The elusive mystery surrounding 'Cloverfield'

I've been awaiting the release of 'Cloverfield' which was originally titled '1-18-08', as that is the date it is scheduled to be released by producer J.J Abrams, and the anticipation is getting to me, not just because the whole release has been surrounded in mystery but also because the trailers and teasers don't really reveal too much about what the dark force in the movie is, in addition when the movie was first announced their web page was a puzzle which contained a bunch of photographs that contained some hidden images, and even now the monster that supposedly is the dark force in the movie is still shrouded in mystery, is it "slusho" or "Cthulhu", whatever it is J.J Abrams seems to have a nack for arousing our curiosity in a lot of his shows, from Alias, to Lost, I remember in Lost they had managed to create a fake corporation called the Dharma Initiative, that was involved in scientific research. And his mysterious writing style continues in the marketing of this upcoming film, whatever the monster is I'm looking forward to watching this film once it's released.

who names the elements on the periodic table?

Well in the past newly discovered elements were named by the scientist that discovered them, such as polonium named by Marie Curie who first discovered and named it in honor of her homeland in Poland. But these days the elements names are decided by an International committee of chemists, and they are usually named after Greek gods, places, or scientists. Go figure, I guess if I ever find that elusive new elements or happen to suddenly come upon a new element out of just pure luck I guess jaynium is out of the question. Well at least we can still name stars at the International Star Registry, even though most starts are probably so distant that they will rarely be observed by any amateur astronomer observing the night sky, eh who cares, when that gigantic book with the names of stars and their RA and Dec my name will be in there. Of course this is not public since the star registry is a private company so most astronomers don't really care what the star is called it will just exist as a couple of letters and numbers depending on what galaxy the star is located in, or however else any of the many books published containing the coordinates of discovered stars happens to assign names to them. sigh.

Incase of fire what would I run out with?

So a few months back I was taking a shower one evening and began to hear some sort of a ringing bell, I thought it was nothing and just someone's loud smoke alarm going off because they probably left the stove on and their pot of spaghetti ran out of water and which eventually evaporated and burned the spaghetti, anyway, so as I finish my shower and still hear the ringing bell I start to wonder what that strange sound it, it sounded like a school bell going off indicating the end of class like we had in high school. So I get dressed and open up my front door and it's definitely not a school bell but rather the fire alarm, so I nonchalantly get my wallet keys, and cellphone and walk out of the building to find the rest of the tenants also waiting outside for a firetruck to come and turn off that annoying bell. Supposedly someone had pulled the fire alarm switch setting the bells ringing, I'm happy it just wasn't in the middle of the night. So it got me thinking if this was a real alarm what would I run out of the house with? Would I run out with my computer, but that would take time unplugging all the cables... should I run out with at least some form of id, I don't know... if all you people in the blog world had to run out with one thing what would it be? I think that at the least I should run out with some soap, toothpaste /brush and deodorant so that at least if I have to spend time in a shelter I won't stink :), or maybe I should take a fire extinguisher with me so that if there is a path that I need to walk through to get to safety but on fire, I can at least reduce the flames a little bit. I bet I would probably be too frantic and not even remember to take anything if the time came when I needed to run out.

interesting disclamer notice from rental car receipt

So I was sitting around waiting to be dropped off after returning my rental car at enterprise today and which I was waiting I decided to take a look at the back of the receipt where they print terms and conditions of your rental, something I guess most people don't do and usually just sign the line where you state that you agree with all the terms, well that's what I do anyways, who has time to go through pages of terms, unless you can take the receipt home to read for a day or 2. Well anyway so under the Damages to. Loss or Theft of. Vehicle and Related costs clause it reads: "Renter accepts responsibility for damage to, loss or theft of vehicle or any part of accessory regardless of fault or negligence of Renter or any other person or act of God". That last item which I bolded brought a smirk to my face, so if some act of god, maybe a swarm of locusts happens to hit the car scratching it more then the 5" damage limit or if a deluge of frogs happen to fall from the sky and dent the car, or if Zeus decides to to throw a lightning bolt, I guess I'm responsible :) (hope I haven't offended anyone, just trying to be a little sarcastic here). Anyway I guess you can find interesting things in the Terms and Conditions if one were to read them thoroughly.

amazon.com's new e-book device, Kindle

I'm sure many of you out there have heard about this new device that's being sold by Amazon.com called the Kindle, it's a neat little device and I was watching the Charlie Rose show where he was interviewing Jeff Bezos, and discussing this little device. It's interesting what the iPod and iTunes did for music, this device and amazon.com will be doing for books. It costs 300 bucks but give you the ability to look up words in a built-in dictionary by highlighting a word from an e-book that you are reading, it can store 200 books and books are quite cheap and can be downloaded wirelessly I believe they use sprint as their wireless service provider. I think it's important that when you release a device that it be tied to a service, just as how iPod seems to be tied to iTunes thus expanding the available content that you can place on the device as the Kindle is doing with amazon.com, which has 1,000's of e-books and newspapers and magazines available, even though I'm sure there will be issues with DRM as there are with the iPod but this is a good start, even though it looks a little bulky and will take away from the analog feel of turning pages and reading a book it's a nice way to move forward in being able to carry around 100's of books without weighing you down.

Eye-Fi, The First Wireless memory card

I was perusing yahoo today and ran across a story in their tech news pages about a new memory stick that has everything you need to transfer photos from it's storage cache to either your computer or to any of the social networking or online photo sharing sites. The company is called Eye-Fi. So the premise behind the technology is that the card connects to your local wi-fi connection, I'm assuming it can be setup and burned into the ROM of the card when you set it up, additionally it support most of the popular encryption standards for protecting the wireless data that will be being transferred. I think this is pretty great, there is no need now to plug your camera into the USB port to transfer photos, or have any sort of external hubs that accept the SD card from which you can then transfer the pictures. However, how safe is this? I mean most people these days even with the proliferation of Wi-Fi access don't really protect their router or their wi-fi connection with a strong enough encryption, or they tend to take the default. So how long before there is a evil cracker out there that figures out how to reprogram the flash of the card remotely and set up an ad-hod network to then download all the pictures to their own machine when someone with the digital camera with one of these cards inside it walks by. Perhaps I'm just being pessimistic here but hopefully people will keep things secure and we won't have this battle of people discovering that pictures they took on their digital camera suddenly appear somewhere on the web where they didn't intend them to.

Backing up your brain

So today I ran across a story on gizmodo about Microsoft developing technology that will allow you to backup or store all your memories and experiences onto a hard disk for quick recollection or search in the future, they call it MyLifeBits. From the story they say that 1TB would be more then enough to store all the text documents, audio files and photos to document our entire life, with video only limited to 4 hours a day for 1 year. The system has special sensing software that determines when a moment seems to be important and should be documented. I would be curious to know what sort of algorithm they will use to determine when a moment is important, I mean there are probably a lot of factors involved in determining whether a moment in our life strikes us as something that maybe be useful to know about in the future, but then how do you differentiate moments that may not be something you would want to remember but the system may think they are with the moments that you truly do want to remember. I think it's cool that you can carry something like this along with you but I don't know how useful it will be, I can already see people no longer needing to memorize anything, and every time they need to recall just pull up a virtual keyboard type in what you are looking for and have it retrieved. I guess it will free us from having to remember everything and just living life but we may take remembering things like special occasions for granted, and what happens if we happen to loose this information, and what if this hard disk was stolen. Well anyway it's pretty cool to see them developing something like this but it will definitely have implications in our already information hungry society :).

how truly globally connected we are...

Ok, so I have to share this story with you, which I first heard on NPR one morning, and also found in Wired. The discussion on the radio station was about how connected the world is now a days with the proliferation of online content and it's availability through an internet connection. I know there has been lots of contreversy lately with some well known search engines and some nations that like to censor information for their country, but I want to keep politics out of this and just talk about this interesting news story and article, so it comes from France and has to do with Nazi items that were being auctioned on Yahoo!'s auction site. Now in France there is a law that prohibits and display of Nazi items or pictures related to it which sparks indignation, well actually it's more like prohibiting items "that incite racial hatred" (source: Wired) and having memorabilia items on the auction which could be accessed by people from all over the world including France seemed to stir the courts and a judge said that the auction offended "the collective memory of the country" (source: bbc news). But anyway I'm not talking politics or offering my opinion I just wanted to have a lead into what happens, well so the French government asked several security experts whether there was a way to block the auctioned items and what a viable solution could be. So they asked Yahoo to filter items from users from the country or be fined certain amount of francs everyday that the filter wasn't up and running past the given deadline. However since the yahoo auction site is hosted in the US on a .com removing those items would mean violating the US Constitutional rights to Freedom of Speech. And after much review yahoo also determined that it would be hard to solely filter based on IP address matches from the country and would only really work for 90% of the users that came from the location they would be filtering for. And I think in the end from what I heard from the radio broadcast Yahoo! decided to just remove the items instead of pay fines and legal fees. Now this really goes to show you how connected our world really is, and information you put on the web is truly global, makes you feel even smaller when you imagine yourself existing as only an IP address in cyberspace amongst millions of other users, just as small as my own existence on this planet. But an interesting story.

The Aphrodisiac (Oysters) song

So I was listening to All things considered on NPR today and they were talking about oysters particularly about their ability to act as Aphrodisiac's. But outside of that at the end of the broadcast they played a song which I started searching for and finally found the artist and lyrics so I leave them here for your enjoyment, I got a real kick out of it :):

APHRODISIAC (OYSTERS)
(Shel Silverstein / Pat Dailey)


Now, listen to me, folks...
Hear what I say.
You got to eat oysters everyday
They'll put your love life back on track
They're nature's own aphrodisiac.

Ohh, ohhh... yes it's true
What a little oyster can do for you.
Ohh, ohhh... ain't it fun
Here's some things them oysters done...

They made Jim Beam
They made Allen Thick
They made Jonathan Swift
And they made Gracie Slick
They made Victor Mature
And they made Tom Petty
They started Willie Waylon
And they got Helen Reddy.
They made Tom Cruise
They made Oscar Wilde
They gave Gary Hart
But they gave Gomer Piles
They made William Hurt
They made Lucille Ball
They made Wilson Picket
And that ain't all.

Ohh, ohhh... yes it's true
What a little oyster can do for you.
Ohh, ohhh... ain't it fun
Here's some more them oysters done.

They made Stevie Wonder
And they made old John Wayne
They made Saul Bellow
And caused Thomas Paine
Turned Clint Black
And turned Barry White
Made Doris' Day
And Gladys' Knight.
They gave Bob Hope
They gave Percy Faith
They made Marvin Gaye
But they made George Straight
They made Bobby's Short
And Lester's Flatt
And hey... they even did more than that.

Ohh, ohhh... yes it's true
What a little oyster can do for you.
Ohh, ohhh... ain't it fun
Here's some more them oysters done.

They got George Bush
They made Bozo a Clown
They got Bobby Bare
And made Ezra Pound
They made Gallo Wine
They made Merle Haggard
They Made Andy Devine
They made Jimmy Swagger
They made Rich Little
And made Hughie Long
They made BB King
And they made Neil's Armstrong
And if you ask my wife,
She'll tell you quite gaily
Best of all they made old Pat Daily.

Ohh, ohhh... yes it's true
What a little oyster can do for you.
Ohh, ohhh... ain't it fun
That's all about oysters
Now we're done.

The lyrics were taken from lyricplayground.

So I want to write more about the show and oysters but that will be another post later..

pandemic?

So what exactly is this word pandemic, I've heard of epidemic, which is the introduction of the proliferation of a disease that spreads through a species, human (from wikipedia... for animals it's an epizootic), beyond what scientists expected or beyond what can be controlled or contained at the time that it spreads. But an epidemic is usually confined to a certain locality perhaps to a nation or a city or a building or a group of people. But nowadays you hear about a pandemic, in particular the Avian Flu (H5N1) which is now a disease that has spread worldwide outside the scope of a locality or a small group, it spreads between species through mutation. So pandemic essentially means that there is widespread continental or global infestation outside the scope of a locality or region.

love on a NYC subway train?

Well I guess you find love in the most unexpected places, and recently on Good Morning America Diane Sawyer invited onto the show a guy who created a website nygirlofmydreams.com, where he posted up a detailed picture of a girl that he spotted sitting across from him on the number 5 train, unfortunately he did not have the courage to go up to her and speak to her, but according to him by the time he did muster up the courage she was getting off at her stop. So he decided to create the site where he posted up what she looked like, what she was doing, wearing and eventually one of the girls friends ran across the site, recognized the girl as being his friend and contacted this hopeless romantic, and they went on their first date. Quite amazing what people will do when they see a woman of their dreams. And how amazing it is that a website can spread so quickly and be seen by so many people. I'm happy for the guy.