Great Jobs at Google

Google is looking for people. I wonder - anyone of you, my loyal readers, looking for a job?

CNN.com - Paris thinkers seek lingua franca with space aliens - March 27, 2002

Lessons to be learned from this:

Lesson one: Free time + Free Grant Money = strange shit.
Lesson two: useful information is not a biprotuct of unstructured thought
Lesson three: this is why we keep them busy teaching classes

I honestly think the only way we will be able to communicate with any alien race when we first contact them is through binary math. Any alien speicies, so long as it has a concept of a number system at all, will have come up with a binary number system of some sort. After that, we can progress to higher number bases ( 8, 16, etc) to what ever common denominator we can find between our two mathematical systems.

Once you have math, music, art, science, and eventually language will all follow. But MATH is going to be the key here.

CNN.com - Baffling black blob floating near Florida - March 27, 2002

Facinating bit of biology here. Algal blooms are a very missunderstood phenomina, dispite how dangerous they can be to fish and humans alike. Red Tide, the most famous of algal blooms kills thousands of fish in a single bloom, while another type produces the nearly psycotic behavior of sea birds who eat tainted fish (The Birds was based on real events, folks, I'm not shitting you). As for what this "black bloom" means - we hardly know enough to start guessing.

Another interesting angle to this is the fact that we would never have known how large this bloom was without satelite imaging. We monitor the entire surface of the earth now, and can observe such events in real time, where in the past we would have only had the reports of the scummy water and what not to document this. Ocean currents, cloud movements, and even the runnoff of rivers is as easily observed now as we observe the movements of ants across the driveway. One can only wonder at how complex yet elegant the planet is in its functions when seen from such a scale.

CNN.com - Thumbs: Key fingers for online youth - March 26, 2002

Just a bit of fluff science for you, my readers. Take a moment some time to notice your thumbs - many of us who grew up in the age of Nintendo have thumb muscle structures that are far more developed than any other generation. Notice too how you use your thumbs: the angle you hold them at, and what you use them for.

Amazing the things we dont pay attention to.