• Google Hosting?
  
  Can Google Page Creator do more than intended? Maybe so! (This is not another "It's here" post!)


• Girls Are Smarter After All
  
  By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes.


• Amazing Google Vid- "Quantum Physics Double Slit Experiment"
  
  This experiment shows the really mysterious behavior of quantam particles. Electrons behaving like waves and then like marbles? Mind blowingly cool.

• 'DNA target' to block HIV found
  
  "American scientists have discovered how a molecule controls HIV's ability to hijack the genetic machinery of human cells. The finding gives experts a new target for blocking the virus, according to the journal Nature Medicine."


• SETI@home-like project to crack unbroken Nazi Enigma ciphers
  
  Four of the messages encrypted with the Nazi Enigma machine were never decrypted; a distributed computing project (like SETI@Home) is harnessing the power of the Internet's many computers to break them.


• Google Page Creator Open To Public Again.
  
  But Only For A Limited Time, Hurry And Get Your Account Set Up.


• 500 Simple Exeriments anyone can do
  
  Explorium, San Francisco's Museum of Science, art, and human perception has a page dedicated to 500 simple experiments anyone can do. It's all hands on! I wrote a bigger review of the site here:
  http://www.sharewonders.com/2006/02/26/exploratorium/


• Government Declines Google's Request for Privacy
  
  Unfortunately, the Department of Justice has turned down Google's request for privacy. The DOJ says that with Google's search results, it can better identify the hazards of online websites that young users might be exposed to.


• The Superbrowser - Firefox with 100 extensions installed
  
  This guy installed 100 very popular extensions on Firefox to stress test it! He says it did pretty well under the load - includes screenshots.


• Cavemen Preferred Blondes
  
  According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.


• 1 billion songs purchased iTunes songs plotted on a graph
  
  Apple recently passed the 1 billion purchased songs milestone on iTunes. Here's a graph showing the major iTunes since they started selling music in May 2003. 500 million songs purchased in the last 7 months!


• Scientists can now predict memory of an event before it even happens.
  
  Scans of brain activity, published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience, indicate that the brain can actually get into the 'right frame of mind' to store new information and that we perform at our best if the brain is active not only at the moment we get new information but also in the seconds before.


• Google OS video!
  
  This girl was talking to me on MSN about how her dad had a copy of Google OS. I told her she was a liar and she was stupid! 10 minutes later she sends me this video :D


• Google calendar to be called CL2, a calendar for you and the world
  
  I stumbled across a a preferences page for a quick links bar in Gmail. Nothing too exciting there I thought, but one of the links you can have is to Google CL2, a calendar for you and world.


• Ebay Auction: 1 punch in the face
  
  You are bidding on one real punch in the face, this is not a joke!! do you hate yourself? i will punch you in the face!

• Massive Multiplayer Pong
  
  Let's see what happens when the entire digg community decides to play a game of pong at the same time.


• Write your own operating system :)
  
  Kernel development is not an easy task. This is a testament to your programming expertise: To develop a kernel is to say that you understand how to create software that interfaces with and manages the hardware. A kernel is designed to be a central core to the operating system - the logic that manages the resources that the hardware has to offer.

• Gmail Guide For Webmasters (With More Than One Email Address)
  
  This advanced guide details how to organise your email and email addresses using just one gmail account :)


• Hi-Res Image of New Space Shuttle Tank
  
  For the first time, the tank will fly without Protuberance Air Load (PAL) ramps. The ramps were on the tank to protect a cable tray and two pressurization oxygen and hydrogen lines during the dynamic portion of launch.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

Douglas Adams(1952 - 2001), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Warning: the following images may cause a sensation of insignificance and despair if brain is wrapped around the uncertainty and finiteness of our existance.

LOL. I went through a lot of references to come up with that frase. They’re all a nice read, if you have the time:

• Meaninglessness - An Introduction to Symptoms
• Nihilism
• Universe Measured: We’re 156 Billion Light-years Wide!
• The Universe: Still Boggling The Minds of ‘Finite Creatures’
• Quotations Page

On the other hand, there are some interesting videos and animations (or plain slides) that will also make you feel a wee bit insignificant, but that will certainly put things into perspective.

The first one is a video called “The Powers of Ten”. It is:…

The ultimate Eamesian expression of systems and connections, Powers of Ten explores the relative size of things from the microscopic to the cosmic. The 1977 film travels from an aerial view of a man in a Chicago park to the outer limits of the universe directly above him and back down into the microscopic world contained in the man’s hand. Powers of Ten illustrates the universe as an arena of both continuity and change, of everyday picnics and cosmic mystery. The film also demonstrates the Eameses’ ability to make science both fascinating and accessible.

It can be viewed in Google Video, but its a bit choppy. A somewhat better version of the same video is also available, although it is interlaced and not that much resizable. The official website shows much more detailed images of quarks.

The Powers of Ten was so inspiring that similar projects have spawned across the web. The two most notable are “Secret Worlds: The Universe Within“, which is an interactive Java Applet, and “Quarks to Quasars“, which is a set of images with a more detailed description.

Anyhow, this post has been sitting in my drafts section for a while. I thought I’d put it out here, hope to get some insightful comments from passers-by and from the ol’ blogger friends.

Tags: Douglas Adams, quote, space, Hubble, images, amazing, insignificance, despair, uncertain, finite, meaningless, existance, googlevideo, powers of ten, life, perspective, draft