September 7th 2010
Archive for the 'Science' Category
August 17th 2010
Dirt can be good for children
It has long been said that playing with dirt might actually be good for children. (Within limits, of course!)
Too much hygiene will actually be bad for your health… now the trick is to find out where the optimum lies :-)
April 19th 2010
You can’t have your own facts…
You are entitled to your own opinion,
You are entitled to your own believes,
But you are not entitled to your own facts – sorry, you are not!
April 13th 2010
Beautifull video: Nature by numbers
Nature is beautiful, even if, no, especially when you can compute it….!
March 23rd 2010
First flight for SpaceShipTwo
March 2nd 2010
13 things we have not solved – yet
New Scientist has a nice list of 13 Big Questions we still need to solve…
You can click on all the intros to read the latest state of things. I must say, most are very baffeling. These are the boundaries of human knowledge :-)
February 22nd 2010
Hubble pictures continue to amaze me…
February 19th 2010
Flowlab
Beautifull and somewhat strange pictures of a ‘lab on a chip’. More pictures here:
Video’s like this one:
can be found on this YouTube-channel. Things like this are, apparently, actually commercially available:
Agilent Technologies is the leader in commercial microfluidic Lab-on-a-Chip technology. This technology utilizes a network of channels and wells that are etched onto glass or polymer chips to build mini-labs. Pressure or electrokinetic forces move pico liter volumes in finely controlled manner through the channels. Lab-on-a-Chip enables sample handling, mixing, dilution, electrophoresis and chromatographic separation, staining and detection on single integrated systems. The main advantages of Lab-on-a-Chip are ease-of-use, speed of analysis, low sample and reagent consumption and high reproducibility due to standardization and automation.
This is from the website of Agilent.
February 17th 2010
What are we gonna do?
Very thought-provoking piece on the Huffingtonpost:
Semi-quote:
So where does that take us? Information is available and so are solutions. And where does that leave us? It strikes me, that with so much knowledge, we still don’t know better. If the world is not changing could it be because people are not changing?
This is what troubles me a about a lot of videos from TED, or many other interesting post/blogs/whatever. The trouble is not by any definition that we don’t know what should be done, or what needs to be done or even how to do it. The trouble seems to be that ‘we’ are just not doing it.
So the question should be more about: how can we pursuade people to start doing the right things? Of course, the trouble starts with defining what the ‘right thing’ is. And that is where most efforts will stop, because people will not even agree on what the right thing is. So that moves the problem again: how can you get people to subscribe to a problem?
Given the recent experience with the ‘Climate-gates’ and all the problems and escapes you see people using to try to wiggle out of this problem, I’m not very hopefull at all. People will deny a problem even if they know it exists if denying it will give them something they value more than solving the problem.
Again, the problem moves: how can you shift the burden of not solving the problem to the people that should be able to solve it, but don’t. And again, recent events (ie: the credit-crises) does not give me a lot of hope that this will happen. There, the exact opposite happens. The people who created the problem go more or less unhindered, and can simply continue doing what they always did and what created the problem in the first place.
Still, I think this might be the only way forward: start burdening people who can actually change things with the problem. That will lead to solutions.
November 18th 2009
Mind of a programmer/expert
Part of a comment on /.:
But I think there’s also a subtler problem, one which, sorry, I’m probably going to do a bad job explaining but I hope you’ll bear with me. The problem is that if you’re a great brilliant technical developer, you’re not going to even think about how to make your program simple. It’s sort of a “not seeing the forrest for the trees” problem. You’re going to be so smart about understanding all the complicated things your program does, and so well-versed at everything that can be done with your program, that you’re not going to be able to understand what a new user will be thinking when he first approaches your program. You’re just too close to the problem.
I totally dig this. I think it is very common too, and not only with programmers. I think it happens all the time, when people are really into a problem and try to explain it to a layman. The layman may be a expert in his/her field, but not in the particular field that is the object of discussion at that moment. Even very bright people will need to have some dots connected if they are to follow the expert.
That is why experts good at explaining things are very rare – and populair!