sci&tech

December 2007
Daily Galaxy
December 10, 2007
Some great articles published in dailygalaxy available at scribd.

Stephen Maturin
December 4, 2007
Stephen Maturin is a fictional character in the Aubrey/Maturin series of novels by Patrick O'Brian. He is a physician at
the service of the Royal Navy, and also a naturalist by vocation; besides that he likes to play violin. He also serve as
a spy during the Napoleonic wars.

He may be considered as a prototype of the modern man; a sub product of the renascence and enlightenment times
of our era. He was a scientist as a physician and a naturalist, with a great commitment to knowledge improvement,
and dedicated to the liberal arts via the music.

In the Master and Commander movie we can see all this psychological traces of his character as a general practition-
er at his post as a physician of the ship commanded by his friend Nick Aubrey, when he explores the Galapagos and
methodically dissect and classify the species that he can come a board and even discover some new ones, and when
he plays the violin with Nick.

That's how i see humanity at the culminate of our state of civilization: mankind devoted to the pursue of knowledge
with respect with their environment and a sensible soul to the art: sneaking into doors opened by the ancient Greeks.

The Complete Aubrey/ Master and Commander -

Maturin Novels The Far Side ...
Patrick O'Brian Russell Crowe, Pau...
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Jules Verne
December 3, 2007

Jules Gabriel Verne (February 8, 1828–March 24, 1905) was a French

author who pioneered the science-fiction genre. He is best known for
novels such as Journey To The Center Of The Earth (1864), Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870), and Around the World in
Eighty Days (1873). Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater
travel before air travel and practical submarines were invented, and
before practical means of space travel had been devised. He is the
third most translated author in the world, according to Index Transla-
tionum. Some of his books have been made into films. Verne, along
with Hugo Gernsback and H. G. Wells, is often popularly referred to
as the "Father of Science Fiction". (more)

YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/v/VGRj0nV-ZVE&rel=1

See also : Museum

Project Gutenberg

Journey To The Center of Jules Verne's 20000

the Earth Leagues Under th...
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November 2007
Pi, The Movie
November 30, 2007
The film is about a mathematical genius, Maximillian Cohen, who narrates much of the movie. Max, a number theor-
ist, theorizes that everything in nature can be understood through numbers, and that if you graph the numbers prop-
erly patterns will emerge. He is working on finding patterns within the stock market, using its billions upon billions of

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variables as his data set with the assistance of his homemade supercomputer, Euclid. (more)

YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/v/UY1P-9xj_GA&rel=1

See IMDb profile

Pi
Sean Gullette, Mar...
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The Camel
November 28, 2007
Here´s a 1975 hit from British band The Camel with Snow Goose. Progressive rock style with a Pink Floyd flavor.

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The Snow Goose

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Tale of Tales, a Short Film by Yuriy Norshteyn

November 28, 2007
Tale of Tales, like Tarkovsky's Mirror, attempts to structure itself like a human memory. Memories are not recalled in
neat chronological order; instead, they are recalled by the association of one thing with another, which means that
any attempt to put memory on film cannot be told like a conventional narrative. The film is thus made up of a series of
related sequences whose scenes are interspersed between each other. One of the primary themes involves war, with
particular emphasis on the enormous losses the Soviet Union suffered on the Eastern Front during World War II.
Several recurring characters and their interactions make up a large part of the film, such as the poet, the little girl and
the bull, the little boy and the crows, the dancers and the soldiers, and especially the little grey wolf (Russian:
се́ренький волчо́к, syeryenkiy volchok). Another symbol connecting nearly all of these different themes are green
apples (which may symbolize life, hope, or potential).

Yuriy Norshteyn wrote in Iskusstvo Kino magazine that the film is "about simple concepts that give you the strength to
live."

YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/v/i4U_xk6CKI0&rel=1

See: Wikipedia

A New TOE Speaking E8

November 27, 2007

According to a new proposal by American physicist Gerret Lisi the above equations may be the answer to the ulti-
mate theory in Physics, the unification between quantum field theory and general relativity or Theory of Everything, as
is most commonly known.

Here's the abstract from the arxiv.org paper by Gerrett Lisi:

All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form
of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravit-
ational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics
of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action
over a four dimensional base manifold.

Conan, the Barbarian

November 26, 2007
I was not kidding when i told that this blog was about me. So now i want to talk about my favorite fiction characters:
Conan, the barbarian, Sherlock Holmes, and Stephen Maturin.

I start with Conan and let Holmes and Maturin for later.

Conan was a character ceated by Ron Howard in the 30's; it made his first appearence in the December 1932 edition
of Weird Tales magazine.

He was a barbarian from Cimmeria in a pre-historic barbaric forgotten world. A world where justice lay in the edge of
a sword, everyone by himself; almost as today...

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Conan was a nomadic wandering adventure; leaving Cimmeria at about the age of 15 he took the world as his home
and made himself a king.

He guide his actions by a strict code of conduct; althought he was a mercenary who sold his sword he was also cap-
able of the most altruistic actions and a loyal compagnion. Someone who keep his word.

That's him, Conan of Cimmeria, as i saw him in my teenage years.

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The Mathematical Art of MC Escher

November 26, 2007

In 1956 the Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis

Escher (1898–1972) made an unusual lithograph
with the title Prentententoonstelling. It shows a young
man standing in an exhibition gallery, viewing a print
of a Mediterranean seaport. As his eyes follow the
quayside buildings shown on the print from left to
right and then down, he discovers among them the
very same gallery in which he is standing. A circular
white patch in the middle of the lithograph contains
Escher’s monogram and signature.
What is the mathematics behind Prentententoonstelling?
Is there a more satisfactory way of filling
in the central white hole? We shall see that the
lithograph can be viewed as drawn on a certain elliptic
curve over the field of complex numbers and
deduce that an idealized version of the picture repeats
itself in the middle. More precisely, it contains
a copy of itself, rotated clockwise by
157.6255960832. . . degrees and scaled down by a
factor of 22.5836845286. . . .

Read more at ams.org

Stephanie - Ouragan
November 22, 2007
Her highness Princess Stephanie du Monaco at her 80's incursion in pop realms here with Ouragan.

YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/v/HrJ1Ldwz62M&rel=1

GNU Free Essay

November 22, 2007
Richard Stallman. He started it all; Linux, Open Source, Free Software, all this has roots in his vision about software,
freedom and user rights. It's all in the first chapter of his selected essays about the GNU project and the Free Soft-
ware Foundation.

At the same time, when he was changing the world, and for the better, he do it at his own expense with the help of
some earlier pioneers. He quit MIT AI Lab to dedicate his energy and effort to the cause, the cause of sharing, free-
dom and helping your neighbor, by his own words. Has a marginal gain, this movement also provide a solution for
whom software cost of ownership his prohibitive.

Information is power, so they say, but without the tools for processing this information is lost as a dumb raw of mean-
ingless data. And now is available to all (or almost). It isn't just free or open source software, it's SOCIAL
SOFTWARE.

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Euro 2008
November 22, 2007
Portugal qualified to Euro 2008 in Austria/Switzerland after a 0-0 draw with Finland.

Flash Content

Xaile
November 21, 2007
Here goes some Portuguese popular music for you. It goes by the name Xaile and you can see and listen them at
their page in MySpace.

Colossus Strikes Back

November 19, 2007
It seems that World War II computer Colossus is cracking codes again.

YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/v/O8WXNPn1QKo&rel=1

Language Discovery
November 19, 2007
Let me tell you about what to me is the greatest human invention of all time: language. By language, i mean speech
and alphabet. How does this capacity that enable us to communicate and persist knowledge among generations
come to be?

Speech of course is the result of perfecting human vocalization and evolve from the discovery of pre-historic man of
his inner capacity to emit and control sound.

Nobody knows when or how that happen but what can be said is that it was a longmaturation process until we reach
the level which enable full communication and expression of abstract ideas.

Speech itself was a great step in human evolution but until we manage to code that speech for future memory it's
value from the perspective of a persisting medium of communication is limited somewhat to oral tradition, so it's not
adequate to mankind build upon past generations of endeavor.

What was lacking was a code, a symbolic or phonetic representation of our capacity to speech and once reached that
our cognitive horizon would expand beyond the stars.

That's the main reason i assert language has the greatest human invention, because language is a pre-requisite to all
other inventions and a necessary one. Civilization could not have emerged without it.

So, how do we reach that point? To talk about that we have to go back to the very beginning of historic time and even
further.

Ancient Greece had a legend about which the alphabet was introduced in Europe by a Phoenician named kadmus;
although the history must not necessarily be truth - Kadmus was a Greek name - it tell us about the importance of the
Phoenicians to this story, but we are aheading our selfs, i come to that again in a moment.

The story of the alphabet can be accurately traced back to the beginning of civilization in the kingdoms of Egypt and
Babylonia. Not that i pretend to imply that his story doesn't have roots in preceding times only that our state of
knowledge can go accurately only that far.

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So, our story could have start as... In the beginning was the hieroglyphs. Hieroglyps are essentially a compound sys-
tem of writing used by many ancient civilizations in different forms. It consists mainly of an ideographic system of rep-
resentation associated sometimes with a phonetic and association one. Meaning that an icon or symbol could have a
literal meaning has in a house picture to represent a house or a phonetic value to represent a consonant in the case
of egyption writing or a syllable as other systems of writing, like the babylonian, did. The association method of rep-
resentation mean that a symbol could have a non literal meaning has in the case of the use of an eagle to represent
the values of persistence, liberty and freedom.

The Egyptians made use of iconographic symbols as a determinative way of help to clarify the meaning of some dubi-
ous word, meanwhile the babylonians drop it all together.

This result in a curiously conglomerate system of writing,

made up in part of symbols reminiscent of the crudest stages of
picture-writing, in part of symbols having the phonetic value of
syllables, and in part of true alphabetical letters. In a word,
this represents in itself the elements of the
various stages through which the art of writing has developed.
We must conceive that new features were from time to time added
to it, while the old features, curiously enough, sometimes were not given
up.

So our story must have started after all as... In the beginning was the picture, and the picture turn itself into an icon in
symbolic (ideographic) writing. So from that we can really see that we can trace back the roots of the alphabet to the
pre-historic cave man. When he learn to express himself in the paintings made in the walls of the caverns. And form
that in the history roll of time we have the ideographic and phonetic systems, but that wasn't enough to reach the
modern alphabet, what was steel lacking was brought to us by the Phoenician people.

Phoenicians were merchants and traders that rule over the mediterranian sea. Trough that merchant activity they
reach and colonize many places including, it is believed, my hometown Lisbon. From and as a result of that they
serve as messengers between different regions of the globe. One of them was ancient Greece, so when the Greeks
developed their own version of the alphabet, the mother of all modern European ones, they derived it from the
Phoenician.

So what was the innovation brought about by the Phoenicians in their alphabet? The use of consonants to express
more than one syllable. You see, when i talk about the babylonian way of writing i told you that their system phonetic-
ally represents the use of syllables so that for each syllable was a unique symbol. That means that there was thou-
sand of symbols to express every possible syllable in their native idiom. The same thing occurs even more frequently
in the Chinese language, which is monosyllabic. The Chinese adopt a more clumsy expedient, supplying a different
symbol for each of the meanings of a syllable; so that while the actual word-sounds of their speech are only a few
hundreds in number, the characters of
their written language mount high into the thousands.

So the Phoenicians have the idea of abstract the use of syllables by consonants and were able to simplify so much
the use of their alphabet that, with time, their version would replace all the old archaic ones and establish the stand-
ard for all future variations from whom the greek was the most well succeeded.

The Phoenician alphabet was so simplified that even vowels were excluded, so that the Greek alphabet was the first
to employ the simultaneous use of vowels and consonants. From that we get latin and so on... and as they say the
rest is history.

Carl Sagan on Hieroglyphs

November 19, 2007
Forward the video to 19m25s to see Carl Sagan explain Champollion quest to decipher hieroglyphs.

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Cosmos Cosmos
Jaromír Hanzlík, J... Carl Sagan
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CHAMPOLLION
November 16, 2007

For many years people tried to understand the egyptian characters

found everywhere in ancient Egypt, the hieroglyphs, but without much
success.

But in 1799 took place a decisive fact that eventually would change all
that. At that time Napolean was pursuing his Egypt campaign and one
of his soldiers made a remarkable discovery, the Rosetta Stone.
This artifact would be the key to unlock a mystery with thousand years
and reveal to the world the secrets of a civilization and a golden era.

The text crafted on the stone surface was the description of the coron-
ation of Ptolemy at 196 BC, but what was remarkable was that be-
sides egyptian native language the report was translated in two more,
demotic and greek.

Greek was one of the languages known at that time by a particular lin-
guist, one that had persuit the deciphering of egyptian language since
he was a boy. His name was Champollion.

When Napolean came to Egypt he took with him many scientists to study the egyptian science and culture and to
help revealing and exposing many precious artifacts.

One of them was Fourier. When he come back to France he took with him some of this minus artifacts that would
capture the attention of a 11 years old boy that he take to his care, Champollion. This, by the time, strange artifacts
would lead Champollion to devote his life to uncover the secrets hidden in them, specially those mysterious symbols
and characters that nobody knew the meaning.

He came to be a skillful linguist and with the Rosetta Stone and another obelisk about Cleopatra he manage to dis-
cover all the egyptian vocabulary.

In 1828, he finally set foot in the land that induce such wonder in him by an expedition to the ancient city and temples
of Karnak. What he and his companions saw overwhelmed them and produce a fascination of a lifetime. In that walls
he was able to read and decipher the meaning of the messages printed many eras ago.

From that moment on the clouds that were blocking our understanding were lifted revealing the apogee of the egyp-
tian civilization.

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Universal Mind
November 15, 2007
A beautiful song by The Doors

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Moonlight Drive, a poem by Jim Morrinson

November 15, 2007
Let's swim to the moon,
Let's climb through the tide
Penetrate the evening
That the city sleeps to hide
Let's swim out tonight, love
It's our turn to try
Parked beside the ocean
On our moonlight drive

Portuguese Culture
November 14, 2007
I warn you about some postings about Portugal: Here's one.

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