November 2009
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“The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.”
– Jonas Dino, NASA
June 2009
1 post
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May 2009
2 posts
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“The ocean has a memory of past events, running out as far as ten thousand years.”
– Professor Carl Wunsch - M.I.T
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April 2009
3 posts
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Simple and Extraordinarily Complicated
From Encyclopedia Britannica:
Although the molecules of water are simple in structure (H2O), the physical and chemical properties of the compound are extraordinarily complicated, and they are not typical of most substances found on Earth.
The root of these anomalies lies in the electronic structure of the water molecule. The water molecule is not linear but bent in a special way. The two hydrogen...
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March 2009
2 posts
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Sinuous Hair
On his book “The Ganges”, Raghubir Singh praises the river.
Ganges is not a river, it is an aspect of the divine.
After leaving India, Raghubir Singh has visited Ganges many times. He was raised to appreciate Ganga, which is the name of the river among Indian people. When he was a child, her mother taught him the significance of the Ganges; it is a goddess. She read aloud about the...
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“Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every...”
– Hiroshi Sugimoto
February 2009
8 posts
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Vision on a Lake
In Tibetan Buddhism, Dalai Lama is an incarnation of boddhisattva of compassion. Conventionally, he is regarded as the political and spiritual leader of Tibet, the head of Tibetan Buddhism – the emphasis is on spiritual issues, spiritual guiding and leading. There can be only one Dalai Lama at a time. When a Lama dies, his or her soul passes into an infant born nine months after his decease. That...
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“Beauty is information”
– Yuri Lotman
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WatchWATER-POWERED JET PACK
January 2009
7 posts
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“Quick, define intelligence. If you find your way out of a labyrinth, do you...”
– The Book of W
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“And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept...”
– The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
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“Too true, too many tears! Dawns of heartbreak.
Each moon is cruel, and every...”
– The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud
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The Game of Life
In its own way, water is capable of processing data. To aid in comprehending this concept, let’s play a classic game: the Game of Life.
The Game of Life by John Conway visualizes how simple rules generate a complex and diverse outcome. In 1970, John Conway worked as a mathematician in Cambridge University, England. During that period, he initially presented the principles of the game in an...
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December 2008
7 posts
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“When you’re thirsty and have to keep fighting, you don’t think a lot, and there...”
– Unidentified Israeli soldier in 2006
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Water Wars
Images of battles and terror from the beginning of the eighties onwards have burnt into my mind. Daily, evening news on television showed tanks rolling, tracks creaking and squeaking, clouds of sand and dust rising to the sky behind. There were people in casual clothes throwing stones at well-armed soldiers, cars burning in the streets. Their eyes were filled with anger and desperation, with...
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“As the swimmer depends on water, so the writer depends on language. To swim...”
– Thomas Szasz
November 2008
3 posts
4 tags
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Joy
Water is a source of endless joys and plays. On a warm sunny day, watch kids having fun in it. They constantly create new ways to enjoy water; they swim, dive and dabble in all kinds of positions, jump to it throwing it all over, hit it with the palm of their hands, have water-battles, squirt it from their mouths. Good mood spreads and stays with them for hours – water refreshes their mind and...
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“Life is like a snowball. The important thing is finding wet snow and a really...”
– Warren Buffett on The Snowball by Alice Schroeder
October 2008
5 posts
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“Did you know that, down here in the desert, we call the rain Paradise?”
– Paulo Coelho: The cloud and the dune
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Impressionist
Claude Monet lived his childhood in Le Havre, city on the west coast of France, where the Seine river meets the Atlantic Ocean. The place and its nature made him a strong impression, particularly the river which he recalls:
The Seine. I have painted it all my life, at all the hours of the day, at all the times of the year, from Paris to the sea…
His works tell about his inclination to...
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The Birth of Beauty
Water possesses a deep understanding of beauty. Its different forms, motions, shapes and surface structures construct the sense - the measure - of beauty to us. Intuitively and subconsciously, we compare everything we see against that measure.
Metre is a measure of length. It became a standard after a series of international conferences in the 1870s. The original prototype bar for one metre was...
September 2008
4 posts
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The Intelligent Cloud →
On the Official Google Blog Alfred Spector, VP Engineering, and Franz Och, Research Scientist tell about the intelligent cloud:
When combined with the creativity, knowledge, and drive inherent in people, this “intelligent cloud” will generate many surprising and significant benefits to mankind.
The pattern emerges once more: water and intelligence united.
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Blue Waters →
The Blue Waters project will build the world’s first sustained petascale computational system dedicated to open scientific research.
August 2008
9 posts
5 tags
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Words of Water and Information
The words and phrases below are related both to water and information processing/transfer. Do you know of something else?
think tank
cascade of impulses
flowchart
swimlane
source
channel
wave
waterfall model
cloud computing
stream computing
bucket computing
snow crash
rainbow arithmetic
Blue Waters
information cascade
[your word here]
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Specifications
Charles Martz.
Hello, is this the Research and Development department?
Yes, this is. I'm in charge here. The official title is R'n'D Director – just call me Charles.
Robert Sachs here. In the same building, but on the floor 18. I'm the new Product Manager and responsible for new product development, we have not met yet. But we will. Charles, I have the specs of a new product here, all eighty pages of them. I'll mail these to you in a moment. I'll go through these now just to give you some idea here what we are looking for.
Okay. Just hit it.
When you heat it to one hundred degrees celsius, it should change its form, become invicible, and rise to the sky.
Hmm. Could it have an electric motor with a propellor or something. It could fly like a helicopter. For measuring the temperature, it needs a sensor of some sorts. The invicibility thing is something that needs further thought. You would not believe what magicians achieve with perfectly-positioned mirrors.
Yeah, in a dark night, they can even make the Statue of Liberty disappear. Ok, it says here that it should be easy to transport it to customers through pipes, copper pipes for instance. You know, just to keep the delivery costs down.
Ok, let's put some rubber wheels to it. The electric motor is already there, so… Wheels should do the trick.
What if the copper pipes have turns and crossings? How will it achieve its goal without getting lost?
That's an easy one. You still don't have a satellite-powered GPS system on your car, do you? We can mix that with an elevation sensor. Then we achieve position based controlling in all three dimensions. Let's embed a computer into that thing. They are dirt cheap, nowadays.
Yes, I'm starting to get a feeling that this will be a piece of cake. But, let's see what the paper says. On page twelve now. It should aid in carrying waste and dirt from households to the cleaning plant.
We have these left-over plastic containers here. We can always attach one to it, and input the GPS coordinates of a route to the cleaning plant. By the way, what are you going to do with this piece of machinery? What's the purpose?
I'm sorry, I do not know that yet. According to our marketing department there already is a competing product on the market now. They say it is old-fashioned and quite cheap, a bit dull actually. There is no hype around it, Music Television doesn't advertise it at all. However, it is in daily use all over the globe. It has 100 per cent market penetration. Just think, if we can grab just a couple of percentages of that. Can you see the enormous potential here? If we design and market it correctly, our company will reap a lot of profits.
Cool. This is very cool. I feel like I am on an edge of something really big phenomenal thing. Flat run tyres are nothing compared to this. When we can start researching this more closely, do you have the budget for this? You do need a feasibility study or something?
Yes, of course, we will come back to those later. I'm skimming here. On page forty now. When its temperature falls to zero, its volume increases and it turns very hard.
That is quite easy to implement with the temperature sensor already in place, and a couple of airbags that will inflate and de-inflate when needed.
That sorted out then. Here comes the next requirement; when hit or on a quick collision, it should make a nice sound of some sorts.
All right. Let's add more sensors to gain motion-sensitivity and touch-sensitivity. Like often is the case, the customer should be able to download new sounds from the internet. Everything should be user-customizable, nowadays, as you know. We have the computer in there, so this is quite trivial. Top-ten hits, and funny burping noises, that's what the customers want. A loudspeaker should be added, of course.
This sounds great. I think we are surpassing our competitor now. Page fifty-two; it should be small enough to be drinkable and nutritious. Drinkable and nutritious? How small can you make this gadget?
Roughly a cube, each side around fifteen centimeters, with the features mentioned. Batteries excluded, however. What on earth are these requirements; did you say drinkable and nutritious?
I have to check those, there could be a mistake somewhere. Page seventy now; the manufacturing process should be environment-friendly. Well, I did see that coming. The production should consume only two chemical elements.
Hmm, getting quite tricky. It seems that there is just too much features to implement - feature creep is the term we use in this kind of situation. How an earth has the competitor solved these problems, and put these all to a single product?
True, very true and valid question. It is dinner time now. Should we discuss about these things over a steak at the restaurant nearby?
Yes, that is a great idea Robert. I will meet you by the entrance. See you in a minute. I'm the guy with a yellow-striped necktie.
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IBM to Show Stream Computing System →
The New York Times reported on 17th of June, 2007:
IBM is introducing a high-performance computer system that is intended to rapidly analyze data as it streams in from many sources, increasing the speed and accuracy of decision making in fields as diverse as security surveillance and Wall Street trading.
The list of words related both to water and information processing keeps growing; words...
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“An object is streamlined when its exterior surface is so designed that upon...”
– Norman Bel Geddes (1932)