China For Life

The continuation of this blog will be at thetimevault.blogspot.com

No content will be moved, as it will be a brand new blog of a more organized sort.

I will not be posting here anymore; go to thetimevault.blogspot.com!

I'm off to make my own blog template

new template comes with the theme "injection, fuel, rush, power, etc"

it's gonna take quite some time to brainstorm, do the artwork, and code.

So no new posts for the next few days; sorry.

Feel free to dig through my old stuff :)

peace!

UPDATE:

New template is about 40% finished. I'm going to call it "The Time Vault". So that means I scraped my idea on "injection, fuel" etc. It looks quite nice. The URL is already reserved at thetimevault.blogspot.com

Shoppers lined up outside the Carrefour superstore in southwestern China saturday, eagerly awaiting to snatch items on sale at 8:30 am sharp. What they didn't expect was a poor job done by the janitors which resulted in a slippery entrance. Costumers fell down and were trampled over by others as they stormed into the store. Three were confirmed to have been "trampled to death," and 31 were injured.

Press said that some were outside the store as early as 3:00 am; apparently they wanted this "rapeseed" oil for cooking. Those in front were probably more prone to get hurt.

Out of the 31 injured, 7 had severe injuries. Local police said that they have heard of the event, but cannot confirm its validity. Telephoning the Chinese headquaters of French owned Carrefour superstore returned a busy tone.

Tsk tsk. China, what happened...

A new lighter from Nathan Gabrielle gives convenience to geek smokers! Instead of the classical zippos, this 21 generation version is flameless; it uses electrical wires to heat up. All it requires is a small battery that gets charged with a USB port. Plus, it also has some decent memory. Cool eh? Now someone tell me where I can get one.

GigaPan is a new add-on for general digital cameras that allows users to take panoramic pictures up to billions of pixels of quality. Not only will this new device allow us to view the world with utter clarity, companies like Google Earth and UNESCO are partnering up with fellow GigaPan photographers to further connect the global population.

The actual add-on is a device that will snap onto your everyday camera, which can then automatically take hundreds of overlapping pictures, ensuring high quality. It takes around five minutes to an hour to take all the pictures; but in the end, the sweet success is always worth it.

A GigaPan will come quite cheaply for such a cool product. Once they get out of the current beta testing, it will retail at around $270 USD. It would be cool to make a real life "Where Is Waldo" picture of yourself next time you take a vacation.

Go ahead and check out some REAL PICTURES of GigaPan. It works just like Google Earth - zoom, image loads, pretty images! zoom more, image loads more, more pretty images... etc. Have fun!

Here is the latest episode of south park.

I wish they win another emmy this year. That WoW episode was simply amazing.

Enjoy!

Greetings indie musician! Here are some of the tools and websites to help you out through your journey to success.

-TOOLS-
Acoustica - a user friendly audio mixing tool for mixing your recordings.
Guitar Pro - a guitar tabs simulator, great for practice and getting the feel of the music.
FruitLoop - if you are more into techno, trance, house, etc. this is the software for you. Fruit loops allow easy mixing along with potential for complex loops.

-SITES-
BandChemistry - Come here to recruit other musicians for a band.

Purevolume - Much like Myspace, you can post your music here and promote your band.

The following three sites are all aimed toward unsigned artists. They will help you book gigs and promote through facebook, myspace, etc.
FireGigs
AnyGig
Artistopia

Finally, before you become famous, you can start selling your music through the following.
Elisteningpost
Fuzz

That's all folks, thanks for reading this early morning post.

After South Park's smashing hit parody of World Of Warcraft (Make Love Not Warcraft), the studio is getting ready for another episode of quality foolishness. Tonight, November 7th, 2007 at 10:00pm ET, south park's new Guitar Hero episode will be aired on Comedy Network (very nice!). Stan, the fat boy, is once again on the verge of breaking up with his friends as he becomes cocky, believing that he is the king of Guitar Hero.

For all you who haven't heard of Guitar Hero, which I really doubt, Guitar Hero is a game, much like ddr, but instead you are in control of a toy "guitar" with large buttons at which you can smack at your pleasure. The newest version of this game, Guitar Hero III - Legends of Rock, has sold more than $115 million dollars in its first week. Not only does this enlighten the video games department, Toy R Us is also getting some credit for selling different forms of "guitar" joysticks.

It's hard to imagine Guitar Hero's success; it was an underdog not so long ago (The first version of Guitar Hero was released back in 2005). But once again, this did allow many hopeless (not you!) people engage in their inner rock-god-mode and play some face-melting tracks with minimal difficulty.

California - Jose Antonio Mosqueda was ruled as guilty by fellow lawyers after torturing a tortoise he found in a backyard. The tortoise, named Bob, is a precious pet of the local autistic boy William Sullivan.

Mosqueda brutally mutilated the 40 pound creature, slashing its neck and legs, puncturing its shell, and smashing it against a wall. Bob is recovering at the moment, though its condition and bodily form is overall horrendous. Now, autistic children are known to be quiet and introverted; in this case, Bob was the first thing William ever spoke to. Poor kid, now he is terrified believing that he will be taken and harassed like the tortoise (through his imagination... autistic children have absolutely amazing imagination).

The accused 18year old was sentenced, on Monday, to 270 days in jail, 5 years of probation, and a fine of $5479. Funny how Mosqueda used to own an iguana, a dog, and a snake. The court ruled that he may not have access to any animals in the future and that he is to abandon his pets. His lawyers didn't have a chance.

Information from the novel "Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments" by Alex Boase.
I am heavily loaded with work today, so here's an article taken from the New Scientist magazine.

Scientists walk on the thin line between reality and fiction, brilliance and madness. The following 10 science experiments are all real; they are based on sudden and insane stokes of genius. I find them all particularly entertaining, I hope you do too.

The Top Ten

1) Elephants on Acid

A curiosity-led experiment from the 1960s, in which Warren Thomas decided to inject an elephant named Tusko with 297 milligrams of LSD — about 3,000 times the typical human dose — to see what would happen. The idea was to determine whether the hallucinogenic drug could induce musth — the state of temporary madness in which male elephants become aggressive.

The result was a public relations disaster: Tusko died. The scientists claimed in their defence that they had not expected this to happen — two of them had taken plenty of acid themselves, they said.

2) Terror in the Skies

Another 1960s experiment, in which ten soldiers on a training flight were told by the pilot that the aircraft was disabled, and about to ditch in the ocean. They were then required to fill in insurance forms before the crash — ostensibly so the Army was not financially liable for any deaths or injuries.

They were actually unwitting participants in an experiment: the plane was not crippled at all. It revealed that fear of imminent death indeed causes soldiers to make more mistakes than usual when filling in forms.

3) Tickling

In the 1930s Clarence Yeuba, a Professor of Psychology at Antioch College in Ohio, formed the hypothesis that people learn to laugh when tickled, and that the response is not innate. He tested it on his son — the family was forbidden from laughing in relation to tickling when he was present.

Leuba’s wife, however, was caught some months later bouncing the boy on her knee while laughing and saying: “Bouncy, bouncy.” By the time the boy was seven, he was laughing when tickled — but that did not stop Leuba trying the experiment again on his sister.

4) Headless rats and painted faces

In 1924 Carney Landis, of the University of Minnesota, set out to investigate facial expressions of disgust. To exaggerate expressions, he drew lines on volunteers’ faces with burnt cork, before asking them to smell ammonia, listen to jazz, look at pornography or place their hands in a bucket of frogs.

He then asked each volunteer to decapitate a white rat. While all hesitated, and some swore or cried, most agreed to do so — showing the ease with which most people bow to authority. The pictures, however, look quite bizarre. “They look like members of a strange cult preparing to offer a sacrifice to the Great God of the Experiment,” Mr Boese wrote.

5) Raising the dead

Robert Cornish, of the University of California at Berkeley, believed in the 1930s that he had perfected a way of raising the dead. He experimented by placing corpses on a see-saw to circulate the blood, while injecting adrenalin and anticoagulants.

After apparently successful experiments on strangled dogs, he found a condemned prisoner, Thomas McMonigle, who was prepared to become a human guinea pig. The state of California, however, refused permission, for fear that it would have to release McMonigle if the technique worked.

6) Slumber learning

In 1942 Lawrence LeShan, of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, attempted subliminally to influence boys into stopping biting their fingernails. While they were asleep, he played them a record of a voice saying: “My fingernails taste terribly bitter.” When the record player broke down, he stood in the dormitory repeating the phrase himself.

It seemed to work: by the end of the summer, 40 per cent of the boys had stopped biting their nails. Mr Boese, however, has another explanation: "'If I stop biting my nails,’ they probably thought, ‘the strange man will go away.’”

7) Turkey turn-ons

Martin Schein and Edgar Hale, of Pennsylvania State University, devoted themselves to studying the sexual behaviour of turkeys in the 1960s, and discovered that the birds are not choosy. Taking a model of a female turkey, they progressively removed body parts until the males lost interest.

Even when all that remained was a head on a stick, the male turkeys remained turned on.

8) Two-headed dogs

Vladimir Demikhov, a surgeon from the Soviet Union, revealed his surgical creation of a two-headed dog in 1954. The head of a puppy had been grafted onto the neck of an adult German shepherd. The second head would lap at milk, even though it did not need nourishment — and though the milk then dribbled down the neck from its disconnected oesophagus. Both animals soon died because of tissue rejection — but that did not stop Demikhov from creating 19 more over the next 15 years.

9) The vomit-drinking doctor

Stubbins Ffirth, a doctor training in Philadelphia during the 1800s, formed the hypothesis that yellow fever was not an infectious disease, and proceeded to test it on himself. He first poured infected vomit into open wounds, then drank the vomit. He did not fall ill — but not because yellow fever is not infectious. It was later discovered that it must be injected directly into the bloodstream, typically through the bite of a mosquito.

10) Eyes wide open

In 1960 Ian Oswald, of the University of Edinburgh, sought to test extreme conditions for falling asleep. He taped open volunteers’ eyes, while placing a bank of flashing lights 50cm in front of them, and attached electrodes to their legs that administered electric shocks. He also blasted very loud music into their ears.

All three subjects were able to fall asleep within 12 minutes. Oswald speculated that the key was the monotonous and regular nature of the stimuli.

Some consider it a curse, some even a mutation, but to Poonam, her two year old daughter Lakshmi Tatma is a blessing sent by the gods. Lakshmi was born with nearly another body (it's just missing a head) attached to her butt, somewhat like a mirror image, giving her a total of 8 functioning limbs. Wow, I found some of her picture peculiarly strange; can you imagine someone without a head stuck backwards from your butt? Take a look if you dare.

The Hindu goddess of wealth comes with 8 limbs, which is why when Lakshmi was born, the entire population from her tiny village of 500 inhabitants came for blessings. Of course, her mother is proud of giving birth to such a symbolic baby, but it is too bad that with her condition, Lakshmi won't live past adolescence.

For £100,000 and after many rejections from hospitals, Lakshmi have successfully found a gurney to have her bottom half cut off by 30 professional surgeons. It is said that this won't be a complicated process, but will require a lot of time.

The entire surgery will involve brutally slicing through her mid-section, restoring the kidney that is currently being shared between the two bodies, reorienting her bladder and genitals, and finally using plastic surgery to fix up her pelvis and skin. Really, this is one of the easier cases with attached identical twins, her x-ray reveals that she does have a fully functioning body with all the required body parts.

In fact, I believe that her surgery is going on right now. I wish her luck (she probably won't need any, being a reincarnation of a goddess) and I'll be looking forward for her results.

Wang Lee Hom's album Change Me released earlier this year is a smashing success (way bigger than Jay's this year). Born in New York, Lee Hom grew up with an American education of music. His style fuses harmonically the two clashing cultures of the west and the east. His artist career has been inclining steeply in the past 3 years, topping music charts and starring in various films. Omg, he's taking over.

Track list

1.Intro
2.改变自己
3.落叶归根
4.创作前言
5.我们的歌
6.你是我心内的一首歌
7.爱在哪里
8.Cockney Girl
9.不完整的旋律
10.爱的鼓励
11.华人万岁
12.星期六的深夜

RFID, or radio frequency identification, has been around for some time. The basic technology of this high-end tracking device involves a group of pretty metal wires, usually yellow or silver, aligned in a rectangular (sometimes circular) pattern engraved onto a small chip or a piece of paper. You might have seen this on books, video games (especially the new XBox 360 games), and generally expensive products. Information is stored in these wires, which are accessed by radio waves, which then are fed into a computer with the object's precise location.

The classic versions of these are mostly chips found in animals, passports, mastercards, hardcore clubbers, etc. The new version is tattoos from Somark. Yes, tattoos! Now it is more flexible and safe, so you can have one too. The new RFID comes in color or invisible passive ink that writes a barcode on your body. This new chemical is also completely inert and bio-compatible with bodily contents. Of course, they are first going to tattoo all the cows, so in a few months, the beef you eat might contain some nutritious RFID ink. Well, at least if you fall ill from mad cow, they can track back to which cow you ate.

This is no longer science fiction. It is only a matter of time before all of us are tagged. If you join the army, uncle Sam would like to give you a tattoo of "solidarity". Yes, you know what that means. A mere 10 seconds is all it takes; you can even be tagged in your sleep.

The 21st century is all about mitigating objects and maximizing power. Semiconductors, microprocessors, blue ray discs are all examples of our wonderful modern inventions. Nanotechnologies is a fairly new topic; few has exploited its potential in our quest for superior function.

Nano is literally a prefix for units 10^-9 times smaller. This extraordinarily small unit allows extreme control and precision. One of my distant friends used to go to University of Toronto, where he had the chance to help his professor develop an electrical wire around 1 electron thick. To me I found it profoundly interesting, since if that wire did work, we could enhance our communication technologies more than tens of thousands of times. Of course it didn't work yet (or else this would be on the news), namely electrons don't behave stably under that condition, so further research is required.

What did work though, is another amazing nano-thing. The world's first nanoradio was made not so long ago at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This entire device is ran by one single tiny carbon-nanotube molecule which acts as the antenna, amplifier, band-pass filter, and demodulator simultaneously. In proper scale, this entire thing is actually 10,000 times thinner than a single human hair. But the radio is only a prototype for a bigger project: radio controlled interface on subcellular scales. What does this mean? It means when you go to the doctors, they can investigate a single cell in your body, and manipulate matter inside that single cell. Cool stuff, eh?

Scientists and researchers have came a long way with nanotechnologies. Right now, nanotech is used in ipods, flash memories, processors, and even pregnancy tests. Nanotech will be one of the dominating factors in the days to come, so get used to this kind of crazy stuff!

Jay Chou's 8th album is out now (nov 2nd)! The new theme is American western cowboys. I personally did not find this album as good as the other ones... kinda soft... the first single sounds a little like a kindergarten theme... anyways! It's Friday, so here's a short post. You can dL the album at the bottom. If you like Jay's work, you should really consider buying it!

Here are the tracks -

01 牛仔很忙 Cowboy On the Run/Cowboy is Very Busy (Niu Zai Hen Mang)
02 彩虹 Rainbow (Cai Hong)
03 青花瓷 Chinese/Green Flower Pot (Qing Hua Ci)
04 陽光宅男 Sunshine Homeboy (Yang Guang Zhai Nan)
05 蒲公英的約定 Dandelion's Promise (Pu Gong Ying De Yue Ding)
06 無雙 Unparalleled (Wu Shuang)
07 我不配 I'm Not Worthy (Wo Bu Pei)
08 扯 Tear (Che)
09 甜甜的 Sweet (Tian Tian De)
10 最長的電影 The Longest Movie (Zui Chang De Dian Ying)

Quantum physics IS a hard subject. Only a few people really, really understand it enough to discover new theories and prove them mathematically. To an average joe like you and me, quantum may seem far reached , strenuous, impossible; it is. But like many complicated subject, the fundamentals are easy to understand and are usually fairly useful. In this article I will introduce to you several basic theories of quantum physics and give an example of each. This hopefully will give you a better understanding of our world and the knowledge to show off to your (geek) friends.

First off, what makes quantum so hard? The simple answer is: the quantum level contains the smallest particles man has ever detected. Things in this level of the universe don't follow the proper rules we obey by today (like gravity, velocity, etc), therefore it is so damned hard.

1. Higgs Field
- Everything is wave. Everything talks to higgs.
Everything in this infinite and eternal space are waves. Including you and me, the computer screen in front of you, even that book sitting quietly vibrating (yes, its vibrations are very small; it is made of waves). Some waves are larger, and we can use them to our advantage (radio waves, satellite) , but most are small enough to be classified as gas, liquid, or solid. All these waves communicate with the higgs inside the "Higg's Field", which occupies all space at all time. The Higg will respond to the waves with instructions of where to go, and how to behave. Without the higg's field, matter (or mass) would not exist.

2. The Double Slit Experiment
- Observation has an effect on how quanta behave.
When shooting a stream of electrons through three slits in a wall onto a sheet behind, we would expect to see an interference pattern because electrons are made of waves (like water). Naturally, if we don't observe the electrons as they pass through the slits, an interference pattern occurs. But when we do observe their motion, trying to understand which slit (if any) the electrons go into, three straight lines matching the slits occur on the sheet, just as if the electrons were single objects. Simply by observing, we have changed the way quanta behave. In other words, quanta "know" that they are being watched.

3. Superposition
- Object exists everywhere.
Right now, you are looking at your computer screen. When you close your eyes and muffle your ears, the screen is in superposition with everything else in the room. This means that they can be anywhere; France, Japan, Antarctica, the moon, or even the other side of the universe. The instant you open your eyes, all objects snap back to where they were before. In fact, if there is a water bottle behind you right now and you can't see it, touch it, or hear it, it is in superposition.

4. Entaglement
- All matter are connected. (We are all connected!)
In quantum physics, we say everything is "entangled". Ever heard of the myth about twins where if one twin becomes morose the other suddenly also becomes sad? That might not be true ( I don't really know... ) but quantum suggests that all matter are connected to each other no matter how far they are apart, therefore everything is forever and infinitely entangled. Scientists have also proven superconnectivity, which is similar to entanglement, but different in the sense that an object is "divided" into "halves". For example, we can divide a certain matter into two, bring one to the other side of the universe, and do something something to the half-object at hand, the other half receives the same impact instantly. This theory has given rise to many spiritual practices, such as teleportation (scientists were able to teleport a single photon to a superposition of three photons!)

5. Tunnel Effect
- You can walk through walls.
Yes you can! The chances of it happening is not zero; it is quite close to zero. If you keep driblling a basketball, there is a chance for the ball to fall through the floor. Again, a relatively low chance of it happening, and too bad no one has ever seen it happen. In one of my earlier posts about a the LDC (large hadron collider), each collision has a side effect chance of forming a black hole - the chance is about the same as tunnel effect occurring in real life.

6. Many World Theory
- Parallel universe? There may be more.
Decisions, decisions, decisions. We make them every day. Every time you make a decision, a new universe is made to suit the outcomes of that decision - you are just living one the many possibilities of your life. In a famous (and silly) mental experiment, Schrodinger stuffed his cat into a box of radioactive material. Within an hour, the radioactive material might kill the cat or it might not. When the cat is in the box, it is in superposition, it becomes uncertain and unknowable. Whether the cat lives or dies, a new universe will be created. If we were to have a new universe created every time a decision is made, there would be "Many World"s. It's chilling to know that Hitler is still alive in some other world. It's more scary to understand the concept of Quantum Suicide, where a person keeps trying to suicide with a revolver, but keeps living in the dimension where the round is on blank.

There are many, many other theories. Some more sane than others, but all are a little disturbing. As we approach the quantum age, I hope the general population will gain a better understanding of our world through the quantum perspective.

After reading all that, consider this classic question:

If a tree falls down but nothing is around to hear it, does it make a sound?