i’m impressed

Look what I’ve found on the interwebs. Is it a watch? Is it a phone? No! It’s an i’mWatch!

I really am a sucker for these kinds of gadgets. It connects to your smartphone over a bluetooth connection. Although the OS of the watch is an adapted version of Android it does not discriminate towards the phone, so iPhone users can make use of it to. You can use it to make calls, send text messages, surf the internet, read your e-mails, listen to music, … basically you use it as though it was your phone, but you can leave your phone inside your rucksack on your back. And of course, you can look at it to check what time it is.

I’m experiencing a sting at the moment, one I anticipated to have sooner or later from the moment I decided to go to the U.S. next year: the sting of realising that I cannot spend any money on this. DAMNIT!

Tags: Android, google, i'm, i'mWatch, smartphone

I love charts!

So a gay nerd is what…? 

Tags: chart, Gay, gay nerd, men, nerd, nerds

Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the Bluefin tuna?

People who know me know that I’m somewhat of an environmentalist. Not as fanatic as before, mind you, age has tempered my temper. I just became 30 after all…

But things like the climate change and the extinction of species around the globe still break my heart.
One such imminent extinction is that of the Bluefin tuna. I used to nag about it to anyone who I saw eating a can of tuna, that’s how I got the nickname Maguro.

It makes me sad that humanity as a whole is not concerned at all by the fact that weakening this small link in the environmental chain can cause that chain to break. Recently I stumbled upon this YouTube video which does a remarkable job at emphasising the gravity of the problem. This video gives you the whole story of the Bluefin, with lots of detailed information and some shocking facts.

Please watch it and let it sink in, your children will be grateful.

Storyboard & Animation: Michael Dilissen & Diederik Jeangout
Audio: LABS Musik/Laurent Aglat
Voice-over: Heather Bain

http://www.howtosavethebluefin.com/

http://diederikmichael.wordpress.com/

Tags: Bluefin, Bluefin tuna, Diederik Jeangout, How to save the Bluefin tuna, howtosavethebluefintuna, maguro, Michael Dilissen

Error = mc²?

We all know by now that the good people of the CERN have been conducting a series of experiments in which they found that neutrino’s could have been travelling faster than the speed of light. I don’t know about you, but I for one, find that fascinating! This would mean that Einstein’s theory of relativity becomes obsolete and basically, modern physics would be shaking on its foundations.

This of course isn’t the case yet. CERN has put its findings online so that other scientists can study them or even reproduce the experiments. One possible explanation comes from one Carlo Contaldi at Imperial College (Ithaca, NY).

From Forbes:

In any good heist, synchronized watches are essential for determining timing, so that a precision plan can go off without a hitch.  Similarly, the clocks in a speed measurement need to be synchronized to ensure that velocity is calculated correctly. The basic problem with OPERA’s calculations, Contaldi suggests, is that the clocks used to measure the neutrinos’ velocity weren’t properly synchronized.

In the case of the faster-than light measurements, the clocks were synchronized using GPS timestamps. But, argues Contaldi, that’s not good enough. That’s because the gravity on different places on the Earth isn’t constant. (You can see a graphical depiction of gravitational differences in the image to the right.) The gravity at the CERN site where the neutrinos left, for example, is actually slightly greater than the gravity at the OPERA detector site. As a consequence, time would appear to move more slowly at CERN from the vantage point of the OPERA detector. Failing to take this into account, Contaldi contends, means that “[t]he resulting measurement that the neutrino velocity differs from c is not only unsurprising but should beexpected in their setup.”

(via Forbes)

Tags: Carlo Contaldi, CERN, Einstein, faster-than-light neutrino's, Forbes, gravity, neutrino's, OPERA, physics, relativity theory

30!

I turned 30 yesterday. I am no longer a twenty-something and that feels strange. And if that wouldn’t have been enough on itself, on top of this milestone age, I got injured during Taekwon-do practice last Friday. Someone fell on my leg which resulted in me limping through the weekend up untill my birthday. So yes, I felt old.

Luckely for me though, I realise that I am still a kid at heart, far from being an adult. This fact often shines through at times when I’m perusing the interwebs and I come across some new toy they didn’t have when I was young(er), like the Kid’s Walker.

The Kid’s Walker is designed by Sakakibara Kikai based in Japan (where else). If this existed some 22 years ago, I would have bugged my parents ’till no end. At my age though, one must be realistic, not only can I not afford this magnificent piece of engineering (about € 17.000),  but I would not fit into the driver’s seat. Besides, Ripley’s Power Loader was way more awesome anyway!

Tags: Aliens, Japan, Kid's Walker, Mech warrior, Power Loader, Ripley, Robots, Sakakibara Kikai, Tech warrior

Heavenly update

*chuckle*

First stop: NYC!

June next year, we’ll be going on a trip, a road trip that is. We’re planning to travel the East Coast of the U.S. of A. Starting in New York City, over Washington through the Great Smoky Mountains to Orlando, Miami and Finally Key West (aka Paradise on Earth).

First stop: NYC!

People always say that New York is a mindblowing experience, I have no problem whatsoever believing that! Just look at this:

This will be where I’ll be spending the week, I’ll be making lots of new friends.

I’ll be visiting places I’ve never been to.

And I’ll be having no idea where to possibly begin.

Tags: American museum of Natural History, Dinosaurs, New York, Road trip, Solar System, Space

En el camino a Gran Canaria!

This summer, I’ll be spending a week on Gran Canaria! We booked our vacation yesterday. The prospect of doing absolutely nothing at the poolside or on the beach was something we both looked forward to, so the only parameters on which we searched for our lazy holiday were: pool, beach, sun & all inclusive. The best option (read: least expensive) that the www gave us was Gran Canaria, so we took it!
So now I’ve been delving for information on the isle itself and I must say, I’m quite impressed and my attitude is somewhat evolving into an active walking holiday.

Apparently Gran Canaria is a ‘miniature continent, a sampler of quite uncommon sceneries in the middle of an extremely diverse archipelago’. I don’t know about you, but I did not know that!

Luckily the hotel has free wi-fi!

UNESCO awarded the island the Biosphere Reserve label, to actively support the conservation of the pieces that make up the puzzle of natural settings. Nearly half the island’s geographical space has been included in this reserve.

The island is part of the collective of Macaronesian islands, which are the isles in that part of the world, and harbors a specific flora and fauna that grew apart from the rest of the world.
For centuries, the flora of the Canary Islands has, so it seems, been capturing the interest of specialists from all over the world. Canarian flora is unique in the world as these plant species became already extinct in the other areas of origin during the last ice age. While approximately five hundred of the plant species on Gran Canaria are also found on the other islands, there are more than a hundred species that grow only on Gran Canaria. As a result, this island has become a point of reference for the study of the planet’s flora. This explains why people refer to Gran Canaria as the island that is to botany what the Galapagos islands are to zoology. I don’t know about you, but I did not know that!

I hope to go visit the ‘Viera y Clavijo’ Botanical Garden in Las Palmas, as well as one of the various pine forests (Pinus canariensis), one of the extensive palm tree groves (mostly cross breeds of Phoenix canariensis and Phoenix dactylifera) and the laurisilva (humid laurel trees) forest in Los Tiles de Moya, which is one of the last remnants of laurisilva in the world.

All of this makes me very eager to depart, but I still need to attend work for a couple more weeks… That, I did know…

Tags: Gran Canaria, Macaronesian islands, UNESCO Biosphere Reserve label

An ABC for me!

 

http://www.yllya.com/

 

 

Tags: ABC, yllya