Today I am travelling to Germany. It will be a a very looooooong trip. The good thing is that a have tons of music and two books.
1. The Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and
2. The pleasure of finding things out by Richard Feynman.
Another good thing, is that I will meet one of my biological brothers at the airport because he is traveling to Singapore.
Hopefully I will post something tomorrow about science or something about my books.
Well, that’s it.
P.S. BTW Wolfram Alpha is A W E S O M E period.
That is this number: 7 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
Nowadays there is a popular application called fMRI (where the f stands for functional), used to identify which part of the brain is working when any type of activity is taken place. The principle is simple. When a part of the brain becomes active, blood flow increases into that part of the brain and that is detected in an MRI scan as a change in contrast on the image.
The image above is the result of the next experiment:
A subject was told to move their left hand for ten seconds and then not to move for others ten seconds and so on. An image of the brain was acquired every second of the experiment.
If you are moving your left hand during a fMRI; at the end of the experiment, the analysis of the data will show that the right motor cortex of your brain will be illuminated as active, and this is because when you are moving your left hand, the blood flow is increased in that part of the brain, and that small changes in blood flow are detected by MRI as a change in contrast of the different images. What happens in the background is that the scans acquired are then analyzed in search for small changes in every image, and where small changes are detected consistently, that means there is activity.
At the bottom of the image, there is a green graph tracing the activity of a selected area of the brain during the whole experiment. You can see the selected area on the brain of the middle in the second row. This graph is going up, and going down. When it goes up means activity, and “no activity” when it goes down.
One clinical application of fMRI is the detection of active areas of the brain, before a neurosurgical intervention where brain tissue needs to be removed. In that way, when a tumor needs to be removed, it can be removed as extensively as possible, while preserving the active adjacent areas.
There is no such thing as luck. You need to be fit to cope and look for opportunities.
I am a big fan of Isaac Asimov, and this made my day.
Colpophyllia natans, known as boulder brain coral and large-grooved brain coral, is a species of stony coral found primarily in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. It inhabits the slopes and tops of reefs, to a maximum depth of fifty metres. It is characterised by large, domed colonies, which may be up to two metres across, and by the meandering network of ridges and valleys on its surface. The ridges are usually brown with a single groove, and the valleys may be tan, green, or white and are uniform in width, typically 2 centimetres. The polyps only extend their tentacles at night.
Last week I went to an aquarium with lots of Corals, and to my surprise, there was one coral with shape of a Brain, It was mind-boggling for me.
Learning a new language.
Last year, I bought a book to learn German, and started to learn, but then it gets boring, so I managed to get a copy of Rosetta Stone. That program is awesome, because you learn as if you were a baby. There is no translation on the learning process, everything is based on associations, for example it shows an image of a little girl and the phrase “Das Mädchen”.
Learning a new language, and read more books are my resolutions for this year.
There is no excuse, today the internet is plenty of resources to learn things, and there are plenty of internet pages to learn languages. I believe that learning a new language is like discover a new world.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another which states that this has already happened.
— Douglas Adams on “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”
This is a scan of a brain using an MRI. There are 120 sagital slices put together in a video.
I made this video time ago, when I used to hear Van Halen. I was looking at the scans and I thought : “Hey, if the transition of this slices could make some sounds, I believe the sound it’s something very close to the song 1984 by Van Halen”
Devil by Grzegorz Cywicki
It’s called Violin Mantis!
Midnight Sun: A natural phenomenon occurring in the summer months north of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle where the sun never fully sets and remains visible 24 hours a day.
This short time lapse film was shot during the Icelandic Midnight Sun in June of 2011.
For 17 days I travelled solo around the entire island shooting almost 24 hours, sleeping in the car, and eating whenever I had the time. During my days shooting this film I shot 38,000 images, travelled some 2900 miles, and saw some of the most amazing, beautiful, and indescribable landscapes on the planet. Iceland is absolutely one of the most beautiful and unusual places you could ever imagine. Especially during the Midnight Sun when the quality of light hitting the landscape is very unusual, and very spectacular.
This is stunning, mind-boggling!
(Be sure to watch it full screen HD)
