Per Ardua Ad Astra

Hehe, that’s a weird topic isn’t it? Well, it’s because I just realised a connection between liquid Nitrogen, liquid mercury and boiling water!

How is that so, you wonder? Well, under certain conditions, the three look similar. Liquid N forms cool droplets at room conditions, as are liquid Hg. But H2O? Well, that requires a really hot pan.

See, what happens was that I was planning on boiling some water. Then, I suddenly wondered how water droplets would react when you sprinkle them on a heated pot. Well, I had a hunch that it would be just be the same as sprinkling liquid N on a tabletop in room conditions. I once saw a mad professor at NUS doing that at the Open House I’ve attended last year, and he’s really mad for dipping his fingers into it! But luckily no harm done (I think!). So first, I heated up a pot for a few minutes. Thankfully I was alone while I was experimenting, or else I would have been severely criticised for wasting gas.

Once the pot is hot enough, I just sprinkled water into the pot and voila! Tiny spherical droplets bouncing around the walls of the pot before merging into a huge droplet! Cool! (I think I seriously don’t have a life since I’m wasting my time playing with water droplets on a Saturday afternoon!) It’s, just like liquid Hg droplets, except that they’re not shiny. This is what I took. Doesn’t seem particularly interesting, since you can’t see them in motion. Well, I can’t post the movies that I took, so this will have to do.

Well, just came back from a day trip to Genting so I apologise in advance if my blog lacks it’s usual clarity (or it being more abstruse than usual). Well, nothing much to add on at the moment except for this. A bunch of researchers in Israel has just developed a concept to string honeypots (decoy systems to lure malicious software to them, so it can be ‘captured’ for analysis) across a network to immunise the network against viral infections. It is just a theoretical plan (that means no practical plans exist for the concept just yet) so we couldn’t expect our anti-virus systems to operate ala immune system style! But as always, it always looks good on paper. But it is an intriguing concept though. Especially the part where the healing patch is generated automatically! That’s so bloody cool! At least we wouldn’t need to spend time updating the anti-virus software anymore! I wonder if they will model it along the lines of a biological immune system. =) More on it here.

Moving on, the Intelligent Design issue seems to be involving more and more science disciplines! I initially thought it was confined to just evolutionary biology (and the associated fields such as palaeontology and geology in providing proof for evolution). But I have simply no idea that those ‘IDists’ even pulled in the fields pertaining to SETI research! SETI (short for Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) is the study of life out there and how it comes about in the Universe. It relates to the fields of planetary science, astrobiology and etc, so imagine my surprise (hard to imagine, but it’s probably sufficient for you to know that I was surprised, hehe) when ID drags SETI into the picture to justify its claims!

Their basic premise was that SETI researchers look for complexity in extraterrestrial (meaning literally out of this world) signals. But guess what? They were seriously misguided (for the umpteenth time!). SETI people look for artificial signals, not complex ones (as if we’ll be able to decode complex messages in the first place!). Plus, SETI scientists do not claim that G** was behind the signals unlike IDists, but rather intelligent life (that is not supposed to be omnipotent nor omniscient) that evolved(not created by design!) elsewhere in the Universe.

To use the example of a pulsar, the discoverers at Cambridge, UK (Anthony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell) first speculated that the signal from a pulsar has its origins in extraterrestrial intelligence, not because it emits a complex signal, but rather a simple sinusoidal signal! The significance was its uniformity (the pulses repeats itself with accuracies matching atomic clocks!). To know more, you can read on why the possibility was discounted later on and why ID proponents have a flawed argument in using SETI to back up their assertions here.

Well, nth new to go around, but here is something that you’ll find funny provided that you know what have been happening in in Washington lately. =)

Let’s Be Thankful

Porous Borders