Power of Ten. From the heart of proton to the edge of Universe.
Why do fingers become pruney when they get wet? Likely, for the same reasons that tires have treads. Mark Changizi examines the evolutionary reasons for pruney fingers, while exploring natural and manmade phenomena, like river networks, that operate similarly.
Lesson by Mark Changizi, animation by Lippy.
As the narrative goes, fat is bad. Well, it’s actually more nuanced than that. The type of fat you eat is more impactful on your health than the quantity. George Zaidan examines triglycerides, the varied molecules that make up fat, and how to identify which types of fat you are consuming.
Lesson by George Zaidan, animation by Igor Coric.
Lesson by George Zaidan, animation by Igor Coric.
Olive oil is 100% fat and Pancake mix is only about 11% fat. Olive oil is good for health but pancake mix is not. Why?
ATOS IT Challenge: Connected cars
We have enough social networks for people, here’s social network for cars or any moving vehicles and people on the move.
“Stay connected on the move”, with our idea on ATOS IT CHALLENGE. Help us bring this idea to life with your super’LIKES’ and share. Please visit the link to know about our idea.
Richard Stallman’s appeal to ditch Ubuntu
One of the major advantages of free software is that the community protects users from malicious software. Now Ubuntu GNU/Linux has become a counterexample. What should we do?
Well, please don’t fork your eyebrows against me as these words are not mine. Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman has now attacked Ubuntu distribution calling it a ‘spyware’ and as bad as Windows. Where are you my big B, Stallman listened you one more time and now propagating your idea!
Stallman is not the first person to criticize Canonical’s search but he is certainly one of the most influential people and whose opinion is significant for the free software users. In his post on the FSF blog, Stallman has criticized Ubuntu and Cannonical (the company behind Ubuntu) for adding the search feature in the latest version of the distribution. In his blog post he explained about free software, its principles and how Ubuntu is violating it.
Free software gives users a chance to protect themselves from malicious software behaviors. Even better, usually the community protects everyone, and most users don’t have to move a muscle. Here’s how.
Once in a while, users who know programming find that a free program has malicious code. Generally the next thing they do is release a corrected version of the program; with the four freedoms that define free software (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html), they are free to do this. This is called a “fork” of the program. Soon the community switches to the corrected fork, and the malicious version is rejected. The prospect of ignominious rejection is not very tempting; thus, most of the time, even those who are not stopped by their consciences and social pressure refrain from putting malfeatures in free software. But not always. Ubuntu, a widely used and influential GNU/Linux distribution, has installed surveillance code. When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical’s servers. (Canonical is the company that develops Ubuntu.)
Stallman argues that the malicious code included in Ubuntu is damaging the entire free software community. He has a suggestion to get rid of the problem too. Just say ‘no’ to Ubuntu! He writes, “If you ever recommend or redistribute GNU/Linux, please remove Ubuntu from the distros you recommend or redistribute.”
He also writes, “Ubuntu allows users to switch the surveillance off. Clearly Canonical thinks that many Ubuntu users will leave this setting in the default state (on). And many may do so, because it doesn’t occur to them to try to do anything about it. Thus, the existence of that switch does not make the surveillance feature ok. Even if it were disabled by default, the feature would still be dangerous: “opt in, once and for all” for a risky practice, where the risk varies depending on details, invites carelessness. To protect users’ privacy, systems should make prudence easy: when a local search program has a network search feature, it should be up to the user to choose network search explicitly each time. This is easy: all it takes is to have separate buttons for network searches and local searches, as earlier versions of Ubuntu did. A network search feature should also inform the user clearly and concretely about who will get what personal information of hers, if and when she uses the feature. If a sufficient part of our community’s opinion leaders view this issue in personal terms only, if they switch the surveillance off for themselves and continue to promote Ubuntu, Canonical might get away with it. That would be a great loss to the free software community. We who present free software as a defense against malware do not say it is a perfect defense. No perfect defense is known. We don’t say the community will deter malware without fail. Thus, strictly speaking, the Ubuntu spyware example doesn’t mean we have to eat our words.”
You can read the complete story on the Stallman’s blog itself. So if you are loyal user of Ubuntu, its your turn to take the decision. Please say you mind.
Microsoft’s glimpse into the future of Technology.
Oppo’s find 5 to board 1080p screen with 441ppi
Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oppo Mobile is back with its next bang in the market. After presenting the world’s thinnest mobile phone this July, Oppo Mobile is here with its new flagship, Oppo find 5. Its a quad-core flagship with 1080p display(yes, it can put your TV screen on shame), sporting the mind-blowing pixel density of 441ppi. A 441ppi pixel density is roughly 100ppi better than the next best smartphone and a cool 115ppi better than the Apple iPhone 5. The rest of the Oppo Find 5 rumored specs include a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset, 2GB of RAM, 12MP camera, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and a 2500mAh battery.
Gangnam Style has become the most popular video in the history of YouTube by passing Justin Bieber’s “Baby”. The video made its YouTube debut on July 15 and passed Bieber’s “Baby” in just 4 months while Bieber’s “Baby” is running since February 2010. At the time of writing this post, Gangnam Style has over 816 millions(816,175,123 to be exact) views, 5428516,
likes and 332446
PS :For lyrics of Gangnam style, visit notes page.
legacy of ugly logos
So you are a budding entrepreneur or you just got an idea to come up with your own startup. And if you are struggling hard(spending much time) to get a nice, beautiful & attractive logo! think again. Your logo should not eat much of your time. If you want to learn from history and establish an extremely successful business, you may start with a very stupid logo. Long story short, just start with any good logo(without spending too much time).
Trust me, you will stop hating your half baked design after looking at ugly logos with which world’s leading technical companies started. Have a look below:
A Japanese multinational corporation specialised in the manufacture of imaging and optical products, including cameras, camcorders, photocopiers, steppers and computer printers.facebook(originally, thefacebook). World’s largest social networking site, founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum,Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
at&t An American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, downtown Dallas, Texas. AT&T is the largest provider both of mobile telephony and of fixed telephony in the United State. AT&T is the seventh largest company in the United States by total revenue, and the fourth largest non-oil company.
Firefoxa free and open source web browser, coordinated by Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation.
IBM an American multinational technology and consulting corporation, with headquarters in Armonk, New York, United States.
kodakan American multinational imaging and photographic equipment, materials and services company headquartered in Rochester, New York, United States and incorporated in New Jersey, founded by George Eastman in 1889.
NokiaNokia Oyj is a Finnish multinational communications and information technology corporation headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, Finland.
microsoftworld’s largest software maker measured by revenues. It is also one of the world’s most valuable companies.
twitteran online social networking service and microblogging service.
Internet usage statistics :
My experience with Data Mining has not been superb but still I feel that Data Mining is quite interesting subject to study specially when you know exactly how and where you will be using the tools and algorithms. It comes out to be more interesting if you ever try to find amazing statistics of data and its usage. I did some digging around the web and found some interesting statistics. I have already posted some statistics about facebook in last few posts so I will not repeat that and will present few fresh cards.
Starting with Youtube:
- It gets over 800 million unique users’ visit each month.
- Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
- 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
- 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
- YouTube is localized in 43 countries and across 60 languages
- In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on Earth
- More than 20% of global YouTube views come from mobile devices
- 3 hours of video is uploaded per minute to YouTube from mobile devices
- 500 years of YouTube video are watched every day on Facebook, and over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute
- 100 million people take a social action on YouTube (likes, shares, comments, etc) every week
- More than 50% of videos on YouTube have been rated or include comments from the community
- 4 billion videos viewed, every day, 1 trillion in 2011
- 44% of YouTube’s users are aged between 12 and 34
- Average video duration is 2 minutes 46 seconds
- It handles 10% of the internet’s traffic
Instagram Facts:
- Instagram was founded in March 2010 with the initial name of “Burbn” by Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger with seed funding of $500,000 in it. It was launched in the Apple “app” store in November of 2010. In February of 2011 they raised an additional $7 million
- Instagram reached the milestone of 1 million users in December 2010 (only 9 months after being founded and only 1 month after going live in the Apple “app” store)
- In August 2011, 150 million photos were uploaded by Instagram users
- The release of the Android app version saw 1 million downloads in 1 day
- 15% of online adults use Twitter as of February, 2012; and 8% do so on a typical day.
- the proportion of online adults who use Twitter on a typical day has doubled in the past year, and has quadrupled since late 2010.
- 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone and half of these users access the service on their handheld device.
- African Americans and Latinos continue to have high rates of adoption of the service. 25% of online African Americans use Twitter at least occasionally, with 11% doing so on a typical day.
- Twitter use by internet users ages 25-34 has doubled since late 2010 (from 9% to 19%) and usage by those ages 35-44 has also grown significantly (from 8% to 14%)
- The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010
Tumblr :
- 20 Billion pageviews a month, 13 billion pageviews a month in September of last year, and a little over 4 billion pageviews a month in January 2011.
Sanket’s quest for dead man’s blood !
Sanket is not showing his face in the class and nobody cares. He has been a consistent student in every semester (consistent for not attending classes!). He is my good friend so I decided to dig the situation and find the reason. Earlier I thought that he may be busy in his usual stuffs of P viz. Python, Pypi(she is the c@, watch her) and (extremely)long midnight Phone calls with yet another P. But what I have found is astonishing. He is in a quest for dead man’s blood. At first, I was not able to understand the situation. After further digging I found that Shekhar too has good share for Sanket’s condition. But I can’t put all blames only in his bag. Since I am the author of this post I can easily omit any involvement of mine (if any)! Now the situation is crystal clear to me.
Actually it began before the mid-semester exam (mid-October) when I had completed six episodes of Sherlock (thanks to Shekhar). I spent next two days to find the method for death-escape for Holmes. Fortunately I was able to get fairly reasonable plan which Sherlock Holmes might use for his death-escape. After finishing up sherlock, fortunately or unfortunately, Shekhar again cane to rescue and provided all episodes of first season of ‘supernatural’. I completed first season during examination and second season during vacation in home and third season again in college. Meanwhile, Sanket was also watching ‘supernatural’ but he took it little more seriously. He completed all episodes of first three seasons by watching back to back(with small breaks of playing with python codes and tweaking css for our secret project) It is important to note that Shekhar had started watching third season of ‘supernatural’ before summer vacation(May) and still he has not completed half of it(now I understood how he gets top rank in the class). Anyway, back to Sanket . .watching more than 60 episodes in such a short time put a troll on him. Now he consider himself as a demon hunter. He has started keeping salt on door and windows to keep demons, ghosts and other supernatural things out of his room. He now keeps cross(made of silver and made in Italy), a mug-full of holy water and sharply pointed wood. He searched Greek and Latin books in Library as we have good amount of books which have been printed more than 30-40 years ago and few books really look like centuries old. After failing to get the required book(as usual), he now struggles on the Internet to find books for spells and supernatural things.
(to be continued…)
This post may(or may not be, who knows!) the result of modification, morphing and emission of facts and events from real events.
The domain name dilemma :
Everyone wants to have short, simple and meaningful domain name for their site(and so do I). But do you know which is the longest domain name in the world ? It is “http://thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com/”.
hp.com is the first two letter domain name registered. There are domains for which people burn huge amount of money just to get the name and at the top of the list is “sex.com”, which was sold for hefty $ 13 millions. The former owner of Sex.com, Escom LLC, failed to turn it into a viable business and declared bankruptcy in 2010. There’s a whole story attached with this domain name which can you read on its wikipedia page.
(Note: World’s most expensive domain name doesn’t worth your visit, so please don’t visit.)
Too much facebook is not healthy :
Now facebook is also admitting that too much facebook is not good, according to the latest post on the official facebook page of facebook.
Is facebook satisfied by crunching 10.5 billion total minutes per day and engaging one sixth of total population on the Earth. It may be one person’s view or facebook prefers to describe itself by how many things people share on the site rather than the hours spent there. Whatever it may be, but this post of facebook on its facebook page is healthier than its other posts.
In my second last post, I had shown some facts about the facebook, now I have got the official announcement(in pdf) by facebook which I have uploaded here. (comment/share/download the file)
Oldest profession in the world :
A physician, a civil engineer, and a computer scientist were arguing about what was the oldest profession in the world. The physician remarked, “Well, in the Bible, it says that God created Eve from a rib taken out of Adam. This clearly required surgery, and so I can rightly claim that mine is the oldest profession in the world.” The civil engineer interrupted, and said, “But even earlier in the book of Genesis, it states that God created the order of the heavens and the earth from out of the chaos. This was the first and certainly the most spectacular application of civil engineering. Therefore, fair doctor, you are wrong: mine is the oldest profession in the world.” The computer scientist leaned back in her chair, smiled, and then said confidently, “Ah, but who do you think created the chaos?”
First paragraph of first chapter(Complexity) from the book “Object-oriented analysis & design with application” by Grady Booch.
1 Billion active facebook users!!
In a post on the official Facebook blog, founder Mark Zuckerberg shared a note celebrating the milestone of 1 Billion active facebook users! According to World Bank’s data of 2011, 6,973,738,433 is the world’s population(now it has crossed 7.043Billion). That’s roughly 1/7 of the world’s population, logging on to the same social network and actively using it on a monthly basis.
A number of key metrics with users along with the announcement has been posted and here’s are few of them:
- More than 1.13 trillion Likes since its 2009 launch.
- 140.3 billion friend connections
- 219 billion photos uploaded
- 17 billion location-tagged posts
- 62.6 million songs played about 22 billion times.
- Median user age is around 22
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