Tecnopolis.eu

If I had to buy a phone now, I would wait at least until Sept 23 for the official presentation of the HTC Dream.  Then, on October 20 we could buy it in US stores (and probably one month later in Europe). Finally (after more than 1 year hype & rumors) we are going to appreciate the first Google-Phone based on the “Android” operating system.  This guy is also supposed to become the IPhone killer device. (I trust the google guys and I know they will kill it !

[img credit: mobilemag]

I like the embedded full qwerty keyboard and the touch screen.  I am just a little disappointed for the camera (3Mpx only, no Carl Zeiss optics like my Nokia N95).  Some other features like GPS are still disputed (!). Here is a video showing also the Google Street View on the HTC Dream.

Price should be around 200 $ + contract (with T-Mobile in the US).

[last img taken from The Reference Frame]

Popularity: 15% [?]

nice

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

Popularity: 20% [?]

It took several years R&D from an idea originally  developd at  XEROX in the 70′.

Ladies & Gentklemen the Plastic Logic Reader

Plastic Logic is a spin-off company from Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, and is a pioneer in polymer transistors and electronics. Production of the Plastic Logic Reader should start this year in Dresden, Germany.

Popularity: 13% [?]

instead, plenty of nice pictures (constantly updated) like this

and this

euphoria spreading all over the internet, already on youtube!

congratulation, Science!

Popularity: 17% [?]

img credit: Leonardo blog

On September 10. (yes in two days.. CERN will start the LHC experiment and as you probably know, there is some concern out there about the possibility such machine could generate a “hungry” black hole, which would eventually eat all the earth including all Mc-Donald’s..

Now people ask me all the time wheather this is going to be true, wheather we should take this threat as serious and so on.. (actually most of them ask me this way: “this is just bullshit, isn’it“?)

Well, in my official position as PhD Student in Engineering with a passion for Physics and Science I should say: there are no real reasons to be scared because the probability of such a catastrophic scenario is ridiculous.

But actually, this is mainly a matter of trust for no-specialists like me and probably you.

The whole has begun for me reading this article on the Herald Tribune. In particular I focused (and my face started to became like this °___°) on this paragraph:

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group.

I also trust Einstein`s relativity theory , Howking’s radiation and CERN’stuff as well (here the official safety review of LHC by CERN). But because I am not an expert in particle physics, it seems to me  quite reasonable to select some of such experts and consider their opinions on the subject. And then if Lubos MOtl and Tommaso Dorigo, guys with PhD and high reputation in particle physics say don’t worry in these terms…

[Lubos Motl] [...] a typical misunderstanding of the LHC alarmists. The black holes that can be produced are not the multi-mile black holes with the total energy matching the whole Sun that they know from TV. Instead, their total energy would correspond to a few mosquitos, as he correctly writes, and this is a certain number of orders of magnitudes away from the Sun [...] whatever they produce, while highly interesting for the experts, will have qualitatively identical impact on the Swiss and global security: no threat whatsoever. It will even be a safely zero threat for the people who live directly above the tubes of the collider (the depth is between 50 and 175 meters) and the children who may sleep there. more

[Dorigo]: “I am so fed up with such claims, soooo fed up, that a small but non negligible part of me is actually rooting for black holes being actually produced by LHC, for Hawking radiation being a gross mistake, and for the very first black hole created at LHC startup to swallow our whole solar system.” more

You can find plenty of articles and blog reactions on this topic. All the sparse links on this post belong to my personal selection.

I also recommend:

The Large Hadron Collider will not eat the world (didactic and detailed, from the interesting site Scholarsandrogues.com, people there seem to be pretty smart.)

What I find more exciting, however, is trusting catastrophists for a while and make some speculation about what would happen on Earth from the sociological point of view.

now check this anti-LHC video:

I think, the most valuable social phenomenon to date (I mean, just before the end of the world has been an increased interest for physics and science from common people and media, even thought most of them have probably joined the anti-science crusade..

I also appreciated this blogger saying

“End-of-the-World scenarios don’t scare me a bit. It’s not comets hitting the Earth, some asswipe terrorist with a suitcase nuke setting it off downtown, the sun exploding, grey goo eating our planet - none of those things. Being covered with very large spiders is way more scary to me.”

My most notable personal “social behaviour reaction” to date has been the weird idea to convince nice girls for a date because of the end of world coming soon..
Unfortunately it doen’t seem to work: you will never imagine how deep the “abyss of indifference” for such topics still is among common people.. let´s hope for some more hype by tomorrow

Goodbye and God bless you!

AZ

PS: Some guys already found a way to make money with the end of the world… and this post share the same ambitions

Popularity: 22% [?]

this is a “call for impressions” about the new browers of bigG.

I had no time to try it out (I will soon) but you certainly did it

[fell free to comment in italian if you want - questo minipost é  un idea di Andrea Masseroni che ringrazio!]

****************************************************

Cari amici,

Popularity: 23% [?]

is the estimated probability of a  fatal accident with the Space Shuttle in current operational conditions.

from a recent article on the  BBC

In April, Dr Griffin, (the Big Boss of NASA) told a  US Senate sub-committee: “The shuttle is an inherently risky design. We currently assess the per-mission risk as about one in 75 of having a fatal accident. If one were to do, as some have suggested, fly the shuttle for an additional five years - say two missions a year - the risk would be about one in 12 that we would lose another crew.”

Popularity: 8% [?]