Going to camp (AKA Sunday church x6)

I reaaaalllyyy don’t want to go. Anyways, that means I won’t be posting for three days. At least I will be taking with me a book to read and papers to do some physics math. In the absense, I will give the following materials:

A creation story retold by science, purely evidenced based, no guesses, or gimmicks:

And reading materials: http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page

Getting away from the web will be a torture, oh, and don’t mind the ideological biases contained in them (in case you are wondering, yes, i’m not so religious), since they have interesting things to say.

Mutant E Coli

The experiment has been a while since it came out, but it is so fascinating and exciting that I have to post about it. It is basically about an experiment done by Richard Lenski with bacterias that could only eat glucose, and after 20 years, around 40,000 generations, they could eat ascorbate. That is amazing! It is a big leap. According to the paper, three mutations had to occur. After this one mutation around generation 20,000, they found out it made it easier for the bacterias to mutate into ascorbate eating ones. They did it by freezing bacterias every some generations and reviving them to repeat it.

More details in: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/06/historical_contingency_in_the.php

And if you want to look at the abstracts and summary by the author himself: https://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/

Brain Storm

There is a really good lecture on finding out about the brain and cool stuff about it in this video: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/184

The neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran explains how scientists can find out more about the brain by looking inside of brains that is not normal or injured. In it, he examines three oddities: People who can’t recognize faces or recognize faces but thinks the person is a stranger, phantom limbs (people can feel their limbs even though it is cut off), and synesthesia (the mixing of senses, like certain numbers make people see certain colors). In it, he explains why he thinks those things happens and gives you insight of the inner workings of the brain, and how he finds about it. I especially like the part of synesthesia, sounds like a cool thing to have 🙂 . Oh, and anyone reading this should check out other TED lectures, K?

Minesweeper Record (part 2)

A new record, but with only a very few differences in seconds from the previous one. I can’t show a pic, though, cause I did it in another computer. Time: Expert Mode: 295

Spore Weirdness

The spore creature creator recently came out, and with it a lot of weirdness. My brother have created a lot of weirdness with it, but I have seen creatures created from the image of videogame characters/monsters, and in the case of the image below, a wiimote.

 

Enjoy more weirdness from this website: http://gonintendo.com/?s=spore

Church is boring

Or at least Catholic church is. I have to go every Sunday, which I think is one hour wasted from my time. You multiply that by the amount of days I have gone, that is like… Idon’t know, but you know the point. Sometimes, though, I have to wear a white robe and stand on the frot like statues, and sometimes “help” the pastor.  Those days are extra boring and tiresome. And damn, I am going to camp next week, which is religious and lasts three days. They dedicate like 2 hours to bible stuff, so that is like going to church 6 times in three days.  I at least enjoyed the stories they told at protestant church sessions. The worst part in any church, in my mind, is the singing session. I think they are horrible, loong, and … horrible.

Now, you may be thinking, why am I telling you this? I don’t know, but it is Saturday, and I dread church days. They bring tears to my eyes 🙂

Vector proof thingy

I have always wanted to do math proof, but it is kind of hard XD . Now, I lately have been reading about vectors (yeah, i know, it is kind of nerdy, but school never teach me science well or what I want to learn well), and there is something called the cross product.

 uv                 

—-=cosθ

|u||v|

  

Vectors are basically arrows in a graph, and it is one method of multiplying them. I saw somewhere, though, that the distance between two vectors (makind a complete triangle) is equal to the law of cosines, and because of that, equation above is equal to law of cosines, since both equation should yield the same angle. So here is proof:

 

 

                

1. |v-u|^2=|u|^2+|v|^2-2|u||v|cosθ

 

2. |v-u|^2-|u|^2-|v|^2

———————– = cosθ

          -2|u||v|

 

3. v^2-2uv+u^2-v^2-u^2

—————————— = cosθ

           -2|u||v|

 

4.  -2uv

   ——- = cosθ

     -2|u||v|

 

5.  uv

    — = cosθ

    |u||v|           QED

                                            I hope I am not wrong.

 

Cool Abiogenesis Video

Abiogenesis is the theory of how life began. It is still in a hypothetical state, but in the video above is one possible way in which life could have arisen 3.5 billions of years ago. Frankly, I think there are many ways life could have arisen, and I don’t buy panspadermia (meteorite from a remote system contains life and seeded Earth) because it is a cop out. One explanation, which is in the video above, is that simple fatty vesicles which could divide, absorbed nucleotides by simple thermodynamics, which I find extremely beautiful and “simple” (meaning, really good explanation that doesn’t need anything overcontrived). It also takes a bite at creationist arguments, which I find logically illogical and ignorant of how science works, and shows that perhaps life was inevitable. In the end, biology is glorified chemistry, a really cool chemistry.

DAS stuff (part 2): star party

Last week, I went to a star party, which is basically an event people gather together to watch sky stuffs. It gets dull sometimes, but talking with people and looking at the magnificent beauties of  celestial phenomena makes one forget about it, and it is fun. That day, we looked at Saturn (I liked the fact that I could see its moons), Mars, and binary stars. The coolest binary was the double double, and as the name suggests, two doubles circle each other.

(you can skip this, tis a science  lesson)                                                                                                                                                                      Which brings me to the first fact of the blog, which is: did you know that most stars are actually double? Yeah, the sun is a freak in that respect, and that is because stars start in a stellar nursery called the nebula, therefore it is very probable that two stars can form close and as time passes, those star systems drift away from each other. The sun is a lucky gal that drifted away a long time ago without a companion.  Disclaimer: I am a High School Student, so I might be wrong in a detail or two.(/science lesson)

Another object we saw was a man made satellite orbitting the Earth, which was visible to the naked eye. I don’t know it was my first time, though, I have seen lots of moving things in the sky in my life. Knowing it was man made, though, gave me this butterfly in the stomach kind of feeling. I ended up pretty satisfied with what I saw, though the sky could have been better. It was hazy and the moon was shiny. (if you look at it with a telescope, your eye kind of hurts because of its brightness)

DAS stuff (part 1)

In the third Tuesday of every month, I go to Delaware Astronomical Society meeting. In the meetings, guest speakers come to talk or lecture about their hobby or latest reasearch in astronomy, which is really cool, and make somewhat geeky jokes. Once in a while, one does get to look at telescopes (observations are done in star parties), and seeing Saturn by one’s own eyes is just magnificent. The experience is nothing like seeing it in picture in my opinion, though the pictures themselves do manage to be even more beautiful.

This month’s meetings was about astrophotography. In the presentations, they presented a wide range of equipments, and introduced the hobby. The hobby seems like it is only for fancy people with money to spend 🙂 . Actually, it depends on what one wants to do, do the cheapest is like a few hundred bucks.  Then, four people presented their equipments and the fancy pictures they took. One person made an observatory, which is just an outdoor plataform with a sliding wooden shed to keep the telescope in. One person had really cool and fancy equipment, and with a computer, he could point it anywhere in the sky. Many, if not all presenters had electronics connected to the telescope from the garage or indoors, to remain warm and cozzy. Some showed some of the techniques they used and how they eliminated problems.  All of them presented really cool pictures, like Orion’s nebula, Whirlpool galaxy, Saturn, a nebula which looked like it had llamas on it, and more.

Twas fun, till the end. Sometimes, one gets to recieve free stuff in the club. Last year, I got a laser from dinner meeting, and in this one, I got two years worth of Sky and Telescope magazine! Yaeh for free stuff! I have some much things to read, though, like other magazines, I don’t know how I can finish them!