The Songs of Distant Earth
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008Falling asleep to Mike Oldfield’s rendition…
R.I.P. Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008).
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
Mandelbrot in ASCII
Sunday, October 28th, 2007Recommended subject: “Small world experiment”
Tuesday, August 14th, 2007The small word experiment (Milgram, 1967) is a fascinating topic. Did you know that you are probably not so far away from knowing Bin Laden? The guy probably knows a lot of people which, in turn, know another bunch of people, and so on, on to you. There’s the concept of “six degrees of separation”, which states that you’re usually less than 6 connection away from anyone else in your society. The Erdös number (in honour to Paul Erdös) is a measure of distance to the hungarian mathematician, in which a link consists in co-writing a scientific paper with someone. Erdös has E(0), and anyone who has written a paper with him has E(1). Since the death of Erdös in 1996, no more E(1)’s are created, and the average E number will most likely increase substantially.
What is you P number? Mine is P(0), and that of anyone who has posted a comment in my blog is P(1). Do the math (or just comment, and get a free P(1))…
24ºC
Monday, April 16th, 200724ºC in Geneva, Switzerland. And it’s April… yes, one month ago it was snowing, and now I’m experiencing some days which wouldn’t be left behind the portuguese summer.
Today I had the privilege of attending a colloquium on “Making a Business out of Open Source”, by the JBoss Founder, ex-CEO, and currently “retired” Marc Fleury. Fleury has a good point on the subject, based on his own experience with JBoss (which was recently acquired by Red Hat). He seems to believe that the most profitable licensing model is the proprietary, when based on the premise of a large user base. However, he believes that hybrid models are the ones which can cope most easily with the problems of distribution channels, and at the same time guarantee both intellectual property preservation and freedom to the users. Regarding this point, he noted that, as most people don’t know, (FL)OSS doesn’t mean “for free”.
It was a pleasant colloquium, in the line of what CERN has provided in the last months (Mark Shuttleworth was the previous one, but, unfortunately, it was on the precise day I arrived at CERN).
Regarding hilarious things, we’ve been asked to stop at the customs, between Geneva and St. Genis, and an agent carefully verified our shopping receipts (just a pile of DVDs, Pedro’s new sports pants, and a football [yes, an european football]). The funny part was… we were travelling by bike. Yes, it is a bizarre situation.
And life goes on… I’ll travel to Portugal from 26th April to 1st of May. It will be a good time to stay with my family (which misses me, and I obviously miss as well).
“Pi on the grass”
Monday, April 9th, 2007Yes, it is not “Pi in the sky”, but rather “Pi on the grass”. The only example of vandalism against monuments which I found in Zurich is precisely a “literate vandalism” case (if such thing exists). Well, the brainless creature who did this may have some kind of salvation: at least he/she knows what “pi” is (well, I guess). At least, it’s not a football club, a signature, or some stupid icon. It’s… a Pi! A “Pi on the grass”…
Welcome to Meyrin, Mr. Ferreira
Saturday, March 10th, 2007It’s split in two by the border between France and Switzerland: most of the land is French, but the official currency is the CHF. The Meyrin site, at CERN, is a gigantic complex of buildings, where 6000 people work, everyday, for the benefit of science. It starts in Meyrin, in the outskirts of Geneva, and ends in a small french village called Saint-Genis, where the “Charles de Gaulle gate” opens everyday, so that people do not have to cross the border in order to get to CERN. It is surprising the large amount of people which cross the gate by bicycle [have to buy one, urgently]. However, less than 30 minutes walking are enough to get from Saint-Genis to building 513, the home of the UDS unit from the IT department. There, I share an office with Piotr and David, from Poland and France, respectively, experienced developers of the InDiCo system, the information system which manages the events that take place at CERN, an open source project adopted worldwide (by Fermilab, for instance).
At circa 100 meters deep into the soil, a giant gallery holds what will be called the “Large Hadron Collider” (LHC). Initially scheduled for the end of this year, the completion of the greates science experiment ever made will be probably delayed until the spring of 2008.
Podcast Favorites - Biota.org Conversations
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007This series of conversations on artificial life gathers different personalities from the ALife hobbyist and academic community, in order to debate different subjects in the Artificial Life field. I had the privilege to take part in the Jan 20th episode (”Is Open Source good for Artificial Life”), and it proved to be a great experience actually discussing this subject with different developers from this area.
Second Life
Saturday, January 13th, 2007
It is not new that Second Life’s client has gone open source. I’ve been discussing this question with Tom Barbalet, from Noble Ape, since we both believe that an ALife component would be interesting in such a simulation.
I’ve always been interested in flexible and “massive” simulations: the WoW phenomenon is a different kind of thing - it is not as flexible as SL, and has a well defined environment. Second Life, in the other hand, seems very user-configurable, perhaps too much user-configurable for an actual “game”. So, it looks as a kind of sandbox for different approaches to virtual worlds.
A possible Gaia component in Second Life would provide the game with a natural environment that would make it evolve towards a more realistic “world” simulation. Have you ever imagined an evolution-based ALife simulation where the selective force would actually include real people, progress, technology… well it could work as a test lab in order to build a small-scale model of our past, present and future world. It would be a great step towards the perfect distributed simulation: a simulation where “actually intelligent” people shape an ecosystem, and animals evolve according to natural and “human” (which is natural, too) selection.
Let’s see how the Second Life community goes with Open Source, and see if the ALife community finds it worthy of some work…
New Age rubbish on portuguese TV
Friday, September 1st, 2006Well… after some episodes of Penn&Teller, I feel tempted to swear in great, great amounts.
Some minutes ago, while watching one of the most seen TV shows in Portugal, “Portugal no Coração”, broadcasted by RTP, the public channel, I felt tempted to drive 50 Km to Gaia, enter the studios, and start yelling “This is crap! Can’t you f*cking realize this is solid crap?”
Well, the reason for such an enraged desire resides in the interview, conducted by the two beautiful and gentle female presenters, to the long-known pseudoscience advocate, Alexandra Solnado, daughter of the famous portuguese comediant Raul Solnado (poor guy). Alexandra defends that she is able to perform hypnotherapy sessions which transport people to their past lives… well, that would be enough to make me angry, but Alexandra decided to take it further, exposing her pseudotheology about human soul, body and behavior. According to Solnado, hyperactive children are a product of an experience in one of their past lives… she says medication is the worst thing you can provide them, and all they need is some of her “therapy” sessions. Well… that would be a perfectly harmless (yet stupid) claim, if she wasn’t being broadcasted to… let’s see… 10 000 000 portuguese citizens, plus 5 000 000 portuguese citizens living outside the country, and people living in portuguese-speaking african countries! I expected that our cute TV show presenters would at least ask her for scientific base for her affirmations, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. Instead of taking it as her opinion, they even managed to give her credibility, by agreeing with her, and placing her questions which denoted some previous knowledge on the matter. Well, after the pedophilia scandal, now we find ou that our television channels are being run by narrow-minded new age fans.
Alexandra Solnado even claimed that, in the USA, scientists had found out that the new generation of children is born with a cerebral cortex that is different from the previous generations’. Well… I bet my cerebral cortex is different from hers… (thanks God) but I’d like to know more about such a study.
I immediately wrote a mail to the show’s official address, which I transcribe below (roughly translated into English, too).
Featured on “Ape Reality”
Monday, August 28th, 2006Yesterday, I had the honour of being part of a voip-based round table discussion, featuring Tom Barbalet, Mridul Pentapalli and me, on the Noble Ape project and its future. It was a funny and quite interesting discussion, part of which was edited as the 42nd episode of Tom Barbalet’s podcast “Ape Reality”, a series which I follow daily. We hope to repeat the discussion, this time with more specific topics. It was interesting to be able to actually speak with Tom (since he had never heard my voice), and meet Mridul, which I hadn’t yet chatted with, since I started collaborating on Noble Ape.