Liquid Ban Explained

The reason for the strange liquid ban on airplanes may be explained now.

ThruVision has developed a camera that can read the electromagnetic radiation of objects and can show shapes through clothing as far as 25 metres.

A small bit at the end of the article mentions:

This electromagnetic radiation is a form of low level energy emitted by all people and objects.

These are able to pass through clothing, paper, ceramics and wood but are blocked by metal and water.

The system works by collecting these waves and processing them to form an image which can reveal concealed objects.

They are blocked by metal and water? There's already metal detectors at every airport. The liquid ban starts to make sense. They must have developed that for years, so the knowledge of a device-to-come has also been there.

Dear Pope Benedict XVI

If I daydream about things that cannot be proven at my work, I get fired. I understand that in your job that is exactly your job description.

However, the recent schizophrenia about Harry Potter books is confusing. First it was good, now it's evil. I am going to let you in on a little secret.

Although you have never seen your boss, nor heard from him, you belive you have a boss. Even though you never got a message from him that you didn't need to decipher wether this is a random incident or a memo from your boss, you still need to believe in your boss. That's fine. I cannot dispute that fact. Believing in it is your job security. But living your life in this kind of belief may compromise your judgement, and therefore I am compelled to inform you:

Magic does not exist.

Harry Potter cannot fly with a broom in real life. There are no spells and witchcraft. In the books you have to use your imagination to make Harry fly and in the movies it is only special effects. You can find out more about special effects if you check for example Industrial Light And Magic's webpage. (Please note: The "magic" part in ILM's name does not mean they do real magic.) You cannot gather mana and you cannot wave a magic wand and do miracles. Doing miracles is the sole right of your boss, if he exists. Also, there are no Dementors, nor Basilisks. No Thestrals nor Griffins. They are figments of J.K. Rowling's imagination. The milestone in Alchemy, the philosopher's stone does not exist either. You cannot convert lead to gold without the help of science. And our current level of science doesn't even work that well. We can create lighter atoms from heavier ones, like Uranium and Plutonium. And we have the basic knowledge how to convert hydrogene into helium. But we can't even get the latter one to work sufficiently. So don't be alarmed for the philosopher's stone and converting lead to gold either.

I know it is easy to mix up the fictional books, but remember this rule of thumb: Your book tells that it is real. J.K. Rowling has never tried to tell us that Harry Potter really exists. She says the character is fictional and as a matter of fact the book can be found under the section called "fantasy". Please try to separate your book from other books that do not claim to be true, but in fact honesty tell you they are fiction.

While I'm at it, I will hereby inform you that Smurfs don't exist either. So no worries about Gargamel making a magical potion out of Smurfs. There's no Saruman and no Merlin, nor Wicked Witch of the West. Mickey Mouse is an animated character who had been drawn to wear a wizard's apprentice's clothes in Fantasia.

For me Smurfs, the Bible and Discworld books are as fictional. But Smurfs and Discworld have less writing staff. I would recommend that stick to one fantasy land and discard the fear of others. If you play Dungeons & Dragons and immediately after that Nethack, you might mix up characters, as Cacodemon and Floating Eye are actually the same character. As a player that would make a small difference in real life, but as your job is to prove one fantasy-world exists, I would stick to only one, if I were you.

If you have irrational fears of other fictional characters, please do not be afraid to seek help. There are professional people who are trained to deal with people with this kind of delusions.

Oldest Man-Powered Transport - Finnish Horse Bone Skates

I read today the oldest man-powered transportation comes from Finland. Skates. Doesn't surprise me. We still sometimes use skates and skis as transportation over lakes, as it is easier than going around the lake. And of course it came from Finland, since Finnish culture is quite old when compaired to these newbies, like Germanic and Latin countries. I've read from somewhere the oldest Finnish words hacked in stone are from about 4200BCE, so it's almost 5000 years older than for example English language, which developed around 500CE. In school we used to take trips to local islands by skates in winters. It was fun to skate when there's ice as far as an eye can see.

After the ice-age Finland was ripped and torned. Huge ice-masses moved to south and ripped the country's landscape. If you look at the map it has all its lakes in lines, coming down vertically from north and after half way turning to south-west direction. Means to travel across frozen lakes came because of need, not because of fun.

Skiing was different also. Up until late 1800's, when modern skis came, the skis were more like a large ski on the other foot and a smaller, sometimes fur-covered ski called Lyly on the other. The smaller ski and a modified spear to paddle gave more speed. The point wasn't to go very fast, but to be efficient when there's not that much food available and it's very heavy to travel through all that snow and ice.

The thing that made made me smile is when I read the horse bone skates were no match for modern speed skaters. No shite Sherlock. I can't skate 60km/h with modern skates. No way. I don't think they held that many speed skating competitions back in that time either. Not enough food to fool around. I would be more interested in comparison of the normal travelling speed of old skates vs normal travelling speed of new skates. How the manouvering is compared to the new skates and so on.

I don't need statistics how McLaren's new F1 car is so much faster than a Benz Patent Motorwagen. I know that already without statistics. I want to know the difference in normal travelling when comparing Mondeo with T-Ford, for example.

I wonder how the skates worked. They mention the skates were made from horse bones, and the fat in the bones gave extra gliding abilities. In Scientific Bloggin's page there's a picture of one skate that has the horse bone as a sole and a metallic blade. This would be already quite advanced skate and must've come after the iron age. (Was that around 600BCE?) Would be nice to test those skates someday.

But in any case, interesting articles in BBC and in Scientific Blogging. Read.

Feargene Revealed

Breakthrough in science! They have found out that rodents have a gene that causes them to fear felines!

Give me that cat used in those tests and I can also foretell the past from its intestines!

The reason Professor Sakano's findings were important, he said, was that
the fearless mouse showed that the two nerve circuits in the olfactory bulb –
the learnt and the innate – are quite separate from one another.

Professor Sakano has probably never heard of a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii...
Prof. Sakano has also probably never heard of Bayer or any other medicine company...

It is common use in animal testing when they are testing for example relaxants on mice to get them first agitated. How do they do that? They whisk little bit of feline urine in front of them and they panic. How does a lab rat who's great-great-great-grandparents have not seen a cat in their lives get scared of a tiny bit of feline urine? I don't think there's any mouse schools where they teach every mouse the dangers of cats.

Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite, and can be found in humans too. It thrives in the intestines of felines, and if it gets inside a rodent, it alters it's brain. After Toxoplasma gondii infestation in a rodent, it will no longer fear the smell of feline. The reason is simple: The mouse doesn't fear cats, and gets more easily eaten by one, thus giving the parasite a free passage to intestines it so loves. You don't need to be Richard Dawkins to figure out that maybe the fear is not learned, but actually in-built...

So basically the scientists managed to isolate and remove the same gene Toxoplasma gondii alters, but want to take the whole credit for themselves. I don't say this is not a great invention, as we learn more about the brain this way and we can duplicate what nature has done for a long time. Only the fact that this was presented as something new, never-heard-before thing.

I know gunpowder was invented in China, but we can always invent some more of it.

Is This A Serious News Article?

I saw this article in Reuters. If this would be in some semi-funny evening magazine, I wouldn't be bothered to mention, but this news is provided by Reuters! Is this for real? It's not 1st of April now, is it? I really can't make up my mind whether this is tongue-in-cheek article or a serious article...

Here's the article, just in case:

Marx's erupting skin may have influenced writings

LONDON (Reuters) - Karl Marx, who complained of excruciating boils, actually suffered from a chronic skin disease with known psychological effects that may well have influenced his writings, a British expert said on Tuesday.

Sam Shuster, professor of dermatology at the University of East Anglia, believes the revolutionary thinker had hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) in which the apocrine sweat glands -- found mainly in the armpits and groin -- become blocked and inflamed.

"In addition to reducing his ability to work, which contributed to his depressing poverty, hidradenitis greatly reduced his self-esteem," said Shuster, who published his findings in the British Journal of Dermatology.

"This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing."

While HS is linked to boil-like lumps, the painful condition also causes more widespread infection, swelling, skin thickening and scarring.

It could also explain a number of Marx's other complaints, not previously linked, such as joint pain and a painful eye condition which often stopped him working.

Shuster based his diagnosis on an analysis of Marx's extensive correspondence, in which he wrote to friends about his health and described his skin lesions as "curs" and "swine".

"The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day," Marx told Friedrich Engels in a letter from 1867.

Marx, who died in 1883, was one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th century and his radical writings formed the basis of modern communism.

© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.

(Link to the original article.)

What a lame 100th blog post... To celebrate the 100th posting, I made a propaganda poster:

Why Didn't Scientists Ask My 5th Grade Teacher?

I just read an article about water spiders and their method of surviving under water. The incredibly smart scientists at the University of Bern, Switzerland have determined in a fresh new study that a water spider spins its silk to produce an air bell when it lives under water. This was taught to me in 5th grade by my biology teacher.

This tip is for those same scientists, so they don't need to spend so much time studying this: There's some water spiders that have some sort of hairs on their bottom that traps the air and they can dive! (Also taught in 5th grade...)

Also, I would recommend that those scientists read those same 5th grade biology books we have in Finland to gain some base knowledge before these ground breaking studies.

...Just trying to help here.

This also raises some questions. Where and how the scientists thought the water spider builds its nest before they found out about the silky nest underwater?

More Moonbase Issues Solved!

There's few issues with the moon and a permanent base there. At the moment moon is moving away from the Earth, until tides and the moon have no or very little effect on each other. Then it will stabilize.

Also, if we would use terraforming factories to create greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, the moon's gravity might not be enough to hold the atmosphere and it would escape to space. Due to the size of the planet, it would also heat up and especially cool down more easily.

I have found a solution!

A microscopic black hole!

Apparently it is theorized that the Large Hadron Collider could be able to produce a microscopic black hole. If we build up one single-serving super collider on the moon, run it once to create a black hole small enough that it would stabilize the moon, preventing it from escaping the Earth - it would also give more mass to the moon so the atmosphere might not escape and also it would warm up the moon from inside for couple of decrees.

This kind of microscopic black hole could explain the unusual temperature of Saturn and Jupiter, which would not be this hot only from the sun's rays.

And if we would be able to create black hole generator (I like that word) or this kind of super collider (if you prefer that term), we would only need to use it once, if we calculate the size of the required black hole - when it is created it will pass through the collider, the floor, the whole moon like air and stay in the core. And possibly, just in case run the collider on the dark side of the moon and slightly diagonally to prevent the black hole to go into the core of our Earth.

Solving the issue with moon escaping and possible problem with the windfarms contributing to the moon drifting away issue, also the temperature problem and gravity issues with atmosphere issues! This would solve many many issues, if it just would work!

Moonstation energy problem solved!

If there's going to be a permanent station on the moon, they need lots of energy and until now that has been an issue.

I got an idea. There's already a company called Magenn, who has this airballoon, that is high in the sky and generates electricity in higher altitudes than conventional wind turbines. There's also (Thanks to Kepler) a solar sail. What if we combine those?

On the poles of the moon we put high altitude solar sails, that don't sail to anywhere, but redesign them as solar windmills - like the Magenn thingie. Then put them high with tethers. And I assume the rotating model Magenn is producing don't pull the tether too hard, so even in large sizes and quantities of the High Altitude Rotating Solar Hijackers (HARSH) they still wouldn't be able to move the moon and cause all kinds of unwanted effects here on Earth.

Actually, we would need to put the solarwindfarm on the north pole, where there's virtually a peak of eternal sunshine. A point where the sun will always shine, except when there's lunar eclipse.

How about that? (Too bad I don't have enough money to patent this...)

Hyperdrive theory

New Scientist reports, that American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics has awarded the 2005 nuclear and future flight category prize for a paper about hyperspace travelling. Using quantum physics within the limits of the general theory of relativity. Interesting.

To Moon and back in few hours, to Mars in five days. I wonder if they have made any new discoveries about the subject.

Hawking testing weightlessness today

Stephen Hawking is today testing weightlessness with Boeing 747, as he's also going to space.

Earth II

Today I saw on the news they found a planet that resembles of Earth.

I thought they've only found gas planets until now, but I did a search and found plenty of articles before. Washington Post, New Scientist, Keck and BBC have reported of new planets too.

And if there's water on this new planet, there could be also life of some sort too or at the very least it could sustain life, if planted on there!

Sweaty relaxation

The following text is thoughts about biological studies of humans and not any male chauvinistic ranting or women liberation speech. So please don't try to find any male vs. female arguments, nor any hidden agenda from this text. It's only a play on thoughts. "What if" scenario, if you will. So if you are male chauvinist, feminist activist, a child or other person who cannot handle a talk about sex as means of reproduction, or cannot play with a thought of evolution, please stop reading here. Also, I do not have answers in this one, only more questions.

There was an article in Nature.com (requires registration) - Indystar mentions this too. They say the sweat from a male armpit actually relaxes women through the pheromones male secret. This puzzled me. I had believed, like this article in Berkley UC says, that hormones that cause something would have the opposite effect. In male sweat there's androstadienone, which causes arousal, rise of temperature, bloodpressure and heart rate in women. Ok, androstadienone is easy to understand in evolution's point of view. But why something that relaxes?

Scotsman and Live Science back this Berkley UC article, that ovulating women are looking for alpha males who have strong body odor. Makes sense, strong man, strong children. Strong man, protects. Man make fire. Urgh. But what has the smell got to do with it?

There's plenty of weird things in human reproduction. Women have concealed ovulation. Their fertile cycle is about all the time, minus the menstruation period. And both men and women enjoy sex just because of sex - even when there's no possibility to reproduce. As far as I understand evolution, the individual is not important, the survival of the species is. So why sex is fun? All of them either unique or very rare amongst animals. It is said only humans, dolphins and bonobo chimps enjoy sex just as sex.

I'm sure there's a reason for all of this. Firstly, when apes started to walk on two legs, the nose got higher from the ground. (The reasons for two-legged walking I can only speculate, but read Desmond Morris instead. He makes more sense than I do...) When the nose is higher from the ground, you won't be sniffing that many things, so we have either lost a lot of our sense of smelling, or we have lost the ability to interpretate the smells.

This may have caused the lengthening of woman's fertile period, as men cannot "smell" the ovulation like a lot of animals can. Thus making it more possible for reproduction. This may have also contributed to the fact we enjoy sex only because of sex, as men don't "smell the ovulation", cannot detect it, and women have longer fertile period - just to "force" humans to copulate more, thus increasing the possibility of fertilization. This doesn't still explain why women get more relaxed when sniffing man's armpit. It just raises more questions.

Was the fact that we stood up a reason our sense of smell withered? Was that partly the cause for women to have concealed ovulation since there was no need for it due to the impaired sense of smell? Did this cause us to try to reproduce more, e.g. women have longer fertile period and we enjoy sex, or was the long fertile period and enjoyment of sex the cause for concealed ovulation? Or are they related to each other in any way?

The relaxation through the sweat of a man is still puzzling. Could it be just simply to get a woman to relax before reproductive act? Or could it be that it based on hunter-gatherer times, when we had small tribes. When men went to hunt mammoths, there was only few men in the tribe. So other tribes could easily loot and pillage this tribe, or if a sabertooth tiger attacks the tribe, there's not enough men to defend. This causes the rise of the rest of the tribe's stress levels. So when a female goes to sleep when a man is hunting for a mammoth, she needs to keep one eye open in case of pillagers or sabertooth tigers. But when the men return, and the next night she's sleeping next to a man and smells the sweat, she knows she's more secure and sleeps better. Could this be it, or is this way too far fetched?

And if it is so, how much does the smells affect us? Giving a sniff of feline urine to a rodent makes the rodent to panic. Do we have such extreme effects from different smells? Have we only learned to fight against and/or to control the instincts/urges we have from smells or have we lost the ability to process the information efficiently? Are we still affected by the odors in our normal life, or is this "change by smell" only present in intime relationships where you are close enough to each other?

I have to take a shower now.

Think about this, Stephen Hawking!

My housemate was watching Yellow Submarine yesterday. As I was going to shower I started to listen to the movie too. I heard the thing about time travel in the movie while I was shaving in the bathroom. They got smaller and smaller as they went back in time. Also their moustache vanished. As they went back to the future (or present time) they grew back. (Both, the Beatles and their moustaches.)

This made me think. If you would shave your face, then travel back in time and you get younger and younger. When you go past (or before, however you wanna think about it) your puberty and your hair growth stops, you stop the time travel there. Then travel back to the future, or the present, anyways, to what now is now.

Does your beard, fingernails and hair grow that long as you would never cut them before?

And if they grow, where does the energy come from? Otherwise, the energy to grow back must be there somewhere when you are young (but where?), but as you have cut fingernails and hair along your live, the matter is lost - where does the energy come from when you travel back to your own time? I think you might be quite hungry then.

Hm.. Maybe this could be a perfect weight-loss treatment. Go back in time, then travel back into the present and transform fat into hair and fingernails and simply cut the extra fat off like hair.

Also, as H. G. Wells wrote in "The Time Machine" (1895), you can't change the past. As in, you can't just check the lottery numbers and go back in time to tell them to yourself. Since from where you came, it didn't happen.

You can meet your friends in the past, like in The Time Machine. So can you meet yourself, like Hunter S. Thompson in a club in San Francisco? If you can, can you shake hands with yourself, or do you vanish, like in van Damme's Time Cop? And if you vanish, where does the matter go? And if you can meet yourself, shake hands with your self and have a conversation with yourself, do you remember shaking hands with yourself twice when you go back to your own time from the past? (1st time in the past, 2nd time when you travel to the past.)