Learn Computer Science CS101 for free from Stanford Univ...

Go to: http://www.cs101-class.org/

/A

Facebook

Facebook related stuff:

* Apps grab your phone no, address:
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/01/17/facebook-apps-now-able-to-grab-mobile-phone-number-address/

* How to protect your account
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/05/30/how-to-properly-protect-your-facebook-account-login/

/A

Thought for the day

"Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every
once in awhile, or the light won't come in" -- Alan Alda.

What do Angrybirds need from you ?

http://lifehacker.com/5864518/is-my-phone-spying-on-me-and-what-can-i-do-about-it?tag=ask-lifehacker

What do Angry Birds need from you ?

"... Angry Birds collects your phone ID, location, and contacts and sends
them to Google or your phone ID and location to another company called
Flurry.

You may be surprised by Angry Birds' need for and transmission of your
location data, but it's most likely so the app developers can get more
insight into its users (not really to see where you're flinging birds at
any point in time): Flurry is a mobile analytics company. The collection
of your contacts is so the app can find your friends.

Another head-scratcher is Bejeweled 2, which sends your Bejeweled
username and password as well as phone number to Facebook. And
Dictionary.com sends your phone ID to multiple third parties (it's one
of the apps, along with Pandora and Best Alarm Clock Free, that transmit
the most data.... "

Facebook tracking, privacy etc

Use Priv3 plugin with Firefox:
==> http://priv3.icsi.berkeley.edu/

Facebook is tracking your every move !
==>
http://lifehacker.com/5843969/facebook-is-tracking-your-every-move-on-the-web-heres-how-to-stop-it

/A

Mumbai school asks students to deactivate FB accounts

(This generation of kids could have their studies washed-out !)
At least one school has realized this - G&M, please take heed...

Mumbai school asks students to deactivate FB accounts
Published: Friday, Nov 25, 2011, 9:30 IST
By Kanchan Srivastava | Place: Mumbai | Agency: DNA

Fed up with the increasing hours students spend social networking,
especially the pre-teens, Smt Sulochanadevi Singhania School of Thane
has initiated a 'networking de-addiction drive'.

The ICSE school has ordered its students to deactivate their Facebook
accounts within a week. Technical experts of the school will keep a tab
on all such accounts.

With board exams round the corner, the drive was announced last Saturday
during an annual event, where the parents of all students were present,
requesting them to ask their wards to deactivate FB accounts. Parents
have welcomed the initiative, and students, too, are cooperating.

A parent of a Std VII student said, "I was asking all my friends if they
knew how to deactivate a Facebook account. But my son figured it out and
has already done it." A Std IX student said, "My class has assured the
principal that no one from us is an FB user anymore."

Principal Revathi Srinivasan said, "Social networking is taking a toll
on students' studies. Even 12-year-olds have Facebook accounts. We want
all such accounts deactivated, so that they devote more time to
studies."

To give the drive a boost, the school has announced goodies. "The class
which shows 100% deactivation will be treated with a picnic. And if
someone has an account under a fake name, he/she will be tracked by our
experts," school authorities said.

The school is yet to gather data of deactivated accounts.

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Faster than the air-speed velocity of an
unladen european swallow

Breaking Points: Recognizing The Signs Of Painful Cultural Shift

From:
http://www.alt-market.com/articles/296-breaking-points-recognizing-the-signs-of-painful-cultural-shift

Breaking Points: Recognizing The Signs Of Painful Cultural Shift

==============
Through the ages, nations and cultures of spectacular proportion and
prominence have risen to prosperity, and fallen to chaos, on very
particular and fundamental principles. In some cases, these great and
terrible declines have taken centuries to culminate (as was the story of
the Roman Empire), and only a few years in others (the Soviet Union
comes to mind). In every example of societal destabilization, however,
there were many signs of danger long before the final plunge; some
unique to each particular culture, and some common to all. One of the
most enduring and frightening similarities between crumbling nations is
an overwhelming belief amongst the people that they have somehow
"advanced" beyond the need for concern. Each self-destructing society
presumed itself invincible. Each country thought itself the pinnacle of
human potential, only to discover yet again that in abandoning or
subverting the principles of freedom, and the bedrock pillars of
conscience, reason, and wisdom, they had become merely another footnote
in a long marathon of footnotes.

Ultimately, the vast and sordid history of collapse could be summarized
simply as a series of breaking points; moments at which opposing ideals
and forces hyperextend the prevailing mechanics of a system, changing it
entirely.

Some of these events have produced surprising strides of understanding
and political progress, as prevailed after the American Revolution.
Others led to dark and mindless collectivist nightmares that fog men's
eyes and hearts, as that which occurred after the Bolshevik Revolution
in Russia. The difference is one of focus. Imperialist (elitist)
ideologies were deemed unacceptable in both revolutions, but the tides
of each conflict leaned towards entirely separate values. Individual
liberty in the West, and collective safety and sacrifice in the East. In
America, the uprising was led by common men and the target was clear. In
Russia, the uprising was led by elitists posing as common men, and the
target was obscured. In America, much of the public assumed roles as
arbiters and political engineers. In communist Russia, much of the
public was oblivious to such responsibility, and only subject to
engineering. Two revolutions in the name of ending tyranny with two
entirely different initial outcomes…

I bring up these opposing paradigms not to spark another endless debate
over the merits of communism versus capitalism, but to highlight a
growing potential for a new brand of revolution in modern day America,
now cutting through the surface, which may very well culminate in one of
the two finales described above. More perhaps than any other time
memorable, centralist and statist visions are today clashing with
individualist and Constitutionalist pleadings for sanity. The air grows
heavy and ripe for ignition. More even than any economic indicator,
social indicators point in the direction of conflict and widespread
malfunction. The question of "if" in terms of citizen dissent and the
inevitable lashing response of government is no longer asked. Now, the
question of "when" has risen to the surface.

To predict the exact timing of a breaking point is impossible, but there
are signals to watch for; social and political attitudes to monitor and
examine. After analyzing the shifts of multiple nations and cultures
over thousands of years of human record, a pattern does, indeed, emerge.
Similar developments in our times should not be taken lightly…

1) The Rise Of Moral Relativism

Inherent conscience is a vital artery to a healthy society. When that
artery is cut, entire structures and peoples die. There is no way around
this, as history has shown. Cynics, often utilizing a highly limited
understanding of the processes of mass psychology and individual
psychology, tend to confuse the word "conscience" with the concept of
taboo. Taboos are man-made morals, and are commonly applied as a method
of social control by oligarchs and collectives, just as many laws are
created to appease sometimes dubious bureaucracies. Conscience is NOT
man-made, but an inborn process that human beings draw from
unconsciously, and which true honor, compassion, and sincerity are
derived. Conscience is an intuitive product, not intellectual.

Moral relativism, by comparison, is a kind of emotional inhibitor which
allows people to mechanize their thinking, and rationalize any activity
no matter how despicable, as long as that activity is rooted in a
"logical" framework. Logic, however, is limited…

Interestingly, there are some forms of theoretical mathematics which
allow false conclusions to be presented as fact, and this same
methodology of fuzzy logic is consistently used by moral relativists to
achieve the "appearance" of reason. At bottom, intellectual prowess
accomplishes little without the disciplines of experience, emotion, and
insight. Cultures which widely abandon the guidelines of conscience
always find themselves subject to collapse, whether economic or
political. Without the ability to feel empathy for the victims of one's
actions, any disaster becomes possible.

2) The Displacement Of Cultural Subsections

A society that maintains healthy appearances by purposely displacing and
marginalizing certain belief systems or political stances is by its very
nature self-destructive. For progress to be made, inclusion of ideas is
paramount. Ideas must be allowed to stand on their own merit and not be
victimized by the biases of an elite minority, or in some instances, an
ignorant majority. Strong and meaningful ideas must be given space to
thrive while bad ideas must be allowed to fall to the wayside. This
happens when open discussion is given fair play. Suppression of
discussion, whether by force or by stealth, leads to an inability of the
people to form a true identity. Forced consensus ends not in stability,
but in madness.

3) Distraction Over Substance

Distracted people are uncaring people. A nation distracted by its own
immediate desires over the concerns of the future is completely
incapable of acting in its own best interest. Distraction comes in many
forms, from vapid entertainment, to disinformation, to war and economic
uncertainty. While most people are more than able to produce their own
distractions, often governments will lend a helping hand in order to
dissuade the masses from participation in the decision making processes.
This includes the dilution of educational options and/or the co-option
of the educational system altogether.

You will find that in nearly every collapse of modern times, the
citizenry found themselves surprised and shell shocked despite numerous
and easily identifiable warnings. You will also find that the stunned
populace was usually obsessed with any existing method to avoid
involvement in the workings of the system in which they lived. They were
caught off guard because, in the end, they were more comfortable not
knowing the details. Comfort at the price of vigilance ends in
devastation.

4) When Law Becomes Tyranny

Law, at least as far as the fundamentals are concerned, is designed to
protect citizens as well as authorities from undue actions and
accusations. At its best, law shields us from our own follies, which may
include the allowed ascension of poor leadership. At its worst, law is
no longer used as a tool for protecting the public from error and
malice, and is instead used as a tool for enslavement.

When a culture elevates and worships law over the contents of their own
consciences, the abuse of law for the sake of control is imminent. Law
does not trump heart, yet many past societies have been convinced to
follow immoral laws all while mistaking their actions for "civic duty".
When law becomes infallible, fallible government becomes god, and no
nation will ever be able to sustain such a delusion of grandeur for very
long without reaping catastrophe.

5) Force Over Reason

Force is used only in two instances within a domestic political
environment; when a controlling entity seeks to acquire or maintain
power after fear and disinformation have failed, and when a rebellious
public seeks to undo the wrongs done and reason has gone ignored. A
nation run by dishonest men is already a supreme candidate for extreme
collapse, but when despots turn to violent policies to silence dissent,
you can be sure that conflict is soon to follow. The level of this
tension will be readily visible in the militant presence of the
government in public buildings, on the roads, and even in the
neighborhoods of the citizenry. A standing army upon the soil of a
country, regardless of supposed rationale, is a recipe for a breakdown
that goes far beyond the more manageable effects of financial distress
and into the realm of lasting and vicious war.

6) False Paradigms And Mistaken Enemies

A country near bedlam is usually filled with people seeking not just
answers, but someone, anyone, to blame. This need for "justice" can be
very misguided, and results in the projections of our own terrors onto
innocent bystanders. Collapse is very often preceded by a swelling wave
of attacks, usually directed at groups contrary to the majority belief.
Political parties become factions. Ideals become battle cries. Fervor
for retribution takes over. All the while, the true culprits (who are
normally not a part of either side) sit back, relax, and turn the public
in on itself. A frantic nation is an easily manipulated nation. Divided
and fragile, such systems degrade while the source of the problem
remains hidden.

7) Desperation And Loss Of Will

A culture on the verge of sliding into full spectrum disintegration is
generally not very chipper, however, when this despair results in the
handing over of personal liberty for the sake of so called "security",
an avalanche of regret and wild compensation in the form of moral
relativism results. No matter what the state of a nation and its people,
the will to move forward and to act for the betterment of the future can
and does change everything. The blackest days of dread and ill omen are
no match for man's ability to endure when he holds the truth dear. No
obstacle is insurmountable. No enemy unbeatable. But, when that will is
lost, so too is everything else.

The concentration and frequency of the above elements can easily reveal
the point at which a country is in respect to collapse. America now has
many of these diseases at one stage or another, and in certain ways, has
surpassed historic examples to form a never-before-seen dynamic for
global turmoil. Currently, citizens are turning in greater and greater
numbers to activism and protest, but the focus has moved away from the
elites (central bankers and globalists) who deserve the largest portion
of the public's ire. We have allowed deflections to go unchecked for too
long, and the unwillingness of arbitrarily delineated sides (false Left
and false Right) to reconcile at least until the larger threat is
removed is setting our culture in motion into the depths of a nightmare
we are not ready to handle. Such loss has happened before, and, through
courage, understanding, and tenacity, it has also been undone before.
The choice is ours. It always has been.

==============

Derek Deville's home brew rocket Qu8k ...See pics!

"Home brew" rocket flies for 8.5 seconds, returns pics and videos.
http://www.ddeville.com/derek/Qu8k.html

/A

Fwd: post xaminum :--)

:-) Ambu's tips :

1. Practise makes perfect : Practise at home/school, and exam
performance
will be close to perfection ?

2. The devil is in the details : Was it hexane or hexene ? Was it
translation or transcription ?? Read the details in the question
carefully.
Was it 3.4152 * 7.128 , or 3.142 ** 7.128
Enna kuduthirukku, enna kettirukku ?

3. Cleanliness is next to godliness : A neat and clean answer script
(with clear steps and reasoning) will automatically happen when
understanding is thorough.
WIll make the student's task easy when checking the script.
Will not put off the examiner.

4. Brevity is the soul of wit (and your answer) : A precise,
to-the-point answer,
to be preferred over a rambling one. Stick to the word limit. (Unless
you are
blogging/writing to yourself)

5. "Yes, your honesty"; admit/find out what you know not :
That will help you to ask the right question. Learning is a ontinuous
process of
discovery; Dig deep, dig regularly...

6. Use it or lose it : Like the naked mole rat, or other rodents which
can die
when their own incisors 'grow' into them. Keep your tools sharp !

7.

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Access your email from home and the web

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Same, same, but different...

Tool

New programming environ for kids ??
http://scratch.mit.edu/

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Email service worth paying for. Try it for free

Robotics for kids :
http://www.usfirst.org/

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Or how I learned to stop worrying and
love email again

Do you really know all your Facebook "friends"?

Your private details on Facebook are at risk: Study

Do you really know all your Facebook "friends"? Beware, if your answer
is 'No', as researchers say you could be putting your private details at
risk every time you say 'Yes' to an unknown friend request.

A team at the University of British Columbia in Canada found a worrying
way to evade Facebook's security measures entirely and harvest
information from the popular social networking site.

They created a team of "fake" Facebook users who were able to harvest
tens of thousands of email addresses and private information from
unsuspecting users, without human input, the Daily Mail reported.

Such basic information is often sufficient to launch an identity theft
attack or launch a "phishing" attack to pilfer somebody's bank details,
said lead researcher Yazan Boshmaf.

"An attacker could do many things with this data."

According to the researchers, the fake Facebook users, known as
Socialbots, were software agents that function almost like a social
computer virus and can manipulate a Facebook account, pretending to be a
human being.

The 'Socialbots' created by the team began sending friend requests to
random users. Each was armed with a profile picture and name -- but were
totally unknown to their new "friends".

The team found that one in five users accepted the friend requests, even
without knowing them. The figure rose when the 'Bots' attempted to
befriend the friends of the "friends" they already had on the network.

Because the 'Bots' seemed to be friends of friends, 60 per cent of
people accepted the requests.

The team unleashed 102 Socialbots on the network. Within weeks, they had
made 3,000 friends, they reported in New Scientist.

According to the researchers, many people's privacy settings 'shield'
private data such as email addresses or their physical address from the
public -- but leave the data open to friends.

The team of Socialbots were able to harvest 46,500 email addresses and
14,500 physical addresses from users' profiles.

The attack launched by Boshmaf's team was small scale -- and Facebook's
defences could pick up on large numbers of socialbots.

But if the software were "cleverer" than the basic models used by
Boshmaf, then Facebook's protection would be rendered useless, the
researchers added.

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Or how I learned to stop worrying and
love email again

Arre bhai ( behen, aur pitaji ) Nikal ke aao ghar say.. :--)

Remain outdoors to reduce nearsightedness

More time spent outdoors is likely to stave off the risk of myopia or
nearsightedness in children and adolescents, new research says.

In parts of Asia, more than 80 percent of the population is nearsighted,
more so than in the 1970s, says the study.

These findings are based on analysis of eight studies on outdoor time
and myopia in children and adolescents, representing 10,400 participants
in total.

Justin Sherwin's team from the University of Cambridge concluded that
for each additional hour spent outdoors per week, the chance of myopia
dropped by approximately two percent.

Nearsighted children spent on average 3.7 fewer hours per week outdoors
than those who either had normal vision or were farsighted, according to
a statement from the university.

"Increasing children's outdoor time could be a simple and cost-effective
measure with important benefits for their vision and general health,"
said study co-author Anthony Khawaja.

These findings were presented at the 115th Annual Meeting of the
American Academy of Ophthalmology.

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Does exactly what it says on the tin

How to lower pancreatic cancer risk

There are two main ways to reduce one's risk of getting pancreatic
cancer.

* Quit smoking

Smoking is the single biggest known risk factor for developing
pancreatic cancer. It accounts for 40 per cent of all pancreatic cancers
in the U.S.

* Reduce intake of sugary soft drinks

A US research study on 60,000 Singapore Chinese men and women over a
14-year period has pointed to intake of soft drinks as a risk factor for
pancreatic cancer.

*****
Follow :

1) a plant-based diet, at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a
day,
2) whole meal foods, less red meat, less fats especially from animals
3) less alcohol
4) be active 30min a day for most days of the week;
5) maintaining an ideal body weight
6) Avoid preserved foods with preservatives

*****
Avoid excess salt/sugar/oil

*****
Avoid processed foods

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Does exactly what it says on the tin

Prime Number Hide and Seek: How the RSA Cryptograhic Cipher works

"This text explains the mathematics behind RSA -- how and why it works.
The intended audience is just about anyone who is interested in the
topic and who can remember a few basic facts from algebra: what a
variable is, the difference between a prime number and a composite
number, and the like."

Read this ==> http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/rsa.html

/A

Relativity Theory explained

From: http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html

============
**Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity**

In Words of Four Letters or Less

[ 0 ]

So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get
you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.

Okay. How do I want to do this? He did so much. It's hard to just dive
in. You know? You pick a spot to go from, but soon you have to back up
and and go over this or that item, and you get done with that only to
see that you have to back up some more. So if you feel like I'm off to
the side of the tale half the time, well, this is why. Just bear with
me, and we'll get to the end in good time. Okay?

Okay. Let's see....

[ I ]

Say you woke up one day and your bed was gone. Your room, too. Gone.
It's all gone. You wake up in an inky void. Not even a star. Okay, yes,
it's a dumb idea, but just go with it. Now say you want to know if you
move or not. Are you held fast in one spot? Or do you, say, list off to
the left some? What I want to ask you is: Can you find out? Hell no. You
can see that, sure. You don't need me to tell you. To move, you have to
move to or away from ... well, from what? You'd have to say that you
don't even get to use a word like "move" when you are the only body in
that void. Sure. Okay.

Now, let's add the bed back. Your bed is with you in the void. But not
for long -- it goes away from you. You don't have any way to get it
back, so you just let it go. But so now we have a body in the void with
you. So does the bed move, or do you move? Or both? Well, you can see as
well as I that it can go any way you like. Flip a coin. Who's to say?
It's best to just say that you move away from the bed, and that the bed
goes away from you. No one can say who's held fast and who isn't.

Now, if I took the bed back but gave you the sun -- just you and the sun
in the void, now -- I'll bet you'd say that the sun is so big, next to
you, that odds are you move and not the sun. It's easy to move a body
like ours, and not so easy to kick a sun to and fro. But that isn't the
way to see it. Just like with the bed, no one can say who's held fast.

In a word, you can't find any one true "at rest". Izzy was the one who
told us that. Izzy said that you can't tell if you move or are at rest
at any time. You can say that you go and all else is at rest, or you can
say that you are at rest and all else goes. It all adds up the same both
ways. So we all knew that much from way back when.

Aha, but now wait! The sun puts off rays! So: why not look at how fast
the rays go past you? From that you'd see how fast you move, yes? For
you see, rays move just the same if what puts them off is held fast or
not. (Make a note of that, now.) Izzy had no way to know that, back
then, but it's true. Rays all move the same. We call how fast that is:
c. So, you can see how fast the rays go by you, and how far off that is
from c will tell you how fast you move! Hell, you don't even need the
sun for that. You can just have a lamp with you -- the one by your bed
that you use to read by. You can have that lamp in your hand, and see
how fast the rays go by you when you turn it on. The lamp will move with
you, but the rays will move at c. You will see the rays move a bit more
or less than c, and that will be how fast you move. An open-and-shut
case, yes?

Well, and so we went to test this idea out. Hey, you don't need to be in
a void to do this test. We move all the time, even as we sit here. We
spin, in fact. So they shot some rays off and took note of how fast they
went east, and how fast they went west, and so on. Well, what do you
know? The rays went just as fast both ways. All ways, in fact. They all
went at c, just the same. Not an iota more or less.

To say that we were less than glad to find that out is to be kind. It
blew the mind, is more like it. "What is up with that?" we said. And
here is when old Al came in.

[ II ]

Old Al, he came out the blue and said, "Not only do rays move at c if
what puts them out is held fast or not: they move at c even if you are
held fast or not." Now that may not look like such a big deal on the
face of it, but hold on. What this says is that you can move as fast or
as slow as you want, and rays will go by you at c all the time. You can
have a pal run past you and when you both look at a ray go by at the
same time, you will both see the same ray go by at c! That is a bit
wild, no? You, back in that void, you just can not say if you move or
not -- with the lamp or no. Not that you can't tell: it can't be said.
It's moot!

But for that to be true, then time also has to get in on the act. For
you and your pal to see the same ray go by at the same clip, her idea of
time must be off from your idea of time!

I can hear you say, "No way. That can't be!" But I tell you it is. Old
Al said so. He said, here, I'll show you. Get a load of this. We have
Bert and Dana. Take a bus, and put Bert on the bus. The bus goes down
the road. Dana, she sits here, on the side of the road. He's in the bus
and she's on her ass. And now take a rock off of the moon, and let it
fall at them. It hits the air and cuts in two. The two bits burn, and
then land just as Bert and Dana are side by side. One hits the dirt up
the road a ways, and one hits down the road a ways. Dana sees each rock
at the same time, but Bert sees one rock and then sees the next rock.
Now: if Bert and Dana both see Dana as the one who is "at rest", they
both will say that the two bits came down at the same time. Dana will
say, "I am 'at rest', and I saw them both land at the same time, so they
both did, in fact, land at the same time." And Bert will say, "I move
away from the rock down the road, so when I add that fact in, I can see
that if I were 'at rest', I'd have seen both land at the same time. So
it must be the case that they did land at the same time." Okay, but what
if Bert and Dana now see Bert as the one who is "at rest"? Eh? You get
to pick who is "at rest" and who isn't, no? So make Bert be "at rest".
Now Bert will say, "I am 'at rest', so the one up the road beat the one
down the road, on the way to the dirt, just the way I saw it." And Dana
will say, "I saw them land at the same time, but I move away from the
rock up the road, so when I add that fact in, I can see that the rock up
the road must have beat the one down the road."

So you see, when you give up on the idea of a one true "at rest", then
you have to give up on the idea of a one true time as well! And even
that is not the end of it. If you lose your one true way to see time,
then you also lose your one true way to see size and your one true way
to see mass. You can't talk of any of that, if you don't also say what
it is you call "at rest". If you don't, then Bert or Dana can pick an
"at rest" that isn't the same as what you used, and then what they will
get for time and size and mass won't be the same.

What a snag, eh? I hope you can see how that gave some of them the fits,
back when old Al told us that one. But even so, that ain't the half of
it. I mean, most of us know that if old Al had got hit by a bus at age
ten, we'd have got this far on our own in good time. No, it was what
came next that was the real slap in the face.

[ III ]

Now, I've said a lot here on how to see (or how not to see) how fast you
"move". What I need to tell you now is just what I mean by that word
"move". When I say "move", I also mean that you don't slow down or get
sped up at any time, and that you don't veer to one side at all. When
you move, you just keep all that the same as you go. How we say it is,
you don't have any "pull". Why do I make a big deal out of that, you
ask? Okay, let me tell you.

Cast your mind back to Ari, from way way back when. He's the one who
said that if you are at rest, you tend to stay at rest, and if you move,
you tend to come to rest. He was off, you know, as he had no way to know
that it was the air that has you come to rest. We had to wait a long
time for Izzy to come by and say, "No, Ari: if you move, you tend to
just go on and on. To come to rest, you need to have a pull." The air
will give you a pull, a pull that has you come to rest. Then we also
have the big pull, the one that says what is down and what is up, the
one that has all of us in its grip. Izzy saw that this pull was the same
pull that has the moon in its grip, too. I said that a pull can be a
veer, yes? That is what the pull on the moon does. The moon has to veer
all the time for it to stay with us. Were it not for that pull, it'd
just go off in a line -- no veer -- and we'd just sit here and wave bye
bye. Same with us and the sun. We veer, each hour, or else we'd get real
cold real fast.

But then, see, Izzy had to deal with the way that the pull acts. If a
body has more mass, then it also has more pull, yes? That is why the sun
is the axis we spin upon, and we are not the axis for the sun. But then
why can't it go both ways? You take your ball of lead and your ball of
wood and drop them, they land at the same time. But the lead ball has
more mass, so it must get more pull. Izzy said, "Well, see, a body has
one more kind of pull. This pull is such that it will want to stay put
all the time. And the more mass it has, the more it will want to stay
put. That pull is the 'a body at rest will tend to stay at rest' part of
the deal. So you see, that pull and the big pull are in a tug-of-war,
and they work out so that any mass will fall just as fast."

I call it a "new kind of pull", but it isn't so new: you feel it all the
time. Get in a car and step on the gas -- you feel a pull back into your
seat. Let up on the gas a bit, and the pull goes away. Make a left, and
you feel a pull to the side. Stop, and you feel a pull out of your seat
as you slow down. Or, go to the fair and get on a ride. As you spin, you
feel a pull out, away from the ride. You spin: that is to say you veer,
and veer and veer and veer, just like the moon. If you had no seat belt,
you'd fly off the ride, and you'd fly off in a line. (Well, that is to
say, you'd fly off in a line as a bird sees it. To be fair you'd also
arc down at the same time. But put that to one side.)

Okay but now, see, old Al's big idea did not work when you look at pull.
Go back to when you were lost in the void. You can't say if you move or
not, yeah, but you sure can say if you have a pull on you or not. If you
did, you'd feel it, no? Sure. So then you have no one true "at rest", no
one true way to look at time, or mass, or size, but you do have one true
way to look at a pull? Old Al said, "Erm. I don't buy that." We all
said, "Aah, why not? Just give it a rest, Al." You can see why Al did
not want to give it a rest, I bet. But this one was not such an easy
nut.

[ IV ]

Izzy once said, Look here: say you have a disk that can spin, and so you
put a pail of milk on it and you make it spin. You will see the milk go
up the side of the pail, and fly over and out onto the disk. No big
deal, eh? The spin will make a pull. But now what if you said that the
pail of milk is your "at rest"? Then you have you and the sky and all
that in a big huge spin, and the disk with its pail of milk is the only
body that is "at rest", yes? How can you say then why the milk goes up?
What can make the at-rest milk fly out of the pail like that?

This is why Izzy came to say: Yes, we have no one true "at rest", and
when you move, some may say you do move and some may say you don't, and
that is okay -- but not so with a pull! A pull is a pull, damn it.

But old Al's mind was set. And he had a big clue that that was not the
full tale. I told you that Izzy put a new kind of pull next to the old
kind. Well, even he felt that this new pull was a tad bit odd. Not to
put it down, mind you -- just that this new kind of pull was so much
like the old kind of pull in a lot of ways. You know? Say I put you in a
box, and then put that box out in a void. (But this time I don't need to
have you in a true void. I just want you to be well away from any pull.
You can have a star or two, or as many as you like, as long as you keep
them far off. Okay?) Now, say I tied a rope from the box to a ship, and
then I got in that ship and sent it up, so that it went fast, and more
fast, and more fast ... I just burn up fuel as long as I have any left.
As long as I see to it that you get sped up all the time, and at the
same rate, you will feel a pull that will feel just like the pull you'd
feel if you were back here, at home. If you have a ball of lead and a
ball of wood in that box with you, you can drop them and they will both
land at the same time. That is a bit odd, no? Puts a bug in your ear,
yes? You can bet it put bugs in our ears. But no one had come up with a
good way to say why that was so. Not yet.

Old Al, he took that ball and ran with it. He went off for a year, and
then ten more. Yep. That long. This was no walk in the park, let me tell
you. In fact, some of us said that it was more like a walk off the deep
end! For you see, when old Al came back, he said, "This 'new' pull that
Izzy gave us, it is just the old pull. Not just like it. It is it. The
two are one and the same. And from this, you will then see that we have
no 'one true pull'."

Do you see what he said, here? When you are in that box with the rope on
the ship, the pull you feel won't just act like the pull back home: it
is in fact the same kind of pull! So when you say, "Hey! What if I want
this box to be my 'at rest', huh? What then? Why does this ball fall
down if I'm at rest and all?" -- old Al will say back at you, "Well, you
see, you have this big old void that goes by, and gets sped up all the
time, and that has a pull on you and your box." You'd say, "Get out of
here! The mass in this void is too far away to give me that big of a
pull!" But old Al'd say, "Nope. You don't get it. How much mass you have
in your void is moot. It's the fact that it's all the mass in the void.
All of it but you and your box, that is."

Same with the milk in the pail. If you say that the pail is at rest,
then old Al will say that the spin of all else will pull on the milk,
and make it jump out over the side.

So here is what we get when we boil it all down. Izzy said that you
can't tell if you move or are at rest at any time. You can say that you
go and all else is at rest, or you can say that you are at rest and all
else goes. It all adds up the same both ways. But old Al then said not
only that, but that you can't even tell if you have a pull on you or
not. So, at no time, in no way, can you act so that you can't be seen as
"at rest". You can go this way or that way or jump up or down or what
have you: even so, you can say that you are at rest -- and it will all
add up just the same.

This was the big one for old Al. He'd like to jump for joy, it all came
out just so. But the rest of us, well, we felt more like it was time to
lock Al up, what he said was so wild.

[ V ]

So some of us said, "Al, you are mad. Look here: you want to make this
pull, this pull that we need to keep next to the sun -- you want to make
this very real pull into some kind of fake pull! I mean, what kind of
pull is it that can go away and come back as you pick what to call your
'at rest'? That is no way for a pull to act." And old Al said, "Yeah,
you hit the nail on the head. It is a fake pull." And we said, "Okay,
that is it. You, Al, have lost it." And old Al said, "Feh. Read this and
weep." And we read it, or we gave it a try, more like. It was a real
mess. Some of us got it, but most of us just went, "Huh?" And some of us
said that even if it was true, we'd just as soon stay with the old lie,
Al's idea was so hard to make head or tail of.

But Herb -- what? No, Herb isn't his real name, but I like to call him
that -- But so then Herb was one of the ones who got it, and he went in
with old Al and his new idea, and what they came up with goes like this.

You know all the ways you can move, here. You have your up-and-down, and
you have your east-and-west, and you have your fore-and-back. Well, Herb
had said, we want to add one more way here: time. Yeah, time as just one
more way to move in. Four ways, all told. And now Herb and old Al said,
"Let's take a look at what we can do when we look at here as a four-way
here. Like, what if this four-way here can be bent? We don't mean that
what is in a four-way spot gets bent: what if the very spot gets bent?"
Some of us said, "You two have got bent, is more like it." But they
said, "Ha. Get a load of this."

They said, what if mass puts a bend in this four-way here of ours? The
more mass you have in one spot, the more bent that spot gets. So now
pick out a spot A and a spot B, one on each side of some mass, and each
at its own time. What does it look like when a body goes from A to B?
You will say: A line. Well, yes and no. It is a line, but it's also
bent, as it goes past the bent spot. You see, this line will only look
like a line if you can see all four ways! If you can't see one of the
ways, if for you the way you can't see is what you call time, then you
will see it as a line with a big old veer in it, half way in. Now, take
a lot of mass, as much as our sun has, and pick spot A and spot B to be
near the mass, and to be the same spot but for the time. Well, when you
do that, the line from A to B in the four-way here will be an arc to you
and me! An arc that will spin on and on, with that mass as the axis!

"You see?" old Al said. "You say that the sun has a pull, but when we
spin with the sun as our axis, in the bent-up four-way here we just move
in a line! We don't veer off at all! That is why I say that your pull is
a fake pull. You don't need any pull if you just want to stay on a
line!"

A few more of us got it, then. But most of us just said, "What are you
two on? Put down the bong and get real! This is way too wild to be
true." But they just said, "Just try and see if it isn't true."

So we came up with ways to test old Al's idea, and each time Al hit the
gold. His idea had the sun's rays a tiny bit more red than what Izzy
said. They were. His idea put Mars a tiny bit off from how Izzy had
Mars. It was.

The big one, the one that got told over and over, was the one with the
dark-at-day time. You know, when the moon gets in the way of the sun. At
that time you can get a real good look at a star when it's up next to
the sun. (Next to it in the sky, that is. Not next to it for real. You
know what I mean.) They went off and got a good look at a star that was
very near the sun, and then they used a book to see just what spot that
star was in. You see, the rays from the star pass so near the sun that
they get bent, on the way to us. Old Al, his idea said just how much the
rays get bent. With Izzy, the rays get bent, too, but only by half as
much. So they took a look at the star, and they took at look at the big
book, and ... well, I'll bet you can tell me as well as I can tell you
just how far off that star was.

A-yup.

And then all of us, we all just sat back and said: "Whoa."

And then we all went back to old Al and said to him, "Al, you must have
some kind of head on you, to pull an idea like that out of thin air." We
said, "Why don't you quit this dumb job you have here and come with us?"
We said, "You know what, Al? We like you."

[ end ]

And that is just the way it was. (Well, that is to say, more or less.)
Oh dear me, look at the time! Sigh. I do know how to run on, don't I? It
must be well past time to turn in. Let me show you out. It was very nice
to have you over, and I hope I was of help.

And y'all come back now, hear?

Note: "Herb" actually refers to Hermann Minkowski. (And "Izzy" and "Ari"
are, of course, Isaac Newton and Aristotle.)

Brian Raiter
Muppetlabs
============
/A

http://www.openculture.com/2009/01/the_whole_earth_catalog_is_now_online.html

http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=1010

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Or how I learned to stop worrying and
love email again

Python Tutorials from "The New Boston"

http://youtube.com/user/TheNewBoston

/A

Steve Jobs's speech

http://www.sify.com/finance/Steve-Jobs-on-staying-hungry-and-staying-foolish-imagegallery-technology-klrnRqdjbei.html

/A

Body suit may soon enable the paralyzed to walk

In a busy lab at Duke University, Dr. Miguel Nicolelis is merging brain
science with engineering in a bid to create something fantastical: a
full-body prosthetic device that would allow those immobilized by injury
to walk again.

On Wednesday, Nicolelis and an international group of collaborators
declared that they had cleared a key hurdle on the path toward that
goal, demonstrating they could bypass the body's complex network of
nerve endings and supply the sensation of touch directly to the brains
of monkeys.

Nicolelis and his collaborators — engineers, neuroscientists and
physiologists from Brazil, Switzerland, Germany and the United States —
are working toward an ambitious objective: On the opening day of the
2014 World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil, they hope to send a young
quadriplegic striding out to midfield to open the games, suited up in
the "prosthetic exoskeleton" they aim to build.

Nicolelis, a Brazilian-born physician and neuroscientist with a
tinkerer's bent, calls that goal a "Brazilian moon shot." And as with
moon shots of the past, his team has recruited a monkey — in fact, two
female rhesus monkeys named Mango and Nectarine — to go first.

The latest experiment of the nonprofit consortium showed that electrical
messages conveying sensation could be sent directly to the monkeys'
brains — in enough detail that both animals could distinguish among
three identical circles by virtually "feeling" their differing textures.

Those sensations did not come from the animals' fingers, but from
specially coded electrical currents delivered straight to each monkey's
sensory cortex by four filaments the breadth of a hair.

Although no one really knows (and the monkeys are unlikely to tell us)
whether one circle felt like sandpaper and another felt as smooth as
glass, Mango and Nectarine quickly learned to discern one circle from
another to complete a task and get their reward: a sip of juice.

The experiment was reported Wednesday in a letter published by the
journal Nature.

For a person with a spinal cord injury, sending such orchestrated bursts
of electrical information to the brain could do more than allow a
patient who has lost sensation to experience the pleasures of touch
again. It could provide the necessary sensory feedback for the user of a
prosthetic walker to navigate uneven terrain and steer clear of dangers
such as hot or slippery surfaces.

The group's latest effort builds upon an earlier accomplishment, in
2003, in which monkeys learned to move a cursor to designated targets on
a computer screen using thought alone.

In another experiment, first described in 2008, Nicolelis' team at Duke
showed that monkeys could learn to initiate movement with their thought
patterns and command a robotic device across the world in a Japanese
robotics lab to walk in real time.

That development was a key step in creating a prosthetic device that
could be controlled by a person incapable of voluntary movement below
the neck. Now, by adding sensory feedback, the latest experiment creates
a loop of command and control that could make the complex act of walking
possible.

Dr. Bruce Volpe, a professor of neurology at Weill Cornell Medical
College who is not involved in the consortium — which its members have
dubbed the Walk Again Project — praised the latest advance. He called it
a "remarkable use of sensory information" that "opens novel ...
possibilities" for patients who have lost movement and sensation to
injury or illness.

Following injury or stroke, patients' recoveries are often hampered by
the "noisy, unresponsive or absent sensory information" making its way
to their brains, said Volpe, who studies and develops interactive
robotic training devices for the rehabilitation of such patients.

"These data suggest new options for generating that missing and
crucially informative sensory information," he said.

The Walk Again Project is one of many research efforts aimed at
restoring movement and repairing tissue in those who have suffered
grievous spinal cord injury. Though much of that work has focused on the
use of stem cells to regenerate nerve and muscle fiber, advances in
neuroscience have made the idea of "neural prosthetics" keenly
attractive.

UCLA physiologist V. Reggie Edgerton, who was not involved in Nicolelis'
work but has pioneered the use of electrical stimulation to initiate
movement in paralyzed patients, said that the brain's innate flexibility
— its ability to take in electrical signals and learn to attach meaning
to them — makes approaches like that of the Walk Again Project highly
promising.

Although the information conveyed to the monkeys' brains in Nicolelis'
lab was not fine-grained, the experiment demonstrated that "sensory
feedback and brain control devices can be combined in real time and in a
useful way," said Kip Ludwig, who directs the program on brain repair
and plasticity at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and
Stroke, which has funded some of Nicolelis' work. "Before, they've
always been separate."

"Ideally, the long-term goal would be a prosthetic that would send all
the sensory information — touch, position, temperature — to the arm that
goes into, say, drinking a cup of coffee," Ludwig added. "This is an
important step, but there's a lot of work yet to be done."

In demonstrating the feasibility of their ideas on nonhuman primates
first, Nicolelis said the team is starting with approaches that are
fundamentally simple. He added that when the experiments move to a
human, he or she will not only learn quickly how to initiate and repeat
movements using thought alone, but the prosthetic should interface so
seamlessly with the intelligent human brain that the patient will begin
to see the prosthetic as a natural extension of himself or herself.

"We are trying to provide the patient a new body, and we believe the
patient's brain will assimilate the new body as part of the sense of
self of the patient," Nicolelis said. "It would be just like a car …
only a little tighter."

melissa.healy@latimes.com

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Access your email from home and the web

HTC Android vulnerability

See this
http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/10/01/massive-security-vulnerability-in-htc-android-devices-evo-3d-4g-thunderbolt-others-exposes-phone-numbers-gps-sms-emails-addresses-much-more/

/A

Facebook

How Facebook tracks you even if you logout:
http://nikcub-static.appspot.com/logging-out-of-facebook-is-not-enough

/A

Playterm -- Master the command line! ... and other tidbits

*PLAYterm*
==========

PLAYterm, an interesting project that offers up recordings of Linux command line sessions, with the aim of helping viewers to improve their skills by watching gurus at work.
http://www.playterm.org/

Neal Stephenson's excellent (and free-to-download) e-Text-Book:
In the Beginning was the Command Line.
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

Linux Journal article:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/playterm-platform-gurus

**New Mac OS X Trojan Hides Inside PDFs**
================

http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/new-mac-os-x-trojan-imuler-hides-inside-malicious-pdf-092311

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/09/24/1930210/New-Mac-OS-X-Trojan-Hides-Inside-PDFs

High School Student Launches a Trash Bag Aircraft
==================================================

...a project completed last month by Manuja Gunaratne.
A high school student at Advanced Technologies Academy in Las Vegas,
Nevada managed to launch an aircraft using trash bags. The trash bag aircraft traveled for hundreds of miles and rose to thousands of feet while capturing thousands of images of the Earth. The trash bag craft consisted of household equipment and only cost $50.

http://www.projecttbac.org/
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/09/24/1549221/High-School-Student-Launches-a-Trash-Bag-Aircraft

Resurrecting Babbage's Analytical Engine.
=========================================

The first phase is to digitize all of Babbage's papers and
designs. These will be available to the general public in 2012. The
machine to be built is no simple calculator: it is a full computer with a
store for between 100 and 1000 values, each of 40 digits, and it was
programmed using punched cards in a modern 'operator/address' format.
There was even a plan to send the output to a printer. When this device
is built it will make it clear that the computer age nearly began in the
18th century.

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/82-heritage/3101-babbage-archive-digitized.html

Wi-Fi Cards Can Now Detect Microwave Ovens
===============

...Researchers at UW Madison have [0]used regular WiFi cards to detect non-WiFi interference sources like microwave ovens, Bluetooth devices, cordless phones, Xbox controllers and video cameras. They call their software Airshark. Current products like Wispy, Spectrum Expert are expensive and need extra hardware, whereas Airshark is a software-only solution that can directly work on the Wi-Fi cards on your laptops and APs. This also paves way several interesting applications. For example, your WiFi network will not be affected anymore just because your neighbor switched on a microwave oven or a cordless phone ??? the newer WiFi APs will be able to switch the channels and adapt to the interference accordingly."

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/092311-wifi-airshark-251193.html

NASA Satellite Falls Back To Earth; Landfall in Canada
========================================================

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-20111100-239/derelict-nasa-satellite-falls-back-to-earth/

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0924/NASA-satellite-falls-on-Canada-as-space-junk.-No-one-hurt

http://uars.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Amendment: Violation of ToS Should Not Be a Crime
=================================================

Three data and security breach notification bills have been [2]approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, one of which includes an amendment that adds clarity with regards to the [3]Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. These three bills would require businesses to develop data privacy and security plans, and it would set a federal standard for notifying individuals of breaches of very sensitive
personally identifiable information, such as credit card information or
medical records. This clarification is welcomed, making the statute more
focused towards hackers and identity thieves, instead of consumers that
run afoul of ToS or AUPs of websites and service providers.

0. http://www.ecogroled.com/
1. https://www.cdt.org/blogs/harley-geiger/239senate-judiciary-committee-passes-three-data-security-bills
2. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/09/senate-committee-agrees-violating-terms-service-shouldnt
3. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1030.html

**** Crowdsourcing Speeds Evolution of 3D Printable Objects ****
==================================================================

The Cornell Creative Machines Lab, which brought us [1]chatbots debating God and unicorns, has developed [2]Endlessforms.com, a site using evolutionary algorithms and crowdsourcing to design objects that can be 3D printed in materials such
as silver, steel or silicone. MIT's Technology Review says 'The rules
EndlessForms uses to generate objects and their variants [3]resemble
those of developmental biology ??? the study of how DNA instructions unfold
to create an entire living organism. [The Media Lab's Mediated Matter
research group director Neri Oxman notes] that this could ultimately have
an impact on design similar to the impact that blogs and social media
have had on journalism, opening the field to the general public.' The New
Scientist has a [4]quick video tour."

0. http://www.djimmy.com/
1. http://idle.slashdot.org/story/11/08/30/1410211/Cornells-Creative-Machines-Lab-Lets-Chatbots-Interact
2. http://endlessforms.com/
3. http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38433/page1/
4. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/08/evolve-your-own-objects-for-3d.html

========================
/A

The bizarre fish that evolved for oceans, but lives on land

The bizarre fish that evolved for oceans, but lives on land
Published: Wednesday, Aug 31, 2011, 20:42 IST
Place: Washington, DC | Agency: ANI

A new study has found that one of the world's strangest animals—a unique
fish that lives on land and can leap large distances despite having no
legs—has a rich and complex social life.

The odd lifestyle of the Pacific leaping blenny (Alticus arnoldorum) has
been detailed for the first time in research findings that throw new
light on how animal life first evolved to colonise the land.

Lead researcher Dr Terry Ord, of the UNSW Evolution and Ecology Research
Centre and his colleagues also discovered that males are territorial and
use complex visual displays to warn off rivals and attract mates.

Females were seen aggressively defending feeding territory at the start
of their breeding season, while males displayed a red-coloured fin and
nodded their heads vigorously to attract females to their closely
defended rock holes.

The Pacific leaping blenny is a marine fish yet is terrestrial in all
aspects of its daily adult life, eking out a precarious existence in the
intertidal zone of rocky shores in Micronesia.

"This remarkable little fish seems to have made a highly successful transition across the water—land interface, although it is still needs to stay moist to enable it to breathe through its gills and skin," said Ord, who is an evolutionary ecologist with a special interest in animal behaviour.

"Our study showed that life on land for a marine fish is heavily dependent on tide and temperature fluctuations, so much so that almost all activity is restricted to a brief period at mid-tide, the timing of which changes daily. During our field study on Guam we never saw one voluntary return to water. Indeed, they spend much of their time actively avoiding submersion by incoming waves, even when we tried to capture them for study.

"I can tell you they are very hard to catch and are extremely agile on land. They move quickly over complex rocky surfaces using a unique tail-twisting behaviour combined with expanded pectoral and tail fins that let them cling to almost any firm surface. To reach higher ground in a hurry, they can also twist their bodies and flick their tails to leap many times their own body length," Ord added.

The study has been published in the journal Ethology.

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Faster than the air-speed velocity of an
unladen european swallow

13-Year-Old Uses Fibonacci Sequence For Solar Power Breakthrough and other news..

13-Year-Old Uses Fibonacci Sequence For Solar Power Breakthrough
================================================================

7th grader Aidan Dwyer used "phyllotaxis" or the way leaves are arranged on plant stems in nature, as inspiration to arrange an array of solar panels to
generates 20-50% more energy than a uniform, flat panel array.

Aidan wrote, "I designed and built my own test model, copying the Fibonacci
pattern of an oak tree. I studied my results with the compass tool and
figured out the branch angles. The pattern was about 137 degrees and the
Fibonacci sequence was 2/5. Then I built a model using this pattern from
PVC tubing. In place of leaves, I used PV solar panels hooked up in
series that produced up to 1/2 volt, so the peak output of the model was
5 volts. The entire design copied the pattern of an oak tree as closely
as possible. ... The Fibonacci tree design performed better than the
flat-panel model. The tree design made 20% more electricity and collected
2 1/2 more hours of sunlight during the day. But the most interesting
results were in December, when the Sun was at its lowest point in the
sky. The tree design made 50% more electricity, and the collection time
of sunlight was up to 50% longer!"His work earned him a Young Naturalist
Award from the American Museum of Natural History and a provisional
patent on the design.

Phyllotaxis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllotaxis
Article: http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html

* Car Makers Explore EEG Headrests
===================================
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/38366/?p1=A3

* Study Shows Dogs Can Sniff Out Lung Cancer
============================================

"Last year, researchers developed a cancer-detecting electronic nose inspired by dogs' ability to sniff out different types of ovarian cancer. Now a new study has found that sniffer dogs' abilities extend to reliably detecting lung cancer. The researchers say the results of the study confirm that there is a stable marker for lung cancer, which offers the possibility that a 'breath test' for the early detection of lung cancer could be developed."

http://www.gizmag.com/cancer-detecting-electronic-nose/17340/
http://www.gizmag.com/lung-cancer-sniffer-dogs/19569/
http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/2011/08/05/09031936.00051711.abstract?sid=b4c367ac-6264-4d94-8b46-2b1505bb3fcf

More Solar Activity predicted:

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011GL048489.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14580995

/A
--

Line follower robot with Analog and PWM (no uC!)

Check this out:
http://www.ermicro.com/blog/?p=1908
----------------------------------------

Art, Typesetting and F/LOSS

=========================================================
Libre Graphics Magazine -- check back for latest issues !
http://libregraphicsmag.com/
=========================================================

It's hard to be in a bad mood while you're playing the ukulele!

It's hard to be in a bad mood while you're playing the ukulele!
Clive Maxfield
8/2/2011 2:23 PM EDT
Yesterday I didn't even know how to spell Ukulele, but then ordered a
"Build Your Own Ukulele Kit" and now I can't wait for it to arrive. This
is a bit of an involved tale (what do you mean "That's not unusual for
you, Max"?) so please bear with me while I explain…

While driving back and forth between my home and office in the mornings
and evenings I listen to the National Public Radio (NPR). A couple of
months ago there was a program about a Hawaiian musician called Israel
"IZ" Kaʻanoʻi Kamakawiwoʻole (1959 – 1997). As part of this we heard him
playing the ukulele and singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow from the film
The Wizard of Oz.

I have to tell you, this really is one of the most beautiful things I've
heard (see the embedded video below). Somehow IZ's voice and his ukulele
meld together in perfect harmony (no pun intended). Whatever you're
doing, this makes you pause for a moment's reflection and brightens your
day.

As the weeks went by, this slipped further and further toward the back
of my mind. Then, yesterday evening, I happened to be glancing through a
catalog from Uncommon Goods. And what did I see on page 53? You guessed
it; it was a Make Your Own Ukulele Kit.

Actually, this is not quite as hard as you might expect because the main
body is pre-assembled. All you have to do is take the unfinished parts,
sand them down, assemble them, add an optional painted design, and
attach the strings (I've not actually read the instructions, you
understand, I'm just guessing that it's best to add the strings after
you've painted the main body). All that remains now it to learn how to
play the little scamp!

Actually I think this is an amazingly good deal, because it costs only
$40. In fact I was so enthused when I saw this that I immediately
ordered two kits – one for me and one for my son.

Now, before we proceed, take a moment to listen to IZ playing his
rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow – even if you've heard this
before it's well worth pausing to listen to it again.

...start searching around on the web. Almost immediately I ran across a
site called Ukulele Boogaloo, and from there I found the chords used in
Somewhere Over the Rainbow. As you will see if you Click Here, this
shows the chords (there are only five) and how they are associated with
the lyrics. You must admit that this is pretty amazing. I've said it
before and I'll say it again: "The Internet is AMAZING!" (Young folks
who were brought up with the Internet simply cannot imagine how much
time and effort all of this would have taken when I was a lad.)

But wait, there's more, because I returned to YouTube and found a guy
called Ukulele Mike who has hundreds of videos of instructional ukulele
lessons out there. Lesson 97 covers the chords used in Over the Rainbow.
As you'll see in the video below, Mike starts by showing the chords
themselves; he then plays the song with the lyrics and chord changes
superimposed as annotations on the screen.

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'Superman' microscope can see nanoscale details without lenses

'Superman' microscope can see nanoscale details without lenses
Published: Tuesday, Aug 9, 2011, 20:39 IST
Place: Washington, DC | Agency: PTI

Physicists at UC San Diego have developed a new kind of X-ray microscope
that can penetrate deep within materials like Superman's fabled X-ray
vision and see details at the scale of a single nanometre, or one
billionth of a metre.

What's unusual about this new, nanoscale, X-ray microscope is that the
images are not produced by a lens, but by means of a powerful computer
program.

The computer program, or algorithm, is able to convert the diffraction
patterns produced by the X-rays bouncing off the nanoscale structures
into resolvable images, the report said.

"The mathematics behind this is somewhat complicated," said Oleg Shpyrko, an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego who headed the research team. "But what we did is to show that for the first time that we can image magnetic domains with nanometre precision. In other words, we can see magnetic structure at the nanoscale level without using any lenses."

One immediate application of this lens-less X-ray microscope is the
development of smaller, data storage devices for computers that can hold
more memory.

"This will aid research in hard disk drives where the magnetic bits of data on the surface of the disk are currently only 15 nanometers in size," said Eric Fullerton, a co-author of the paper and director of UC San Diego's Center for Magnetic Recording Research. "This new ability to directly image the bits will be invaluable as we push to store even more data in the future.

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wherever you are

Team player or individual best ?

Blog Comment :
"My experience has been that the best individual contributors make the
best team players. If you apply the same skills that it takes to be a
great individual contributor - focus, persistence, objectivity, ability
to learn, ability to look at a problem from different perspectives - to
your interactions with others, you can make yourself a better team
player over time, just like the best engineers are good because they are
constantly examining their own work and figuring out how to improve..."

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/pop-blog/4218479/Just-what-on-earth-is-this-?cid=NL_EETimesDaily

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love email again

Must visit!

Very interesting site of Micah Elizabeth Scott / Micah Dowty

http://scanlime.org/
Main top level site: http://navi.cx/

Car battery in a bottle aims to obsolete gasoline

Car battery in a bottle aims to obsolete gasoline
R. Colin Johnson
7/19/2011 10:40 AM EDT
Semi-solid flow cells aim to replace the gas-guzzling internal
combustion engine with electric motors driven by pumpable fuels that
bear electrons as their active elements.

Electronics has already transformed society. By harnessing electricity
to perform the operations that were once performed manually, computers
have made obsolete legions of mechanical devices, from adding machines
to carburetors. Now electronics is poised to replace the gas-guzzling
internal combustion engine with electric motors driven by pumpable fuels
that bear electrons as their active elements.

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4217970/Car-battery-in-a-bottle-aims-to-obsolete-gasoline

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Stepper Motors

Read this, about ** Micro-stepping a stepper Motor ** :

http://www.eetimes.com/design/embedded/4217719/A-simple-algorithm-for-microstepping-a-bipolar-stepper-motor

* Stepper Motor Basics *
========================

==> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepper_motor

==> http://www.solarbotics.net/library/pdflib/pdf/motorbas.pdf [PDF]

Introduction, not too superficial, not too hard to follow:
==> http://www.engineersgarage.com/articles/stepper-motors

More in-depth, A Tutorial for Engineers
==> http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/step/

/A

33 GB of Scientific Publications -- now freed

Release of 33GiB of Scientific Publications
==> http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/07/22/2254204/Release-of-33GiB-of-Scientific-Publications

Description:

This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR...

The link ==>
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331

/A

"Why my father hated India" - Aatish Taseer/WSJ/livemint

From:
http://www.livemint.com/2011/07/21012219/Why-my-father-hated-India.html

** Why my father hated India **

Pakistan's anger at India is not merely about Kashmir. It goes to the
heart of an artificial identity it acquired after 1947

Aatish Taseer / WSJ

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge-its hysteria-it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan.

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician, but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim League, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence". Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

This experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before the partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. It set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favour of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase. Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after the partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.

But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after 1947 evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam. As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's Utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.

The primary agent of this decline has been the army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of US assistance and money, the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability, but rather a backyard, which might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.

In order to realize these objectives, the army has led the US in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of US money. All this time it kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some-such as Lashkar-e-Taiba's 2008 attack on Mumbai-actively supported.

The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of trade in nuclear secrets.

This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests.

The reversal in the fortunes-India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized Utopia-is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part-a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.

This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness.

-The Wall Street Journal

Edited excerpts. Comment at theirview@livemint.com
=====================

Stuxnet story, soldering, making stuff...etc

Stuxnet
=======

* Story of Stuxnet:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/

** Soldering etc.. making stuff**
=================================

Video Tutorials:

1. How to solder: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NU2ruzyc4&NR=1
2. Types of Solder: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COqGkYMOA44&NR=1

Soldering Surface Mounts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NN7UGWYmBY

Curious Inventor:
Tools, Parts, Kits for DIY'ers...
http://store.curiousinventor.com/

This guy's making a tiny home made CPU board
http://www.bigmessowires.com/

/A

Solar powered 3D Printer / Sun Cutter etc..

*The work of Markus Kayser*

http://thisiscolossal.com/2011/06/markus-kayser-builds-a-solar-powered-3d-printer-that-prints-glass-from-sand-and-a-sun-powered-laser-cutter/

http://www.markuskayser.com/work/sun-cutter/

/A

Simple uC + Assembler, learn uC programming.

Base 2 Electronics:
Simplest possible uC with I/O pins, learn assembly programming
with an assembler written in python, everything open sourced:
(Tulsa Univ).

https://www.base2.us/

More Interesting stuff

* Teen Builds Nuclear Bomb Detector

A teenager has created a homemade, hand-held nuclear bomb detector.
It utilizes a small fusion reactor that he made when he was 14,
and detects nuclear materials by shooting neutrons at closed
containers and exciting any nuclear materials inside which,
in turn, causes more radiation to be
produced, and is detected by the device. This may provide a simpler, more
effective alternative to searching containers visually, one-at-a-time. No
information is given about how safe such a practice is.

1. http://www.sciradioactive.com/Taylors_Nuke_Site/Current_Projects.html
2. http://gizmodo.com/5813207/teen-builds-nuke-detecting-device-saves-us-all-from-horrible-death

* First Exploit On Quantum Cryptography Confirmed

Physics World reports on researchers demonstrating a full eavesdropper
on a quantum key distribution link.
Unlike conventional exploits for security vulnerabilities that are often
just a piece of software, spying on quantum cryptography required a
box full of optics and mixed-signal electronics. Details are published
in Nature Communications.

Report from Vadim Makarov
0. http://www.vad1.com/
1. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/46305
2. http://www.iet.ntnu.no/groups/optics/qcr/full-eavesdropping-2011/#suitcase
3. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v2/n6/full/ncomms1348.html
4. http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.0105
5. http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/08/30/0647243/Hackers-Eavesdrop-On-Quantum-Crypto-With-Lasers
6. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/quantum_crypto_attack_dispute/

* NanoNote Goes Wireless

"Even though completely copyleft, the [1]NanoNote
hand-held platform failed to get the attention of many due to its low
specs and the lack of wireless connectivity. The objective to keep things
open had its price, and wireless technology is a mine-field of patents
and NDAs. Now, a few gifted hackers [2]designed an add-on card to bring
wireless to the NanoNote. It's not what you would expect; WLAN
compatibility was sacrificed, going for the less encumbered IPv6 over the
802.15.4 standard instead. The resulting dongles won't win a prize for
the highest bandwidth, but excel at simplicity, energy efficiency and
manufacturability. Want to see the ugly details? Designs, source code and
production documentation are [3]published under open source licenses."

Links:
1. http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Ben_NanoNote
2. http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/wpan/web/
3. http://projects.qi-hardware.com/index.php/p/ben-wpan/source/tree/master/

* New Imaging Technique Helps Explain Unconsciousness

"A new imaging technique called fEITER (for functional
Electrical Impedance Tomography by Evoked Response) attempts to
[0]explain the process of slipping into unconsciousness. The fEITER is a
[1]portable device that creates 3D imagery based on evoked potentials
measured hundreds of times a second. The interesting finding from these
studies is that unconsciousness appears to result from a buildup of
inhibitor neurons. From the article: 'Our findings suggest that
unconsciousness may be the increase of inhibitory assemblies across the
brain's cortex. These findings lend support to Greenfield's hypothesis of
neural assemblies forming consciousness.'"

0. http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=7143
1. http://images.gizmag.com/gallery_lrg/brain-3d-1.jpg

* Kilobots:

Costing a mere $14 each and buildable in about five minutes, but you
you don't just get yourself one single Kilobot -- designed to swarm in
the thousands.

Links:
0. http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/kilobots-are-cheap-enough-to-swarm-in-the-thousands
1. http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/ssr/projects/progSA/kilobot.html

/A

http://french.about.com/od/beglisten/Beginning_French_Listening_Exercises.htm

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Jim Williams, analog circuit guru, dies
Bill Schweber, Planet Analog
6/13/2011 10:23 AM EDT

Very sad news: Jim Williams of Linear Technology Corp—one of the world's
best analog-circuit designers, experimenter, hands-on guy, project
genius, damn nice guy, story teller, mentor, eternal student, engineer,
collector of historical scientific instruments, master of true and
measurable precision and accuracy, and much more—passed away
unexpectedly. Many of you know of him though his detailed, voluminous
application notes, or his many articles in EDN.

I knew Jim for decades, his sheer love of engineering and
experimentation was always a pleasure to absorb; he was a no-nonsense
person who liked tangible things and did not fall under the sway of
"hot" trends as the solution to all your problems, whether it was
software, Twitter, or Facebook. I recently saw him in his lab at LTC,
and our encounter inspired this column, here. Due to his talents and
accomplishments, Jim could easily have gotten away with being a
know-it-all expert and pundit, but he was actually fairly humble and had
genuine humility, as he wrestled the demons of circuit and component
reality, usually winning (and sometimes losing).

Jim began his career in the MIT Nutrition Lab, building circuits and
systems for their experiments and research. As far I know, he was not a
formally degreed EE; he was largely self-taught. He traveled back to MIT
each year to give a guest lecture to EEs and also do some recruiting and
outreach on the joys of analog.

Jim was a man who truly understood the analog signal chain, what it
could do, what it couldn't do, its vagaries and foibles, and how to make
it do what you wanted despite pushback of the laws of physics. His mind
was "one" with op amps, converters, references, and power supplies. He
will be sorely missed by his family, friends, and the engineering
community. I invite and encourage any of you who knew him, or knew of
him, to add a comment below.

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Youtube to MP3

Tips:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/grabbing-your-music-youtube-do-it-your-way

/A

Yoga keeps toppers fighting fit

<from indiatimes>

It may be a new trend, but it is several thousand years old. Yoga, once
associated with sages and gurus, is turning into a lifestyle statement.
Youth are taking to it in a big way, and swear that it calms jumpy
nerves and improves concentration, and helps them crack exams.

In fact, toppers who are basking in the glory of success at the end of a
gruelling exam season, attributed it to yoga. TOI came across several
such students from all streams, one of them being Aditya Gaonkar, top
state IIT scorer and CET engineering topper. Aditya feels yoga is one of
those things that helped him sail through the entrance tests. "Yoga
helps me a lot and improves my concentration while studying. It improves
the general health of a person and good health is important to study,"
he said.

"I used to suffer from an eye disorder when I was 10, and when all else
failed, I turned to yoga. I learnt it from my mom, who learnt it from a
yoga guru. Sometimes, I also learn from Baba Ramdev's CDs," says Aditya.
He performs a combination of light asanas (postures) like surya namaskar
and ends with pranayama (breathing exercises) for about 30-45 minutes
every day," he said. Yoga also reduces the stress students of his age
normally feel, he says. "It frees your mind, makes you feel calm, yet
energetic enough to study."

Amitha Ajith Kamath, ISC high scorer from Vidyashilp Academy, agrees. "I
initially started meditation after my 10th grade on a friend's
suggestion, as I was under a lot of stress. I didn't have a problem with
concentration, but I didn't think it would help me improve," said
Amitha.

Amitha learnt yoga and meditation in school and feels that it
significantly reduced her anxiety level. "I became stress-free, calm and
relaxed and my mind was clear, this helped me concentrate," says Amitha,
who prefers meditation to yoga.

Amitha feels there is a direct link between meditation and her academic
performance. "It definitely helps, and I recommend it to all students.
I'm sure they'll see a positive change in performance."

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or over the web

http://en.childrenslibrary.org/

--
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New Bhagavad Gita (in simple English!)

Go to => http://newbhagavadgita.blogspot.com/2009/01/contents.html

OR website: http://newbhagavadgita.in/2009/01/contents.html

/A

INCREDIBLE act - MUST SEE!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=jJrzIdDUfT4&vq=medium

Thanks Charu!

/A

.

__,_._,___

----- End forwarded message -----

Parents and Kids... reverse psychology?

Watch: ==> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504784_162-20053557-10391705.html
thanks charu

/A

Arduino projects -- cool

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/the-awesome-button.html

Teensy the tiny USB board ....very cool!
==> http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

/A

Drawing Pictures in LaTeX

==> http://timmurphy.org/2010/08/20/drawing-pictures-in-latex/

e.g.
\begin{picture}(5,5)
\multiput(0,0)(0.1,0.2){10}{\circle{1}}
\end{picture}

Enjoy!

http://apuzzleaday.org/puzzle/

--
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Games..games...games

Take a look at ==> http://www.mygamefast.com/volume1/issue3/

/A

IBM's Watson on Jeopardy

Introduction:
==> http://www.smartplanet.com/business/blog/business-brains/ibms-watson-on-jeopardy-is-this-the-beginning-of-the-singularity/13641/

Then go to:

==> http://www.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/

/A

Arduino Board, wire-up, program... make coffee

==> http://wirejungle.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/standalone-coffee-timer/

/A

Cellphone Use Tied to Changes in Brain Activity

Cellphone Use Tied to Changes in Brain Activity
By TARA PARKER-POPE

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have found that less
than an hour of cellphone use can speed up brain activity in the area
closest to the phone antenna, raising new questions about the health
effects of low levels of radiation emitted from cellphones.

The researchers, led by Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, urged caution in interpreting the findings
because it is not known whether the changes, which were seen in brain
scans, have any meaningful effect on a person's overall health.

But the study, published Wednesday in The Journal of the American
Medical Association, is among the first and largest to document that the
weak radio-frequency signals from cellphones have the potential to alter
brain activity.

"The study is important because it documents that the human brain is sensitive to the electromagnetic radiation that is emitted by cellphones," Dr. Volkow said. "It also highlights the importance of doing studies to address the question of whether there are — or are not — long-lasting consequences of repeated stimulation, of getting exposed over five, 10 or 15 years."

Although preliminary, the findings are certain to reignite a debate
about the safety of cellphones. A few observational studies have
suggested a link between heavy cellphone use and rare brain tumors, but
the bulk of the available scientific evidence shows no added risk. Major
medical groups have said that cellphones are safe, but some top doctors,
including the former director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer
Center and prominent neurosurgeons, have urged the use of headsets as a
precaution.

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Brown's gas... what's that ?

Monatomic H + O in gaseous form, is called Brown's gas.

Read more at http://waterasfuel.com/browngas/whatisbg/watergas.php

Practical Energy research:
**** http://waterasfuel.com/ ****

/A

Thirukkural - excellent site

http://www.muthu.org/kural/kural.php?kid=484&eid=1

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