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 !
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).
Plastic Logic is a spin-off company from Cambridge University’sCavendish Laboratory, and is a pioneer in polymer transistors and electronics. Production of the Plastic Logic Reader should start this year in Dresden, Germany.
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 amatter 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 LubosMOtl and TommasoDorigo, guys with PhD and high reputation in particle physics say don’t worry in these terms…
[LubosMotl] [...] 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 LHCstartup 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.
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.
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..
“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
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.”
NASA.com - Heads of Agency International Space Station
The heads of the International Space Station (ISS) agencies from Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia and the United States met in Tokyo, Japan, on March 11, 2010, to review ISS cooperation. From the left are Dr. Keiji Tachikawa, President of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator; Jean-Jacques Dordain, Director General of the European Space Agency; Anatoly N. Permirov, Head of the Russian Space Agency; and, Dr. Steve MacLean, President of the Canadian Space Agency. With the assembly of the ISS nearing completion and the capability to support a full-time crew of six established, they noted the outstanding opportunities now offered by the ISS for on-orbit research and for discovery including the operation and management of the world's largest international space complex. The heads of agency reaffirmed the importance of full exploitation of the station's scientific, engineering, utilization, and education potential. They noted that there are no identified technical constraints to continuing ISS operations beyond the current planning horizon, and that the partnership is currently working to certify on-orbit elements through 2028. They emphasized their common intent to undertake the necessary procedures within their respective governments to reach consensus later this year on the continuation of the ISS to the next decade. Image Credit: JAXA 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…...
this is a “call for impressions” about the new 
