Calories Affect Brain Power!!!

"I fast for greater mental and physical efficiency", Plato said.

A study has been published that says:

When the stomach is empty the body produces a hormone called ghrelin. This hormone travels to the hippocampus in the brain and causes new brain cell connections to form. The hippocampus is the memory engine of your brain. when lab animals are injected with extra ghrelin, their learning ability and memory improved.

"Could intentionally keeping your stomach empty (by cutting down your food intake) accelerate learning ability and improve memory? The recent discovery involving ghrelin, taken in conjunction with recent research involving calorie restriction - suggests this may very well be the case"



Wow. Very interesting stuff...

I started looking into the relationship between food and mental power when I finally got fed up of the situation I fall into whenever I eat large meals at work. My efficiency falls to the floor. Not only do I feel slow, tired and exhausted after the large meal, I am unable to concentrate. I become a zombie!

The relationship between our diet and our life is extremely strong. Unfortunately I abuse my diet. I'm working on that...

PS: Definitely more posts on this subject...

The Indian Fibonacci and Rabbit Reproduction

Most of you know of the Fibonacci sequence. Its the magical sequence of numbers that was mentioned in the Da Vinci Code novel. I took it in school and university and never actually knew what it represented.

The original sequence was studied by an Indian mathematician called Virahanka in the 6th century AD. Virahanka was analyzing the length of sequences of long and short syllables in an ancient Indian language. The long syllable was twice as long as the short syllable. The Ith number in the Fibonacci sequence is the number of total combinations that can be composed of those two syllables with length equal to I.

For example:
If the short syllable is S (represents 1 unit of length) and long is L (represents 2 units of length) then for the 3rd number in the sequence the number of combinations of the two syllables that make a total unit length of 3 are:

{ SSS, SL, LS }

If you do this for lengths of 1,2,3,4,5,... you will find that the original Fibonacci sequence is created which is 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,...

Later on Leonardo of Pisa (AKA Fibonacci) studied the sequence of numbers and linked it to reproducing in rabbit populations to produce the sequence we know today which is summarized in the formula: F(n) = F(n−1) + F(n−2). Which is:

0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21...

Has anyone seen rabbits reproduce before? I had rabbits in my back yard when I was a kid. We bought two French rabbits (male and female) and two Egyptian rabbits (male and female). In about a year they had become an extended family of 18 and the number went up and up exponentially just like the Fibonacci sequence. Very often we would catch sight of a new born exploring its way outside of the burrow and race back in as we approached.

Yaaaaa...those were the days...

I came across the Fibonacci sequence the other day when I came across a question; It said, "Given that you can take one step or two steps forward from a given step, find the total number of ways of reaching the Nth step?"

Space Tourismo!!!

How amazing would it be to go up into space, experience zero-g and to look back at our home planet and see how small we really are in the context of the universe.

The Russian space program offers trips to the International Space Station. There have been five space tourists who have undertaken this trip before. The next person to go up to the ISS in October of this year is Richard Garriot - a Game desginer. The last one to go up was Charles Simonyi - a software company executive. Richard Garriot is paying 30 million dollars for this. Quite an astonishing amount of money to be paid by one man for one trip.

Is this a waste of money? I personally think there are much more productive ways to spend that kind of money. For starters he could help millions of unfortunate people on Earth instead of riding off on his dream voyage. He could help starving people. He could donate it to disease research. There are many benefits 30 MILLION DOLLARS can bring!!!!

In the end it isn't my decision, I'm just wondering how the last two to go up are people in the software business!!! I want to be next!!!...hehe.

A Sneak Peek

My poor telescope is still being held in customs...:'(. I just hope it gets here in one piece. I guess I'm going to have to introduce it before it actually arrives. Maybe I'll get it piece by piece (Rabena Yostor).

There are of course many different types of telescopes. There are three main types of telescopes; reflectors, refractors and catadioptric. Reflectors use mirrors to reflect the light captured by the aperture. Refractors use lenses to convey the image caught at the aperture to the opening for the eyepiece. Catadioptric telescopes are telescopes that combine together mirrors and lenses. There are many pros and cons of each type of telescopes. I'll talk about these in later posts.

The telescope I ordered is a 90mm Maksutov-Cassegrain. This is a catadioptric type of telescope. The 90mm corresponds to the diameter of the aperture of the telescope. This is the most important aspect of a telescope. The larger the aperture, the more light the telescope absorbs and hence the more fainter and further objects it can reveal.

Another important factor is the focal length of the telescope. The longer this is the more power of magnification it provides. The magnification is the first thing people think of when they think of telescopes and they believe this is the metric on which to evaluate a telescope. This is not true.



The magnification of a telescope equals the focal length of the telescope divided by the focal length of the eyepiece. Eyepieces are changeable. Astronomers typically have sets of different eyepieces to attach to the telescope depending on what they want to see. Eyepieces each have a focal length and a field of view. There is no point in trying to get the highest possible magnification, which means getting the eyepiece with the smallest focal length. This is because there is a limit to the amount of magnification a telescope can handle. The limiting factor is our old friend, the aperture. There is only so much detail (i.e. light) that exists in the image caught by the telescope's main mirror or lens (according to the aperture size). There is no point in trying to magnify beyond the detail that the telescope reveals. This will give you a blurred image. Another thing to consider is the field of view of the eyepiece being used. I'll talk more about eyepieces in future posts.

My telescope-to-be (isA) is a catadioptric type. It is a very compact model. You can see it here...



I didn't order the tripod you see in the pic.

This telescope should be able to see, believe it or not, the red spot on Jupiter and the dust ring around Saturn. Of course I'm going to go out to the desert or somewhere with no light or air pollution.




Just hope I get the scope intact soon isA...
When I do I won't stop showing it off :p

The formidable wall we know so well

Very frequently in my line of work do I find myself in front of an obstacle. I find myself confronting a dead-end wall. There is no way around this wall. No solution to allow you to pass. You are stuck. You struggle to get around it, but in vain. You hack away at the wall but everything seems impossible. Then you really break down in spirit. You feel helpless and useless.



Then I always remember standing on the other side of the wall and looking back at the wall and thinking, "It wasn't that hard? It all worked out in the end". I take a deep breath and walk on. Only to confront another wall may be even bigger than the last.

Time and time again you look back upon the wall you just conquered and think, "there is no such thing as impossible".

How many times have I slumped down at the sight of a formidable problem with "no" solutions at all. I've tried and tried different approaches and nothing helps. I get tangled up in the threads of my own thoughts and little by little strangle myself. Then I can not take anymore so I get up and go take a break and suddenly as I'm watching the TV, walking away from my room or doing whatever it is I'm doing to get my mind off the problem at hand, I trip over the solution to the problem. I see something that I hadn't seen prior. I find a fundamental answer to the puzzling problem and later on, yet again, I look back at the wall I just climbed.

Dexter in Space!

We are minutes away from witnessing the launch of the Endeavour space shuttle from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA. It's quite amazing that some people are unaware of something orbiting the Earth called the international space station...hmmm...interesting...

The shuttle will be taking up an interesting two-armed robot called Dextre. Its a Canadian made robotic arm which will help substitute astronauts going out for space-walks. The shuttle is also taking up a Japanese made science laboratory or a piece of it at least.

This is Dextre below...



Quite fascinating I must say.

The World is Shrinking!

How I wish some times that I was an undergrad student again these days. The world is shrinking!!! There are more and more oppurtunities popping up everyday. All this has become possible by the Internet which youngsters take for granted these days. They never saw what was before the Internet! Since I'm from a slightly older generation; it's like the stone age humans who came across fire!!!! hehe...So the east and west have come closer and with the advancement in technology we see "exciting new opportunities that people are talking about" {The way Bill Gates puts it}.

The reason I was set on this nostalgic path of thought was because I was nominated to be a Google Student Ambassador. Where were these opportunities when I was an undergrad??? Fein???? :D. Google was still on the rise back then and well, more and more multinational companies are interested in draining the innovative brains of our talented youth :). Well that is another line of thought - Countries are loosing their little powerhouse brains to the west. The industry is reaching across the globe and hacking into oilfields of ideas from innovative young youth. :'(

Of course I don't have the time anymore to do something like this. In order for it to be done properly it needs time and commitment. Those are two things I have allocated to other aspects of life...

I'm not sad, just thought I'd share a spur of thought with ya as always...

Why do we stick out our tongue to focus?

The real reason to this, psychologists say, is because there is a significant amount of background processing that goes on in the brain that controls the movement of our tongue. We are of course unaware of this but when a person is trying to concentrate on a mind-intensive task at hand they tend to involuntarily stick out their tongue or fixate their tongue between their teeth or up against the top of the ceiling. This is to relieve the brain of any background processing and to fully focus on the task.



Quite interesting...

Blogging Mind-Bogglers

If you haven't watched this video on youtube then you've missed quite a lot...thats if your interested in virtual reality and gaming. I was sent a link to this video a long time ago but never actually watched it. Yesterday I came across the same video again and it blew my mind away! It is one of the most watched videos on the Internet. Its utterly awesome!

Its by a guy called Johnny Lee from Carnegie Mellon University. He created virtual reality using the Wii controller and sensors. You have to watch this. Towards the end when he views the stadium, its like looking out a real window! Watch now...

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A Clap for WikiSky and Google Sky

WOW! Technology is definitely moving faster than we can grasp. The discovery of Microsoft WWT has brought to my attention two other technologies that have beaten Microsoft to the stargazing software arena. The first being Google Sky who has already launched itself with the newer versions of Google Earth. Now not only can you look at Earth and zoom down to street level, but you can turn the gaze up and look at the night's sky. Unbelievable!



Seriously mind-blowing!



Download it now and take a look for yourselves. Another technology I was aware of but caught my eye as I was looking at Google Sky is KML (Keyhole Markup Language). This is an XML-based language which was originally built by Keyhole Inc. - the creators of Google Earth. The KML file specifies a set of features - placemarks, images, polygons, 3D models, textual descriptions - for display in Google Earth, Maps and Mobile or actually any other 3D earth browser (geo-browser) implementing the KML encoding. Pretty neat huh?

This has led to some amazing applications like for example watching the animation of international flights on Google Earth and a scary simulation of water level rising. You can see this @ here!
and watch it in the Google Earth application.

Another stargazing technology I came across is WikiSky @ Wikisky.org. This freaking blew my mind! I've recently gotten into astronomy again after long years of absence. This comes at a wonderful time.



We have come a long way with technology. There are even virtual moon trips coming up! Imagine this...going to the moon in virtual reality. You can read all about this here. This should be coming up in a year. This will allow people to hitch rides on probes to the moon and watch as the lunar robots explore the surface of planets. This will all be in real-time and will allow everyone to participate in space exploration. WOW!

I'm glad though that I ordered my telescope. So far I can see that these two portals into the night sky are just knowledge providers and will in no way replace real astronomy. They will definitely greatly help the astronomy communities around the globe and are welcomed as an amazing innovation. They are truly grand! I can't wait to explore some more!