This is so true. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is probably the most famous astrophysicist on the planet, and of late he’s been the face of science education in America. He’s got the coolness of Jay-Z mixed with the lovability of Bill Cosby and the intelligence of Carl Sagan all rolled into one. He’s been promoting science in America a lot, and fighting for a budget increase for NASA...
I came across a really cool youtube video from the amazing numberphile series that detailed how companies are already analyzing sports and farming huge amounts of data from sport events like football matches. In fact, these guys are basically farming data from events like the world cup, and then hoping that among that mountain of data lies some insights that could prove useful to football...
Sometimes good intentions lead to bad things, particularly when they’re not grounded on rational science. Just like how some still believe that Wi-Fi poses a health hazard and even more common myth of how Mobile phones cause gas station fires. Now that’s a myth that’s been around a loooong time. No matter whether you call them handphones or cellphones or mobile...
When Maxis, or Telekom or Digi claim that you’ve used all your bandwidth quota–can you really trust them? A good article from consumerist reported that even American telcos are facing difficulty counting the bytes their users use. For the most part this is OK if your ISP provides you unlimited quota, in which case it doesn’t matter how much you use. However, if your ISP is...
Are you ready for PSY? or are you ready for some PYSICS? Well, that’s too nerdy even for me. The reality is that if you want to know whether penang-ites said a big ‘NO’ or ‘YES’ when Najib asked them if they were ready for BN? The answer doesn’t lie with political blogs or with the politicians. The answer lies in Physics. Sound waves, just like all other waves...
Techdirt recently reported on how Canadian Schools are Banning WiFi based on bad science, and I was appalled by the complete lack of science we have operating in the minds of these clueless parents. No doubt they’re well-intentioned but their complete and utter disregard of the scientific evidence in favour of fearful knee-jerk reactions are actually causing more harm than good for the very...
This is a bit of old and stale news, but in April of 2012, the Information Ministry released a ‘directive’ to ban all movies or films that featured gay characters. In their defence, the Ministry did later clarify that their facebook post wasn’t a directive, but a topic for debate. Of course, there can’t be much defending when the post itself starts with “Berkuatkuasa...
A good friend and regular reader (or so I hope) of this blog sent me this link last week. It’s a really nifty chart of all the undersea cables in the world. Now, for those who don’t know what undersea cables are, they’re basically the huge data cables that carry around the data we use for the internet. While modern satellites orbit overhead, the unfortunate truth is that...
A couple of days ago, I was invited to blog about crowdsourcing trends for a big event happening in Singapore on the 3rd to 7th of June. It’s called Crowdsourcingweek and if you’re interested in learning more about crowdsourcing there’s a whole boat-load of interesting speakers and events going on–so I definitely encourage you to attend. The article was about crowd...
Lawrence Krauss is a smart guy, he’s a professor of physics, he’s written a whole plethora of books on science and has an award list from the scientific community that’s longer than my sunday grocery list (and trust me that list is looong). He’s also famous for one of my favorite books, the science of Star Trek, in where he explains things like warp speed an teleportation...