MPJ

You know that feeling with reading novels when your bookmark location is in the second half of the book and you find yourself turning pages faster and faster in order to find what happens next? If your reading interests coincide with mine, the most likely case is that you are reading either science fiction, spy or fast-paced action thrillers, or good and old adventure stories filled with espionage and politics in the background. Well, that was before. Nowadays, if I wanted all that combined in a single novel, there's a new sub-genre called technothrillers, and with some of them, especially with new authors in the self-publishing realm, and on almost all occasions, I found myself turning pages even faster. Three of those great technothrillers you could find presented in this blog post. The premises are extraordinary, and all of them borrowed from science fiction: smart robotic nanoparticles enhancing human bodies, evil artificial intelligence operating Darknet, and one extraor...

My first encounter with Intelligence Quotient, aka IQ, was 25 years ago during my preliminary exam for the mandatory military service. In those years Serbia was part of a former socialist federation of Yugoslavia along with couple of more countries and avoiding army service was impossible. Everybody had to go to serve the "time" for one whole year and they used those preliminary tests to better fit you into suitable unit and doing a form of an IQ test was part of it. They didn't give us the result, but I probably did it pretty well since they put me to be main operator of a ground-to-ground missile unit. At least my little bit higher intelligence than average "soldier" spared me from the mud, dirt, long marches, carrying heavy weaponry and other meaningless activities of the service. So I spent most of the time in a classroom surrounded with state of the art simulators, playing video games made specially for practicing real time guidance of the missile in simula...

I remember reading an article in the Guardian last year with title "Our galaxy may contain billions of planets with the same mass as Earth". Surely, it is valid scientific guess as it is but if it is really true, my first thought would be that intelligent life as we know it (assuming we are intelligent species) is as rare as we can imagine. If they are not, the big question is why we are still not able to detect any single proof of their existence or still not eaten by some violent alien species? The only logical answer that we are first one walks on the edge of impossibility to me. Most likely we are missing something important, a discovery as important as fire was. While this statement is still accurate and generally speaking plausible, let's think a little more about it. So to start with the original statement, is there really that many planets with Earth like properties in our galaxy? Ever since I read the Drake equation for the first time (shown above), I coul...

Recently, every time when I am trying to shut down our Xbox 360, loud laughter fills our living room as my wife is every time equally entertained by my heavily accented "turn off" command, especially in all those times when I am repeatedly saying it again and again with different levels of enthusiasm until the poor thing finally understands what I really want it to do. I don't mind, even though the laugh is on my account, I am positive that voice commands are the most effective way to shutdown the Xbox. Alternatives are either to use its motion sensor and in series of waves force it to turn off or to find the controller (which is always located under the last pillow in the farthest corner of living room) and in a series of clicks do the same. But this is also not the only reason I like to use voice commands. The main reason is that I really like to try and use new features in nowadays computers simply because no matter how rudimentary they are they surely represent the fu...

In writers world, titles are extremely important. If they are strong enough, the stories are practically writing themself. So to speak. According to MarketingProfs  research, more than 2 million articles, posts and stories are published online everyday and lots of people reads no further from the title. Opening lines capable of forcing you to perform the actual click are nowadays rarity and I am not talking about those behind daily politics and current worldwide affairs. It's about all those titles that don't expire with next election or season. I am talking about all those powerful enough to coin new words. The one on today's menu is exceptional. Simply, "Déjà vu" has it all, potential of diving into mysterious and unexplored world of human brain. It always comes with great glimpse into fabulous quantum mechanics we are still pioneering to understand, tons of speculations of various kind, including spiritual experiences, subconsciousness network of living bein...