Human Symbiosis

I was going to send this to AirChina, but that seems pointless now. A quick search of the web brings up hundreds (probably more like thousands) of complaints about service quality. I'll just add mine here. To AirChina, I am composing this to you onboard flight CA861 to Geneva, direct from Beijing. I am using a laptop computer, having just been informed by the flight attendant that cell phones (even in flight mode) cannot be used at any time during the flight. I am not sure if I am being singled out for some reason, as I have seen a number of passangers reading text on their cell phone screens throughout the flight. I listened to music during the flight to Beijing, and never had any complaints from the service staff. The cabin staff chief assures me that I can use an ipad, a tablet computer, or a laptop… just not a cell phone (even in flight mode, which means all radios turned off). This is the first time that I have encountered this policy on any airline. It's like a ru...

Going through my archive of 'Google Buzz' posts, and re-indexing them. Here is an interesting article on the chemical origins of life... RNA reactor could have served as a precursor of life

Voyage the Voynich Manuscript Following the announcement of a possible translation of a word or two in the VM (14 characters I beleive it was), and seeing the AMA on reddit with Dr. Stephen Bax, I thought I'd post up this page offering full resolution images of all pages of the VM (above). For good measure here is the video Dr. Bax posted to youtube to explain his 'revelation' ;) I was also intrigued by the suggestion of another redditor who had apparently researched the life of Niccolo Di Conti, a successful venetian merchant who lived during the time of the VM's writing. He is said to have studied Arab language, traveled through the regions that seem to be documented in the VM, and upon his return, recounted his story to a scribe of the Vatican. Interesting tidbit seems to be that he may have met Zheng He, the famous Chinese explorer of the same time period! Could Di Conti or a family member have been the author of the VM?

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Electronic paper wallet for BTC...sweet project Pitbull Wallet - Onda Technology Institute

I was just thinking the other day about how we like to think of ourselves as humans, but we are infact mere living structures for colonies of microbes ;). Apartment complexes with central heating, and food delivery. InfoGraphic OK, there is some basic human structure dependent on DNA passed along from our ancestors, but there is also (by weight) an astonishing percentage of cell sized travelers on our skin, in our bellies, etc...I've read it can be 10% of body weight, and that in terms of cell numbers, there are actually 10x more bacteria than human cells. That means 90% of the cells you are walking around with all the time are not coding proteins from your DNA, but rather microbial proteins. It is not easy to count all these organisms I imagine, so who knows how much is enough/too little/too much. At the same time, if for one reason or another one of the bacterial groups gains an upperhand, then we end up with systemic problems... This seems to happen following a course o...

Incredibox V3 - "Sunrise" - 2013 (Brand new version)

Dear Youtube, I know you want me to use my 'real name', but I don't want to link all my accounts together. I already have multiple G+ accounts, I don't want to create yet another for my youtube account. Inspite of your stupid metrics, profitablity, and internet takeover ambitions... is it not possible to allow a youtube user with a youtube account to comment on a youtube video? . Thanks for your consideration, you lug. You know who

Diary: Chinese session 1 : Chinese words and associations The difference between ”kou3”(r30) & ”wei2”(r31) isn’t much visually except that one is bigger than...

Wall Street Crypto: Crypto-Forex 101 : Crypto-Forex 101: A Magic School Bus Ride By the @CryptoForex Team For those of you just getting into crypto-forex,  you've come...

On my Galaxy SII I've been getting warnings about 'storage space low'. After trying to work through cleaning up apps, removing photos and movies, I wasn't making much headway. In system settings 'storage' there appears to be a large part of the internal memory free...but it is not recognised as free.  I am using Cyanogenmod, and found a forum post about a log file accumulation that eats memory in this way. I followed these instructions with Terminal Emulator: 1. Get superuser access:   su - (and allow access when prompted). 2. Change current directory: (I had to search for the directory...which turned out to be something like /data/logs)   cd /var/log 3. (optional) You can see how much space (in KB) is being used by log files with this command:   du -k . 4. (optional) If you want to see the names of the log files:   ls 5. Delete log files with   rm *.log 6. End superuser session:   exit 7. End terminal se...

HSK level 1 - Introductory Mandarin (with audio) - Memrise

Have you seen this excellent film? Had some questions about who was who and when who was who doing what? Here's a visualisation to help: Full Size Original

In this amazing lecture J. Rifkin walks us through the development of human civilisation, from small tribes thousands of years ago, to the modern world...and along the way he points out technological and corresponding psychological transformations of society. The rub is that we are in a dire situation, due to global economic social structure, that threatens the survival of man imminently. Is is too late to change? Are we just trying to adapt and react now? Can we preserve a few human lives on this planet if the ecosystem we depend on collapses?

True facts about Ocean Radiation and the Fukushima Disaster | Deep Sea News