sex warehouse

Professor Richard Wiseman started his unusual career as a professional magician before obtaining a degree in psychology then a doctorate. He is currently based at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, where he holds Britain's first Professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology. His international reputation stems from his research into unusual areas of psychology, including luck, deception, the paranormal, humour, and the science of self-help where his critical examination leads to the debunking of unusual phenomena, including reports of paranormal phenomena. He has published over 60 papers in various academic journals and science publications and penned four books. The Luck Factor presents a comprehensive account of his research into the psychology of luck. Quirkology examines the curious psychology of everyday life, including laughter, lying, and love. 59 Seconds investigates the science of self-help and rapid change. His latest book, Paranormality, was published in March 2011.

Prof Wiseman's research has been featured on a number of television programs such as Horizon (BBC), Body Shock (Channel 4), 20/20 (ABC), and Dateline (NBC) and he is heard on BBC Radio 4, with regular appearances on Start The Week, Midweek and The Today Programme. Articles about his research have been published in The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian and his work has even made its way to the front cover of the The New York Magazine. The professor maintains his own web site, a blog and a YouTube channel while further distributing his work via Facebook and Twitter.

I ran across these charming and fascinating videos about some "magic tricks" filmed by the professor. What he does is interesting and educational and when combined with the music, you have a good little piece of entertainment. Enjoy!


Uploaded by Quirkology on Dec 7, 2009
Top 10 quirky science tricks for parties

Uploaded by Quirkology on Dec 6, 2010
Ten more science stunts for parties


References

Wikipedia: Richard Wiseman
Professor Wiseman is known for his critical examination and frequent debunking of unusual phenomena, including reports of paranormal phenomena.

official web site: Richard Wiseman

official blog: Richard Wiseman
[If you like puzzles, this gentleman has a mind for you. I note that Prof. Wiseman seems to be publishing a posting Monday through Friday so with 5 entries per week, you going to have to tune in regularly to keep up!]

Facebook: Richard Wiseman

Twitter: Richard Wiseman
@RichardWiseman London and Edinburgh
Personal twitter account of psychologist, author and magician Richard Wiseman.

YouTube channel: Quirkology
[Prof. Wiseman's own YouTube channel]

Web site for the book: Paranormality
[This is Prof. Wiseman's fourth book.]

CSI: The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The mission of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry is to promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims.
[ The list of staff shows Richard Wiseman as a research fellow.]

2011-07-17

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Apparently, our predilection for gossip is built-in and we pay more attention to those nasty things said about people. Unflattering gossip about our friends, family members — even down-and-out movie stars — shapes our visual perception of these individuals and provides a looking glass into how we subconsciously protect ourselves from harm, according to a new study led by a neuroscientist at Northeastern University.

“You are more conscious of a face if you know something bad about that person,” says Distinguished Professor of Psychology Lisa Feldman-Barrett, who led the study. “Gossip,” she says, “has an effect on how the visual system works.”

"The Visual Impact of Gossip" published in the June 17, 2011 edition of the journal Science delves into how people react to faces according to the circumstances surrounding those faces. A team of researchers led Barrett discovered that their test subjects unconsciously paid more attention to the faces of people about whom they had heard in defamatory or disparaging terms. They believe the reason stems from evolution when it was important to know who to avoid and to keep an eye on them. Humans could live in groups and learn from others, not just from direct experience.

Two experiments were performed. In the first, 61 people looked the images of faces. The participants in the study were presented with images of visually neutral faces that were paired with three kinds of gossip: negative (“hit a dog” or “stole money”), positive (“helped an elderly woman cross the street” or “volunteered at an animal shelter”) or neutral (“mailed a letter” or “went shopping”). The faces were then paired with an unrelated image.

The second test saw the researchers using a technique that exploits what's known as "binocular rivalry". This presents each eye with a separate image, and allowing the two to compete for attention — only one of the two images will consciously be seen at any given time. The participants were presented with an image of a face in one eye, and a picture of a house in the other. Compared the faces linked to neutral or positive information, those linked with negative gossip were perceived for longer.

As Barrett puts it, “If gossip helps predict who is friend and who is foe without first-hand experience of that person, then this strategy may have evolved to protect us from liars and cheaters. If we see them for longer periods of time, then we can gather more information about their behavior.”

According to Barrett, we don’t interpret the world through the exclusivity of our senses. “Usually we assume that what you see influences what you feel, but here we have a case where what you feel about someone influences what you see visually. This has immediate use for translational science.”

NPR in a May 20/2011 article reports that other scientists have said the results make sense from an evolutionary perspective.

Frank McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. was reported as saying, "I was actually pretty excited to see this paper. For years, people like me have been saying that our intense interest in gossip is not really a character flaw. It's part of who we are. It's almost a biological event, and it exists for good evolutionary reasons."

We return to the phenomenon of humans living in groups. McAndrew explained that people needed to know things who might be a threat and who might be after a particular mate and learning those things through personal experience would have been slow and potentially dangerous. Gossip was a shortcut.

"People who had an intense interest in that — that constantly were monitoring who's sleeping with who and who's friends with whom and who you can trust and who you can't — came out ahead. People who just didn't care about that stuff got left behind," he said. A brain which pays special attention to negative gossip makes sense. "If somebody is a competitor or somebody is higher than you in the food chain, you want dirt about them. You want negative information; because that's the stuff you can exploit to get ahead." (Gee, this almost sounds like politics!)

Another description of this emphasis on the negative as opposed to the positive is that you're more likely to survive if you mistakenly respond to a stick as though it were a snake than if you make the opposite error. This may be a concrete example of Darwin's theory of evolution. Those who remain today are those who always jumped whether it was a stick or a snake. Those who are no longer with us are those who always thought it was a stick.

Final Word
We love to gossip but to imagine that this behaviour comes from evolution. While empirical evidence shows that we pay more attention to those about whom we've heard bad things, the reasoning behind our selective focus makes sense from our survival instinct. Pay attention to what's bad; avoid getting into trouble.


References

news@Northeastern - May 20/2011
Gossip triggers defensive response

Science. 2011 Jun 17;332(6036):1446-8. Epub 2011 May 19.
The visual impact of gossip.
Anderson E, Siegel EH, Bliss-Moreau E, Barrett LF.
Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
[The full text of this study is only available for a fee.]
Abstract
Gossip is a form of affective information about who is friend and who is foe. We show that gossip does not influence only how a face is evaluated—it affects whether a face is seen in the first place. In two experiments, neutral faces were paired with negative, positive, or neutral gossip and were then presented alone in a binocular rivalry paradigm (faces were presented to one eye, houses to the other). In both studies, faces previously paired with negative (but not positive or neutral) gossip dominated longer in visual consciousness. These findings demonstrate that gossip, as a potent form of social affective learning, can influence vision in a completely top-down manner, independent of the basic structural features of a face.

The Visual Impact of Gossip

Out of sight, but not out of mind

Northeastern University
Lisa Feldman Barrett
1992: Ph.D., Clinical Psychology, University of Waterloo

NPR - May 20/2011
Psst! The Human Brain Is Wired For Gossip by Jon Hamilton

2011-06-22

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On Saturday, our "full moon" is going to be what NASA is calling a "super full moon". Like me, I'm sure you're baffled but it turns out the explanation is relatively simple.

The moon's orbit around our planet is elliptical, that is, it's not a circle; it's not moving in an evenly spaced manner. Its orbit leads it closer to the Earth then father away so it is not always at the same distance. At its farthest point know as the apogee, it is approximately 406,731 km (252,731 mi) from Earth, at its closest point known as the perigee, it is approximately 364,397 km (226,426 mi). On Saturday, the full moon we are going to see is when the moon is at its perigee so it is, essentially, larger than normal. According to NASA, the last time this happened was in March 1993. The space agency also states that with the moon about 50,000 km closer to Earth than at its apogee, it is going to be 14% larger and 30% brighter. This is dubbed the "perigee moon".

I have to chuckle as various sources say that we may not appreciate this 14% larger and 30% brighter. The naked eye may not discern the difference as other factors as pollution blocking the view, clouds, etc. may affect our perception of the moon. The following video says that for an unknown reason, we get the idea of the moon being larger when it is closer to the horizon so maybe it's not so much the "perigee moon" which makes it a super full moon, but when exactly we get a look at it during the night.


Final Word
Don't miss it. The next one is slated for 2029.


References

Wikipedia: Supermoon
The term supermoon is not widely accepted or used within the astronomy or scientific community, who prefer the term perigee-syzygy.

Wikipedia: Syzygy
In astronomy, a syzygy is a straight line configuration of three celestial bodies (as the Earth, Sun, and Moon) in a gravitational system. The word is usually used in reference to the Sun, the Earth and either the Moon or a planet, where the latter is in conjunction or opposition. Solar and lunar eclipses occur at times of syzygy, as do transits and occultations. The term is also applied to each instance of new moon or full moon when Sun and Moon are in conjunction or opposition, even though they are not precisely on one line with the Earth.
Wikipedia: Orbit of the Moon

NASA: Super Full Moon

2011-03-19

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This coming Saturday, March 26, 2011, from 8:30pm to 9:30pm, we will be showing our support for Mother Earth by turning off our lights. This now global event was humbly started in Sydney, Australia in 2007 with 2.2 million residents of that city switching off all non-essential lights. This idea, initiated by the WWF Australia and the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, has now grown into an annual event of an international scale to raise awareness about the need to do something about climate change.

Wikipedia's list of the participating countries is so comprehensive; one would wonder why anybody is not taking part in the event. Even the Antarctica is on the list! (I'm certain somebody is going to painstakingly go through this list to find out who's being a bad boy by not participating.)

EarthHour.Org
The official web site contains a wealth of information about not only the event, but climate change and the need to do something. I notice a handy countdown clock reminding us of our duty this Saturday. On the home page, you can also find a locator to find country specific sites. Click here for Canada's web site and find out what's happening in the Great White North!

On the About page, they offer a downloadable pocket guide to Climate Change. The PDF contains a telling quote from Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Climate Convention: "The financial crisis is a result of our living beyond our financial means. The climate crisis is a result of our living beyond our planet's means." The pamphlet contains numerous stats, quotes from experts, and talk of various initiatives which need to be undertaken. Are people listening or is it business as usual?

I read a statement I have heard elsewhere:

As a result of warming, with more heat energy and water vapour in the atmosphere, climate and weather of all kinds will become more extreme. Storms, including hurricanes, may become more intense and more frequent. Wet areas will generally become wetter and dry areas drier. Droughts, which are already more frequent, will get longer and more intense, and extend to new areas – including the Mediterranean, Middle East, Central Asia and southern Africa, which can all expect substantially less rain.

The sceptics always say that things don't feel warmer and I guess that in general, maybe that "feels" true. However, if I think over some of the headlines I've read in the past few years, is the first sign of global warming not more heat but more extreme weather? I can certainly think of a number of extreme weather reports.

True Story
When I was a kid, I always remember building forts in the piles of snow beside the driveway in front of the family home. By the beginning of December, we had certainly shovelled a lot of snow onto each side and the mounds provided excellent cover for snowball fights or even hollowing out a mound as a sort of igloo. That was during the 1950s. Today, it is rare that I see that amount of snow. Something has certainly changed and I only have to bring out the old family photos to see proof that our climate has different. Winters are milder than they were. Yes, I know there are a lot of doubting Thomas's who say global warming is a myth but it seems pretty hard to explain what I have experienced first-hand. Whatever you want to call it, something is going on.


Energy Saved
Wikipedia rattles off some stats about how much was saved in energy sometimes translating that into an equivalent in carbon dioxide.

According to WWF Thailand, Bangkok decreased electricity usage by 73.34 megawatts, which, over one hour, is equivalent to 41.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Ireland, as a whole, had a reduction in electricity use of about 1.5% for the evening. In the three-hour period between 18:30 and 21:30, there was a reduction of 50 megawatts, saving 150 megawatt-hours, or approximately 60 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

And for my home town:

Toronto saved 900 megawatt-hours of electricity. 8.7% was saved if measured against a typical March Saturday night.

Criticism
What doesn't have criticism? Too little, maybe too late? What about Earth Day? Or Earth Week? Do we really have what it takes to do something truly meaningful?

The Ayn Rand Institute wrote, "Participants spend an enjoyable sixty minutes in the dark, safe in the knowledge that the life-saving benefits of industrial civilization are just a light switch away... Forget one measly hour with just the lights off. How about Earth Month... Try spending a month shivering in the dark without heating, electricity, refrigeration; without power plants or generators; without any of the labor-saving, time-saving, and therefore life-saving products that industrial energy makes possible." (The Real Meaning of Earth Hour By Keith Lockitch - March 23, 2009)

In my blog Let's go green... er, black?, I talk about our need for electricity, how much coal we all may be burning to produce electricity and just what we collectively are doing and should be doing. I wrote:

A couple of years ago, I was reading an analysis in the editorial pages of the Toronto Star where the author [looked] at our green efforts. He listed off our various initiatives in North America like changing traditional light bulbs to more energy efficient ones, getting more green appliances, turning off unnecessary lights and dimming others, etc. Then he said that these types of efforts, while laudable were laughable when one took into account that at that moment, China was constructing a new coal-fired electrical power generating station every week. All of our light bulbs were dwarfed by the new developments elsewhere in the world which were leading to even higher levels of pollution.

Good question. The Kyoto Protocol aims to fight global warming. It sets out targets in the reduction of various pollutants known to contribute to this phenomenon. As of October 2010, 191 countries have ratified the agreement with one very notable exception: the United States, a country ranked by several reports as the biggest polluter on the planet.

In saying that, I don't mean the rest of us should do nothing, but it seems obvious that only with everyone doing their part will the entire planet be a better place. In the meantime, I can switch off on Saturday and even if it's only symbolic as opposed to making a measurable, substantial difference, it can be a start that will hopefully be seen by those who are in a position to make a decision hopefully for the better.


References

Wikipedia: Earth Hour
Earth Hour is a global event organized by WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature, also known as World Wildlife Fund) and is held on the last Saturday of March annually, asking households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights and other electrical appliances for one hour to raise awareness towards the need to take action on climate change. Earth Hour was conceived by WWF and The Sydney Morning Herald in 2007, when 2.2 million residents of Sydney participated by turning off all non-essential lights. Following Sydney's lead, many other cities around the world adopted the event in 2008. Earth Hour 2011 will take place on March 26, 2011 from 8:30p.m. to 9:30p.m., at participants' respective local time.

official web site: Earth Hour

Facebook: Earth Hour

Twitter: Earth Hour

official web site: Earth Hour for Kids
[An interactive web site with games and educational texts geared for the smaller crowd.]

Google Images: Earth Hour
[Lots of great pictures, some before and after photos]

Wikipedia: Earth Day
Earth Day is a day that is intended to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's natural environment. It is celebrated on April 22. Some also celebrate "Earth Week" from April 16 to April 22.

2011-03-15

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Okay, now just how geeky is this? The mathematical constant Pi is equal to three point one four one five nine yadda yadda yadda. - Some clown in the audience is going to impress us all by reciting this to 20 decimal digits. Geeks rule! - Well, who would have guessed? Pi has its own day and that day is March 14. I can see the perplexed looks now. March is the third month of the year so that gives us 3/14, the first three digits of Pi. [slaps forehead] Oh... my... gawd! I have to add here that the U.S. shows dates in the format month - day - year. Britain shows day-month-year and Japan shows year-month-day. Only in America!

Yes folks, today is - or if you're reading this tomorrow, yesterday was - Pi Day, a holiday commemorating this most unusual of mathematical constants. Well, is it the oddest? Maybe the know-it-all geniuses may disagree but I would come back to Pi being the most commonly know of all constants, at least for us lay people and/or dunderheads.

What is Pi?
Just what the heck is Pi anyway? π (sometimes written pi) is a mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any Euclidean plane circle's circumference to its diameter; this is the same value as the ratio of a circle's area to the square of its radius. (Wikipedia) [stunned silence] Ah, but what exactly does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

Pi is represented by the Greek letter π, and it is the most important constant in mathematics. You can find out the area of a circle of radius r, using πr2. The perimeter of this circle would have the length 2πr. Without pi there is no theory of motion and no understanding of geometry. Likewise, the volume of a sphere of radius r is 4/3πr3 and that of a cylinder of height h is πr2h. Pi occurs in important fields of applied mathematics such as Fourier analysis. It is used throughout engineering, science and medicine and is studied for its own sake in number theory. (ABC Science)

Well, didn't that just clear things up nicely! Oh boy, am I in over my head. However, the fascination with this mathematical constant goes on to the nutty and the funny.

Piphilology
This oddball word (read made-up) is the creation and use of mnemonic techniques to remember the digits of Pi. The word derives from Pi (natch!) and philology which is the study of language based on historical sources. A "piem" (Pi and poEM) is a poem which represents the constant. The trick is that the number of letters of the word must correspond to a digit. For example (supposedly the most famous):


If you look back at Pi, you find 3.141592653. How = 3, I = 1, want = 4, etc. Funny, eh? But some have even gone further in pushing the limits of this mathematical slash artistic creativity:

Sir, I have a rhyme excelling,
In mystic power and magic spelling,
Mystical spirits elucidate,
For my own problems cant relate.

That one takes you out to the twentieth digit of Pi. I see though that some have gone nuts. Wikipedia gives an example of a poem to the 75th position written in iambic pentameter and talks about texts going on for thousands of digits. That's a lot of free time on your hands. Then again, I appreciate the challenge of creatively working within certain constraints.

And speaking about working creatively, I just happened to run across two creative guys who put together an amusing musical number about Pi set to the tune of American Pie, the 1971 song written and sung by Don McLean. Here is "Mathematical Pi" by Ken Ferrier and Antoni Chan.

The following YouTube video by Steve Toner, a teacher, is his version of Mathematical Pi by Ferrier and Chan. (A MP3 of Ferrier and Chan singing their own song can be found below.)



A long, long time ago
Long before the Super Bowl and things like lemonade
The Hellenic Republic was full of smarts
And a question resting on the Grecian hearts
Was "What is the circumference of a circle?"
But they were set on rational numbers
And it ranks among their biggest blunders
They worked on it for years
And confirmed one of their biggest fears
I can't be certain if they cried when irrationality was realized
But something deep within them died
the day they discovered pi.
They were thinking

Pi, pi, mathematical pi
3 point 14 15 92
65 35 89 7
932384 62
6433832 7 (not rounded)

Well this kind of pie is different than most
It hasn't got berries, ain't spread on toast
And that's how it's always been
We keep extending its decimal places
Pushing our computers through their paces
But we'll never reach the end

So why the fascination with
A number whose end is just a myth
Whence the adulation
For mental masturbation
It might have something to do with the stars
To calculate distances from afar
But that's just a guess 'bout the way things are
Regarding the precision of pi
I am pondering

CHORUS:

Now I feel that I should mention
Pi is applicable in any dimension
At least as far as I know
If there were no Pi we'd be missing things
Like marbles and mugs and balls of string
And sports such as soccer and curling
The orbs in their celestial paths
Navigate along elliptical graphs
Ellipses have pi in them too
Just one side of them has grew
You can see pi in most everything
It's in Cornell's Electron Storage Ring
And also in slinkies and other springs
And that's why it's important to know pi
You should memorize

CHORUS:

Once one night I had a dream
That pi was gone and I had to scream
Cause all pi things had disappeared  (pause)
Can you imagine a world like that
Circles aren't round and spheres are flat
It's the culmination of everything we've feared
'Twas a nightmare of epic proportions
One that gave me brain contortions
Oh wait!  I mean contusions
They put me in some institutions
But then I escaped and now I'm free
To sing of the virtue of pi

CHORUS

Pi itself set to music
Phil Tulga has some unique offerings to teaching on his web site. In one of them, he has put together a little music using the digits to select notes. Look at "part 2 Sequencing with Pi" and listen to "Phil's Pi song". Starting with middle C as 1, he creates some harmony, adds some timing and manages to come up with something quite pleasant to the ear based on 3, 1, 4, 1, and 5. Hmmm, does nature have a lot of surprises? A lot of connections between mathematics and music? It's uncanny.

Another oddity about Pi: The Feynman Point
The decimal representation of Pi goes on forever and the current world record is calculating Pi out to 5 trillion digits. An oddity of these numbers is that starting at the 762nd decimal place, there is a sequence of six 9s. It is called the Feynman point after physicist Richard Feynman who once stated during a lecture he would like to memorize the digits of π until that point, so he could recite them and quip "nine nine nine nine nine nine and so on", suggesting, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, that π is rational. (Wikipedia)

Final Word
Some miscellaneous references:

There are all sorts of references to Pi on the Net especially ones making use of the homonym pie. Hats off to Larry Shaw who created Pi Day in 1989 at the San Francisco Exploratorium where he worked as a physicist.

The U.S. House of Representatives made it official on March 12, 2009 recognising March 14 as National Pi Day.

July 22 or 22/7 (day/month) is Pi Approximation Day as the fraction 22⁄7 is a common approximation of Pi.

I can't wait until 2015 when we can all really go all out as then Pi Day will consist of not three but five digits of Pi (3.1415) as 3/14/15 in the month/day/year format.

Now, I think I'll go cut me a slice... of pie. Hmmm, now where is the whipped cream?


References

Wikipedia: Pi Day
Pi Day is a holiday commemorating the mathematical constant π (pi). Pi Day is celebrated on March 14 (or 3/14 in month/day date format), since 3, 1 and 4 are the three most significant digits of π in the decimal form.

Wikipedia: Pi
π (sometimes written pi) is a mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any Euclidean plane circle's circumference to its diameter; this is the same value as the ratio of a circle's area to the square of its radius. It is approximately equal to 3.14159265 in the usual decimal notation. Many formulae from mathematics, science, and engineering involve π, which makes it one of the most important mathematical constants.

Wikipedia: Piem, Piphilology
Piphilology comprises the creation and use of mnemonic techniques to remember a span of digits of the mathematical constant π.

Mathematical Pi by Ken Ferrier and Antoni Chan
The following link is to a MP3 of our two troubadours giving their rendition of their own opus. Please note that unlike YouTube videos which are set up to stream (they start playing without you having to wait for the whole video to download), this MP3 is not streaming so you have to patiently wait for the whole thing to come down to your computer before it starts to play. You are forewarned. Enjoy.

MP3 of the complete song

All Too Flat
Welcome to All Too Flat. Prepare yourself for some serious time-wastin' and (hopefully) a fair amount of laughing.

Alright, so what is this site all about?
I think Yahoo describes ATF the best: "A web site that takes its name from a Monty Python sketch seems like the natural place to find oddities like The Bible According to Cheese and scientist trading cards. At alltooflat.com, quirky humor is the name of the game. The ATF Squad tries to debunk myths such as don't overfeed your goldfish, although tragically, this turns out to be sound advice. They play some vaguely funny pranks on their friends and offer tips on how to stage your own. They even get pretentious and spout off poetry -- don't miss the haikus about bowling, NAFTA, tech guys, raves, NYC, and Law and Order. And if you have questions or need some advice, just ask the fish."

So then what is all this "Too Flat" nonsense anyway?
It's an obscure Monty Python reference:
"He is an halibut. I chose him out of thousands.
I didn't like the others; they were all too flat."

2011-03-14

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The unthinkable has arrived. Or is it the unimaginable? The Internet has run out of IP addresses. Gosh, it seems so easy to zip through four billion, two hundred and ninety-four million, nine hundred and sixty-seven thousand, two hundred and ninety-six addresses.

To give a bit of information or if you're computer savvy, we can joke about bit, byte, word and double word of information, on February 3, 2011 - mark this date down in your calendars! - the last IP addresses were allocated and there ain't no more. IANA which oversees all IP numbers, allocated the last five blocks to the five RIRs so what the RIRs have is all there is.

What? 4 billion?
All of us in setting up our home computers at one time or another must have run across an odd-looking piece of information consisting of 4 numbers separated by periods in the form "74.125.53.106". (For those of you savvy readers who are going to immediately launch your DNS look-up; that is the main IP for Google.com). The IP or Internet Protocol address is a series of 4 bytes which designates the address of a computer on the Internet. This means all computers are identified by this unique address so when somebody sends a piece of information; all the other computers know where to route the information.

Quickie lesson. A bit is the fundamental building block of computers which consists of 2 states: on or off. A byte is a series of 8 bits which permits values from zero to two hundred and fifty-five. If you string 4 bytes together, you end up with 256 times 256 times 256 times 256 or 4,294,967,296 combinations.

Now think about that one. For years, the Internet has been working on a 4 byte address system giving us over 4 billion combinations and we have run out. Holy Hannah! Who would have thought? Hmmm, were these the same people who thought using 2 digits for the year back in the 1970's wasn't such a bad idea because all those systems would be replaced by the year 2000? Ha!

IPv6
In reality, the experts have known about this limitation for a long time and have been working to bring us a new and improved system. The current system is called IPv4 and the new system which will eventually replace it is called IPv6. What's the big difference? IPv4 is a 32 bit addressing system. Each byte has 8 bits; 4 bytes give us 32 bits and that can be noted as two to the thirty-second power or 2^32 which equals the four billion plus number. IPv6 is a 128 bit system or 2^128 which equals (now watch carefully)


That is 10 to the 36th power which apparently is called a "undecillion". Okay, we are supposed to arrive at 7 billion people on the planet sometime in October 2011. We've now run out of the 4 billion plus Internet addresses we had and are moving to a new system which consists of 340 undecillion addresses. One video I saw said that this number is larger than all the grains of sand on the entire planet. I'm assuming we're not going to be running out of this list of addresses any time soon.

Actually, not all addresses are used
Various erudite articles on the subject point out that not all addresses are currently used. In fact, there is supposedly a great deal of waste in the Internet. Lots of addresses are not being used and a re-allocation of said addresses could see us all making better use of the 4 billion plus we have.

True Story
I started at a company in the mid-nineties with 100 employees. Our ISP gave us 110 IP addresses. Over the years, the company shrank down to as low as 65 employees but is now on the rise and could be up to 80 employees by the end of this year. Add another 5 IP addresses for servers and we would need a total of 85 IP. All this time, we have always had 110. Think about it. We've been holding on to 20, 30, sometimes 40 IP addresses and not using them. If we hit our end of year complement of 80, we will continue to hold 25 addresses we don't use. I suspect we could represent a typical situation for a lot of companies which would back up the notion that the four billion plus IP addresses making up IPv4 are not all being used. Now who's going to figure this out and work out a practical re-allocation of addresses?

The explosion of the Internet
Do I have to state the obvious? Who knew the Internet would take off like it did? I was born in the 50's. Now I have a difficult time imagining how I or anybody else could live without this communication platform. Good gawd, don't deprive me of the Internet!

According to Wikipedia:
According to a 2001 study, there were a massive over 550 billion documents on the Web, mostly in the invisible Web, or deep Web. A 2002 survey of 2,024 million Web pages determined that by far the most Web content was in English: 56.4%; next were pages in German (7.7%), French (5.6%), and Japanese (4.9%). A more recent study, which used Web searches in 75 different languages to sample the Web, determined that there were over 11.5 billion Web pages in the publicly indexable Web as of the end of January 2005. As of March 2009, the indexable web contains at least 25.21 billion pages. On July 25, 2008, Google software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj announced that Google Search had discovered one trillion unique URLs. As of May 2009, over 109.5 million websites operated. Of these 74% were commercial or other sites operating in the .com generic top-level domain.

YouTube: The State Of The Internet - Feb 28/2010
Here we look at the incredible growth of the internet, courtesy of Jess3, Jesse Thomas. JESS3 designed and animated this for the JESS3 lecture at AIGA Baltimore in Feb 2010. 1.73 billion internet users worldwide, 90 trillion emails sent in 2009, 234 million websites, 126 million blogs, 27.3 million tweets per day, 260 billion pages served per minute at Facebook. The numbers are staggering. The world can be found online.


YouTube: Social Media Revolution 2 - May 5/2010
Social Media Revolution 2 is a refresh of the original video with new and updated social media & mobile statistics that are hard to ignore. Based on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman.

The song Right Here, Right Now by Fatboy Slim has been used in several videos which show statistics relating to various subjects like world population.

Final Word
I started out with a catchy title for the article. In reality, the Internet is not full. The RIRs, Regional Internet Registries will take some time to allocate the final addresses but already efforts are underway to introduce IPv6 across the board. As a consequence, we are not going to see any sort of disruption of service. Come to think of it, Y2K turned out to be a non-event and this will too. Chicken Little, the sky is not falling. Hmmm, I think the sky has been 128 bit all along. Maybe it's even 256 bit. Imagine that one: 10 to the 78th power!


References

Wikipedia: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)

Wikipedia: Regional Internet registry (RIR)

Wikipedia: IPv6

Wikipedia: Right Here, Right Now (Fatboy Slim song)
"Right Here, Right Now" is a 1999 single by Fatboy Slim. The song reached #2 on the UK charts. It was released on the studio album You've Come a Long Way, Baby and the compilation album The Greatest Hits - Why Try Harder.

The basic string melody of the song was sampled from the James Gang song, "Ashes, The Rain & I". The lyrics "right here, right now" are a sample of Angela Bassett's voice from the film Strange Days at the 1:39:08 mark.

YouTube: Fatboy Slim - Right Here, Right Now - music video
The music video of the single shows a depiction of the process of evolution condensed into three and a half minutes. The beginning of the music video is set "350 billion Years Ago", and starts with a single cell organism in the ocean evolving into a jellyfish, a pufferfish and then a predatory fish. It manages to eat a smaller fish before leaping up onto dry land. With a dinosaur visible in the background and an insect in front, it stays still for a few seconds before setting off and eating the insect.

The land-fish evolves into a small alligator as it enters a forest. It sees a tall tree, which it climbs up. Its hands are visibly evolving until it arrives at the top as a chimp-like ape. It jumps from the tree into an icy landscape, enduring a blizzard as it evolves into a larger, gorilla-like ape. At the end of a large cliff, the ape beats its chest as the camera zooms out to show a vast desert.

The ape jumps onto the ground, where it has evolved into a primate resembling an orangutan. A large storm blows away much of its hair, turning it into a human (at this point the timer at the bottom right slows dramatically). The human runs much faster and puts on some trousers and a shirt. When fully clothed, it turns into a modern human with a beard. The man walks through a city environment and eats some food (taken from a cardboard cutout of Fatboy Slim himself), at which point he loses the beard and turns into the obese person from the cover of You've Come a Long Way, Baby. He finally sits down on a bench at night, at which point the video ends.

YouTube: Shocking Facts You Did Not Know A Minute Ago - Jan 6/2009
Fatboy Slim's Right Here, Right Now

2011-02-05

Site Map: William Quincy Belle

A 21 year-old silverback western lowland gorilla called Ambam at the Port Lympane Wild Animal Park in Kent, England has drawn a lot of attention to himself and the park due to his walking upright. While such a practice is not unknown for gorillas, Ambam is doing this with a degree of consistency which makes him quite unusual. Zookeepers have conjectured that the animal is trying to see if there may be food on the way and staying upright gives him a better view of what may be happening outside of his enclosure.

Gorilla keeper Phil Ridges explains:

Ambam was hand raised for a few months when he was a year old because he became very ill and as a last resort he had to be taken away from his mother Shumba. He came over to port Lympne when he was 7 or 8 years old. He is our biggest gorilla at around 220kg.

Ambam's father Bitam used to display the same behaviour if he had handfuls of food to carry. Ambam also has a full sister, Tamba, and a half sister at Howletts, who also sometimes stand and walk in the same way. All gorillas can do it to some extent but we haven't got any who do it like Ambam and he is quite a celebrity at the park.

We think he might use it to get a height advantage to look over the wall when keepers come to feed him and standing up can also help him in looking for food generally in his enclosure as it gives him a better vantage point. Ambam can also carry a lot more food if he stands and uses both hands and walking on two feet also means he doesn't get his hands wet when it is raining!'

YouTube: Gorilla walks upright like a human - Jan 28/2011


There are 2 main species of gorillas: the Western Gorilla and the Eastern Gorilla and both are listed as endangered species. The Port Lympane Wild Animal Park is run by the Aspinall Foundation which is working to not just protect these endangered animals, but to breed them and return them to the wild. The About page shows:
The Aspinall Foundation is a world leader in animal husbandry and conservation and has to date returned gorillas, black rhino, Przewalski’s horses, cape buffalo, ocelots, and pythons to protected areas of their ancestral homelands.  We also manage two African gorilla rescue and rehabilitation projects situated in approximately one million acres of rainforest in Congo & Gabon, as well as a programme to protect one of the most threatened of all lemur species, the Greater Bamboo Lemur, in Madagascar.  The Aspinall Foundation also contributes to several other conservation projects around the world.

The Aspinall Foundation Mission:
John Aspinall started his famous animal collection in 1957 when he bought Howletts Wild Animal Park. In 1973 he bought Port Lympne Wild Animal Park to help house the growing groups of animals. Today the two wild animal parks are home to over 1000 animals and 90 different species. Now through The Aspinall Foundation, a registered charity, we work to ensure that the late John Aspinall's innovative work in protecting and breeding wild animals should continue. As well as the two wild animal parks in Kent, The Aspinall Foundation manages two gorilla rescue and rehabilitation projects in central African countries of Gabon and Congo, where we have successfully reintroduced over 50 gorillas. As well as projects being developed in Indonesia and Madagascar.

Of course, for those of us who may just remember the sixties, the phrase "walk like a man" evokes a popular song by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Of course, somebody couldn't resist tying the two things together, the song and a celebrity walking gorilla.

YouTube: Gorilla: Walk Like A Man - Jan 28/2011



References

The Aspinall Foundation
Gorilla Walks Like a Man

Wikipedia: Gorilla

2010-01-30

Site Map: William Quincy Belle

Question: Why does a hippopotamus lick a crocodile?

Answer: Because it can.

Some of you may recognise this as a variation on the joke about a dog and why he licks his... okay, I'll let you fill in the rest. When I mindlessly surf around the Net late at night, overtired and a little zoned out, I sometimes run across the darnedest things that I may never have otherwise seen.


National Geographic has a video floating around in cyberspace on YouTube and elsewhere that shows hippos licking crocs. Yep, you heard me correctly and before I say anything else about it, you just need to look at this most unusual of animal behaviours.

YouTube video: National Geographic: Hippos lick crocs - Sep 9/2010
Although crocs are ferocious predators, they don't mess with hippos. Here's why.


Okay, I suppose like a lot of people, I could have stopped there and moved onto the next oddball video during a marathon of late night surfing, but I thought to make note of this and come back to it with the intention of discovering what could explain such behaviour. After all, a crocodile is a fairly menacing predator and it's a little hard to fathom why they just lay there and "take it". At any moment during the clip, I was expecting the croc to whip around and snap at the hippo, but no, he just didn't pay any mind to this intrusion at all.

A little digging rewarded me with an article entitled "The Hippo Whisperer" on the official web site of the BBC Wildlife Magazine. The author, Karen Paolillo, is a researcher who has spent some time studying the hippopotamus up close and personal, that is in the wild in their nature habitat. She has some revealing insights about this oddity of the animal kingdom.

A bit of a recap about this animal from Wikipedia:
It is the third-largest land mammal by weight (between 1½ and 3 tonnes), behind the white rhinoceros (1½ to 3½ tonnes) and the three species of elephant (3 to 9 tonnes). Despite its stocky shape and short legs, it can easily outrun a human. Hippos have been clocked at 30 km/h (19 mph) over short distances. The hippopotamus is one of the most aggressive creatures in the world and is often regarded as one of the most dangerous animals in Africa.

Ms. Paolillo concurs with the aggressive nature of the animal and considering how close she's gotten to them in her studies, she should know. While these animals are herbivores which one usually associates with a more passive temperament, they are apparently very territorial and display an unusual aggressiveness in their waters. In an odd contrast, hippos are known to come onto land during the night to graze on grass but they are not territorial on land, only in the water.

Why do hippos lick? According to Karen Paolillo and other experts, this plays a part in their grooming and is performed mainly around the rear of other hippos. It is thought that the scent of dung stimulates this activity. Hippos are known to flip their tails when defecating seemingly with the express purposes of spreading the fun around and considering that hippos and crocs are many times side by side one another on a river bank, it is thought that some of that dung ends up on the crocs. In the video, when we see the hippo licking the croc, the conjecture is that the hippo is motivated by dung on the croc.

Of course what is truly noteworthy in this interaction between the hippopotamus and the crocodile is the acceptance on the part of the reptile. The hippo is big, strong and armed with a sizeable set of teeth which can do untold damage to the recipient of a bite. Obviously the crocodile knows who the boss is and knows the futility of protesting.

Hippo to the rescue
Another unusual behaviour on the part of the hippopotamus is that it will sometimes intervene on the behalf of other animals. This was observed firsthand by Ms. Paolillo. The following video demonstrates this charitable attitude to those who are smaller and weaker and it is difficult not to attribute to the animal the human characteristic of kindness. What is the actual motivation of the hippo?

YouTube video: Hippo saves another animal - Feb 2/2007
A crocodile grabs hold of a young impala crossing a stream but a hippo steps in and scares the croc into letting go. The hippo then helps the impala out of harm's way and attempts to revive it. Unfortunately it's too late, the impala succumbs to its injuries but it is amazing to see the hippo try to do this.


This next video demonstrates the same behaviour on the part of the hippo: he takes a carcass away from a crocodile. However, while the viewers in the clip keep saying that the hippo is munching on the body, it strikes me when comparing this to the previous video that the hippo may be trying to revive the dead animal. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippopotamus#Behavior) mentions that hippos have been known to eat meat but this to be rare as its stomach anatomy is apparently not suited to carnivory.

YouTube video: Hippo vs Large Male Crocodile.
Hippo takes carcass away from a crocodile.


Final Word
Hey! So, a hippo licking a croc. Ha! Is that up there on the weirdness scale? And when you read the title of this article you said to yourself, "What a crock!"


References

Wikipedia: hippopotamus

BBC Wildlife Magazine: The Hippo Whisperer by Karen Paolillo - July 20, 2010

2011-01-27

Site Map: William Quincy Belle

I look out from the port during the summer to see the lake spotted with the sails of the intrepid enjoying the peace of Mother Nature's push. I watch our favourite swashbuckler Jack Sparrow order his men onto the yardarm to unfurl the canvas as he strikes out on a new adventure. There's a certain romance to this age-old system of propulsion, a system which doesn't use fuel to produce the force necessary to move the vehicle but which harnesses the power of the wind. It is an interesting concept. Instead of burning a substance to release its inherent energy, we are tapping into the energy of an existing force. It could be hydro-electricity; it could be a wind mill farm; it could be a solar panel but it is all an attempt to make use of what already exists.

Such are the things of dreams but dreams can come true; they can happen to you. In science fiction circles, a story line has been presented where a space ship doesn't fire up its rocket engines; it unfurls its sails and rides the solar winds. I remember reading about such a farfetched idea when I was young, my nose buried in a sci-fi novel which sometimes included an artist's rendering of just what such a contraption would look like. This seemed so unbelievable; how could anybody think this was possible?

As strange as this sounds, all this starts with light. For those of you who may have forgotten your physics one oh one, light is made up of individual particles called photons. These particles exert a certain force, a very small force mind you but a force nevertheless. Scientists have known for a long time that such a force could possibly be harnessed as a system of propulsion much in the same way a sail captures the force of the wind. The sun is constantly shining light everywhere and the stream of particles emanating from the sun is called the solar wind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind). It is this "wind" that causes the various disturbances here on Earth like upsetting our power systems or communications, producing the northern (and southern) lights and pushing the tails of comets away from the sun.

Knowing this, scientists came up with the idea that a sail, obviously a very light sail, could conceivably be pushed by the solar wind. The image of a sailing ship is a good one and while the phenomenons (phenomena?) are totally different, the idea is essentially the same. Normally we think of propulsion in terms of a fuel as when the combustion engine of our car burns fuel to produce energy to displace it or a rocket which burns fuel to provide thrust. As with a sailing ship, we are using a force of something passing by us to push a sail and hence, push our vehicle. But who would have thought that light could push a sail and hence push a vehicle?

NanoSail-D2
Never heard of it, right? Hey, this is the stuff of science fiction; it is indeed exciting and we all need to get on-board and catch up with the latest from this NASA initiative.

Back on November 19, 2010 NASA's Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite, or FASTSAT, was launched from the Kodiak Launch Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska. This satellite is a proof of concept called a "microsatellite platform" or a satellite which enables researchers to conduct low cost experiments. One of the many experiments on-board was NanoSail-D2, a device no larger than a breadbox which was to study the deployment of a solar sail. (see video of solar sail unfurling)

On January 17, 2011 NanoSail-D2 was successfully ejected from FASTSAT and according to its official web site, the sail was deployed. Unfortunately, NASA subsequently lost track of the device and the conjecture is that the battery running the device was drained. Without power, it is no longer sending out any signal. (artist's rendering of the device) However, there is a contest to snap pictures of the unfurled sail in orbit. The size of the sail is stated to be the size of a small tent and the orbit will approximately last for the next 100 days.

IKAROS
However, NanoSail is not the first to attempt to use a solar sail; that distinction goes to this Japanese satellite. Launched in May 2010, this interplanetary spacecraft deployed its sail in June 2010. A 20-meter sail made of polyimide resin just 0.0075 mm thick was unfurled in space (see diagram). The craft rotated 25 times per minute, and extended four "arms" of material folded origamilike, which unraveled and started generating power.

The craft is now using a solar sail for its propulsion; there is no rocket. It has already "set sail" for Venus and after doing a fly-by, it will continue to the far side of the Sun onto Jupiter where it will pass by that planet and the Trojan asteroid.

According to the official blog (Google translation of Japanese), IKAROS is currently 120 million kilometres from Earth. Signals take 14 minutes to traverse that distance!

Final Word
Considering how weight is such an important factor in anything involving space - the cost of getting all those pounds / kilograms off the ground - this new kind of propulsion system would have an enormous impact of the design of future spacecraft. Instead of costly motors and fuel, a solar-sail craft could devote more of its payload to scientific experiments. A craft with a propulsion system consisting of only solar sails would start at a snail's pace however, with no air resistance in space, momentum would rapidly build. Scientists have estimated that a mission to Pluto which currently takes 10 years could be done in five.

I read about this and saw drawings when I was a child. The future has arrived and here are two projects which have turned fantasy into fact.


References

Wikipedia: Solar Sail

Wikipedia: Solar Wind

Wikipedia: NanoSail-D
NanoSail-D was a small satellite which was to have been used by NASA's Ames Research Center to study the deployment of a solar sail in space. It was a three-unit CubeSat measuring 30 by 10 by 10 centimetres (12 × 3.9 × 3.9 inches), with a mass of 4 kilograms (8.8 lb). The satellite was lost shortly after launch due to a problem with the rocket carrying it, however a replacement, NanoSail-D2, was launched in 2010 to complete its mission.
...
NanoSail-D2 was built as a ground spare for NanoSail-D. Following the launch failure, it was launched in 2010 aboard a Minotaur IV rocket. It was ejected from the FASTSAT satellite on 6 December 2010, and successful ejection confirmed on 19 January 2011. NASA has requested to amateur radio operators to listen for Beacon signal from NanoSail-D.

NanoSail-D2 Mission Dashboard

NASA: Small Satellite Missions

Twitter: NanoSail-D

NanoSail-D2: video of sail unfurling

Wikipedia: FASTSAT
Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite or FASTSAT is a NASA satellite that was launched from the Kodiak Launch Complex in Kodiak, Alaska on November 20, 2010 on a Minotaur IV rocket. The mission's objective is to demonstrate the capability to build, design and test a microsatellite platform to enable researchers to conduct low-cost scientific and technology experiments on an autonomous satellite in space.

YouTube video: Minotaur 4 rocket launches FastSat, NanoSail-D (7 satellites total) from Kodiak, Alaska
November 19, 2010

Wikipedia: IKAROS
IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun) is a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency experimental spacecraft. The spacecraft was launched on 21 May 2010 aboard an H-IIA rocket, together with Akatsuki (Venus Climate Orbiter) and four other small spacecraft. IKAROS is the first spacecraft to successfully demonstrate solar-sail technology in interplanetary space.

JAXA Space Exploration Center: IKAROS Project

2011-01-26

Site Map: William Quincy Belle

He is a health professional, a statistician, a software developer, an advisor to international organisations and a sword swallower. That last one was an unexpected discovery in this multi-talented man's resume. We'll come back to that one in a video.

Current, Mr. Rosling is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute, one of Europe's largest medical universities. He co-founded the Gapminder Foundation with his son and daughter-in-law which developed the Trendalyzer software system. This software converts statistics into moving, interactive graphics and his lectures using this system to visualise world development have won awards. Here's an example of what this gentleman is doing:


Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four
Hans Rosling's famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport's commentator's style to reveal the story of the world's past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of 'The Joy of Stats' he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.



Google Public Data Explorer
According to Wikipedia:
On 16 March 2007 Google acquired the Trendalyzer software with the intention to scale it up and make it freely available for public statistics. In 2008 Google made available a Motion Chart Google Gadget and in 2009 the Public Data Explorer.

Public Data Explorer is now available to the public as an experimental service. Google is looking for feedback and talks in its official blog dated March 2010 about its eventual goals in using this technology.

Last year, we released a public data search feature that enables people to quickly find useful statistics in search. More recently, we expanded this service to include information from the World Bank, such as population data for every region in the world. More and more public agencies, non-profits and other organizations are looking for ways to open up their data and expand global access to this kind of information. We want to help keep that momentum going, so today we're sharing a snapshot of some of the most popular public data search topics on Google. We're also launching the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool in Google Labs.

What's interesting about this is that Google has started with a piece of software, Trendanalyser and put it together with data sets publicly available from various sources. We, the public, now can use the two to explore the data, study the statistics and visually represent the statistics to better understand the numbers and possibly discover new perspectives on the existing data. The blog entry says that they are currently offering data from the following sources with more to come as other organisations see the value of contributing to this effort.

• the World Bank
• the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
• the U.S. Census Bureau
• the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)
• the California Department of Education
• Eurostat
• the U.S. Center for Disease Control
• the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Google Example
In this example from Google, we can observe Unemployment in the United States from January 1990 to October 2010. You will note how the display is similar to the Trendanalyser demonstration in Rosling's video above. Move the slider back and forth to change the display according to a point in time.


TED: Hans Rosling: No more boring data - Feb 2006
With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling uses an amazing new presentation tool, Gapminder, to debunk several myths about world development. Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a nonprofit that brings vital global data to life. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA.)



TED: Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world - March 2007
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts.

As promised, he swallows a sword!!!



Final Word
Hans Rosling is quite the interesting gentleman. His lectures are both interesting and entertaining but more importantly, they are thought-provoking. With the acquisition of his Trendanalyser software by Google and Google's offering of it as the Public Data Explorer, what else will we be able to do in order to make sense out of the numbers that may seem meaningless up to now? Will we all find the joy of stats?


References

Wikipedia: Hans Rosling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling

BBC: The Joy of Stats
Professor Hans Rosling
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wgq0l

YouTube: The Joy of Stats (59 minutes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5zjA4momw0
This is the complete BBC show.

YouTube: Rosling's World - a documentary about Hans Rosling (57 minutes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_7howQzatw&feature=related

Unveiling the Beauty of Statistics
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/oecd-world-forum.html
This has a video of another great talk by Professor Rosling. Well worth watching.

Google Videos about Hans Rosling
http://www.google.ca/search?q=hans+rosling&tbo=p&tbs=vid%3A1&source=vgc&hl=en&aq=f

2011-01-01

Site Map: William Quincy Belle