Enjoy the speech (especially the final part) of one of the most visionary mind of the past century about problems which we wrongly consider as belonging to the past (cold war, self-distruction, etc..). Ladies and gentlemen: Isaac Asimov !
I think this video, particularly the final part, very well fits the spirit of Tecnopolis. It is curious that Asimov, the father of robotics and an advocate of technocracy, has been wrongly perceived as representative of cold “iperrationalism”, while as you can see he was endorsing “humanism” and he was himself “humanist” like true technocrats are.
Take one of his most famous sentence (I put it on my master thesis and I am going to do it again for the phd..)
“I do not fear computer, I fear the lack of them”"
You may be surprised or disagree, but I think, this sentence has a profound sense of humanity.
1. number of medals pro population (weighting gold > silver > bronze). Here the table
2. number of world records pro million of inhabitants (ok, I didn’t calculate it for each country, but I am pretty sure no country performed better then Jamaica: 3 world records and 2.8 Mil people - for comparison Australia: 7 WR and 21 Mil people)
One should also consider the kind of gold medals and world records Jamaica scored. (Athletics 100m+200m+4*100m, which are among the top competitive discipline at the olympic games)
Ok, Athletics is only a part of the Olympic Games, and I don’t want to say Athletics is more important than other sports, but how to say.. I am so happy for Jamaica!
Bolt belongs to an exotic group of high energy human particles, the so called BU -”Black Ãœbermenschen”. There are some in the Universe, but they are very difficult to find, of course.
Lunch:One pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.
Dinner:One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks.
PS: 1 pound ~ 0.5 Kg
Then he should devote at least one medal to Italy .. or pay some royalties to italian pasta manufactures (I suppose he only eat original pasta) or make some donations to the city of Naples.. (–> history of pizza )
We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
This Saturday we are especting a tremendously exciting 100m final at the Olympic Games in Beijing. [if you already look suspicious and wanna discuss about doping, please refer to the previous thread]. Look at this video, it’s stirring.
Olympic games are started, plenty of records have been scored (especially in the swimming pool) and most of the discussions I have now with people are about doping and “technologization” of performance.
Should we enjoy a world record or should we blame it?
please read this article from NYT, entitled “Let the Games Be Doped”.
the opening ceremony of the olympics games in Beijing was really beautiful. It radiated the image of a highly developed and refined civilization, with a high sense of beauty, history and progress.
Here: remembering the discovery of mobile-type printing
(Photo credit: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
Hopefully China will develop soon a comparable level of human rights too.
The sands of time are running out for the central star of this the Hourglass Nebula. With its nuclear fuel exhausted, this brief, spectacular, closing phase of a sun-like star's life occurs as its outer layers are ejected and its core becomes a cooling, fading white dwarf. In 1995, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to make a series of images of planetary nebulae, including the one above. Here, delicate rings of colorful glowing gas (nitrogen-red, hydrogen-green, and oxygen-blue) outline the tenuous walls of the 'hourglass.' The unprecedented sharpness of Hubble's images revealed surprising details of the nebula ejection process and may resolve the outstanding mystery of the variety of complex shapes and symmetries of planetary nebulae. Image Credit: NASA, WFPC2, HST, R. Sahai and J. Trauger (JPL) Read More
Recent Comments
BelfSleby: Wow - very awesome subject. I am goin to write about it too!!
sandrar: Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. Cheers! Sandra. R.
Klystron: No, I didn’t. Perhaps you’re right and more details are given elsewhere. I just would have appreciated just a little more explanation also in that article. Probably because I’m always slightly more interested in methods than in results… :o)
Massimo: About the methods… have you tried to track other publications by the same authors? probably they gave away some technicalities in other and more specialistic journals. Applying the model to only two scenarios doesn’t mean much, although it can be an interesting exercise. It would be interesting to know what results they got for Palestine, Rwanda, Sudan, etc etc…...
at least for me 
.. and for at least 2 reasons:
Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.
