The sky remains forever dark

Stasis! We know - well, most scientists but not all believe - that the universe is not static and is continually expanding but yes, energy is conserved, there may be something called dark matter and evenmoreso dark energy that comprises much of the universe and holds it together, but yes... the sky does remain forever dark.

#Nihilism? No. Just some bunny-hole I went into after  I ran into this excerpt while reading about entropy and the end of the universe, something that came up while discussing a Wallace Stevens poem, of all things! ;-)



__
P.S. I didn't know they had released a stamp in honor of Gibbs. I need to get myself this stamp somehow!

Poetry and Science - Deep forms of knowing

From an article discussing "difficult" poetry (like T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, for example)... 

"Poems and poetry are, for me, a deep a form of knowing, just like science. Yes, obviously, they are different. But each, in its way, is a way to understand the world."

This perhaps explains why despite being trained in the sciences, I lean more and more towards poetry as I age; not for answers or the truth or meaning but sometimes just to make the days worthwhile! Others look to religion too for answers but for some of us that was a delusion we gave up a long time back! Or as the poet Wallace Stevens wrote: 

“After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”

I quite empathize with this because although I have always read poetry, the amount of time spent reading poetry and reading about poetry has definitely increased in the last 5 years since I went through some tough times after the death of my father. In these 5 years, I've found myself going back to Wallace Stevens poems again and again; as if seeking some light, some form of redemption, some strength in words, some allusion of joy in words! His poems, in particular, are an intriguing mix of life lessons, but not in a cliched kind of way that bad poems can be! But in most of his poems, there is always something that immediately inveigles you in but very often leaves you on the fringes of understanding it completely. And although it is tough to explain to you why this is so, I believe it is this lack of complete understanding that makes me go back to them again and again. This is true of Stevens poems as well as the work of Ashbery but then there are obviously some poems whose works I do not understand at all and it does NOTHING for me. (Case in point, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets like Lyn Hejinian and some poems by Rae Armantrout come to mind but there are many others.)

In any case, I think of Stevens being a poet who I will continually be going back to for the rest of my life. After years of borrowing books of poems by Stevens and books about his poetry, I finally bought Stevens' Collected Poems last year when I found it in a used book store and coincidentally just this morning I found the book again while emptying out boxes of books; so I may read some more of his amazing but complex poems later tonight before going to sleep...so you may expect a few other posts about them in the next few days/weeks!

I'll leave you with an excerpt from one of many favorite poems of mine by Stevens ....

Beauty in Simplicity / Order in Chaos

I got introduced to the topic of chaos and the beauty and order implicit in chaos in 1991 when I did a senior year project on the order seen in fractal agglomerates and through the mid-90s, I read many articles and books about chaos theory. Though I do not claim to understand all the math behind it, there is something about the topic of chaos that draws me to it every few years.

So, I recently got two books from the library: Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop and Deep Simplicity - Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity by John Gribbin.

Prefaced in the second book, I found this wonderful quote from Richard Feynman.

‘It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of spacetime is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities.’  - Richard P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, November 1964 Cornell Lectures, broadcast and published in 1965 by BBC, pp. 57-8. 

[Also, seems Bill Gates has now put the full video of the lectures online, as part of Project Tuva.]

Leave you with these words from Feynman in the same lecture series:

‘Nature has a simplicity and therefore a great beauty.’

Indeed! And how many of us live our lives completely oblivious to the great beauty of nature!

Updates: Couple more quotes about chaos -- though not necessarily in the scientific sense:

“Chaos in the world brings uneasiness, but it also allows the opportunity for creativity and growth.”   Tom Barrett

“Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.” - Chuck Palahniuk“

Chaos is a friend of mine.” - Bob Dylan

“When tempest tossed, embrace chaos” - Dean Koontz 

"Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.” -  Henry Miller

“Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.” -  George Santayana

“Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit” - Henry Brooks Adams

In short, in chaos, there can be an opportunity to be creative, to grow, and to even flourish!

Woof Woof

What can I say but... Woof!

Dog translator transforms barks into words 

Japanese inventors have come up with a device they claim can detect a dog's emotion from its bark. The gadget focuses on the detection of six emotions including sadness, joy and frustration, alongside a recorded repertoire of spoken phrases

Photo © AFP

Deccan Traps & Comet Chunks

I have read about a meteor being the likely reason ..but seems it may have come from a passing comet!

Solving the Mystery of the Biggest Natural Explosion in Modern History
On the morning of June 30, 1908, the sky exploded over a remote region of central Siberia. A fireball as powerful as hundreds of Hiroshima atomic blasts scorched through the upper atmosphere, burning nearly 800 square miles of land. Scientists today think a small fragment of a comet or asteroid caused the "Tunguska event," so named for the Tunguska river nearby. Now, a controversial new scientific study suggests that a chunk of a comet caused the 5-10 megaton fireball, bouncing off the atmosphere and back into orbit around the sun. The scientists have even identified a candidate Tunguska object—now more than 100 million miles away—that will pass close to Earth again in 2045.

Lake Cheko in the Siberian region of Tunguska has been considered an  “impact site” of the Tunguska explosion of 1908.

Note: It is estimated that the "Tunguska event had an explosive energy roughly on order of 60 A-bombs, or 500 KT of TNT. It was closer in effect to a very large H-bomb."


In kinda related news, this was reported last week.. 

Maybe an Asteroid Didn't Kill the Dinosaurs


but maybe..

Massive volcanic eruptions in India killed them off!

The commonly told "tale":

Some 65 million years ago — as we've all come to know — an asteroid struck the earth, sending up a cloud that blocked the sun and cooled the planet. That, in turn, wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of mammals. The suddenness with which so many species vanished after that time always suggested a single cataclysmic event, and the 1978 discovery of a 112-mile, 65-million-year-old crater off the Yucatán Peninsula near the town of Chicxulub seemed to seal the deal.

The asteroid charged with killing the dinosaurs, after all, left more than the Chicxulub crater as its calling card. At the same 65-million-year depth, the geologic record reveals that a thin layer of iridium was deposited pretty much everywhere in the world. Iridium is an element that's rare on Earth but common in asteroids, and a fine global dusting of the stuff is precisely what you'd expect to find if an asteroid struck the ground, vaporized on impact and eventually rained its remains back down. Below that iridium layer, the fossil record shows that a riot of species was thriving; above it, 65% of them went suddenly missing.

Now:

A study in the Journal of the Geological Society throws all that into question. The asteroid impact and dinosaur extinction, say the authors, may not have been simultaneous, instead occurring 300,000 years apart. That's an eyeblink in geologic time, but it's a relevant eyeblink all the same — one that occurred at just the right moment in ancient history to send the extinction theory entirely awry.

Keller and Addate worried that we were misreading both the geologic and fossil records.

Long story short...(see above link for details, if interested)

So if the Chicxulub asteroid didn't kill the dinosaurs, what did? Paleontologists have advanced all manner of other theories over the years, including the appearance of land bridges that allowed different species to migrate to different continents, bringing with them diseases to which native species hadn't developed immunity. Keller and Addate do not see any reason to stray so far from the prevailing model. Some kind of atmospheric haze might indeed have blocked the sun, making the planet too cold for the dinosaurs — it just didn't have to have come from an asteroid. Rather, they say, the source might have been massive volcanoes, like the ones that blew in the Deccan Traps in what is now India at just the right point in history.

And so, dinosours were rendered extinct by India back then too, like a friend quipped! :)

Related: This 1993 report on the "Deccan trap"

A huge outpouring of the earth's interior that occurred over much of present-day India 65 million years ago came from the boundary between the earth's lower mantle and its molten iron core some 1,800 miles beneath the surface. ..... volcanic activity incubated for 3.5 million years before erupting, rapidly blanketing the Indian subcontinent with more than 1 million cubic kilometers of lava. The stack of lava is now known as the Deccan Traps.

clearly says:

"This paper's primary importance is on how flood basalts form and how they evolve," says Renne, who notes nevertheless that "the results will be interpreted in different ways by different people" seeking to explain the demise of the dinosaurs. "No definite link between the Deccan volcanic activity and the disappearance of the dinosaurs has been proven," he notes.

So, presumably this report last week is not new speculation - just old speculations that won't die with time. Sometimes its amazing what "news" gathers feet after it hits the press wires! Soon all major MSM outlets start reporting it and we believe it as novel news or worse still as the gospel truth! I think many naysayers of global warming would also say the same about a lot of "news" related to global warming and its effects; many of these also start and spread like this from press releases put out by various researchers or universities. Very soon it becomes difficult to tell science and facts from speculation and theories!

The infinite variety and mystery of life

Impressive project. Emphasis mine.

Africans have more genetic variation than anyone else on Earth, according to a new study that helps narrow the location where humans first evolved, probably near the South Africa-Namibia border.   The largest study of African genetics ever undertaken also found that nearly three-fourths of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to West Africa. The new analysis published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science.  "Given the fact that modern humans arose in Africa, they have had time to accumulate dramatic changes" in their genes, explained lead researcher Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.  People have been adapting to very diverse environmental niches in Africa, she explained in a briefing.  Over 10 years, Tishkoff and an international team of researchers trekked across Africa collecting samples to compare the genes of various peoples. Often working in primitive conditions, the researchers sometimes had to resort to using a car battery to power their equipment, Tishkoff explained. 

More at the link above. Also this kinda related study from the Scripps Research Institute. Variety, thy name is life!

A group of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has set up the microscopic equivalent of the Galapagos Islands—an artificial ecosystem inside a test tube where molecules evolve to exploit distinct ecological niches, similar to the finches that Charles Darwin famously described in The Origin of the Species 150 years ago. As described in an article published in an advance, online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the work demonstrates some of the classic principles of evolution. For instance, research shows that when different species directly compete for the same finite resource, only the fittest will survive. The work also demonstrates how, when given a variety of resources, the different species will evolve to become increasingly specialized, each filling different niches within their common ecosystem.

Uber-cool! Again, More at the link above.

--

“In the time of your life, live - so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite variety and mystery of it.” - William Saraoyan

The cosmos is all it is, or ever was, or ever will be."

friend emailed me about this news snippet today about a story from... once upon a time!

 

Its the tale of a primordial blob 12.9 billion light years away! Stunning stuff, no?

This image of the Himiko object, the most massive object ever discovered in the early universe, is a composite and in false color.

So, how many of you have seen much of Sagan's Cosmos? I do not think I saw the show much in India; though I vaguely remember they showed it on Sunday's in the late 80s. From all I have read and heard, it is quite the show and a must-see. (Though an apples-to-orange comparison, it ranks right up there with David Attenborough's show Living Planet, which they also showed in India in the 80s, in terms of wonderful TV shows to watch in teenage years...and then again every few years till you die! I believe, modern cinematography has far surpassed the Living Planet experience recently with the Planet Earth series in 2006. The same friend recommends you watch the UK version, narrated by David Attenborough, if possible instead of the US cable television edition narrated by actress Sigourney Weaver).


Btw, it seems you can watch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on hulu.com now.

The groundbreaking, and for many of us, life changing documentary “Cosmos” is now available on Hulu. The 13 episode series premiered in 1980 and it is estimated that it has been viewed by over a billion people. If you have never seen it or just want a refresher, head over to Hulu today

For those of you who cannot view videos on hulu, it also seems to be on Google Video also.  Start here - The Cosmos Part 1 The Shores of the cosmic ocean - and then go find the other 12 episodes via a search or under Related Videos.

Also this..

Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan - Episode 1: "Wanderers"

In 1996,  Sagan recorded a partial audio version of his 1994 book "Pale Blue Dot". Often described as the "sequel" to Cosmos,...

Or you can read the book via google-books or if you want to buy a 7-DVD set and have $100 to spare, buy it on amazon! ;)

For now...go just hear the intro to Cosmos. Awesome introduction to this awesome universe!



The words:

"The cosmos is all it is, or ever was, or ever will be."

seem so appropriate for today as we read the above news from "once upon a time". :)

Smart Chips

A smart chip, indeed!

An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine.  Although the chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up, says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project, or FACETS.  The hope is that recreating the structure of the brain in computer form may help to further our understanding   of how to develop massively parallel, powerful new computers, says Meier. 

Picture © Karlheinz Meier 

But well nigh impossible (yet) to make something that functions like a human brain, I think... but this is an interesting small step towards that sci-fi-ish goal!

The Future is Now

This is a must see!

This talk was the buzz at TED Talks this year -- Game-changing wearable tech

Related article in Wired: MIT students develop a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen.  

"The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when done."

My first thought was that this was like the movie Minority Report! Actually, this is quite different. I googled to remind myself of what Tom Cruise did in Minority Report and I think that was something like this "intuitive, interface-free, touch-driven screen".... also presented at TED Talks earlier.
 

One big step for mankind

Interesting!

The oldest human footprints – left more than 1.5 million years ago – have been discovered in northern Kenya.

Two sets of prints left by Homo ergaster, an early ancestor of modern humans. were found in separate rock layers near Ileret. Laser scanning revealed that feet have stayed much the same over 1.5 million years and the creature walked the same way as people do today.The prints bore all the hallmarks of a modern human stride, including an arched foot, short toes, and a big toe that was parallel to the other toes. As in modern humans, weight was transferred from the heel to the ball of the foot and then to the big toe with each step. The find is the first of its kind since the famous discovery 30 years ago of footprints dating back 3.75 million years at Laetoli, Tanzania. These older prints are thought to have been left by the more primitive and apelike Australopithecus.

 

A fossil footprint left by a human ancestor about 1.5 million years ago in Kenya has been discovered. Photo © REUTERS

God’s balls banging together

Via an mail from Neel, here's an article by Richard Dawkins on Darwin, which talks about "why we really do need to know the amazing truth about evolution, and the equally amazing intellectual dishonesty of its enemies."

How can you say that evolution is “true”? Isn’t that just your opinion, of no more value than anybody else’s? Isn’t every view entitled to equal “respect”? Maybe so where the issue is one of, say, musical taste or political judgement. But when it is a matter of scientific fact? Unfortunately, scientists do receive such relativistic protests when they dare to claim that something is factually true in the real world. Given the title of Jerry Coyne’s book, this is a distraction that I must deal with.

A scientist arrogantly asserts that thunder is not the triumphal sound of God’s balls banging together, nor is it Thor’s hammer. It is, instead, the reverberating echoes from the electrical discharges that we see as lightning. Poetic (or at least stirring) as those tribal myths may be, they are not actually true.

More at the article. Previous posts on Darwin: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Happy Birthday, Darwin

2 million people are wishing Darwin a happy 200th birthday year - Care to join them on Facebook? (Read more about it here and here.) 

Also, on this occasion, as we celebrate Darwin, evolutionary biologist Sean Carroll (who is a Professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin) reminds us that..

..we should take this opportunity to celebrate more than just one man and an idea. We should celebrate the spirit that drove Darwin and many other exceptional people to explore previously unseen parts of the world and to unearth the history of life. Their adventures and discoveries have transformed our view of nature and our place in it.

Do read the article to read about the heroic journeys and work of Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates, who "undertook even longer voyages under more difficult conditions than Darwin" in arriving at their theories of evolution / natural selection. 

Also, a great collection of articles about Darwin, courtesy Forbes magazine and  the best Darwinian sites on the web, according to the Guardian of UK.

The picture is from here. All copyrights with whoever owns it. Please attribute the link (which is where I found it) if you use this great picture!

Addendum: I file this away under life's little coincidences -- in the past 48 hours, I heard and read something that pertains to Darwin (in a way!), although at that time I did not appreciate that Darwin's 200th birthday was coming up this week!

1) Heard a scientist/entrepreneur say that it is not the smartest, not the fittest... but those that adapt will survive the current economic scenario.

2) "It's not the strongest who survive, but the ones who adapt best. And in order to adapt, we need to create, and in order to create, we need stimulus, and in order to get stimulus, well, ...you need to read this book!" - That's from the book, Stimulated, which I started reading earlier this week.

---

Previous posts on Darwin (and Lincoln's) 200th Birthday: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Let's Evolve

Lots of articles, podcasts, and videos through variousnews-portals today (and even a Facebook group) as the world celebrate's Darwin's and Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday.

 Picture from this site.


Alas...here in the US:

From: Miller JD, Scott EC, Okamoto S, Public acceptance of evolution. Science 313:765-766, 2006.

I'll just leave you with this Gallup Poll about Education, Religion, and Evolution in the US.

On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, a new Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they "believe in the theory of evolution," while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don't have an opinion either way. These attitudes are strongly related to education and, to an even greater degree, religiosity.

There is a strong relationship between education and belief in Darwin's theory, as might be expected, ranging from 21% of those with high-school educations or less to 74% of those with postgraduate degrees.

Those with high-school educations or less are much more likely to have no opinion than are those who have more formal education. Still, among those with high-school educations or less who have an opinion on Darwin's theory, more say they do not believe in evolution than say they believe in it.

For all other groups, and in particular those who have at least a college degree, belief is significantly higher than nonbelief.

More data and graphs at the link.

Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

In less frivolous mode than my previous post, let me share two links that talk about Lincoln and Darwin's lives and their importance today.

1) Brad Hirschfield, who explores the uses and abuses of religion in politics and pop culture in his posts, writes today in a post titled Lincoln, Darwin and Gay Marriage

Of course, there is no moral equivalence between creationists and supporters of human slavery, but it is worth noting that in each case, people used/use religion and scriptural passages to justify their beliefs. I hope that both those in the PCUSA and anyone else who uses sacred teachings to justify their position, whatever it may be, remembers that having a verse to lean on never guarantees that God is leaning your way.

It would be helpful in addressing today's culture wars if both creationists and those who oppose any recognition of the potential sacredness of a committed, monogamous, same sex relationship, without betraying their beliefs, approached these issues with greater humility. It's worth remembering that like those who used the bible to support slavery, they might one day look back, if not with shame, at least with regret over their understanding of God's word....and so might those who support such marriages and unions. If we treated each other with that awareness, whichever we go, will get there together and be the better for it as a nation.

2) A book Review in Time magazine of a recent book: Angels & Ages: A short book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life by Adam Gopnik.

Looking back, Looking Forward

I have another post on the year that was...

... but here's a post by Adam Bright in Good magazine about the things to look forward to in 2009.

P.S. I did not know that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born on the same day ..as in same day, same year - Feb 12th, 1809. So, both have their 200th birth anniversary being celebrated next year.

P.P.S. Kinda related, thanks to the P.S. mention: The complete works of Charles Darwin, now online. Also, this Daily Kos science post on Darwin's 199th birthday.

Weird, alright

Despite having read many books over the years on relativity and quantum mechanics, these theories just won't get embedded in my brains like Newtonian's theories and classical mechanics that I learned in school. (There was some exposure to statistical mechanics - Boltzmann, Gibbs, etc. - in some of the thermodynamics coursework I took but it was superficial at best and I rue I did not wade into the details and try to get a better grasp of that topic too!)

And yet, I'm drawn from time to time to read more about the fascinating developments in physics from 1900 onwards. I am currently reading a few books on the subject; some of which delve into the lives of the great men involved while others give a good historical narrative of their quest to understand the world of atoms and its components and the forces that hold them (and the world) together. It is amazing that these unique and devastatingly intelligent people were brought together in this scientific quest at the same time (essentially 1900 till mid-30s).

Anyways, just rambling now....since the books I have been reading the past week or so were on my mind and also because I saw this book review in the Washington Post just now.

Very Small, Very Weird - The struggle to understand what goes on -- or doesn't -- inside the atomThe Age of Entanglement - When Quantum Physics was Reborn by Louisa Gilder. - A review of

Because I have never really understood even the basic ideas developed before WWII, I have kept away from the more recent (post WWII) developments in particle physics and new theories like string theory etc. First I need to grasp what Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Einstein and co. are trying to teach us...then I can worry about Feynman, Greene, and many others!!

Darwin and The Origin of Species

Great set of pictures, via the Guardian.

Darwin at age 31 in 1840, recently married, a dignified young naturalist with a secret theory about evolution. Portrait of Darwin, 1840, by George Richmond, ©Darwin Heirlooms Trust, courtesy of the English Heritage Photo Library

A grand old man of science. Darwin aged 71, photographed a year before his death in 1882. Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1881, ©Private

Extrapolate the past or Invent the future

The Emerging Technology Conference at MIT started yesterday ...

Technology Review's EmTech Conference brings together world-renowned innovators and senior business leaders to discuss the emerging technologies that are poised to make a dramatic impact on our world. Keynote sessions, insightful panels, and groundbreaking presentations--of a caliber only Technology Review can deliver--are combined with networking opportunities and live demonstrations.

And this morning, even as I sit here and read about all the wonderful work going on around the world in cleantech and renewable energy, a few miles from here, these wonderful talks:

Keynote: Vinod Khosla (8:25 am - 9:10 am)

“Extrapolate the past ... or invent the future. A renewable-energy perspective: financing, forecasting, modeling, and trajectory.” A look at renewable energy—where we are now and where we need to be. The focus is on "Chindia" solutions—how to identify them, the issues with forecasting them, the importance of cost and scaling trajectory, and the policy prescriptions that can help drive them.

Green Transportation (9:10 am - 10:10 am)

Leaders from companies that are transforming transportation discuss how emerging technologies will enable more environmentally friendly planes, trains, and automobiles.
Confirmed Panelists: Steven E. Koonin, Chief Scientist, BP; JB Straubel, Chief Technical Officer, Tesla Motors; Ryan Chin, PhD Candidate, MIT Media Lab

Sigh... I couldn't be there for the talks but luckily you (and I) can all watch these two talks for free at the links above. (Thanks, TechReview for the freebies!)

Khosla, of course, is hugely invested in renewable energy (particularly biofuels, see my earlier post about it).

With regards to solar energy (which is an industry I currently know more about than other cleantech/renewable energy industries), he is not such a big fan, though he has been reported to be pro-solar thermal but not gungho about photovoltaics & solar roofing so much.

Why? Because ..

"I invest in technologies that achieve unsubsidized market competitiveness with five to seven years after introduction to the marketplace. I don't think photovoltaic has reached that point yet but I do think that solar thermal electricity will meet this criteria."

And like he said this week...

"If it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter. Most of what we talk about today--hybrid, biodiesel, ethanol, solar photovoltaics, geothermal--I believe are irrelevant to the scale of the problem" of climate change," says Khosla.

Though I am still a proponent for rooftop solar, which is how I came to be interested seriously (more than just a feel-good renewable-is-good sort of interest) in renewable energies, I am all ears to everything that Khosla has to say because as an entrepreneur, he brings a very practical and realistic view of things.

With regard to solar, I should add that his belief is that large, centralized solar power plants are feasible and we can get "up to 90 percent of the power we need from centralized renewables, which are “getting very competitive” with natural gas and other forms of fossil energy."

You can hear a speech he gave on solar energy at the annual Solar Power conference in 2006.



Ignore the rather irritating and pointless first 2.5 minutes of introduction and move on to hear what Khosla had to say.

Update: Since I wrote about one VC's opinions on solar, perhaps it is important to point out this timely post from the NYT Technology blog yesterday about VC investments this year:

Still, 39 percent of venture capitalists said that solar would become the dominant clean-energy source over the next 20 years, while 27 percent predicted it would be nuclear and 18 percent predicted it would be wind.

Per the article, thin-film solar companies alone have raised more than $800 million this summer! Also linked in the article is the TED Talk: Salvation and profit in greentech by John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, "one of the top venture capital firms in Silicon Valley" which recently announced that "it had raised a $500 million Green Growth Fund and is also investing part of its eighth, $700 million fund in clean technology."

Know your insects

An ant's social status

Whether an ant becomes a dominant queen or a lowly worker is determined by both nature and nurture, it turns out. A new study found that an ant's social status in its colony depends both on its genetic inheritance and the food it eats when it is young.

Earlier: Why ants rule.

No point to this post. Its not even blog-worthy perhaps. What can I say! Obviously, I'm just not as busy as an ant. Oh -- the phrase is 'busy as a bee', you say? Oh well -- different species, same order, wiki enlightens. (Wiki has a whole lot more information on ants, if they interest you!)

Total Solar Eclipse

Video of today's "Olympics eclipse" - a total solar eclipse from remote Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwestern China near the Mongolian border. 10,000 people traveled for 16+ hours by bus to go see this!

Unfortunately, it is a 1 hour video from the San Francisco Exploratorium. If u do not have time, scroll ahead in the video to where 27 minutes are left and watch for the next 10-12 minutes at least. AMAZING! If interested, you can also read their dispatches.

Highlights of the video, where I found the link to the SFE video, are at this Wired blog post, which is posted by someone who saw their "first total solar eclipse in 2001 in Zambia, Africa and has never been the same since."

It's an amazing world, indeed!

P.S. If you are interesting in seeing the next one live, start planning. Another Wired blog post has a

"handy How-To guide to eclipse chasing. The next two are slated for July 22, 2009 and July 11, 2010. The first will be visible in parts of India and China before heading into the Pacific, while the second will primarily be visible from South Pacific islands. For a full list of future dates, check out NASA's page of eclipse dates."

This 2nd wired post also has a link to some amazing flickr albums, which link to not only some great eclipse pictures but also have some great pictures of NW China.

Also more links to eclipse images from around the world via the Huffington Post.