I just wanna share this gold in Youtube. I love this version of A Long and Lasting Love by Billy Preston and Syreeta (the other version is from Crystal Gayle, but I am not sure which one is the original).
A long and lasting love
Not many people find it
But those who do their whole life through
Put their heart and soul behind it
A long and lasting love
A long and lasting love
Is what I always dream of
And when I look into your eyes
I knew I've really seen love
A long and lasting love
Refrain:
Now that you're in my life
I'm gonna make you stay
I'll have to be some kind of crazy fool
To let you get away
(Repeat) (my favorite part)
A long and lasting love
We share for many reasons
A special bond that goes beyond
The changing of the seasons
A long and lasting love
A long and lasting love
Is someone I can care for
Someone to be there for
The rest of my life
A long and lasting love
(Repeat Refrain)
(Repeat Last Stanza)
A long and lasting love...
It's really a good feeling to fall in love, especially when you listen to this kind of ballads.
I will always sing this to my love, MF.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Bursting Neurons
My room smells, looks like a sanitary landfill. Empty styro-cups of McDonald’s Premium Roast Coffee and Hershey’s Cookies and Cream Chocolate drink tetra-packs are scattered around. Nicotine is mixing with Oxygen and other gaseous molecules frantically floating and bumping to each other within the enclosure of my room. Papers, fast-food wrappers and plastics, empty plastic bottles, and all waste stuffs produced by a cramming, stressed and overloaded post-bachelor student (I am not yet in this level) can be found anywhere in my room and not surprisingly are being feasted by cockroaches and mice. And my laundry is there in one corner cocktailing a new smell from perfume and sweat. Trust me, when you happen to visit my room, you will experience chaos in cosmic level.
John Baez’s Website
n-Category Café
And some other blogs listed in CosmicVariance Blog Links.
What the hell are they talking about? I read something about E8 and my brain cells conked out. Suddenly, I have this urge to join them in their discussions, like this one, Back Reaction, but I can’t because I barely know the things that they were discussing. I am attracted by these mathematical equations but I cannot comprehend them. They are in the highest forms that can’t be deciphered by the processes of my brains.
It’s not really that I don’t have time. It is just that my focus is on somewhere else.
Actually, I am supposed to clean my room today, but for some random reactions in my cortex I decided to do something else… to browse through my “Favorites” archives. I visited different science blogs bookmarked in my archives and I was hooked. My 9 hours spent exploring these blogs and made almost all of my neurons swollen and some ready to burst (including my alveoli due to the Nicotine-heavy air).
I guess after reading these, someone has really a good reason to complain about headaches and exhaustions:
Garrett Lisi’s An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything (PDF)John Baez’s Website
n-Category Café
And some other blogs listed in CosmicVariance Blog Links.
What the hell are they talking about? I read something about E8 and my brain cells conked out. Suddenly, I have this urge to join them in their discussions, like this one, Back Reaction, but I can’t because I barely know the things that they were discussing. I am attracted by these mathematical equations but I cannot comprehend them. They are in the highest forms that can’t be deciphered by the processes of my brains.
Here’s E8:
And this is the animated version: Quicktime
And what’s that? A cosmic mandala I think. Nah, it’s a geometric presentation of particle interactions of our universe, or in short a visual mathematical (cosmic level in terms of comprehensibility of its equation) presentation of our universe. This is just an attempt to describe how the very components of our universe interacts (that’s only on my understanding, but for detailed description and you are a technical person read Lisi’s paper or read this Backreaction).
Nowadays, physicists are dancing on the line that borders Physics and Pure Mathematics, and doing some stints that are too incomprehensible for all us. I also wondered why I kept on reading these blogs, these papers and these tutorials even I know that I can only comprehend barely 1% of the subject matter. Group theory really piqued by curiosity and now I am dying to know the subject. To be honest, I am too far to reach this level of comprehending this kind of mathematics.
I met the Galois Group in high school when I submitted a project, which is to collect recent developments in mathematics, to my Math teacher and that time I was only studying the Matrix algebra. But I never really understood the essence of that paper about Galois group. On one hand, I met Lie and Abelian Algebras when I was in second year college that was the time also when I spent so many hours understanding the Quantum Mechanical world. I met String that same period also along with Supergravity and Theory of Everything. All of them, I just met them but never had a chance to know them well. From that time until now, that I have abandoned the academic life, I am always haunted by these topics. My mind is grappling to understand the basic and fundamental mechanisms of the universe.
I admit I have always been a jack of all trade (as observed by most of my friends) but never have been a master of something. But I know deep inside of me that my brain was really designed to master one thing, and that’s Mathematics. Now I regret that I wasted 5 years of not enhancing this talent (but I won’t stop here, I still have time to go back). I remember the conversation I had with a friend 3 weeks ago. That conversation really pricked my ego. She, Gwen (who is now a full pledged physicists and just came back from
Maybe it’s time for me to go back. I need time, 2-3 years more and I will be back. By that time, I can already join the online community of physicists in their discussions. I am thanking Gwen for letting me to realize that I have been a wasted mathematician for years. It’s time for me to be recycled and renewed.
KAYSunday, April 13, 2008
Myriad
Last year, I tried playing around with Terragen hoping that I can create extrasolar terrains. Due to my limited time, I wasn't able to produce good images, or shall I say "stunning" images, capturing my imagination.
I am always a fan of planetary artists and I always love to see myriad terrains produced by these artists. Here are some of the artworks of the different planetary artists from Pandromeda. I hope someday I can also create images like these.
I am always a fan of planetary artists and I always love to see myriad terrains produced by these artists. Here are some of the artworks of the different planetary artists from Pandromeda. I hope someday I can also create images like these.
Irene Alora
Armands Auseklis
Other Artists
Monday, April 7, 2008
What’s With Molybdenum?
While browsing through the items of my bookmarks, I came across a very interesting, in scientific perspective, website which I saved long time ago (I cannot remember the date anymore). This website is dedicated to answer the questions of our existence, of life, of the possibility of other life forms beyond the confine of our planet, and even of our system. A small patch in the immense manifold of cyberia, this site exists to provide us bits of information, insights of different scientific papers, ideas of different scientists about a new field called Astrobiology – life in our Universe (not just within the boundaries of out planet but all through the space of our cosmos).
When I opened the site, I was intrigued by one article. This article caught my attention and commanded by eyes to read through it. It was insightful, the science of heavy metal in connection with the progress of the evolution of life here on earth. How the hell is Molybdenum connected to the delays of the evolution of complex organism, such as ourselves, here on earth?
To answer this, please read the article below from the Astrobiology website:
Missing Molybdenum
Based on an Arizona State University news release
International team of scientists discover clue to delay of life on Earth.
Scientists from around the world have reconstructed changes in Earth’s ancient ocean chemistry during a broad sweep of geological time, from about 2.5 to 0.5 billion years ago. They have discovered that a deficiency of oxygen and the heavy metal molybdenum in the ancient deep ocean may have delayed the evolution of animal life on Earth for nearly 2 billion years. The findings provide an important example of connections between the evolution of life and the environment of Earth.
The findings, which appear in the March 27 issue of Nature, come as no surprise to Ariel Anbar, one of the authors of the study and an associate professor at Arizona State University with joint appointments in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Earth and Space Exploration. The study was led by Clint Scott, a graduate student at University of California Riverside. Scott works with Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry at UCR who is a long-time collaborator of Anbar’s and also an author of the paper.
“Clint’s data are an important new piece in a puzzle we’ve been trying to solve for many years,” says Anbar. “Tim and I have suspected for a while that if the oceans at that time were oxygen deficient they should also have been deficient in molybdenum. We’ve found evidence of that deficiency before, at a couple of particular points in time. The new data are important because they confirm that those points were typical for their era.”
“Clint’s data are an important new piece in a puzzle we’ve been trying to solve for many years,” says Anbar. “Tim and I have suspected for a while that if the oceans at that time were oxygen deficient they should also have been deficient in molybdenum. We’ve found evidence of that deficiency before, at a couple of particular points in time. The new data are important because they confirm that those points were typical for their era.”
Molybdenum is of interest to Anbar and others because it is used by some bacteria to convert the element nitrogen from a gas in the atmosphere to a form useful for living things – a process known as “nitrogen fixation.” Bacteria cannot fix nitrogen efficiently when they are deprived of molybdenum. And if bacteria can’t fix nitrogen fast enough, then eukaryotes – a kind of organism that includes plants, pachyderms and people – are in trouble because eukaryotes cannot fix nitrogen themselves at all.
“If molybdenum was scarce, bacteria would have had the upper hand,” continues Anbar. “Eukaryotes depend on bacteria having an easy enough time fixing nitrogen that there’s enough to go around. So if bacteria were struggling to get enough molybdenum, there probably wouldn’t have been enough fixed nitrogen for eukaryotes to flourish.”
“These molybdenum depletions may have retarded the development of complex life such as animals for almost two billion years of Earth history,” says Lyons. “The amount of molybdenum in the ocean probably played a major role in the development of early life.”
This research was motivated by a review article published in Science in 2002 by Anbar and Andy Knoll, a colleague at Harvard University. Knoll was perplexed by the fact that eukaryotes didn’t dominate the world until around 0.7 billion years ago, even though they seemed to have evolved before 2.7 billion years ago. Together, Anbar and Knoll postulated that molybdenum deficiency was the key, arguing that the metal should have been scarce in ancient oceans because there was so little oxygen in the atmosphere in those times.
In today’s high-oxygen world, molybdenum is the most abundant transition metal in the oceans. That is because the primary source of molybdenum to the ocean is the reaction of oxygen with molybdenum-bearing minerals in rocks. So the hypotheses rode on the idea that the amount of molybdenum in the oceans should track the amount of oxygen. To test that idea, Scott, Lyons and Anbar examined rock samples from ancient seafloors by dissolving them in a cocktail of acids and analyzing the rock for molybdenum content using a mass spectrometer. Many of these analyses were carried out using state-of-the art instrumentation in the W. M. Keck Foundation Laboratory for Environmental Biogeochemistry at Arizona State University. The scientists found significant evidence for a molybdenum-depleted ocean relative to the high levels measured in modern, oxygen-rich seawater.
By studying Earth’s ancient oceans, atmosphere and biology we can test how well we understand the modern environment, according to Anbar. “Our molybdenum hypothesis was inspired by the theory that biology in the oceans today is often starved for a different metal – iron – and that the lack of iron in parts of the oceans affects the transfer of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean” he says. “The idea that metal deficiency in the oceans can affect the entire planet is very powerful. Here, we are exploring the limits of that idea by seeing if it can solve ancient puzzles. These new findings strengthen our confidence that it can.”
Currently, I am looking for the copies of these papers resulting to this insight. I believe they are worth reading and will really give me handful of ideas about how we are created.
Here are some helpful links:
1. Ariel Anbar [http://knet.asu.edu/research/?getObject=asulib:60426]
2. Molybdenum Isotope Evidence for Widespread Anoxia in Mid-Proterozoic Oceans [http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;304/5667/87]
(It’s quite difficult to find free copies of their papers)
When I opened the site, I was intrigued by one article. This article caught my attention and commanded by eyes to read through it. It was insightful, the science of heavy metal in connection with the progress of the evolution of life here on earth. How the hell is Molybdenum connected to the delays of the evolution of complex organism, such as ourselves, here on earth?
To answer this, please read the article below from the Astrobiology website:
Missing Molybdenum
Based on an Arizona State University news release
International team of scientists discover clue to delay of life on Earth.
Scientists from around the world have reconstructed changes in Earth’s ancient ocean chemistry during a broad sweep of geological time, from about 2.5 to 0.5 billion years ago. They have discovered that a deficiency of oxygen and the heavy metal molybdenum in the ancient deep ocean may have delayed the evolution of animal life on Earth for nearly 2 billion years. The findings provide an important example of connections between the evolution of life and the environment of Earth.
The findings, which appear in the March 27 issue of Nature, come as no surprise to Ariel Anbar, one of the authors of the study and an associate professor at Arizona State University with joint appointments in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Earth and Space Exploration. The study was led by Clint Scott, a graduate student at University of California Riverside. Scott works with Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry at UCR who is a long-time collaborator of Anbar’s and also an author of the paper.
“Clint’s data are an important new piece in a puzzle we’ve been trying to solve for many years,” says Anbar. “Tim and I have suspected for a while that if the oceans at that time were oxygen deficient they should also have been deficient in molybdenum. We’ve found evidence of that deficiency before, at a couple of particular points in time. The new data are important because they confirm that those points were typical for their era.”
“Clint’s data are an important new piece in a puzzle we’ve been trying to solve for many years,” says Anbar. “Tim and I have suspected for a while that if the oceans at that time were oxygen deficient they should also have been deficient in molybdenum. We’ve found evidence of that deficiency before, at a couple of particular points in time. The new data are important because they confirm that those points were typical for their era.”
Molybdenum is of interest to Anbar and others because it is used by some bacteria to convert the element nitrogen from a gas in the atmosphere to a form useful for living things – a process known as “nitrogen fixation.” Bacteria cannot fix nitrogen efficiently when they are deprived of molybdenum. And if bacteria can’t fix nitrogen fast enough, then eukaryotes – a kind of organism that includes plants, pachyderms and people – are in trouble because eukaryotes cannot fix nitrogen themselves at all.
“If molybdenum was scarce, bacteria would have had the upper hand,” continues Anbar. “Eukaryotes depend on bacteria having an easy enough time fixing nitrogen that there’s enough to go around. So if bacteria were struggling to get enough molybdenum, there probably wouldn’t have been enough fixed nitrogen for eukaryotes to flourish.”
“These molybdenum depletions may have retarded the development of complex life such as animals for almost two billion years of Earth history,” says Lyons. “The amount of molybdenum in the ocean probably played a major role in the development of early life.”
This research was motivated by a review article published in Science in 2002 by Anbar and Andy Knoll, a colleague at Harvard University. Knoll was perplexed by the fact that eukaryotes didn’t dominate the world until around 0.7 billion years ago, even though they seemed to have evolved before 2.7 billion years ago. Together, Anbar and Knoll postulated that molybdenum deficiency was the key, arguing that the metal should have been scarce in ancient oceans because there was so little oxygen in the atmosphere in those times.
In today’s high-oxygen world, molybdenum is the most abundant transition metal in the oceans. That is because the primary source of molybdenum to the ocean is the reaction of oxygen with molybdenum-bearing minerals in rocks. So the hypotheses rode on the idea that the amount of molybdenum in the oceans should track the amount of oxygen. To test that idea, Scott, Lyons and Anbar examined rock samples from ancient seafloors by dissolving them in a cocktail of acids and analyzing the rock for molybdenum content using a mass spectrometer. Many of these analyses were carried out using state-of-the art instrumentation in the W. M. Keck Foundation Laboratory for Environmental Biogeochemistry at Arizona State University. The scientists found significant evidence for a molybdenum-depleted ocean relative to the high levels measured in modern, oxygen-rich seawater.
By studying Earth’s ancient oceans, atmosphere and biology we can test how well we understand the modern environment, according to Anbar. “Our molybdenum hypothesis was inspired by the theory that biology in the oceans today is often starved for a different metal – iron – and that the lack of iron in parts of the oceans affects the transfer of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean” he says. “The idea that metal deficiency in the oceans can affect the entire planet is very powerful. Here, we are exploring the limits of that idea by seeing if it can solve ancient puzzles. These new findings strengthen our confidence that it can.”
Currently, I am looking for the copies of these papers resulting to this insight. I believe they are worth reading and will really give me handful of ideas about how we are created.
Here are some helpful links:
1. Ariel Anbar [http://knet.asu.edu/research/?getObject=asulib:60426]
2. Molybdenum Isotope Evidence for Widespread Anoxia in Mid-Proterozoic Oceans [http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;304/5667/87]
(It’s quite difficult to find free copies of their papers)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)