February 2005
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Love it/ Hate it
An excellent observation by BBC's Washington correspondent Justin Webb -
"America is fast becoming a nation of faith not fact. A nation where the unpleasant aspects of human existence are simply airbrushed away."
On the other hand, Rob Watson, also a Brit journalist, says to his Beloved US of A -
"... the rest of the world has far more to learn from you than it has to fear."
Friday, February 18, 2005
A 1000 Mb and beer?
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Knotty problems!
A couple of days back, I had the good fortune to attend Dr. Brian Green's lecture on "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality.". It was mostly a the same material as from the PBS program - The Elegant Universe [which you can actually watch online], and presumably, from his books [which I haven't read]. Nonetheless, it was great to see and hear a leading physicist of our day in person.
I couldn't ask him any questions though... so I'm going to post them here. Of course, since I know nothing of the current status of string theory, I don't know whether these questions are still questions for everybody or just for me. Feel free to answer them, or to ask more questions...
- How does matter interact with space-time and warp it at the large scale? [not strictly related to string theory, but arising from the lecture.]
- What 'form' of energy are the strings?
- or - When mass is converted to energy, what is happening in terms of strings?
- or - Can we convert energy to mass? [this has perhaps been done before string theory?] If we can, how is that happening in terms of strings?
- If space rips, and there are no strings around to 'heal' it, then what? [I suppose we can always invoke virtual strings, like virtual particle pairs]
- How do strings 'calm' space over Planck lengths? Is Planck length effectively a smallest unit of space - making space discreet, rather than continuous? [Possibly, but at lengths far smaller than Planck length..]
- What would happen to the strings inside a black hole? [Apparently, a singularity can't be smaller than a string...but can multiple strings be packed in the same space?]
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Nice! :>
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Distributed Computing
More and more computing intensive research projects are utilizing the 'Volunteer your CPU cycles' approach of SETI@Home [which I've never ran, I don't think it's a significant quest as of now...]
Last year I used to run grid.org's cancer research program, but this year I've switched to ClimatePrediction's whole earth climate simulations [they recently published [pdf] in Nature!]. There's also Foldin@Home which explores the protein folding problems - partly to understand protein mis-folding diseases like
bovine spongiform encephalopathy [mad cow disease to us mortals], cystic fibrosis, and Alzheimer's, among many others.
Now there is a newcomer [yet to be launched] - Einstein@Home! It plans to "search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors" whatever that means! ;) - here's an introductory article on news@nature.com.
Take your pick! [tell me if you know some more, I'll add them to my list - look in the left hand column...]
Interestingly, Google has started helping out [having considerable experience in running DC] by offering a DC Client bundled with their Toolbar. Right now you can run Folding@Home via the toolbar, but they're saying that there will be more.