Tecnopolis.eu

Today I woke up noticing my Chinese neighbours being quite excited. They were setting the laptop in the kitchen and trying to watch the main chinese tv channel (CCTV) through the internet.

What’s going on here? - they look at me quite surprised -come on you don’t know? today is new year’s eve in China! For all Chinese people around the world is a very important day!

“[from Wikipedia] Chinese New Year or Spring Festival is one of the most important traditional Chinese holidays. It is sometimes called the Lunar New Year, especially by people outside China. The festival traditionally begins on the first day of the first lunar month (Chinese: 正月; pinyin: zhÄ“ng yuè) in the Chinese calendar and ends on the 15th; this day is called Lantern Festival. Chinese New Year’s Eve is known as ChúxÄ«. It literally means “Year-pass Eve”.

Wow! nice!!!!!! You can also have a look at this video:

CCTV1 was broadcasting a huge special about this, but, surprisingly they did not show so much about colorful celebrations . They focused on the president Hu Jintao visiting common people, poor people, people who have to work during this holiday, etc. They then showed famous places around the world where people were celebrating China new year’s eve (not only Chinese ones, like in Harvard and NY). The atmosphere of spreading happiness seemed to me quite genuine. Maybe you can disagree on this point and call it propaganda. I don’t think so. I was feeling a kind of true human contact between the highest chinese politic figure and the common people of the “People’s Republic of China“.  I was impressed.

And you know, the Chinese wave is huge. When it resonates worldwide with such a positive energy (as it was at the Olympic Games last year) is really nice.  I think, I’ ve got a better insights into their culture, today. Of course I remain aware of the dark side of the moon.

Happy New Year, China!

img credit: chineseculture.com

Popularity: 83% [?]

Hello Physics&Philosophy Freaks! this is the first post of my old friend Max, bio-engineer with a passion for Physics and “itself” an advanced positronic brain. But he missed the proper name of HeiseNberg, probably due to the U.P. … [Ok ok, I've corrected the spelling, NdMax]

..btw, if you don’t know Heisenberg&Co, either you commit directly suicide or you just do it after watching “Electrons Are Weird“ ..[ anyway this nice vid from BBC is also recommended to all of you]

c h e .. r s!
AZ

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W. Heisenberg, “Physics and philosophy” (Der Teil und das Ganze,1954)

The author of this book doesn’t even need a presentation. The style is definitely very smooth and accessible, and fancy maths is removed altogether.

The purpose of the whole essay (written in 1954) was to give a summary about how the evolution of physics, throughout the centuries, was able to revolutionise the very idea of reality, and how the early cartesian “Weltanschaung” heavily influenced the successive development of natural sciences and of the scientific method itself.

The first chapters are a fast-paced summary of 2500 years of epistemology (philosophy of knowledge), from the ancient Greek to the present (well, at least the present as it was in the ’50s).

In the following, Heisenberg takes the reader by the hand and introduces him/her to the most counter-intuitive aspects of quantum physics. He then explains how and why such results required, in order to be interpreted, a radical philosophical revolution within the scientific community, a revolution that, at the time when the book was written, was still at the center of white-hot debate.

Einstein is regarded as the man who first introduced a radical Ockham’s razor-like approach to physics, that first produced the Special Relativity by removing the (physically unnecessary) dogmatic belief in the absoluteness of time and space.
However, according to Heisenberg (and we educated 21st-century people can respectfully agree), Einstein himself was not able to take his approach to the extreme and shocking consequence, namely the necessity of removing the principle of deterministic causality in order to interpret some of the observed physical phenomena (an operation that led to the birth of quantum physics).
All his life he remained skeptical about the metaphysical implications of the new theory.

And here comes the most interesting thesis proposed by the book:
Heisemberg tracks the difficulty of this paradigm shift, back to the “original sin” committed by Cartesius, when he divided reality into “res cogitans” (human mind) and “res extensa” (all the rest), and assuming that the laws of physics would apply only to the second (at the time the distinction appeared necessary in order to cope with the problem of free will).
This -in itself, illegitimate- assumption would have then propagated through the centuries, producing a widely accepted view of the physical world that was lacking a solid justification both on physical and phylosophical ground.
Of great interest is also Heisenberg’s insight in the foundations of the experimental method, where a suggestive (and quantistically corrected) version of Immanuel Kant’s “a priori” is proposed.

A highly recommended reading.

Popularity: 97% [?]

chinese tightrope artist: just luck?

Tianwa Yeung: young chinese violine player (Capriccio n.5 is one of the most difficult and spectacular piece for violin solo)
http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=NZmc0fKfgWs

Amazing performance of a group of Chinese boys:

Popularity: 33% [?]

Non nascondo la mia contentezza per la vittoria di Obama.

Ma non nascondo nemmeno le mie preoccupazioni, in primis per la sua vita.  

Lo Zeitgeist é un animale difficile da domare e che puó sempre impazzire, specie quando gli devi insegnare cose nuove e fargli cambiare direzione.  Servirebbe trapiantare il ghost di Obama in un cyberbody Megatech protetto dalla Section 9.

Intanto accontentiamoci della DTS2006, una  Cyber-Cadillac corazzata (previsti sviluppi futuri per decollo verticale tipo Delorian “BitF- part 2″):

dal Corriere:

“..la sua corazza in titanio, acciaio, alluminio e ceramica resiste ai colpi di mitra ma anche di lanciagranate. Per ingannare eventuali attentatori, il Secret Service ne può usare più di una all’interno dello stesso corteo. ” 

In bocca al lupo, Obamax!

[img credit: Ghost in the Shell 1]

Popularity: 27% [?]

Nonostante i sondaggi, rimane ancora qualche dubbio. Dopo la scioccante rielezione di Bush del 2004, non ci stupiremo piú di nulla.

Beppe Severgnini “se non lo vede non ci crede“.  Bel reportage sulla situazione in USA a pochi giorni dal voto e ottimo esempio di real journalism. Highly recommended.

Popularity: 23% [?]

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.

AZ

Popularity: 16% [?]

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.

video via Faniq.com

full coverage by ZDF (better quality, german commentary)

Popularity: 22% [?]

here is the video (audio is crap)

AZ

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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.

Read the Rest of ‘fastest than ever ?’

Popularity: 12% [?]

I start this rubric inspired by one of my favorite scientific blog: A Quantum Diaries Survivor [focused mainly on particle phyiscs, but you can find interesting discussions also beyond this specific topic]

let´s start with the legendary Richard Feynman and one of his provocative statement:

“Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.”

Popularity: 13% [?]