Month: January 2007

Slashdot is running this post with these brave words:

Space.com is reporting that NASA has decided to use the metric system for its new lunar missions.

Finally! Metric system is beautiful and international. Accepting it for an international space program is the right choice in my book. Hopefully, it can help in wider adoption of the system too (although, USA is about the only country in the world that still ignores it).

What we need now is to do something about our time measurements. Programmers do understand what I mean. For everyone else, try to figure out what was the day of week of your birthday. Or what time it was 86,400,000 seconds ago. (Hint: 60 seconds make 1 minute, 60 minutes make one 1 hour, 24 hours make 1 day, 365 days make a year, except for leap years. And they you have the weekday tango. And for the curious among you, factor in some timezone magic.)

I saw this dude today… Smiling eyes, huge cigar, and a little Japanese car that makes funny sounds. I saw this for maybe just a couple of seconds, but it was an instant and complete picture.

There is plenty of stuff going on around us at any given moment. Things which can’t be captured by photo or video cameras. Things that can’t be described properly. Each of those things exist for a mere moment. Next second it’s gone, vanished forever.

I just love it when I can catch a moment and enjoy…

(OK, this is an old story, but I haven’t paid due attention before, and only found out about it today, via this photograph at Flickr)

Free Hugs is an amazing movement. People just make signs with “Free Hug” and go out on the streets, offering free hugs to strangers. It’s all about loving people for who they are, and sharing the good feelings with the world.

I have a mixed feeling about it. On one hand, I think that’s an excellent idea. It’s perfectly normal and all that, and the world does need more love. (Just read through some hugstories at the official web site.) On the other hand, I know that I won’t be making a sign and going out on the street any time soon. Although, if I see someone with the sign, I’d give him or her a hug.

Why wouldn’t I make a sign myself? The jury is still out on that one. It’ll take me some time to figure that out, but the two leads for now are insecurities and cultural atmosphere in Cyprus.

Before you run away from this blog and never come back, please take the time to watch this video, read this Wikipedia page, check this discussion at digg, and look through this article. If you are still here, please, leave a comment.

Science can be a lot of fun. Any science. But chemistry and physics do have some bonus potential as they both deal with all sorts of different materials. Applying and extracting energy, as well as other “special effects” can result in some ultimate coolness.

Check these videos for some really amazing stuff. My favourite is the video with ferrofluids presentation. What’s yours?

It seems that there is a lot of activity around RSS lately (does that answer the “will RSS ever go big?” question?). I am interested in this subject, because I use RSS a lot (here are some stats from recently released trends feature in Google Reader) and because I was involved in development of RSS reader – a project dear to me, and frozen to death at the moment, but with plenty of hopes on my side to unfreeze it one day.

One of the major challanges, when creating RSS reader, is trying to solve the “information overload” problem. There are a number of ways to ago about, and none of those that I saw worked well enough. In our RSS reader we used something very simple, based on the user’s reading habbits – feed access counts, items read counts, items bookmarked and followed counts – all measured against feed activity.

Today I came across some excellent thinking at Ilya Grigorik’s blog – part 1 and part 2. There was also a link to RSS habbits study by Microsoft.

Something tells me that RSS readers will change a lot in the next few years…