Category: Videnskab

Artikler vedr. videnskab

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Blogs Design Education/Undervisning Historier/Stories Kim Blog (English) Manic Panic Music Technology Videnskab

Review: The Science of Sleep – Michel Gondry, le mec est genial!

Yesterday I went to see the movie The Science of Sleep, directed and written by Michel Gondry, the fantastic French director, and my expectations were quite elevated!

For those who’ve never heard of Michel Gondry, just dig in your memory for the GREATEST music videos EVER made, and the top 10 will be dominated by his works.

He is best know for his works with Björk, Chemical Brothers, Foo Fighters, Kylie Minouge(!) and of course: The White Stripes.

Just one comment to the movie: “MICHEL GONDRY VOUS ETES GENIAL”. This is the greatest movie of creative vision since Brazil, I simply love it. It’s such a tribute to the creative mind and life in general – and I ended up with a tear in my eye because of the beautiful ending, that was a dream or was it?

I will go see it again and again and can’t wait until it is released on DVD.

It also made me realise how much I miss Paris, the scene where they’re dumping a TV in Canal St. Martin, my favorite spot on the planet, is priceless, and I also miss the love of my life (so far)! Now the tears are turning into a river! Quote: Once a woman has decided to dump you, she CAN’T change her mind! Unquote. I NEED TO GET OVER HER, and HER as well! Isis where are you?

10 stars out of 6 possible!

BTW! I’m in love – should I go seek out my love consultant, or maybe hire a new one (I already know who that should be!)?

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Blogs Kim Blog (English) Mactopia Technology Videnskab

Review: An Inconvenient Truth movie

An Inconvenient Truth movie posterYesterday I went to see the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, a documentary that follows former vice-president Al Gore’s struggle to spread global awareness of the crisis facing humanity as a result of global warming.

As if I didn’t know it already, global warming is indeed a fact, and it will have big consequences. The opposition to Al Gore and the environmental scientists, defined by people like Bjørn Lomborg, need to stop doing the oil industry’s dirty laundry, humanity faces other serious problems, but this is the one that will impact all of us – the Earth might be rendered uninhabitable, the Planet Venus has an atmosphere filled with greenhouse gasses, could this be the destiny of Earth?

The facts are presented: Global temperature and CO2 levels in the atmosphere is strongly correlated, higher CO2 levels equal higher temperature. From core samples from the Arctic and the Antarctic we know that CO2 levels have never been above 300ppm over a period of 650.000 years, right now it’s above that, and the levels are skyrocketing.

I hope that this movie will be an eye opener, and the practical advise on how to take action on the web-site (climatecrisis.net) is very useful.

The movie ends on a positive note, the fact that we’ve already managed to control a global environmental crisis, the hole in the ozone-layer, leaves room for optimism.

Al Gore used to be the Next President of the USA, I’m actually happy that he lost the election, because he’s been on the grind spreading awareness of this, the most important, challenge facing humanity.

I have some issues with the movie. I could have been without the segment on the lost election, and I really doubt that you directly can see the passing of “the clean air act” in the ice-core samples. Al Gore clearly loves his Mac – but isn’t he a member of Apple’s board?

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Rumforskning Videnskab

JPL.NASA.GOV: Honey, I Shrunk the Solar System – (ex)Sit Pluto!

Solar system montageJPL.NASA.GOV: Feature Stories – Honey, I Shrunk the Solar System

If you woke up Thursday morning and sensed something was different about the world around you, you’re absolutely right. Pluto is no longer a planet.

As expected the 9th planet Pluto, is no longer considered a planet, but more “the mother of all Kuiper belt objects”, or more precisely Pluto is now considered a “dwarf planet”.

I must admit that I sort of fail to see the importance of this decision, it’s more like “splitting words”. “Planet” is nothing but a word that means “wanderer”, refering to the fact that planets move across the sky unlike stars (well I know that they do, but slowly, so within this definition stars could also be consideres “planets”, so it is actually good to have a somewhat clearer definiton…).

The problem is that within the old definition, the number of objects to consider for planetary status is likely to grow, with the improved observation technology, and the scientific community would potentially be locked in mindless debates, since the discovery and classification of a planet would be significant.

Well…The science books need to be rewritten, or maybe not! Wikipedia has already been updated with detailed information on this subject, and Pluto has already been reclassified in the article on Planets.

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Rumforskning Technology Videnskab

NASA – STS-121 – Shuttle Discovery has landed

Shuttle Mission STS-121Welcome back Discovery. It’s amazing watching the landing procedure as seen from the cockpit, the descend is steep and quick.

It will be interesting to hear the post mission briefings, I hope that the Shuttle is finally considered safe again, so that the construction of the International Space Station can pick up pace.

Congratulations to NASA with a successful mission, but what’s with the constant need to reboot the computers?

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Rumforskning Technology Videnskab

NASA – STS-121 NASA’s Starbangled 4th

Shuttle Mission STS-121Phew…The Shuttle has returned to space, and for the first time a Shuttle Launch on the 4th of July.

It’s always nervewrecking to watch a Shuttle launch, and it’s great to have live coverage by NASA TV that is streaming over the Internet from this address:

NASA – NASA TV Landing Page

Congratulations to NASA with the fitting celebration of Independence Day.

The Shuttle program is nearing it’s end, it’s the end of an era and a too complex program, that so far (touch wood) has resulted in the loss of 2 orbiters and 14 lives.

NASA is now looking back to the Saturn V program for inspiration, and a couple of new launch vehicles will be introduced, ending with the return to the moon by the end of the next decade.

Everytime the Shuttle program seemed to be running smoothly, we encountered a major disaster, making for a rude awakening to the dangers of space exploration.

The space program is the greatest project humanity is currently involved in, and it’s a great inspiration, and space is finally opening up due to the X-Prize and SpaceShipOne.

We’re once again taking baby steps into the final frontier, following the lead of the Apollo pioneers. Earth is too dangerous a place to stay.

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Technology Videnskab

HOPL:History Of Programming Languages

HOPL: History Of Programming Languages from ACM

After browsing the Alan Kay Wikipedia entry, my attention was drawn to the “History Of Programming Languages”, proceeding that has been published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

This is a very good collection of documents, usually written by the people who were involved in the development of the different languages, including some Danes – Concurrent Pascal. Unfortunately ACM requires a subscription to access the articles, I guess I need to fork out some money and get the paper print.

Hmm great! The ACM web-site currently has an error, so I can’t buy the book online. Should I join ACM? It’ll cost me USD 198, if I throw in an account for the digital library. It would be cool to have access to the ACM digital library.

Considering…BTW it looks like ACM should add some new articles, e.g.. on Java, Python and Ruby.

Sure a lot of things has happened since 1993, but I suppose none of the newer languages are revolutionary, or even more than marginally different from what already existed in 1993, that is somewhat discouraging.

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Open Source Technology Videnskab

Talk:Alan Kay – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Talk:Alan Kay – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I was just checking the Alan Kay article on Wikipedia, and I switched to the Talk page, to find a comment by the man himself…

He makes this interesting point:

But today, it matters not that Smalltalk was an “improvement on its successors” (as Tony Hoare said about Algol). None of the so-called OOP languages around today are above threshold to deal with programming in the 21st century. I think this is a huge problem, that is made more severe by the vocational temptations to “get good at something bad” in order to make a living. This has produced a staggering legacy of moribund code, that makes it hard for young people especially to think about qualitatively better ways to proceed.

Very well put, but do we have alternatives today? I have no idea.

I remember a BYTE magazine cover story from 15 years or so ago, “There is a silver bullet”. That “silver bullet was OOP. Maybe it was, but the challenges of software development has also changed. Today we slave away using the same patterns again and again, it’s not exciting writing database access classes and wire them up to the UI, usually starting from scratch, since the new app you’re doing, is slightly different.

Currently people are looking into alternatives to C++ like languages, like Python and Ruby, but they’re still rather traditional. But these languages do seem to have some great frameworks, like TurboGears and Rails.

What I really find interesting is a video where Steve Jobs is demoing NeXTSTEP version 3, he’s demoing amazing application development without any coding at all! Why didn’t this catch on?

Another problem. The traditional web has been a nightmare in terms of usability, due to the fact that everybody basically has been writing their own custom UI.

What the web really is, is a list of connected links, URLs/URIs. What we need to start doing is to assign more meta-data to links, so that we can stop using the browser.

RSS feeds are a step in that direction. Direct links to media files and especially streams is another. After somebody posted a collection of direct links for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s (DR) radio streams, so that I could use the VideoLAN Client (VLC) to listen to music, I’ve finally bothered with it. Why oh why does the media companies develop their own embedded players, it’s a serious nightmare and completely un-called for.

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Open Source Technology Videnskab

From Improbable to Unstoppable: a brief history of the World Wide Web – Reboot

From Improbable to Unstoppable: a brief history of the World Wide Web – Reboot

Too bad I missed this session at reboot. Looking forward to the video being made available.

In the begining was the word and the word was NeXT@CERN.

Let there be web! Thank you Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Here’s a couple of slides from the presentation by J.F. Groof. It shows how the first incarnation of the web looked like if you had a NeXT, and if you didn’t – poor you.

Whatthewebwasmeanttobe-1

Firstimpressionsoftheweb Ifyoudidnthaveanext

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Rumforskning Videnskab

ESA – Venus Express

ESA – Venus Express

OK OK…Since I always comment the NASA robotic missions, it’s sort of a disgrace that I have ignored the successful VOI (Venus Orbital Insertion) manoeuvre of the Venus Express mission last week. Congratulations to ESA on another success – things are shaping up, and I’ve almost forgotten the disappointment of the Beagle 2 Mars mission.

I must admit that I sort of fail to see the need for a mission to Venus. The Venusian surface, below the heavy cloud-cover has already been mapped, in quite a lot of detail, by one of the few NASA missions of the early 90ies.

But I welcome any science, and it is a real mystery why Venus is such a hostile environment, it’s amazing how “sweet a spot” Earth has hit in it’s orbit of the Sun, the “life as we know it” zone seems to be extremely narrow.

ESA has caught the Podcast wave, and Vodcast? That’s the first time I head that term – I guess that it covers Video Podcasts – really just call it a Podcast or maybe V-Cast – I really hope that Vodcast doesn’t catch on – it just sounds bad?

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Rumforskning Technology Videnskab

Google Mars

Google Mars

Wahooo…Great…

And we thought that Google only looked for TWD (Total World Domination), it’s sooo much bigger than that…