Everyday Experiments

I've written zilch in the last 3 months. 3 months of sleepless nights, drowning in report after report, spewing out graph after figure after paper. I guess this is how my brain should feel like right now:



I think I'm going on a loooong needed (and deserved!) vacation right now. Preferably in a cold, dark cave where I can sleep undisturbed until Christmas :-p

Just in from Discovery blogs: a fully operational high-intensity lightsaber - er, portable laser - is up for sale by consumer laser manufacturer Wicked Lasers. This baby boasts of being the first ever 445-nm direct blue diode portable laser in existence. For $200, you get your own Li-ion battery powered version of Luke Skywalker's bright blue lightsaber.



It cannot cut through flesh like it was butter, but the S3 Arctic Spyder III can cause instant retinal damage, permanent blindness, and skin cancer, among other things. Yes fellas, this lightsaber - sorry, Class 4 portable laser - is not a toy and should not be used for puerile entertainment.


So what's exactly the point in making a portable lightsaber with a hilt that looks exactly like the one from the popular George Lucas franchise? It seems that Lucas is taking the hint. Lucasfilms is now planning to sue Hongkong-based Wicked Laser if they do not change the design of the laser. (More on that story here.)

I was in the middle of compiling my personal Jane Austen movie collection when I came across this message from a site I frequent for my movie fixes:

I finally made it to the Helium Homepage! And my article got top spot at that!

I'm so happy and thrilled and ecstatic that I just might forget my previous and present hang-ups about the site (namely, the inability to log in occasionally, and also the... oh, heck, I'll just drop my nitpicking). I've been part of Helium for 3 months and have written only 9 articles so far....and I was absolutely thrown off my seat when I got the email from Helium congratulating me for making it to the homepage. I'm so happy and proud I'm literally bouncing off my rickety office chair and doing cartwheels in my head. Yey for me.

Now only if being featured meant receiving some sort of prize or compensation... oh well, guess I'll have to do with my 15 minutes of fame and short-lived bragging rights for now. Yipee!

You can visit the Helium home page here.

Has the husky voice of a man ever turned you on so bad it can elicit uncontrollable shivers through your spine?


Well, it turns out that there's probably an evolutionary reason why women find men with very masculine voices especially irresistible. A study just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society has found a correlation between perceived masculinity in a male's voice to actual macho-ness in terms of physical strength. In the study, male and female subjects were asked to listen to speakers from four distinct language groups and asked to evaluate their upper-body strength based on their voice alone. Results showed that male speakers perceived as physically strong actually fared better than their counterparts in tests of hand grip, chest strength, shoulder strength, and bicep circumference. This, the subjects gleaned just from hearing the males say “When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow.”

Guilty as charged :-p

Before someone calls me an ignorant creationist...no, I am not one of those anti-science advocates who try to discredit scientific theory for the benefit of preserving their more traditional beliefs.


A new study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, however, has identified the particular method that these people use to discredit scientific ideas. Called "scientific impotence," this method relies on discrediting a particular scientific finding - say, that humanity is causing climate change - to imply that science as a body of knowledge is impotent as a whole.

One of the many new things I vowed to do at the start of the year (or decade?) was to try my hand at writing for the web. I've met a couple of people who swear by the financial opportunities a decent writer can get online, and even know a few who actually make their living as web-based freelancers. So I did my own research on sites that accept non-US based writers and signed up for some of them.

It has been a little over four months and to date I've made around $850. That's not really too bad, considering I only spend 2-4 hours a day (or rather, at night), and not everyday at that, writing online. Here's a breakdown of my earnings so far:

(Btw, I've written a separate review of some of the sites listed here. You can read it here if you want more in-depth details about each site.)

Just came across a map showing the patient to doctor ratios in different countries worldwide. Though the map is three years old, it's still effective in showing how health care is addressed worldwide. Glaring fact: Cuba tops the doctor-to-patient ratio stats worldwide with one doctor per 170 citizens. Now this is not bad for a country that has been getting a lot of bad press through the years (actually, made me recall the scenes from Sicko where Michael Moore takes the 9/11 rescue workers to Havana to get free health care and cheap medicines). Another interesting factoid is that three of the top 10 countries with low doctor patient ratios include former Soviet states, namely Russia (230:1), Turkmenistan (240:1), and Ukraine (240:1).

A few decades (or perhaps years) from now, lab rats (at least of the murine kind) will cease to skitter, scamper, and be probed and tested in most research labs. A paper published in Tissue Engineering Methods just this quarter details how Dr. Amit Gefen of Tel Aviv University and his team were able to deduce, using fat cells, that stem cells are sufficient in creating the tissue required for most current animal tests. Once other scientists (including Dr. Gefen himself) take up this promising lead and conduct more experiments to verify this claim, this may lead to the elimination of the need to sacrifice so many mice for just one experiment on one tiny organ or system. No more cute furry little white critters to feed, grow, clean, and experiment on...

POVs can be quite confusing, sometimes you forget which POV you actually originally took on... (thanks to xkcd for the cartoon)

Starting May 1, the writing site Associated Content will start to close its doors to non-U.S. writers, except for those who qualify for its Featured Contributor program (those with "top-notch writing skills, and a strong body of work in one of our featured topic areas", and willing to submit a U.S. W-8BEN form).

Apparently, a new law passed by the U.S. Senate has affected several U.S.-based writing sites with a international, non-U.S. writers. Read more details about the issue here.

This sucks in a major, major way. Helium has just emailed me saying they're blocking users from "regions in the far east", including the Philippines, from accessing the site. And now this.

Oh, and yes, I haven't really been able to access my Factoidz account, either. I'm not sure if it's just a server problem or if they're blocking non-US I.P. addresses as well.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a possible review of the law, or a sudden decision of these writing sites to open up non-U.S. based domains.

*sigh*

Eyja-what? Eyjafjallajokull is a volcano in Iceland that has been recently making waves - not with its hard-to-pronounce name, mind you - but with its recent eruption that spewed enough ash to paralyze much of northern Europe's airspace. An earlier eruption on March 20 was just a minor belch - a fissure vent, to be exact - but it was enough to shut down runways in the country and cost Swiss pilot Riccardo Mortara a few hours' delay in his fastest round-the-world flight record (he still won the record, by the way).

The latest eruption, occurring on April 14, caused floods from melting glaciers that required the evacuation of some 800 residents. Moreover, it spewed volcanic ash at a height of up to 11 km above the Earth's surface that  spread to most of northern Europe, grounding flights for several days. Here's an image showing the extent of ash cloud cover from Eyjafjallajokull's April 14 eruption - see how it was able to cover the UK, which was more than 1,000 km away.

Just made  my very first seafood paella a few hours back... and I managed to make it all from scratch!



I made this for a dear friend's glad-you're-well-from-influenza lunch. I was visiting and she had a whole lot of seafood stocked up in her fridge so I offered to make her seafood paella. I just made this on the fly, based on what I remembered my mom used to do when she makes the dish. Now I'm not really proud of my [selective] memory, but I think I managed to do justice to the meal.

Have you ever wondered what great contribution you can make to further advance the understanding of human sociology?

Well, fret no more. The US Library of Congress has announced that it will keep an archive of all tweets made on the microblogging service Twitter since March 2006. Yep, that means all the tweets you've sent out - from the most mundane "I'm having enchiladas for lunch" to the most profound "just discovered Angelina Jolie's face is really asymmetrical" will be immortalized in the august archives of the largest library in the world. The LOC made this announcement in its very own Twitter and Facebook pages before the official press release was circulated to the world. A very fitting, a courant approach for a library that has been around since the 1800s.

Response will be most likely ambiguous from the over 75 million Twitter users worldwide. Tweet preservationists might rejoice, but everyday users guilty of sending out the craziest, most drunken, incriminating tweets can only collectively cringe with dread. Before you despair, here's a comforting thought - the LOC has promised it will only highlight the historically and culturally important tweets, like President Obama's "This is history" message. The rest will just go into the LOC's 167-terabyte online archive for the perusal of sociologists, researchers, and the occasional tweet voyeur.

...But if you'd care to read, I'm in the process of linking this blog to MyLot.

After days of figuring out how to create post summaries in Blogger, trying out a few unsuccessful html tweaks here and there, and even being lured into downloading a suspicious widget that asks for blog account details, I finally got the "Read More" link that I've always wanted. And apparently, it's as simple as clicking a humble little button.

Have you ever tried cooking tomato dishes where you end up with the tomatoes tasting more like mush than pizzaz?

Just in... another exploit vulnerability has been discovered in Firefox browsers, allowing the remote execution of arbitrary code (read: MALWARE). Everyone who uses version 3.6 or 3.6.2 of Mozilla Firefox should update their browsers asap. You can download an updated version of Firefox for free here. For more technical details about the latest release and the security bug discovered in Firefox 3.6.x, read the Mozilla tech notes here.

Have you logged on to your Gmail account lately? I was just about to log in to a Gmail account I use for my home-bound hobbies when I was stopped dead in my tracks. The Gmail login page looked as if it was written in txt language! wch mns tht th txt lkd lkd ths:

Sometimes even the best, most feature-packed computer acts up. Common culprits include an unprotected computer (read: computer viruses), and another, lesser known miscreant: incompatible hardware devices.

Each hardware component in a computer system has a corresponding device driver. The driver's job is to make sure that communication between the computer and the device is running smooth. When the computer starts acting up, and it's because of a misbehaving device, a driver update may be just the fix you need.

Here's something to make your little list-critter a bit happier: apparently there's a nifty Windows command that you can use to create a list, in .txt format, of the contents of any Windows folder.

…try sleeping between 2 and 6 am. Here’s why:

In 2003 a team of researchers with Stanford’s School of Medicine decided to look into sleep times and its effect on sleep-deprived people (like you and me). Now, we all know that everyone, or at least most people, need at least 7 to 8 hours of sleep. In this fast-paced, sensory-overloaded, troubled modern world however, many people have succumbed to insomnia or are sleep deprived for various reasons and causes. Some people just can’t fall asleep. While others cannot even if they want to. And this just wreaks havoc on the body, as it cannot get the right amount of downtime it needs to rejuvenate tired cells and organs.

One of my favorite poems. This was written way back in 1936 by American poet Carl Sandburg.  This was the year that the Great Depression was still roaring throughout the land of milk and honey, the Spanish civil war broke out, and Stalin unveiled his New Constitution for the USSR. Though it's been more than seventy years its message still hauntingly reverberates.

Here's an excerpt (courtesy of glenavalon.com):

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
"I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time."

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum:
phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:
"They buy me and sell me...it's a game...sometime I'll
break loose..."

Once having marched
Over the margins of animal necessity,
Over the grim line of sheer subsistence
Then man came
To the deeper rituals of his bones,
To the lights lighter than any bones,
To the time for thinking things over,
To the dance, the song, the story,
Or the hours given over to dreaming,
Once having so marched.

Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet
for lights and keepsakes.

The people know the salt of the sea
and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth.
The people take the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
with constellations of universal law.
The people is a polychrome,
a spectrum and a prism
held in a moving monolith,
a console organ of changing themes,
a clavilux of color poems
wherein the sea offers fog
and the fog moves off in rain
and the labrador sunset shortens
to a nocturne of clear stars
serene over the shot spray
of northern lights.

The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can't be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can't hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
"Where to? what next?"

Now just what do these two have in common?

For starters, both specimens are H-O-T!!! They both come in absolutely jaw-dropping packages that can make anyone a candidate for cardiac arrest (or at least I'd like to think so). When you have 'em in your hands you'd want to caress and play with every contour and curve, each button and key. And personally I'd really, REALLY want both of them with me in my bed.

(okay, I'm making an effort to control myself now. breathe.)

Of course, David Beckham has been around for years now. And yes, he is happily married to Posh Spice. So I'd have to settle myself for something a wee bit more obtainable then:

[caption id="attachment_20" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="courtesy of Gizmodo"][/caption]

The Lenovo site has announced the upcoming release of its new hybrid notebook, the Lenovo Ideapad U1. Just when all the anticipation for the Apple Ipad has died down (and generally met with disappointment, I might say), Lenovo comes to the rescue with a sleek new innovation that takes the idea of the Ipad one step further:

[caption id="attachment_21" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="courtesy of Gizmodo"][/caption]

The detachable 11.6" touch-screen tablet has its own Qualcomm 1 Ghz ARM Snapdragon processor, customized Linux Skylight OS, 512 MB RAM, 3G capability, and webcam. The six-panel Skylight interface has options for email, web browsing, social media maintenance, calendar plus a really swell image, music and video playback option, along with the usual tablet ebook reader function.

[caption id="attachment_22" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Courtesy of Gizmodo"][/caption]

I've always wanted a tablet reader that lets me conveniently read books on the go. And, more importantly, while in bed. The only thing that's keeping me is the price (plus the proprietary restrictions with Kindle) . For that price I'd prefer to have something a little extra aside from the ebook reader. Actually I've  been waiting for that perfect little tablet with multimedia functionality to come along. You see, I'm the kind of person who likes to plunk down to bed and just read a good book or watch a decent movie after an especially dreary day at work. Most of the time though I end up getting neck strain from watching TV shows and movies from my laptop. I realize I'd like to read books and watch movies ON my bed, not from it. I want a handy piece of hardware that I can take with me to my bed and flip whichever way I want so that I can get the ultimate reading and watching experience.

Never mind if there's no David Beckham beside me.

Oh, by the way, the specs for the laptop are pretty decent as well. It comes with an Intel Core2Du0 SU4100 processor , Windows 7 OS, built-in Wifi, 4GB RAM (including the tablet's 512 MB), and a muti-card reader.

[caption id="attachment_23" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Courtesy of Gizmodo"][/caption]

The only hangup I have as yet is that I'm not sure if the detachable screen has slots for removable media... will have to look up on that. It's all pretty much under development, and it will probably ship out in June this year. That's lots of time for Lenovo to tweak and optimize the hybrid. Until then, this packing hot little gadget is definitely going to be on my spicy-hot-gadget list to look out for.