WORLD’S MOST FRIENDLY: PHILIPPINES IS EIGHTH
The most friendly countries around the world, according to Forbes:
1. New Zealand
2. Australia
3. South Africa
4. Canada
5. USA
6. Turkey
7. UK
8. Philippines
And all along I thought we would be number one!
THE SHIFTING SANDS OF POWER IN THE NEW WORLD
A SINGING LITTLE ANGEL
MOST INDEBTED COUNTRIES
Here are the nations most buried in debt:
1. Ireland- 1.382% (as percentage of GDP)
2. United Kingdom- 413.3%
3. Switzerland- 401.9%
4. Netherland- 376.3%
5. Belgium- 335.9%
6. Denmark- 310.4%
7. Sweden- 282.2%
8. Finland- 271.5%
9. Austria- 261.1%
10. Norway- 251%
Surprisingly, the Philippines is only at 51.2%? So, how come for Filipinos it’s almost like the house is burning as far as the external debt is concerned.
ENGINEERS AND ARCHITECTS WEIGH IN ON 9/11
Conspiracy theorists they are derisively called those who poke questions on the official story explaining the tragedy of 9/11. But now that architects and engineers themselves are joining the swelling ranks of those challenging the established line, conspiracy theorists may just gain the upper hand. Now, what happens when the alternative view is indeed more compelling, with all the ramifications so profound and staggering?
MORE FRACTALS ON MY ART BLOG
More fractal designs are posted on my other blog. Many here, like the samples below, are old unused files given life with some ‘re-touching”.
LINKIN’ PARK
Linkin’ Park’s best video, I think.
CONSCIOUSNESS, DIMENSIONS, QUANTUM MECHANICS, ETC.
“I KNOW WHAT I SAW”: THE UFO DOCUMENTARY
I posted about it sometime ago as sort of a bookmark on my blog, then it simply slipped out of my mind. Bestirred by the recent spate of reports on UFOs, my searches on YouTube on the matter brought me yet to the actual documentary freshly uploaded by one 69blackbox.
The thing about UFOs and the like, they are “taboo”, “forbidden” subjects. They are, shall we say, outside the realm of any intelligent discussion. You touch them at your own peril, and, baby, what a sucker or an idiot you are to take them seriously. How did this come about, you wonder. Curiosity– which is about having a wide open, probing mind– is still one of the hallmarks of science and knowledge!
TALKING QUANTUM AT T.E.D.
A LIKELY CANCER CURE IS FOUND!
The University of Alberta, Department of Medicine, has made an all-important discovery.
DCA is an odourless, colourless, inexpensive, relatively non-toxic, small molecule. And researchers at the University of Alberta believe it may soon be used as an effective treatment for many forms of cancer.
Dr. Evangelos Michelakis, a professor at the U of A Department of Medicine, has shown that dichloroacetate (DCA) causes regression in several cancers, including lung, breast, and brain tumors.
Michelakis and his colleagues, including post-doctoral fellow Dr. Sebastien Bonnet, have published the results of their research in the journal Cancer Cell.
But Big Pharma is unlikely interested.
The DCA compound is not patented and not owned by any pharmaceutical company, and, therefore, would likely be an inexpensive drug to administer, says Michelakis, the Canada Research Chair in Pulmonary Hypertension and Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Program with Capital Health, one of Canada’s largest health authorities.
However, as DCA is not patented, Michelakis is concerned that it may be difficult to find funding from private investors to test DCA in clinical trials.
FRACTALS: A TRIP INTO ENDLESS DEPTHS
Fractals are always a captivating and a staggering spectacle. In a way, they seem like subtle intimations of the true nature of reality.
A SHORT SCIENCE FICTION I LIKE
Isaac Asimov’s THE LAST QUESTION
Excerpt:
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”
And there was light—-
WEIRD WORLD OF QUANTUM
A SCHOOL IN THE INTERNET
I would have done a lot better in high school and college with this. One thing about learning inside a classroom is that so many things beyond control could come in between: a professor who do not know how to teach, a bad hangover, a chick over at one corner, a noisy classmate, an allowance that did not arrive, a basketball game to play, the girlfriend back home, the unwashed laundry, the moods, the problems, the many distractions and so on and so forth. And so something important that you should have learned just flew over your head instead. You recall your teacher asking aloud, “do you follow?” or “did you understand anything at all?!” It was often “no, i did not!” but hell if you would let others know you have a problem with your IQ! So you just keep it to yourself and hope that the divine forces of the universe would resolve themselves later.
It need not be so now and what a lucky generation! Welcome to Khan Academy.
Watch Salman Khan introducing his brainchild.
AN UNSPEAKABLE HORROR
Against nature, are we not like ants and their anthills being flushed out of the yard with water from the wash basin?
Image from The Big Picture.
Update: Here’s a footage showing a more extensive coverage of the tsunami.
HYPNOTIC
SEX OF IDEAS
SENATOR TRILLANES AND CO., READ THIS.
Corruption is a symptom of a deeper malady— not the root cause. When one falls for the trap that corruption is the mainspring, like the doctor that keeps on prescribing pain relievers for a headache that is a symptom of a cancer, he shall rail and thunder against a symptom not the disease. He has a platform to make him a pop icon, an anti-corruption crusader worthy of a pedestal, but has not the proper viewpoint to see the forest from the trees and set a real, long-lasting solution.
I agree with how Herman Tiu-Laurel puts the matter in perspective:
If one were to follow government corruption like a maze and work back to its starting point, one may well find this ridiculous government pay schedule as the root of it all. An AFP or PNP general, or even a Cabinet official, with just an official monthly salary that approximates the take home pay of a veteran call center agent doesn’t make sense.
MORE: The root of RP’s systemic corruption by Herman Tiu-Laurel
Yet it goes even further. For instance, why don’t or can’t we pay our government personnel and officials more? Answer: because we are poor, our coffers are near-empty and we are deep in debt. Then comes, why are we poor? And so on and so forth.
A POEM
BANGBANG! BYEBYE!
Come, I hear your steps,
come catch me, if you can
Your mouth froths for Justice as if you know its meaning
Will you have been a better man? Or worse
Had the Fates took you there to where I’ve been?
I did what I did, I don’t need to tell you why
Ahh, you fools, you think you have me in a corner?
Come, follow me to the end of nowhere!
Bangbang , byebye…
THE SUN IN 360 DEGREES, BY NASA
VISIT MY ART BLOG
blue star
Drop by my art blog.
My output of several days in the last quarter of 2010, I would say, an unusually productive period as far as my forays in art are concerned. I am publishing them in re-sized smaller copies as my upload speed does not support large images. Blame it on lousy service (hear that, PLDT?).
I used Apophysis, as with the earlier fractal images.
HEY, PLDT AND THE REST, ARE YOU PROUD OF THIS?!
Look here and weep. Compared to the rest of the world, this is how the Philippines ranks in Internet connection speed: download speed, 137th at 1.5Mbps; upload speed, 134th at 0.47Mbps. Not only that, can anybody explain why it should be much, much more expensive?
And we say, we are gearing up for global competition!
A month ago, I decided I needed an upgrade. I was thinking e-business with my art designs, done some free trials and heck I was feeling genuinely excited with my prospective project. But larger images are required. I need higher upload speed. So, off I go to a PLDT service center and ask for a package two rungs higher, at P1,600+ a month. A few hundred bucks more better spent for beer but for a more meaningful pursuit, a good trade off I say. Or so it seems. In the next following weeks, excitement over some new-found entrepreneurial spirit slowly gives way rather to alternating rage and exasperation– at an upload speed that swings to as low as .06mbps to an average of 0.16 to 0.22 when it should be at least 0.30 to 0.52, and a monitor repeatedly flashing “Error sending message”. I yell at the service rep at the other end of the line “To one impoverished fella like me, P1,600 is a fortune, do you know that?” Poor soul, I should be telling that to Manny Pangilinan’s face. I have since lost count of follow ups and after playing host to a group of technicians that could not seem to figure out why, my enthusiasm for the project has started wearing off. Hell, I’m getting wasted on high-def porns instead.
Paging Congress.
TELEPORTATION IS HERE?!
Or maybe, that’s how it looks:
Thanks to physics, and the truly bizarre quirks of quarks, those Star Trek style teleporters may be more than fiction.
A strange discovery by quantum physicists at the University of California Santa Barbara means that an object you can see in front of you may exist simultaneously in a parallel universe — a multi-state condition that has scientists theorizing that teleportation or even time travel may be much more than just the plaything of science fiction writers.
Until this year, all human-made objects have moved according to the laws of classical mechanics, the rules governing ordinary objects. Toss a ball in the air and it falls back to Earth. Drop a coin from your roof and it falls into your yard. But back in March, a group of researchers designed a gadget that moves in ways that can only be described by quantum mechanics — the set of rules that governs the behavior of tiny things like molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.
And the implication — that teleportation and even time travel may someday, somehow be a reality — is so groundbreaking that Science magazine has labelled it the most significant scientific advance of 2010.
Is this real? We need to revise our entire understanding of reality, if true.
THE BEATLES
I have wanted to watch this but never found a copy, until I came across it by accident last night.
Update:
Embedding the video is belatedly disallowed. Here’s the link to the start of this 60+ part docu:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkGFpoWgR6A&feature=&p=B9CA9F960CB897F7&index=0&playnext=1
GYMNASTS FROM LAOAG
First time the group wowed the audience in such a breathtaking, hair-raising fashion.
It won the grand finals today. Congratulations, boys and girls!
A BOY SINGS “TELL ME WHY…”
INTRIGUING AND OLD VIEWS ABOUT THE PHILIPPINES
The first half of this video is about the Philippines, the undying insurgency, poverty, Marcos dictatorship, American interventionism etc from two differing viewpoints:
ON THE EDGE OF DEATH
Is there life after death? Science is taking a more serious look.
At 18 hospitals in the U.S. and U.K., researchers have suspended pictures, face up, from the ceilings in emergency-care areas. The reason: to test whether patients brought back to life after cardiac arrest can recall seeing the images during an out-of-body experience.
People who have these near-death experiences often describe leaving their bodies and watching themselves being resuscitated from above, but verifying such accounts is difficult. The images would be visible only to people who had done that.
“We’ve added these images as objective markers,” says Sam Parnia, a critical-care physician and lead investigator of the study, which hopes to include 1,500 resuscitated patients. Dr. Parnia declined to say whether any have accurately described the images so far, but says he hopes to report preliminary results next year.
The study, coordinated by Southampton University’s School of Medicine in England, is one of the latest and largest scientific efforts to understand the mystery of near-death experiences.
At least 15 million American adults say they have had a near-death experience, according to a 1997 survey—and the number is thought to be rising with increasingly sophisticated resuscitation techniques.
