Blog in Space II: The Certificate

This a Certified Space Blog now.

Immortal Mice

I am Jerry McCloud from the clan McCloud. I was born in the highlands of Scotland...
For anyone that thinks that the Highlander movies/series were stupid and unrealistic read this and prepare your sword.

Big Brother is a Printer

Secret Code in Color Printers Lets Government Track You A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

Full story

Blog in Space

We are in spaaaace!
The Aereal is now proudly being broadcast in space....
Really, thanks to Mind Comet, that are probably insane
people or have money enough to dip themselves in gold.
The process is fairly simple they have a powerful antenna that
they aim at lets say Omicron Persei 8 and just broadcast the blogs.
Some one is going to be very surprised when they get the first
Alien comment saying that no one cares what Earthlings think.

{ design.history

This are some of my old web sites, most stink, some have good ideas on them, others are rip-offs of other sites. A few of them are in Spanish so get you BabelFish ready.

• Aereal City (Green)
• Aereal City (Simple Lime Green)
• Aereal City (Red)
• Aereal City (Fancy)
• Zaap!
• Backteria
• LibreCea
• Muertoz Warez Center
• Necromonium
• DNG (Digital Necromonium Gallery)
• Tu5k Studios
• Magoz Comix
• V1 Design
• AllFile

There is a few more I want to get there but I have to find them, and some others that are not online anymore.

Everything is Illuminated

Yesterday in an attempt to see Jim Jarmush's Broken Flowers on one of the two functions still playing (West Boylston Theater) around here, I was happily surprised by this film. At the moment of getting the tickets for BF the girl at the counter tells us that there is a scratch in the entire film and we could go and see how bad it was before buying them. After checking the green strobe light in the middle of the screen we decided to see what else was playing. Our first option was The Constant Gardner but it was 5 minutes into the film already. An Elijah Wood movie was playing that, after some inquire we decided to give a chance. The movie starts with a freakishly looking Jonathan (Wood) at her grandmother's death bed, continues with a flashback of a child Jonathan at his grandfather's funeral and illustrates us about his slightly creepy collection habit. After this we are introduced to the main characters and proceed with the "rigid search". The storytelling is very interesting, jumping between past and present. The choice of having all the Ukraine characters (all except for Alex (Eugene Hutz) who is a "premier" character and translator) speak their native language gives the story a realistic geographic anchor . There has been a healthy amount of great films with WWII and the holocaust as central themes, but this one manages to "illuminate" in a different way both the large, because of the setting and small scale of those times thanks to the deep personal nature of the story. The story is based on the novel (by Jonathan Safran Foer) and how the author seeks a woman in a small town that saved his grandfather. The acting is very moving, specially Alex's Grandfather (Boris Leskin), who doesn't say a lot pleasant things but tells a very sad and regretful story thru his eyes. Photography and Music of old and modern times make this film shine in a seldom seen part of the world that is full of memories and melancholy.

more >
read the novel>

{ science.energy: Biodiesel

Another theme of interest to me is practical energy and how not to give money to the Fat Evil Oil System (FEOS for short). I got some articles in how to do your own biodiesel out of used cooking oil. Here there is some interesting ones:

• Make your own biodiesel >>
  Very extensive and detail.
• Fabrica tu propio biodiesel >>
  Same as first but in Spanish.
• Biodiesel: A Primer >>
  More practical less science.

I guess the more interesting facts on this is that if you can get the used oil for free (that is, usually, a hassle to get ride off) and you have the time; can be a very profitable hobby at a personal or family scale. Applied to a small business (For example Food production and delivery) will drastically cut down cost in transportation.
In a farm environment will exploit crops unsuitable for food and help reduce cost of production and transportation. More surprising yet is the fact that the best producer of vegetable oil is an algae that grows in human or animal waste water, imagine the use of city sewers to produce this energy. Not a nice job to do, but I guess we'll have to omit the sense of smell and disgust in robots for this task.

{ science.idea-research: Zero Point Energy

I did some quick research on ZPe (Zero Point Energy) and this is what I think can be used for a story and how I understood it: When you have two objects of neutral charge close to each other by a couple of atom diameters the wavelength of this space is reduced. In "Normal" empty space there are particle-antiparticle systems that appear and disappear constantly. If you deduce the wavelength the amount of these systems decreases making it less populated or emptier, so the outside vacuum pushes the objects close together, is similar to the effects of wind and water in aero and hydro dynamics.

Try this hold two sheets of paper forming a V shape and you blow in the middle the sheets will come together. So in theory this works like basic movement that is power by the vacuum. My application for it will be to use some kind of springs (more on this next)to make this movement continuous and with that movement generate energy. For the springs this is my idea: stuck to the neutral charge objects we need some kind of material that will not pass charges a buffer insulation, and stuck to that we need an object with a charge (positive or negative, lets say positive for the example) so if we have negative charge objects in the positive side of this sandwich (positive/buffer/neutral) the vacuum will separate the opposite charges and the magnetic energy will try to put them back together if u can create a balance and have control over the negative single objects you can create an oscillating atomic machine. This machine will be symmetric and have two sides working at the same time. If all this can be constructed all we need now is to take some atoms and put together a dynamo that will transform this movement into usable energy. Another way could be to have a series of these machines and create some kind of wave that I guess will generate energy by itself. Keep in mind that this is all theory and my objective is to create some basic pseudo science to fuel sci-fi fiction.
I will do some sketching of the system (Ala Back to the Future) and put it here soon.

For an interest read on Quantum Machines GenieBuster has an interesting article.
And for some visual help see this guys work on Flash Math Creativity.

{ RSS Feeds

I'm doing some research to get a couple of RSS feeds up and runing directly on this blog.
The first Candidates are:

• Betanews (This is a news site about software and computers mainly)
• Newsarama (I'm not sure they have the feed now)
  
  More coming soon.

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