MPJ

Let's turn our imagination to the edge and do something different today. We can call it thought experiment, childish game, day dream, science fiction, pure fantasy or whatever we want but let's move the boundaries far away from Earth, far away from our Solar system, even farther from our Galaxy and do something wild. Let's choose a planet. Or to be more precise, let's select one in the vastness of cosmos and move away from this Earth and start new life. Of course in day dreams we are allowed to do this just because the imagination is what our species differs from others on Earth. Ok, to begin this little endeavor, we need a little astronomy to start with. What we know for sure is that our galaxy alone contains more than 200 billion stars, majority of them not so much different from our Sun and by using basic statistical study based on planet finder's microlensing technique there are approximately 100 billion planets orbiting them. Perhaps more. Multiple that b...

Do you gamble? I don't. Not because it is not fun nor because it is one of famous five sins. It is simple for me. I never win. I tried couple of times with lottery tickets and I never won a dime. Not to mention that I am terrible at predicting sport results or to win any kind of gambling event. I remember once I watched Euro-song contest and had strong feeling that Austrian band will win big time. Their performance was great and the song was pretty good.. I even typed one of those SMS messages to support them. And yet, they scored exactly zero points! Were they bad? No. Check the video within YouTube refs below. They were pretty good. Only sometimes, the luck doesn't come with quality.. It chooses by some strange criteria, as it seems, I will never understand. When I was in high school I thought I was smart enough to build some system by analyzing previous results in national lottery and to win at least the second prize which would be enough for me to buy super home compu...

You probably heard that matter is pretty much an empty space. It's true. Everything is made of tiny particles with nucleus in their centers and cloud of electrons orbiting around. If we take Hydrogen (H) for example - the smallest atom with just one proton in nucleus orbiting by just one electron and if we scale the proton to be the basketball size, the orbit of the electron in diameter would be something about 15km. Both, nucleus and electrons are electromagnetically charged, keeping everything in stable equilibrium and also inside nucleus two more fundamental forces - strong and week nuclear interactions are keeping all the matter and energy in line. However, the smallest atom in the Universe is not the smallest, standalone system we know of. According to standard model, all atoms and complex molecules found in nature or artificially produced are made of fundamental particles. Something we cannot cut into smaller pieces. Electron is one of them. But there are more. So far, as far...

Have you ever thought about what is the major waste of time in everybody's lifespan? I am not talking about lost time you made by choosing bad movie or book. Nor about spending months in company of incompatible people or within single relationship with no spark of good chemistry. I am not even thinking about wasting years within poorly chosen school or job. No. There is one more, even worse time-waste we all are experiencing no matter who we are or where we come from. On daily basis. I am referring to one simple thing we are all taking for granted. Sleeping. Something we do for eight or so strait hours every night. No exceptions. Something we do by design of nature. Now, currently, in this very century, if we are talking about lifespan globally, it is estimated to be around 70 years in average. Someplace little more, other places little less, depending on quality of life within our societies. Well, if you ask me and considering enormous vastness of the universe in both space and ti...

"Gloria had a grip about the robot’s neck that would have asphyxiated any creature but one of metal, and was prattling nonsense in half-hysterical frenzy. Robbie’s chrome-steel arms (capable of bending a bar of steel two inches in diameter into a pretzel) wound about the little girl gently and lovingly, and his eyes glowed a deep, deep red." - If you didn't recognized the narrative, it is from Gloria & Robbie's reunion from the touching ending of the Isaac's "I, Robot" first story. If you read "Robbie" before, you are probably, by now, recollecting what actually preceded to this very moment of two persons getting together in this happy ending of the most famous Asimov's short story. But if you never did, I am encouraging you to do so, if nothing else, then for the simple reason that even though it was written some eighty years ago, the premise is still fresh and valid just like it was published yesterday. The word 'robot' ...

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...

Mwahahaha. Muahahahahahahah. Finally they got me. I tried to defy crossing to the dark side for so long... But I couldn't help myself. Resistance was futile. It always is. As from today, I am proud to announce that I finally joined and opened my first darknet page. Every Yin has its own Yang and today this blog earned its own yang page. Or was it yin page? Hmmm, that's unclear and surely depends on the point of view and in case of the almighty Internet, and its Darknets and Clearnets, what is Yin and what is Yang is not intelligibly comprehensible, especially if you are familiar with internet background and its traffic, packets, sniffing, crawling, protocols, addresses, tcp sources and lots of other technicalities. Anyhow, please behold my first darknet page which you will never find by googling and searching. For all the mainstream sake, it doesn't exist. Even if they find it, I will change the node and the link and go even deeper into the dark shadows of the network where...

Is Internet dangerous? Well, yes we know all the hazards of spending all the work hours behind monitor screens, browsing the web at home, doing social networking, playing online games, watching YouTube, staring at smartphone little displays or for whatever reasons we sit above our keyboards most of the time every day. That's indeed what we first think of all the negative aspects of mighty global network, but today I am not referring to all the potential medical issues inherited from too long sitting on the chair or everyday looking into LCD screen. I also don't mean the obvious social and/or physiological outcomes from letting the virtual world to take over the real one for more and more people every day. No, I mean the real danger. Did Internet overcome the pure network system and became a tool for mass destruction or a background tool for criminal activities? Can someone use the internet to hurt somebody or to perform a murder? Either directly or indirectly? Can some organisa...

Did you know that there are certain species on the face of the Earth that are truly and literally immortal? Yep. They never die. Of old age that is. I am not talking about some microscopic bacterial life or stubborn viruses in existence. No. Real animals. Take these two: turtles and lobsters. They literally don't age. When it comes to first one, I can't resist not to quote article in below refs* I read online - to the logical suspicion of endless turtle lifespan and why in aftermath they don't crawl everywhere we look today, they answer: "Of course they die, otherwise we'd be swimming in turtles, but the weird thing is, they never seem to die of old age. It's always a disease, or a falling boulder, or Master Shredder". And this is a real truth actually, including 'Master Shredder' who might be just a metaphor for us killing turtles for food or purses and belts or whatever we do with dead turtles. Joking aside, the very research of big turtles shows...

It's a well known fact that our universe is, as far as we know today, four dimensional space-time continuum with three spacial coordinates and the time playing a role of the fourth one. We are perfectly capable of traveling backwards and forwards within first three spatial coordinates, but is it possible to do the same on the fourth one? I am sure you would agree that it is not too exciting going up or down or left or right but traveling through time could be something special. But, is it possible? Let's explore all the theories, share some stories and read about one connected hoax.

Until recently I had a toy-model of Russian space station Mir hanged in our living room settled nicely between two more common house decorations. It was small in size, no bigger than five cubic inches with two teeny tiny Soyuz spacecrafts docked at their designated locks and numerous solar panels all over the place. The plastic toy is long gone now but still from time to time it raises some nice memories, especially those moments when couple of our guests after close inspection from all directions asked questions like "What the heck is this?" or "Is this art?". Not many of them recognized the most challenging technological endeavor of the last two decades of previous century at first glance. On March 23, 2001, all the biggest Mir's fragments after surviving hellish re-entry through the atmosphere hit the Pacific ocean and ended 15 years of various scientific experiments performed by 28 long duration multinational crews with total of 104 people from 12 ...

Do you have that strange feeling when you are about to visit new city abroad and little afraid of what you would stumble to when it come to simple things? Like how to use metro line or how to buy a bus ticket or how to identify your next destination? Or how to book your flight back to your home? Or how to handle a simple dilemma of should you exchange the money to the local currency or is it wise to put your card in every ATM or any other 'slot' machine on your way? Hello™ at Microsoft Campus Days, 2014 Ericsson, a Swedish multinational provider of communications technology and services, has the answer for you. And me too. Last week, I took my entire family to the trip to Copenhagen for both, business and pleasure hours in the Danish capital. During my previous visits I didn't have much time for tourism and any off work activity for that matter. So I took a little research this time and Ericsson's " Networked Society City Index " helped a lot. Within t...