What do you think of this boy? Amazing? Ordinary? Nothing special at all?

The power of tweets
What have Jan Moir, AA Gill and Jimmy Carr got in common? They have all provoked storms of protest on microblogging website Twitter. But is this a new age of democracy, or a danger to free speech?

You may click here to go to the full article.

What is your answer to the question above? Is Twitter a symbol for democracy, or is it a way to diss someone you don’t like and/or do not agree with?

I’ve learned about this video from Roberta, and since she still hasn’t posted it here, I’ll do so.

I believe this is a clear demonstration of what can be accomplished through the use of social media tools we have available on the Internet these days. The event has been called a flash mob, and more than 20.000 people participated in the dance. Watch it till the end. It’s definitely worthwhile!

If you think the best way to travel ecologically is by bike, think again.

Did you like it? Unfortunately, it’s not for sale.

Check out their website clicking here.

Michael Brooks
The Guardian, Monday 2 February 2009

Dark matter ring in galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17. Some 96% of the universe is dark energy or dark matter. Photograph: Johns Hopkins University/Esa/Nasa

Even today, there are scientific phenomena that defy explanation. If history is anything to go by, resolving these anomalies could lead to a great leap forward, so what are the greatest mysteries, and what scientific revolutions might they bring?

1 The missing universe

Everything in the universe is either mass or energy, but there’s not enough of either. Scientists think 96% of the cosmos is missing. They have come up with names for the missing stuff – “dark energy” and “dark matter” – but that doesn’t really tell us anything about them. And it’s not as if they’re not important: dark energy is continually creating new swaths of space and time, while dark matter appears to be holding all the galaxies together. No wonder cosmologists are searching for clues to their whereabouts.

2 Life

I know you think you’re more than a sack of molecules, but why? Next time you see a tree, ask yourself why that is alive when your wooden dining table is not. The phenomenon we call life is something that biologists have almost given up trying to define – instead they’re investigating ways to make different combinations of molecules come alive. Bizarrely, the best hope is similar in chemical terms to laundry detergent.

3 Death

Here’s the flip side: in biology, things eventually die, but there’s no good explanation for it. There are hints that switching genes on and off controls ageing, but if our theory is right, those switches shouldn’t have survived natural selection. Then there’s the argument that an accumulation of faults does us in. However, there are plenty of whales and turtles who seem to age ridiculously slowly – if at all. Of course, if we can work out why, that could be great news for future humans (if not for the planet).

4 Sex

Charles Darwin might have fathered 10 children, but he couldn’t understand why almost everything in biology uses sexual reproduction rather than asexual cloning – sex is a highly inefficient way to reproduce. We still don’t know the answer. The suggestion that sex’s gene shuffling makes us more able to deal with changing environments seems plausible, but the evidence is scarce. At the moment, sex only seems to exist to give males some role in life.

5 Free will

If you want to keep your sanity, look away now. Neuroscientists are almost convinced that free will is an illusion. Their experiments show that our brains allow us to think we are controlling our bodies, but our movements begin before we make a conscious decision to move. Some researchers have already been approached to testify in court that the defendant is not to blame for anything they did. A scary legal future awaits.

• Michael Brooks is a consultant for New Scientist and the author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, published by Profile on Thursday

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/02/science-mysteries

Future Internet Video from Castemelijn on Vimeo.

Cheers!

In case you’d like to study some vocabulary this week, this is a very nice text. It comes from this page: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/27/computers-tablet-microsoft-apple

I’ll copy it here, anyway. Maybe you could post some comments on the new words you found interesting.

Microsoft beats Apple to the Tablet
Microsoft is working on a lightweight device combining power with the convenience of a paper notebook

John Naughton
The Observer, Sunday 27 September 2009

The quest for the Holy Grail is generally regarded as a preoccupation of those of a religious or mystical bent. But in fact the community which suffers most from Holy Grail Syndrome is made up of geeks and early adopters who would never be seen within a mile of an altar.

For Christians, the Grail is the cup, plate or dish supposedly used by Jesus at the last Supper. For the computing community it is the Tablet, a slim, lightweight device which combines significant computing power with the convenience of a paper notebook. And sightings – or rumours – of the mythical device provoke the kind of delicious excitement so masterfully exploited by the novelist Dan Brown.

We had such a sighting last week, courtesy of the technology site Gizmodo (http://bit.ly/3ScSo) which had descriptions, photographs and even a video of an intriguing manifestation of the Tablet concept.

It’s called the Courier. At first sight, it looks just like a notebook, but when you open it you find two hinged screens with elegant, touch-driven interfaces. When you want them to behave like paper, they are happy to oblige; you can scribble and sketch away to your heart’s content. But when you want them to behave like computers, then they do that too, enabling you to browse the web, compute with spreadsheets, manipulate images and pull in data from just about any application you can think of. Then when you’re finished, you close the “notebook”, put it in your bag and resume normal life.

What made the Gizmodo scoop even more intriguing was its claim that the Courier is not just a concept but a real device under development in the bowels of a big, powerful corporation. But the thing that really caused a stampede for the smelling salts was the news that this company is, er, Microsoft! This was definitely not in the mystical Tablet script. It was as if Vladimir Putin had suddenly announced that the Kremlin had been in possession of the Holy Grail all along, and indeed that Lenin used to take his breakfast on it most mornings.

The Keeper of the Tablet flame, you see, is supposed to be Apple, the home of everything cool in modern computing. There has been fevered speculation that the Tablet is what Steve Jobs and his designers would do next. One couldn’t go to any gathering of the faithful without people whispering that Apple had been secretly placing large orders for 7-inch (or 9-inch or 10-inch) screens.

The company’s patent applications were scrutinised with an intensity previously accorded only to the Dead Sea Scrolls for evidence of interface technology (touch-screen, gesture-based) that would confirm that the Tablet was nigh. Kids with a mastery of PhotoShop were taking images of the iPhone and iPod Touch and producing pictures of what the Apple device would look like. And so on.

So you can see why the revelation that the Evil Empire (aka Microsoft) might actually have some better ideas on the Tablet front has caused such discombobulation. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. And of course it might not: these are still early days. The Microsoft concept seems more ambitious, in a way, than what Apple is rumoured to have in the works, which will probably be an iPod Touch on steroids.

And even if the Courier and the Apple device do eventually go head-to-head, what will determine the outcome will be mundane things such as which operating systems they use. Because Microsoft’s co-founder, Bill Gates, was a strong believer in the Tablet-computing idea – and always used one himself – the company has been producing software for “Tablet PCs” for aeons. But these were very clunky devices, mostly laptops with reversible screens made by Taiwanese manufacturers. They were relatively expensive to buy and heavy to lug around. And they ran Windows, which meant that they were not exactly intuitive to use.

Since Apple made its own hardware and produced more intuitive software, the assumption therefore was that, in the end, the Tablet market would be Jobs’s for the taking. Maybe it will be. But this week’s revelations about the Microsoft Courier have planted the first, tentative, thoughts in the minds of detached observers that the quest for technology’s Holy Grail isn’t over yet. All we need is for Dan Brown to take up the story.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009