Al Gore – Didn’t You Notice The Zig Zags?

On his global warming lecture, Al Gore is displaying CO2 levels spanning 650 000 years. On the graph behind him, CO2 levels go up and down and backward and forward in time. In other words, there are occasionally two or more CO2 levels at the same time.

Al Gore, how is it possible? Didn’t you pay any attention to the massive screen behind you?

You can see the full video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxi-OlkmxZ4 [the graph is at 7:30]

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Some background for this post. I watched An Inconvenient Truth movie two years ago, and believed every word of it. After studying the issue more carefully, I was surprised: the movie has been proved to contain material which is misleading, incorrect and false. All in all, it is full of scaremongering without any science to back it up. Almost every segment of it.

Yet, governments are making large decisions based on false theories promoted by non-scientists who can not even produce a simple graph correctly. Yet, even Barack Obama – whom we all regard highly and is currently the man with the most power on this planet - is being misinformed and misled.

Al Gore says the science on man-made global warming is settled; there’s a consensus, scientists stand behind it. That’s an easy argument to validate. Just search the web to see whether it’s true. You will see how the whole house of cards begins to crumble.

Wolfram|Alpha Test Drive

Ok, Wolfram|Alpha – the computational knowledge engine – is up and running. Granted, I’ve seen three different versions of “site is currently under heavy load”. Do remember that there’s a large amount of on the fly computation and algorithm crunching behind each result. 

These are the queries I tested it with:

Where are you? gives a good result.

Where am I? gives the correct answer.

Who am I? gives the same answer.

sin(n/10) * 100 draws a nice chart.

What are you doing? is the first computed tweet.

What time is it? surprisingly gives nothing.

green, red – minimum result.

BMW presents stock information.

Weather in Lahti Wow!

Weather in Lahti June 2003 Double-Wow!

Neuron is not that interesting for Wolfram to have knowledge about.

Are you OK? opens a “Human Discourse” functionality which is under development. What will it be?

All in all, Wolfram|Alpha provides an interesting approach and implementation. It’s certainly one to follow and use.

However, I do get ”everything is a number or a taxonomy” feel from the data it contains. It mostly answers with numbers; even Madonna boils down to a straight line between two dates.

So, Wolfram|Alpha is the engine Douglas Adams wrote about. 

Google left, Wolfram|Alpha right.

I do not know why, but the system creates an impression of an autistic Rain Man recalling phone book numbers and curated minutia with precision. Whereas Google is the outgoing guy with all the fun; its bots gathering data from the web carelessly, and giving noisy, vague answers at times.

The Book of W: A Book or a Blog or a Blog Book?

As you have probably noticed, I’ve partially moved my act to thebookofw.com.

On that site, I’ll create an experience which takes all the good parts of books and blogging. Furthermore, the site should be readable with mobile devices also.

One of the simple, minor, mundane things that bug me is how the pages are numbered. In blogs, the most recent page is the page number 1, by default. In books, page number 1 is the beginning. In my view, the best solution would be to number the oldest (i.e. first) blog post with the page number 1, and increase from there on. I haven’t yet found a way to accomplish this feature with Tumblr technology without relatively heavy scripting, or manual tagging (using tags like “page1″, “page2″). Yeah, I could code it using Tumblr API, but we’ll see.

Anyway, The Book of W is an interesting experiment. You wouldn’t believe how much, how long, how dearly I kept the contents and the subject hidden. Only my wife knew something about the unpublished, unprinted, unagented book. My face blushed and hands started to shake on those rare moments when the discussion reared it. And now, I’m on the other extreme as I publish the chapters to the web for you all to read.

When I was younger, I hided all my creative works (music, writings, …) from others. The rationale – if you can call it that – was that the works felt too personal, they gave out too much of me and made me vulnerable. Now I’ve learned that life’s too short for that. So, if you have something to present, just pour it out. Thanks for the web, it’s easy, fast, inexpensive and leads to an uncharted territory…

Something Wet Is Out! Really Wet…

It’s quite natural for a guy nicknamed raindropper to create a book covering all aspects of water, don’t you think?

So, point your browser to The Book of W and start exploring. There will chapters and postings about science, business, arts, cultures and religions – all of course water-related.

It looks like a mish-mash of blog postings and book chapters. But there’s a simple, common theme underlining all of those – and it’s clear as water.

Radiohead – …

… Learnings from The “On How The Brain Functions” Experiment.

You, the web wanderer, are perhaps aware that a bit over one year ago I posted my research paper about theory of how the brain functions. I also built a blog around it so that you, the brain researcher, can comment it with witty references to tin-foil hats.

The current gain is zero remarks to tin-foil hats.

Seriously, though, I still stand behind the theory and see several strenghts in it. The question is: why I’m not building a working prototype as it only takes a few diodes, capacitors and coils to make it. Maybe it’s because I do not want to disturb the local neighbourhood with electromagnetic noise.  

And: I’d like to thank Joni Tuoreniemi and Paul Tudsbury for commenting it and creating conversation. Thank you!

Google Search Works in Mysterious Ways

The moment I saw the first prototype – my drawings in flesh – of the Deomo TV/HIFI unit (“tv-taso” in Finnish), I realized its potential and began marketing it. You can call it passion hitting when you least expect it – I’ve never been inclined in designing or selling furniture.

How do people find the great product (if you pardon these plugs)? Via searching the web, of course. So, the marketing plan is currently a simple one - it’s a start and one can build from there. Later on, the product will be on the shops at display and advertising moves on, the usual.

Selected a perfect name for the product. I chose the word “Deomo” because of its visual properties; it looks good and dynamic, and yet stands firmly. Say it out loud: the word starts sharply and ends landing softly giving nice contrast to it. And Deomo.com domain was available.

Then, I designed and built the Deomo.com website. Simple, once again. (I use Microsoft’s free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition.)

The point (gripe) of this post is: the whole site is based around one product “tv-taso” – and yet, currently, it only appears on the distant page 13 of Google search results for that word. Some sites on the results prior www.deomo.com are not that relevant, e.g. they contain random, one-off “I’m selling my piece of furniture” ads.

The other day, it was on the first page for a while, then it dropped back to depths. My guess is that the site had an overload of the term “tv-taso”, and Google punished it for that reason and gave a meagre PageRank. An additional factor is that Google servers are not all in the same state, data-wise, and this inconsistency generates irregular search result ups and downs, high rankings and low rankings making the analysis more difficult. 

Well, I’d guess that after GoogleBot comes and scrapes the contents of this WordPress post, the Deomo site will go higher. Or not, or get even blacklisted – hmm… not really. Who knows – The Google Algorithm, are you listening? Deomo.com is not a typo.

In mysterious ways, indeed. The mystery recipe of The Algorithm keeps us website creators/marketers humble and not capable of tinkering the machine, righteously so I might add. In the past, one of the main trade secrets was Coca-Cola formula, now among the secrets hides also the Google one.

Double-Slit Experiment…

…is something that wasn’t taught on my physics lessons. It’s one of the most interesting and mysterious phenomena, and as yet unexplained by scientists.

Put simply, the experiment goes like this: shoot photons through a plate which has two slits on it, to a photographic film. An interference pattern appears on the film – even if you shoot the photons one by one, during a period of time.

Here’s a movie of the experiment.

The question is: from where the interference pattern emerges, how do the photons know where to land on the film to create this pattern? There’s only one photon “on the air” at a time so with what it is having an interaction?

More info on Wikipedia.

W3C – Let’s Extend The A HREF Tag To Convey More Information

Sig’s posts on Thingamy and RDF triples inspired me to “put the verb” back to this interlinked mass of documents we call the Web. In a simplified way. 

Here’s the official W3C recommendation and specification of links: 

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html

If you go through it, you perhaps end up in the same conclusion with me: There’s no simple way to define a semantic relationship between web resources.

I propose that we extend the A HREF tag so that it carries more meaning with it. Let’s borrow the PREDICATE concept from RDF and add that to A HREF tag. 

Here’s an example. On nokia.com, there could be a link like this: 

<A HREF=”www.nseries.com” PRED=”produces, sells, markets”>Nseries</A>

So, what would we achieve with this? It would be a way to provide more precise information, more knowledge for the search engines, etc… We would be closer to the Internet Singularity. 

Jumped From Sculpt 3D to Blender – I’m Hooked

In the late 80s, most of the neighbourhood bitboys had an Amiga 1000 or 500. Some of us were interested in 3D rendering with Sculpt 3D or Imagine software.

Raytracing took a long time with a CPU running at 7.1 MHz and 1 MB of memory. So, I left the Amiga run its raytracing overnight – in the morning I would check how the picture turned out to be. Heh, I did not even have a hard disk, so I must have been a patient guy.

Now, I’m amazed about the quality of the open source Blender software. I added YafRay renderer, and I’m hooked. Check out those galleries…

An Inconvenient Truth – Too Important to Miss

Watched the Inconvenient Truth movie. I was surprised by how clearly and softly it carried its massively important message. I was expecting a sensationalistic blast, but got a delicate whisper instead.  

The movie is also a portrait of former Vice President Al Gore. He comes through as a scarred, caring man, learning from mistakes. Future votes will find their way to him. 

During watching the movie, we were heating our sauna. The temperature of our electrically powered stove was around 86 Celsius degrees for over an hour.

I’m still eager to know: what is the role of heat generated by stoves, car engines, factories, central heating systems, computers etc. in changing the global climate? Do they increase the temperature and make the wiggling red lines of the film go up? We took a sauna – did we cause a tiny part of a glacier to melt?

[25.05.2009] Watched The Great Global Warming Swindle and felt totally betrayed.