Silicon Cloud

Ok, so we’re told that the universe is infinite and that it’s expanding at an infinite rate. That’s pretty hard to comprehend. Just trying to imagine something on that scale simply doesn’t work, as you have no point of reference.

This then got me thinking… If the universe is infinite as seems to be commonly accepted then why aren’t there more stars? If the universe is truly infinite, then from earth it should be infinite in every direction, therefore when you stand in your back-yard and stick your arm out in any direction and look along at the point you’ve picked then you should see a star. This should be true for any point you pick. With this in mind that the universe is infinite then there shouldn’t be any night as there are an infinite number of stars. Now we’ve confused ourselves. You may now be thinking that the stars are so tiny and so far away that we won’t be able to see them. BUT. If there is an infinite number of them then the cumulative effect would be that any point in the sky would be as light as looking at the sun.

So why isn’t this true? Well it seems that we were half right when we said that the stars are so tiny and so far away. Our theory is sort of correct, the universe is infinite and expanding at an infinite rate, so there should be a star at every point in the sky. However, the universe is not very old and although the speed of light is damn(1) fast, not all the light from this infinite universe has reached us yet and isn’t likely to anytime soon.

However in a while(2) when all that light from all those stars finally reaches us night will become day. Won’t that be weird? It’ll certainly confuse migratory birds.

That’s enough rambling for today.

1) ‘Damn fast’ is the official term for the speed of light (actually about 3×10^8m/s).
2) ‘A While’ in universe-time is actually a very long time indeed and we’ll be long gone by then.
Science

Popularity: 1%

We got sent this email about where electricity comes from. It made us smile so we thought we’d share.

Today’s scientific question is: What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?

Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical lesson: on a cold dry day, scuff your feet along the carpet, then reach your hand into a friend’s mouth and touch one of his fillings. Did you notice how your friend twitched violently and cried out in pain? Did he bite off your finger? This teaches us two things: one is that electricity can be a very powerful force (but we must never use it to hurt others, unless they deserve it) and the second is that electricity can hurt us, as experienced when your friend bit your finger.

It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When you scuffed your feet, you picked up batches of “electrons,” which are very tiny objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpet so that they will attract dirt (this makes sense when you realize that the carpet companies own the vacuum cleaner industry). These electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect in your fingers, where they form a spark that leaps to your friend’s filling, which then travel down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit. CAUTION: Do not perform this experiment on your pet cat!

AMAZING ELECTRONIC FACT: If you scuffed your feet on carpeting long enough without touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your finger would explode! There is however, nothing to worry about unless you have carpeting.

Although we as a modern society tend to take our electric lights, radios, blenders, etc. for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any these things, which is just as well because there was no place to plug them in. Then along came the first electrical pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lightning storm and received a serious electrical shock. This proved that lightning is powered by the same force as carpets. Unfortunately, the experiment also damaged Franklin’s brain so severely that he started speaking in incomprehensible maxims, such as, “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Eventually he was given a job running the post office.

After Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have become part of our electrical terminology: Charles Coulomb, George Ohm, Myron Volt, Mary Louis Amp, James Watt, Joe Transformer, etc. These pioneers researched theories and conducted many important electrical experiments. Among them, Galvani discovered (this is the truth) that when he attached two different kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, an electrical current developed and the frog’s leg kicked, even though he wasn’t on carpet. Galvani’s discovery led to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medicine.

The greatest electrical pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison’s first major invention in 1877 was the phonograph, which soon found its way into thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented. Edison’s greatest achievement came in 1879 when he invented the electric company. Edison’s design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again.

This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely. This has resulted in tremendous profits for the electric companies. If Californians ever figure this out, I suspect that there will be another bloody revolution. You may be surprised to learn that the last time any new electricity was generated was in 1964 for a Beatles concert.

Today, thanks to many men like Edison, Franklin, and Galvani’s frog, we receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. For example, in the past decades, scientists have developed and refined the laser, an electronic device so powerful that it can vaporize an enemy tank 2000 yards away, yet so precise that doctors can use it to perform delicate operations on the human eyeball. They simply have to remember to change the power setting from “tank” to “eyeball.”

(Credit to original author – although we have no idea who that is)
Science, Humor

Popularity: 1%

Here’s a list of links and articles we’ve found interesting recently.

In no particular order (or more approximately – in the order we found them in our bookmarks list).

Booting your PC from USB – A neat little tutorial explaining how you can configure your USB flash disk so that you can boot directly from it. Take your OS and system settings with you where ever you go.

Lego USB JumpDrive – We’re just going to have to try this, unfortunately at the moment we can’t find any Lego, or our old Jump-Drive to hack into. Never mind, we’ll get round to it one day soon…

LED Throwies – We love the ‘Instructibles’ website and wish we had more time to make some of the stuff they feature. This article on how to make disposable, throwaway, magnetic lights really caught our imagination.

How Stuff Works – This has been on our bookmarks list for an age now. If you’ve ever wondered how things work, then this is the site for you. Well-written articles that explain complicated stuff in a way we understand.

Remove Hidden Data in Microsoft Word – MS Word holds a huge amount of data that you may not want it too. Perhaps you work in a large company and many people review documents before you send them to the customer. Do you really want the customer to be able to read all the embedded comments or track the changes to the document? This tutorial shows you how to remove all the embedded information you never knew existed.

Popularity: 1%

We got one of these as a present recently and have not been able to put it down since. It takes the classic game of 20 Questions to a new level. Playing the game is as simple as thinking of an item and then letting the spherical genius ask some seemingly random yes/no type questions before guessing the answer. It has an uncanny ability to get the object your thinking of correct, we estimate about 90% of the time. It got chair, rose, elephant and pants correct first time thru. Only finally getting stuck on ‘religion’ guessing ‘ghost’ instead.
It’s almost scary ability to guess the object your thinking of had us bewitched for hours, even considering at one point that it had a hidden microphone listening to our conversation.

An excellent little present to keep people amused with. Available from Amazon (and other retailers).

Popularity: 1%

Yesterday we posted an article to Digg for the first time not expecting the results of what happened next. Here we analyse the life of a Digg article and what people are calling the ‘Digg effect’.

Our story starts yesterday early evening. We’ve had an article on the site about how inexperienced web-masters ruin the appeal of their site by making some basic mistakes. We thought the article was relatively amusing and decided to put it on Digg.

Step 1 was to post the article into the Digg site. This was fairly easy as we already had a Digg account. Once our article was in digg on the diggall list we sat back and watched what happened next. Quite quickly a few people ‘dugg’ the posting and within about 15 minutes the post had 10 diggs and appeared as the next level of popularity in the cloud view. Things were going well. All this was helped by the first comment received on the article which was almost as funny as the article itself. Thanks James.

A cup of coffee later and the posting had nearly 40 diggs and was shown in the BIG BOLD text in the cloud view to show that it was gaining popularity. The post had been on for about an hour now and a couple of people were providing comments. Traffic to the site had increased initially in the first 15 minutes, but had levelled of since.

At this point we had to leave the office for a couple of hours. It was when we came back that the term ‘digg effect’ dawned on us. I thought I’d check what was happening, as I was quite excited about having my first post getting some comments and the site receiving some traffic.

The first thing I noticed on my return was that the post was on the front page, in the top 5 most popular articles of the Digg site. A couple of pleased expletives were uttered in wonder at how the post had done so well. A quick check of the statistics showed that nearly 900 people had dugg the article, providing over 70 comments on the digg site and close to 50 comments on the article itself. Wow. I then checked the server logs to find that the site had received 16,000 visits serving 35,000 pages in 4 hours. Unsurprisingly at it’s peak of interest the server could not cope with the demand that the digg effect was having. For some users the pages were simply un-viewable. Ironically an article about methods to annoy and frustrate visitors to a web-site had by it’s own success and the bandwidth it was needing had made it become so slow and un-usable that it was annoying itself!

After 5 hours on Digg and a good spell on the front page, some people decided that it was a spam article and it was removed from the list. I was slightly disappointed by this as 900 people had thought the article good enough to digg it and plenty of comments were being left. Before you all start commenting about how I was only after revenue from advertising and adsense, know this. The people who read Digg are generally net-savvy users who either have advertising banners blocked, or are experienced enough to know not to click on one. The 35,000 visitors to the site barely generated enough click-thrus to cover our server costs.

Anyhow, the site article had now been removed from the Digg front page. Phew, we could breathe again and our server could recover. However the traffic did not stop. It reduced by about a third but we now found that we were in the top 10 posts on the del.icio.us popular page and also the front page on diggdot.us. Although the Digg effect had now officially ended as we were no longer in the index, in the 8 hours that passed we received a further 5,000 views and 10,000 page reads.

The last time we checked, the article had 942 diggs, 92 comments on Digg.com and 58 on this website, with a total of 47,000 page views. Traffic has finally begun to slow down.

The lesson of the story is that when a page makes it on Digg then don’t be surprised if your server cannot cope. Be prepared for some negative comments. When 150 people comment on your article someone’s going to post something negative amongst all the positive responses. Above all have fun and enjoy the ride.

Just to prove I haven’t learnt my lesson. We also put this article on Digg… but don’t expect the server to survive if we hit the front page again.

Update: The traffic on the original posting has really started to slow down now. Still seeing clicks coming from some sources, I expect that it’s bookmarks and track-backs that people are now browsing. In the last 5 Hours we’re seeing about 20-30 hits an hour on the posting and a few more comments but nothing on the scale of yesterday.

Update: This posting has just made it to the top of Digg as their most popular post. Two in 24 hours that’s some going. So far the server seems to have held up. There seems to be less traffic on this post than when the other post went ‘front-page’ yesterday, it is the weekend after all. However it’s still fairly early in the day in some parts of the US so we’ll see if it holds.

Popularity: 11%

How can we not crave the Pac-Man plug in game. It doesn’t get any more retro than this. Simple concept allowing you to plug in this little beauty into your TV and play some of the coolest old-school games around. And it’s got PAC-MAN…

Ok so you also get Bosconian, Dig Dug Rally-X and Galaxian but most importantly a straight port of the orginal (and still the best) Pac-Man game. Quite simply still the best game around and one of those classics that started the video-game movement. Would we be playing WoW and others if the likes of Pac-Man, Sonic, Mario and Pong were never made?

We expect this will be available from many good retailers – and some poor ones too!

Popularity: 2%

Amusing Employment Slogans

• * If you do a good job and work hard, you may get a job with a better company someday.
• * The light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off due to budget cuts.
• * Sure, you may not like working here, but we pay your rent.
• * Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings—they did it by killing all those who opposed them.
• * A person who smiles in the face of adversity probably has a scapegoat.
• * If at first you don’t succeed—try management.
• * Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid altogether.
• * Never quit until you have another job.
• * Hang in there: Retirement is only 30 years away!
• * Go the extra mile—It makes your boss look like an incompetent slacker.
• * Pride, commitment, teamwork—words we use to get you to work for free.
• * Work: It isn’t just for sleeping anymore.
• * There are two kinds of people in life: people who like their jobs, and people who don’t work here anymore.

Popularity: 2%

This cool looking wooden clock has numerals that seem to apear from nowhere. When not displaying the time this clock looks like a scandinavian well sanded piece of wood. When the clock is on, a very thin veneer on the front allows the shiny LED display contained within to show through. How cool is that?

It looks like magic. The beautifully clean design has no visible buttons, hiding them all at the back to give the clock an extra sleek look. Bascially it’s a time-piece for the cool geek, who wants their toys without looking like being considered dorky. We like.

Popularity: 2%

Have you ever sat there thinking ‘I wish I could buy something that did…’ We can buy dancing iPod docks, or little robots disguised as dogs, and mobile video phones with 2+ mega-pixel camera’s. Sometimes though that simply ain’t enough. Here’s our list of items that we really wish existed but can’t find them (yet).

1) The wi-fi enabled car stereo. We’ve searched high and low for one of these. What we’re after is a car stereo that either connects to our iPod or features a hard-drive. When we get back to our house/apartment we hit the ‘sync’ button and it goes off and downloads our podcasts and synchronises our music with our PC. Simple yet effective. Imagine having to fight for bandwidth with your car… or ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks when your sat in a jam.

2) The iPod phone. We’ve seen the Rockr and the Sony Walkman phone, but thery’re not quite there yet. What we want is 30-60Gb storage on our mobile phone. They’ve got to be working on it. Someone’s got to be bringing one out soon. Unfortunately we want one NOW. (Impatient aren’t we?). Come on Apple/Sony/Whoever give us what we want. Please…

3) The Sky+ improvements. One for the UK users. Why oh why didn’t Sky put a netwrok port or USB port onto their sublime Sky+ boxes? Ok it’s probably for commercial reasons, but imagine being able to dump your recorded Sky+ content onto you PC or to your video iPod digitally. You can do this with a slingbox, but wouldn’t it be great to have One box under your TV that did it all? With the advent of Sky High Definition which has got uur mouth’s watering, we’re just wishing we could stream it wirelessly around our house.

4) The High Memory PSP We love the Sony PlayStation Portable, it’s a beautiful piece of kit, but you can’t help thinking that Sony could have made it better. There simply isn’t enough memory available. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a PSP with iPod memory sizes? At present we only seem to be able to get 1 or 2 Gb memory sticks, that’s hardly much if you want to pre-load a few movies onto it before you go on holiday. With the apparent demise of UMD based films (Some major Hollywood studios have already ramped their production rates) we need more memory available. How about a 30 or 60 Gb Hard-drive add on. Come on Sony, you know it makes sense.

Popularity: 2%

How can we not want one of these… The 60Gb video iPod, the daddy of them all. At first Apple started by playing music, now selling over 1 billion songs, then a brief sojorn into photo’s. The advent of the podcast made the iPod a truly ‘must-have’ item. Now they move into video’s and we simply cannot resist. The whopping 60Gb edition can store upto 15,000 tunes, 20,000 photos or upto 150 hours of video playback. Reports of upto 20 hours battery life make this simply irressitable.

Apple have also managed to shrink the thickness of the iPod to even greater proportions. Keeping the click-wheel with which so many people are familiar. This technology allows you to find, play, skip and pause your tunes and videos with a single thumb. When married to iTunes, to watch video podcasts, music videos and your favorite TV shows, plus of course synchronise your exisitng tunes and buy new music. It’s quite simlpy the best feature rich iPod to date. (Until the next one!)

Popularity: 2%