the computer. The files have to be transferred by iTunes (and in some cases converted - anything that isn't mp3, avi or in one of apple formats I think). And iTunes has the same annoying library system that make me avoid Picasa (only use it to upload photos to the web) and WMP (never use). I understand the appeal of having everything in one place but when the number of files reaches certain number it becomes unreadable. There is a reason why I keep my music and photos in separate folders. And the syncing just drove me crazy (it kept failing and hanging the whole program).

This was what finally convinced me it's not for me and go back to android and the simple joy of drag and drop. I keep thinking of trying apple because so many people love it but I keep failing to see the appeal (except maybe MacPro as I like it's so flat and comes with integrated Unix but I still think it is overpriced). Both in software and hardware it's just not what I want. Maybe because I know what I want. I suppose that the only good thing about the whole experience was learning I know myself enough by now to what I won't like.

So, I've been playing with my new android phone for a day now. It's so nice. So easy to use.

Of course it helps that I'm already accustomed to android so I know what is what and how to deal with it. There are also things that I don't like (inevitable). I don't like that it adds my phonebook and my gmail address book (along with all the weird addresses there) and my skype contacts to contacts (once again folders!). Luckily it has option of Groups so I can find what I need. I dislike the limited numbers of languages to pick. The iOS let me pick Polski without problem. And this is important because it comes with a different keyboard options (Polish letters!). European versions come with more languages I think. However, I can lean to live with these - at least it didn't make me want to throw something against the wall as iTunes did.

There is much more things I love about it. The giant screen. The SD card I can use to expand memory. The standard micro USB jack that means I don't have to worry about the cord. That it connects to computer as an external drive and I can organise my files the way I want. That it plays flash. That I could just install an app that plays all the files (and subtitles). The fact that I can take I back home and use it there.

My choice is Samsung Galaxy S II.

The biggest story lately is the discovery of a hidden life on the floor of Southern ocean. Almost 2.5 km beneath water in cold waters near Antarctic there is an oasis of lives powered by thermal vents. There are pale octopuses, and hairy, white yeti crabs. All colourless as the creatures of constant darkness tend to be.

These aren't the only octopuses living near a pole. There are also ones living in frigid waters and surviving there despite being genetically very similar to the ones living in warm tropical seas. The biggest problem is functioning of nervous system as the ion channels that take part of  signal transmission in neurons get sluggish in lower temperatures. However they work fine in cold water octopuses and it turns out it's not because of the mutations in their coding genes. It's just that information coded by those genes get processed differently so  it leads to creating channels working better in low temperatures. This may also explain other instances of rapid assimilation of octopuses to different environments - like ocean floor.

Here are 12 monkeys compressed into two. Each of these is a chimera of 6 different genetic identities. They are the world's first chimeric monkeys.Till now the artificially generated chimeras were mostly rodents and lower vertebrae. I've been fascinated by them ever since we were told about them on Biology of Development classes by man who pioneered that research. I was even more fascinated when I was told they occur naturally - an opposite of twins - one organisms containing cells with two separate genotypes.

Wouldn't it be fun to switch genders on a whim? SF has been promising it to us for a while. For some fish it's just the way of life. They are male or female depending on situation. Hawkfish start their lives as females but can change into males after maturing. When opportunity arises the females can also switch to males and take over a part of harem. If males are threatened by larger one they can switch and mate as females. Reminds me a bit about Left Hand of Darkness.

It looks like the Moore's law is safe for a little longer. A team from Australia found a way to have etched channels in a silicon chip just 1.5 nanometres wide that behave just like larger wires by covering the whole thing with phosphorus atoms. The problem with continuing miniaturization was the laws of quantum mechanics taking over and wrecking havoc on the signal. The wave behaviour of electrons in the wire might then cause them to interfere with each other and the entire wire can exist in a superposition of states. This is why we switched from miniaturisation to parallel cores. This might us get back on track.

Proving once again that anything can be religion here's a new one. Kopimisms - We were founded about 15 months ago and we believe that information is holy and that the act of copying is holy. Well, it's less insane then most. After all if you can be religion to avoid taxes, why not to try to avoid prosecution for copying data.

And to end on something on more awesome end of weird here is Banach-Tarski paradox video of creating infinite oranges out of one:

It suddenly got cold this weekend (from 30C to 16) and it started to feel like autumn. The air is clear and crisp and I woke up in the night because I was too cold and had to get the comforter out. I'm sleeping underneath it tonight as it's suppose to be just 4C. I know I was born to live in moderate climate because I realised I missed wearing jeans and jumpers. Funny enough it was one of the warmest beginnings of October in Poland and when I talked to my father he was outside wearing t-shirt. Well, it's suppose to get warmer again here soon.

I finally decided to format the HD and reinstall the OS today as I collected way to much junk on my laptop. This means a whole day of fun reinstalling all the programs.

So instead of more writing about Doctor Who here is the minisode by the winners of Script to Screen contest for 9-11. It's called Doctor Who: Death is The Only Answer and it's pretty fun:

The difference between Ray Kurzweil and a priest is that there is a slight of truth in what Ray believes in.It doesn't make his University any less a scam but at least it's better science fiction then Scientology. It's like UFO believers. All they say is almost completely made up but there is evidence that supports the possibility of extraterrestrial life. And the research into AI and brain-computer interfaces brings us closer and closer to exchanging fiction with fact.

Twitter is not only full of fake personalities it also can contain fake humans. Three teams competing in Socialbots 2011 let loose their software that pretends to be human into the network. Their goal was to gain followers and get response tweets and the best one got 100 followers and been responded to almost 200 times. It seems it's much easier to pass for humans in 140 signs or less.

The brain microchip that is used by paralyzed woman to control mouse cursor and thus to communicate with outside world is still working 1000 days after implantation. It wasn't rejected or covered with scar tissue and the neurons didn't stop signalling. In fact the problem with fewer electrodes recording useful neural signals than they did when tested six months after implantation seems to be engineering problem not one with the interface. One day I'll be thinking all of this. But then a bot might replace me and noone will notice.

In even more science fiction news Quatar is planning to build artificial clouds for 2022 World Cup it is to host. The main argument against Quatar hosting the event are extreme summer temperatures in that region. So they plan to keep the stadiums from overheating by  constructing helium filled, giant, shade providing clouds from an advanced, lightweight, and strong carbon-fiber material. They are to hover in place like a helicopter and is remotely controlled and driven by solar-powered engines. That reminds me of the good old Soviet plans of controlling nature. But then look at what the China did for the last Olympics.

And last but not least the artificial bird. From the distance it looks almost real. Especially the wing movements are eerily bird like. From close up you can see the company logo on every part of its body. Is this how Tyrell Corporation got started?

Yesterday all the sites of Gawker Media started showing warnings about hacker attack on their servers that led to stealing passwords to the users commenting accounts. They are asking people to change their passwords on their and any other site they use same password (especially if they use the same username). The passwords were coded but now that the hackers have them they can work on them till they can decode it so it's better to be safe and change it. Good I don't use that password for anything important.

I also just got an email from deviantArt that the servers of Silverpop Systems, Inc., a company that dA used were hacked. This resulted in email addresses belonging to deviantART members and possibly also corresponding usernames and birth date being removed. LUckily it wasn't dA servers that got hacked so at least all other data profile is safe. But now all the millions dA users are bracing themselves for spam overflow. This can actually be worse then Gawker as I used a good a email for this.

Today my new laptop arrived but I only had it for a moment before it was sent to the people who will install all the software and put it in the network so it'll be few more days before I'm able to use it. Still that means I'm soon to be a modern, 21st century girl again. And I will finally get back on Skype and look at my cat. And my family of course. I talked with them on the phone but it's not the same and the kids are much more communicative on Skype. And my best friend and her little boy. I miss talking with everyone. I don't know how people did this before technology.

Soon.