Archive for December, 2007

Magnetic “ropes” are causing Auroras

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Space.com is reporting that a fleet of NASA spacecraft launched less than eight months ago has revealed new insights into the forces that cause the northern lights, including giant magnetic “ropes” between Earth and the sun. Understanding the cause of auroras will help scientists solve the mystery around solar flares and what causes them and get a handle on the outer space weather. I don’t so much understand the geo-physics of why the solar winds slams into the earth’s magnetic field in the magnetosphere. I’m simply enamoured by the spectacular shows, gallery here and here. Chasing Auroras? I could take this for a living!


Photograph by Phil Hoffman

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Google engineers convey world dominance in encoded URL of search experiment

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Several blogs are reporting about Google experimenting with Digg-style voting of search results. What I found intriguing is the URL of the experiment. Here it is unhyperlinked:
http://www.google.com/experimental/a840e102.html
Look at the last part. It reads “a840e102” which looks like some encoded message where the engineers are trying to convey their world dominance. Here is a screen shot of an analysis of probable meanings. I like the cannabis one :D)
a840e102.gif

You can read some of them as:

  1. A twice the dose of cannabis produces 100 times better search experience
  2. A unifying-democratizing way of producing a 100 times better search experience. Just like the Tibetan script Phagspa unified the various languages
  3. 840 is one of the smallest composite number with 32 divisors. Shows the technical prowess of one of the algorithms employed in the experiment or maybe just dump of a highly complex issue in maths, just like they used the value of Pi in their IPO

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