Friday, April 3, 2009

Nothing? or Just an Optical Illusion?

Can you please count the Black dots?

Answer:__________________?

Actually, there is no black dots in the figure, but the optical illusion made the black dots appear.


Well, first let us have a trivia...

Question:

What is ,"Wider than the Universe, but smaller than an atom;
Holier than God, but more evil than the devil;
And if you're going to eat it, you'll gonna Die..."

Answer: __________________
Well, If you don't get it, You must be it...

There is vastly more nothing than something. Roughly 74 percent of the universe is “nothing,” or what physicists call dark energy; 22 percent is dark matter, particles we cannot see. Only 4 percent is baryonic matter, the stuff we call something.

And even something is mostly nothing. Atoms overwhelmingly consist of empty space. Matter’s solidity is an illusion caused by the electric fields created by subatomic particles.

There is more and more nothing every second. In 1998 astronomers measuring the expansion of the universe determined that dark energy is pushing apart the universe at an ever-accelerating speed. The discovery of nothing—and its ability to influence the fate of the cosmos—is considered the most important astronomical finding of the past decade.

But even nothing has a weight. The energy in dark matter is equivalent to a tiny mass; there is about one pound of dark energy in a cube of empty space 250,000 miles on each side.

In space, no one can hear you scream: Sound, a mechanical wave, cannot travel through a vacuum. Without matter to vibrate through, there is only silence.

So what if Kramer falls in a forest? Luckily, electromagnetic waves, including light and radio waves, need no medium to travel through, letting TV stations broadcast endless reruns of Seinfeld, the show about nothing.

Light can travel through a vacuum, but there is nothing to refract it. Alas for extraterrestrial romantics, stars do not twinkle in outer space.

Black holes are not holes or voids; they are the exact opposite of nothing, being the densest concentration of mass known in the universe.

“Zero” was first seen in cuneiform tablets written around 300 B.C. by Babylonians who used it as a placeholder (to distinguish 36 from 306 or 360, for example). The concept of zero in its mathematical sense was developed in India in the fifth century.

Any number divided by zero is . . . nothing, not even zero. The equation is mathematically impossible.

It is said that Abdülhamid II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s, had censors expunge references to H2O from chemistry books because he was sure it stood for “Hamid the Second is nothing.”

Medieval art was mostly flat and two-dimensional until the 15th century, when the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi conceived of the vanishing point, the place where parallel lines converge into nothingness. This allowed for the development of perspective in art.

Aristotle once wrote, “Nature abhors a vacuum,” and so did he. His complete rejection of vacuums and voids and his subsequent influence on centuries of learning prevented the adoption of the concept of zero in the Western world until around the 13th century, when Italian bankers found it to be extraordinarily useful in financial transactions.

Vacuums do not suck things. They create spaces into which the surrounding atmosphere pushes matter.

Creatio ex nihilo, the belief that the world was created out of nothing, is one of the most common themes in ancient myths and religions.

Current theories suggest that the universe was created out of a state of vacuum energy, that is, nothing.

But to a physicist there is no such thing as nothing. Empty space is instead filled with pairs of particles and antiparticles, called virtual particles, that quickly form and then, in accordance with the law of energy conservation, annihilate each other in about 10-25 second.

So Aristotle was right all along.

These virtual particles popping in and out of existence create energy. In fact, according to quantum mechanics, the energy contained in all the power plants and nuclear weapons in the world doesn’t equal the theoretical energy contained in the empty spaces between these words.

In other words, nothing could be the key to the theory of everything.

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Facts About Pencils

Do you think, you already know everything about pencil?

Here are some additional infos that you might need to know about our little friend, Penicillus.

  • Graphite, a crystallized form of carbon, was discovered near Keswick, England, in the mid-16th century. An 18th-century German chemist, A. G. Werner, named it, sensibly enough, from the Greek "graphein," meaning “to write.”
  • The word pencil derives from the Latin “penicillus,” meaning -- not so sensibly -- “little tail.”
  • The black core of pencils is referred to as “lead,” even though it never contained the element lead.Therefore, there is no risk of lead poisoning if you stab yourself (or someone else) with a pencil because it contains no lead. However, pencil wounds carry a risk of infection for the stabees and lawsuits for stabbers.
  • Pencil marks are made when tiny graphite flecks, often just thousandths of an inch wide, stick to the fibers that make up paper.
  • The average pencil holds enough graphite to draw a line about 35 miles long or to write roughly 45,000 words. History does not record anyone testing this statistic.
  • According to G. Gordon Liddy's autobiography, he describes finding John Dean (whom he despised for “disloyalty”) alone in a room. Spotting sharpened pencils on a desk, Liddy fleetingly considered driving one into Dean’s throat.
  • The Greek poet Philip of Thessaloníki wrote of leaden writing instruments in the first century B.C., but the modern pencil, as described by Swiss naturalist Konrad Gesner, dates only to 1565.
  • French pencil boosters include Nicolas-Jacques Conté, who patented a clay-and-graphite manufacturing process in 1795; Bernard Lassimone, who patented the first pencil sharpener in 1828; and Therry des Estwaux, who invented an improved mechanical sharpener in 1847.
  • French researchers also hit on the idea of using caoutchouc, a vegetable gum now known as rubber, to erase pencil marks. Until then, writers removed mistakes with bread crumbs.
  • Most pencils sold in America today have eraser tips, while those sold in Europe usually have none. Are Europeans more confident scribblers? Or erasers on tips are not enough to erase their mistakes, so they tend to buy a separate and larger eraser.
  • Henry David Thoreau -- American, but a confident scribbler all the same -- used pencils to write "Walden." And he probably got them free. His father owned a pencil-making business near Boston, where Henry allegedly designed his own pencils before becoming a semi-recluse.
  • In 1861, Eberhard Faber built the first American mass-production pencil factory in New York City.
  • In 1861, Eberhard Faber built the first American mass-production pencil factory in New York City. Birth of the Faber Castell.
  • Pencils were among the basic equipment issued to Union soldiers during the Civil War.
  • The mechanical pencil was patented in 1822. The company founded by its British developers prospered until 1941, when the factory was bombed, presumably by pencil-hating Nazis.
  • "Je suis un crayon rouge." After the 1917 Soviet revolution, American entrepreneur Armand Hammer was awarded a monopoly for pencil manufacturing in the USSR.
  • More than half of all pencils come from China. In 2004, factories there turned out 10 billion pencils, enough to circle the earth more than 40 times.
  • Pencils can write in zero gravity and so were used on early American and Russian space missions -- even though NASA engineers worried about the flammability of wood pencils in a pure-oxygen atmosphere, not to mention the menace of floating bits of graphite.
  • Those concerns inspired Paul Fisher to develop the pressurized Fisher Space Pen in 1965. After the Apollo 1 fire, NASA banned pencils in favor of his pen on manned spaceflights.
  • The world’s largest pencil is a Castell 9000, on display at the manufacturer’s plant near Kuala Lumpur. Made of Malaysian wood and polymer, it stands 65 feet high.
  • At the other extreme, engineers at the University of California at Santa Barbara have used an atomic force microscope as a kind of pencil to draw lines 50 nanometers (two millionths of an inch) wide. Just because they could.

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Wednesday, April 1, 2009

All about the Month of April

Trivia for the Month of April
  • The 4th month of the year in Gregorian Calendar
  • One of four months with a length of 30 days
  • Originally the 2nd month of the Roman Calendar (before January and February were added by King Numa Pompilius about 700 BC.
  • However, The derivation of the name (Latin Aprilis) is uncertain;
  • The traditional etymology is from the Latin aperire, "to open," in allusion to its being the season when trees and flowers begin to "open", so basically there goes the springtime.
  • The Anglo-Saxons called April Oster-monath or Eostur-monath, the period sacred to Eostre or Ostara, the pagan Saxon goddess of spring, from whose name is derived the modern Easter. Which explains, Easter Holiday falls on April.
  • In China the symbolic ploughing of the earth by the emperor and princes of the blood takes place in their third month, which frequently corresponds to our April.
  • The Finnish called this month Huhtikuu, or 'Burnwood Month', when the wood for beat and burn clearing of farmland was felled.
  • The "days of April" (journées d'avril) is a name appropriated in French history to a series of insurrections at Lyons, Paris and elsewhere, against the government of Louis Philippe in 1834, which led to violent repressive measures, and to a famous trial known as the procès d'avril.
  • The birthstone of April is the diamond
  • the birth flower is typically listed as either the Daisy or the Sweet Pea and the Tulip, as well.
  • April starts on the same day of the week as July in all years, and January in leap years

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