Time to Think

On Iran Earthquake

Those lives that are lost, are lost forever, but those that are saved will never forget this tragic event. While international help is pouring into Iran, one wonders why people are so far yet so close to each other? Why should we care about each other only in times of turmoil? Why?

Please help survivors of this devastating earthquake through one of the following websites:

- Relief International
- Mercy Corps.

Wright brothers and the dilemma of invention

Last week was the centennial celebration of Wright brother’s flight as a turning point in the history of human journey toward the heavens. Wright brothers, who owned a bicycle repair shop, were able to invent powered flight while working in a small garage with very little help from some friends. To me, the magnitude and importance of this invention 100 years ago is comparable to building a space ship that can travel to the moon in less than an hour at the present time! Is it possible to build such thing today in a garage with small amount of money and help from some friend scientists? Of course not. The science and technology has advanced so much that it is impossible to have a big contribution in any part of it that can be recognized by ordinary people the way it happened to Wright brothers’ invention.

Today, all we can do in science and technology is to add bits and pieces to the existing knowledge. Look at the recently filed patents in the US patent office for example. How many big and revolutionary invention you see? Most of them are very small modifications of some previous works (and I do not say they are bad). This is natural. The breath of science and knowledge has become so vast that it is impossible to make big observable contributions any more. It seems that the easy inventions have been made by our ancestors and the difficult ones are left for us!

Lunar Solar Power

Recently, the idea of wireless power transmission commonly known as power beaming has been very hot among the scientists. One of the application of this technique is proposed by Dr. David Criswell who is the Director of the Institute for Space Systems Operation at the University of Huston (TX). Based on this proposal, solar power is collected on the surface of moon (that is always facing the earth) using huge solar arrays and the electricity generated by them is then directed toward a microwave transmitter which transform it to microwave signal at 2.5GHz. The high power radio signals are then beamed toward the earth using high gain antennas. On the surface of the Earth, very large array antennas gather the microwave signals and convert them back to electrical power. Some special satellites are also to be used for relaying the signal to the part of Earth that is not in line of sight with moon.

Of course the process is not as efficient as the wired power transmission but Dr. Criswell has claimed that the approach is completely feasible and economical too. In fact he believes that the cost will be a fraction of a cent per kilowatt electric hour. The details of this approach is available in here and here.

writing a book

I was just thinking that writing a fiction book is much easier than a nonfiction. In writing a fiction novel, you do not need to refer to many references and do much research on each individual sentence or statement that you make. You basically write everything that is in your mind. However, in writing a nonfiction or science book, you have to do so much research on each subject you want to cover in the book and provide reference to each of them. This makes the writing process very lengthy and difficult.
I think this is why there are so many novels and so many people who write novels in a very short period of time. I recently saw a project called nanowrimo in which participants tried to write a 50,000 words novel in a month. This will be a complete book that can be published and sold worldwide. Now, who can write a nonfiction book in a month?

Terrible news

I just read in a report that if we scale down the population of earth to 100, then only one person will have access to a computer and only one person will have an academic degree! This is terrible.