The conversation thing

Not everyday we live to have this type of news. Japanese researchers at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan, the “Belle collaboration”, recently announced the discovery of an exotic new sub-atomic particle with non-zero electric charge. This particle, which the researchers have named Z(4430), does not fit into the usual scheme of “mesons”, combinations of a quark and an antiquark that are held together by the force of the strong interaction.

How about that ?

I have a friend in Holland doing her PhD in subatomic particles, and I remember we first met at a common friends party… the party was ok and we only got to talk late around midnight … until than I considered it to be a normal party, but after we got acquainted, for an hour or so we only discussed about mesons and quarks and stuff like that and two other friends were looking at us like at the discovery channel. nice party turnout, I’d say! Me, I just had info from physics in university and from my beloved Stephen Hawking’s books read like ten years ago… but Miruna was packed with up-to-date info on how research in this matter stands and where is it heading. Have to talk to her some time soon… keep you posted.

Now coming back to this new and shiny Z(4430), it reads there that it is produced together with the K-meson from decays of the B meson, and instantly decays into a psi-prime particle(Psi-prime) and a pi-meson. Cool… one question: What applications will it have in further research? Anyone taking a guess?

Thanks Adrian Buzatu for the info

… and sometimes you might even get a Nobel prize for it.

Fathers of mp3 industry, France’s Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg win the Nobel prize in physics for independently discovering a physical effect in 1988 which has led to hard disks being as we know them today. Nanotechnology gives sensitive read-out heads for compact hard disks, sensitivity that lets the electronics industry use smaller and smaller disks.

“The MP3 and iPod industry would not have existed without this discovery,” Borje Johansson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences told The Associated Press. “You would not have an iPod without this effect.”

Further on, cnn.com quotes Phil Schewe, a physicist and spokesman for the American Institute of Physics, who said the prize honored a terrific combination of great physics and huge practical application:

“I can hardly think of an application that has a bigger bang than the magnetic hard drive industry. Every one of us probably owns three or four or five devices, probably more, that depend on billions of bits of information stored on something the size of a dime.”

I’ve learned about this effect in university. Probably different storage systems will appear and other incredible ways of reading data will be developed, but indeed Fert and Gruenberg’s discovery actually made a point in the last 20 year computer industry.

Remember the first 5MB hard-disk?

Now that’s evolution….

Speaking of which, where do you think we’re heading in this quest for “you can never be too thin” Apple approach, the actual trend for everything in electronics and computer business?

I’ve just read the iht.com article on Muriel Cooper and have discovered a great mind. Never knew where the MIT logo came from and that it was her idea.

She was one of the visionaries that forseen design as interactive and driven by simplicity. In the 60s when tehnology was only in its infancy, people tended to see it as a big monster capable of changing social realities but unflexible.

Cooper has reinforced the idea that on-screen design can be better than just linecodes …. Almost 40 years after we’ve come to Microsoft surface and Apple’s iPhone. Muriel Cooper sure was right!

Such a nice robot, reminds me of when I was working
on a project of artificial intelligence… pattern recognition (first project in university) and I thought that determining an object by its contour was such a simple thing …. yeeaaah right! discovered only a few hours later that humans are quite marvelous beings … and the most simple things we do, take such vast computation in computer realm ..

I remember before actually starting to work on this assignment (its purpose was to learn the neural network the alphabet and then test the neural network what it has actually learned.. kinda like how we were taught the alphabet in the first grade, remember? ) Anyways, my imagination started to go places and I thought what is the big deal about recognizing letters … such simple shapes … we can always recognize cars for instance … and concepts come from bringing the learned shapes seen the most to conscience, or at least that was what I was thinking….

Well, I was sooo good in theory (I might have been a very good psychologist) but when finding ways to implement it …. the tough part came. And that’s when I realized that for an artificial being just to come to the concept of a car is not a simple matter of seeing many car shapes, you have to have the concept of velocity, of objects that can move, but are artificial, not nature based … and this simple thing such as what is natural and what is made by humans is sooooo hard to even consider not to mention to encode.

When I read the critics about this robot at first I joined the amusement “Even if this cyclist goes at the speed of a snail under sedatives, it is quite amazing to watch it ….”

Guys… just the fact that it can control its moves through a rough path, it’s mooore than enough… not to mention it is soooo cute! Way to go, MuRata!

Four grad researchers Kyle Buza, Luis Blackaller, Takashi Okamoto, and Kate Hollenbach from MIT have presented at FlashForward conference, a new graphics environment called E15. As Maeda says on his blog, E15 attempts to bring together the best of the power intrinsic to the Web, full-performance graphics processing, and a fully interpreted environment with dynamic class loading.

There’s a video on this site, looks amazing if I am imagining the right things. Anybody knows more about this E15 or has some more documentation on it?

A project from 2002 of the same Lev Manovich, with a daring(for its time) approach on browsing video content. Tagging visual information such as: contrast, automated velocity computing, while having means to navigate through a vast database of videos and audio files enables the spectator to choose themes and switch perspectives while enjoying this new type of eclectic cinema movie.

I am not actually convinced by this project, now seeing it at over 4 years distance, even though the idea has seen implementation - google video e.g. has done something relevant in this regard. The idea is truly valuable as the amount of video content exceeds at this point the possibility of indexing it in a normal fashion, but the visuals for the project are not that impressive.

Looking up the Internet for this (re)Actor2: The Second International Conference on Digital Live Art - Leeds, UK conference, I’ve found one very interesting woman. Kind of what I’d like to have done after the next 10 years.

One of the ideas I thought it would be good to develop (not that I’ve taken the time or the money to do it … oooh, hate myself in this kind of moments) is the one of online video conference portal.

This VideoLectures.net video portal is one very interesting website to look for in the following months. I think it has the spark that might turn itself into a great project.

Would you research such a site in order to learn for school or work related stuff?

Interesting material invented by Steven Kistler in 1930s over a bet … This material now revived by NASA appears to be the material for the future. Prevents pollution, insulates from extreme temperature … global warming, watch out!