Pi, The Movie

The film is about a mathematical genius, Maximillian Cohen, who narrates much of the movie. Max, a number theorist, theorizes that everything in nature can be understood through numbers, and that if you graph the numbers properly patterns will emerge. He is working on finding patterns within the stock market, using its billions upon billions of variables as his data set with the assistance of his homemade supercomputer, Euclid. (more)



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The Camel

Here´s a 1975 hit from British band The Camel with Snow Goose. Progressive rock style with a Pink Floyd flavor.

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Tale of Tales, a Short Film by Yuriy Norshteyn

Tale of Tales, like Tarkovsky's Mirror, attempts to structure itself like a human memory. Memories are not recalled in neat chronological order; instead, they are recalled by the association of one thing with another, which means that any attempt to put memory on film cannot be told like a conventional narrative. The film is thus made up of a series of related sequences whose scenes are interspersed between each other. One of the primary themes involves war, with particular emphasis on the enormous losses the Soviet Union suffered on the Eastern Front during World War II. Several recurring characters and their interactions make up a large part of the film, such as the poet, the little girl and the bull, the little boy and the crows, the dancers and the soldiers, and especially the little grey wolf (Russian: се́ренький волчо́к, syeryenkiy volchok). Another symbol connecting nearly all of these different themes are green apples (which may symbolize life, hope, or potential).

Yuriy Norshteyn wrote in Iskusstvo Kino magazine that the film is "about simple concepts that give you the strength to live."



See: Wikipedia

A New TOE Speaking E8

According to a new proposal by American physicist Gerret Lisi the above equations may be the answer to the ultimate theory in Physics, the unification between quantum field theory and general relativity or Theory of Everything, as is most commonly known.

Here's the abstract from the arxiv.org paper by Gerrett Lisi:

All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold.

Conan, the Barbarian

I was not kidding when i told that this blog was about me. So now i want to talk about my favorite fiction characters: Conan, the barbarian, Sherlock Holmes, and Stephen Maturin.

I start with Conan and let Holmes and Maturin for later.

Conan was a character ceated by Ron Howard in the 30's; it made his first appearence in the December 1932 edition of Weird Tales magazine.

He was a barbarian from Cimmeria in a pre-historic barbaric forgotten world. A world where justice lay in the edge of a sword, everyone by himself; almost as today...

Conan was a nomadic wandering adventure; leaving Cimmeria at about the age of 15 he took the world as his home and made himself a king.

He guide his actions by a strict code of conduct; althought he was a mercenary who sold his sword he was also capable of the most altruistic actions and a loyal compagnion. Someone who keep his word.

That's him, Conan of Cimmeria, as i saw him in my teenage years.

The Mathematical Art of MC Escher

In 1956 the Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis
Escher (1898–1972) made an unusual lithograph
with the title Prentententoonstelling. It shows a young
man standing in an exhibition gallery, viewing a print
of a Mediterranean seaport. As his eyes follow the
quayside buildings shown on the print from left to
right and then down, he discovers among them the
very same gallery in which he is standing. A circular
white patch in the middle of the lithograph contains
Escher’s monogram and signature.
What is the mathematics behind Prentententoonstelling?
Is there a more satisfactory way of filling
in the central white hole? We shall see that the
lithograph can be viewed as drawn on a certain elliptic
curve over the field of complex numbers and
deduce that an idealized version of the picture repeats
itself in the middle. More precisely, it contains
a copy of itself, rotated clockwise by
157.6255960832. . . degrees and scaled down by a
factor of 22.5836845286. . . .

Read more at ams.org

Stephanie - Ouragan

Her highness Princess Stephanie du Monaco at her 80's incursion in pop realms here with Ouragan.

GNU Free Essay

Richard Stallman. He started it all; Linux, Open Source, Free Software, all this has roots in his vision about software, freedom and user rights. It's all in the first chapter of his selected essays about the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation.

At the same time, when he was changing the world, and for the better, he do it at his own expense with the help of some earlier pioneers. He quit MIT AI Lab to dedicate his energy and effort to the cause, the cause of sharing, freedom and helping your neighbor, by his own words. Has a marginal gain, this movement also provide a solution for whom software cost of ownership his prohibitive.

Information is power, so they say, but without the tools for processing this information is lost as a dumb raw of meaningless data. And now is available to all (or almost). It isn't just free or open source software, it's SOCIAL SOFTWARE.

Euro 2008

Portugal qualified to Euro 2008 in Austria/Switzerland after a 0-0 draw with Finland.

Xaile

Here goes some Portuguese popular music for you. It goes by the name Xaile and you can see and listen them at their page in MySpace.

Colossus Strikes Back

It seems that World War II computer Colossus is cracking codes again.

Language Discovery

Let me tell you about what to me is the greatest human invention of all time: language. By language, i mean speech and alphabet. How does this capacity that enable us to communicate and persist knowledge among generations come to be?

Speech of course is the result of perfecting human vocalization and evolve from the discovery of pre-historic man of his inner capacity to emit and control sound.

Nobody knows when or how that happen but what can be said is that it was a longmaturation process until we reach the level which enable full communication and expression of abstract ideas.

Speech itself was a great step in human evolution but until we manage to code that speech for future memory it's value from the perspective of a persisting medium of communication is limited somewhat to oral tradition, so it's not adequate to mankind build upon past generations of endeavor.

What was lacking was a code, a symbolic or phonetic representation of our capacity to speech and once reached that our cognitive horizon would expand beyond the stars.

That's the main reason i assert language has the greatest human invention, because language is a pre-requisite to all other inventions and a necessary one. Civilization could not have emerged without it.

So, how do we reach that point? To talk about that we have to go back to the very beginning of historic time and even further.

Ancient Greece had a legend about which the alphabet was introduced in Europe by a Phoenician named kadmus; although the history must not necessarily be truth - Kadmus was a Greek name - it tell us about the importance of the Phoenicians to this story, but we are aheading our selfs, i come to that again in a moment.

The story of the alphabet can be accurately traced back to the beginning of civilization in the kingdoms of Egypt and Babylonia. Not that i pretend to imply that his story doesn't have roots in preceding times only that our state of
knowledge can go accurately only that far.

So, our story could have start as... In the beginning was the hieroglyphs. Hieroglyps are essentially a compound system of writing used by many ancient civilizations in different forms. It consists mainly of an ideographic system of representation associated sometimes with a phonetic and association one. Meaning that an icon or symbol could have a literal meaning has in a house picture to represent a house or a phonetic value to represent a consonant in the case of egyption writing or a syllable as other systems of writing, like the babylonian, did. The association method of representation mean that a symbol could have a non literal meaning has in the case of the use of an eagle to represent the values of persistence, liberty and freedom.

The Egyptians made use of iconographic symbols as a determinative way of help to clarify the meaning of some dubious word, meanwhile the babylonians drop it all together.

This result in a curiously conglomerate system of writing,
made up in part of symbols reminiscent of the crudest stages of
picture-writing, in part of symbols having the phonetic value of
syllables, and in part of true alphabetical letters. In a word,
this represents in itself the elements of the
various stages through which the art of writing has developed.
We must conceive that new features were from time to time added
to it, while the old features, curiously enough, sometimes were not given
up.

So our story must have started after all as... In the beginning was the picture, and the picture turn itself into an icon in symbolic (ideographic) writing. So from that we can really see that we can trace back the roots of the alphabet to the pre-historic cave man. When he learn to express himself in the paintings made in the walls of the caverns. And form that in the history roll of time we have the ideographic and phonetic systems, but that wasn't enough to reach the modern alphabet, what was steel lacking was brought to us by the Phoenician people.

Phoenicians were merchants and traders that rule over the mediterranian sea. Trough that merchant activity they reach and colonize many places including, it is believed, my hometown Lisbon. From and as a result of that they serve as messengers between different regions of the globe. One of them was ancient Greece, so when the Greeks developed their own version of the alphabet, the mother of all modern European ones, they derived it from the Phoenician.

So what was the innovation brought about by the Phoenicians in their alphabet? The use of consonants to express more than one syllable. You see, when i talk about the babylonian way of writing i told you that their system phonetically represents the use of syllables so that for each syllable was a unique symbol. That means that there was thousand of symbols to express every possible syllable in their native idiom. The same thing occurs even more frequently in the Chinese language, which is monosyllabic. The Chinese adopt a more clumsy expedient, supplying a different symbol for each of the meanings of a syllable; so that while the actual word-sounds of their speech are only a few hundreds in number, the characters of
their written language mount high into the thousands.

So the Phoenicians have the idea of abstract the use of syllables by consonants and were able to simplify so much the use of their alphabet that, with time, their version would replace all the old archaic ones and establish the standard for all future variations from whom the greek was the most well succeeded.

The Phoenician alphabet was so simplified that even vowels were excluded, so that the Greek alphabet was the first to employ the simultaneous use of vowels and consonants. From that we get latin and so on... and as they say the rest is history.

Carl Sagan on Hieroglyphs

Forward the video to 19m25s to see Carl Sagan explain Champollion quest to decipher hieroglyphs.

CHAMPOLLION

For many years people tried to understand the egyptian characters found everywhere in ancient Egypt, the hieroglyphs, but without much success.

But in 1799 took place a decisive fact that eventually would change all that. At that time Napolean was pursuing his Egypt campaign and one of his soldiers made a remarkable discovery, the Rosetta Stone.
This artifact would be the key to unlock a mystery with thousand years and reveal to the world the secrets of a civilization and a golden era.

The text crafted on the stone surface was the description of the coronation of Ptolemy at 196 BC, but what was remarkable was that besides egyptian native language the report was translated in two more, demotic and greek.

Greek was one of the languages known at that time by a particular linguist, one that had persuit the deciphering of egyptian language since he was a boy. His name was Champollion.

When Napolean came to Egypt he took with him many scientists to study the egyptian science and culture and to help revealing and exposing many precious artifacts.

One of them was Fourier. When he come back to France he took with him some of this minus artifacts that would capture the attention of a 11 years old boy that he take to his care, Champollion. This, by the time, strange artifacts would lead Champollion to devote his life to uncover the secrets hidden in them, specially those mysterious symbols and characters that nobody knew the meaning.

He came to be a skillful linguist and with the Rosetta Stone and another obelisk about Cleopatra he manage to discover all the egyptian vocabulary.

In 1828, he finally set foot in the land that induce such wonder in him by an expedition to the ancient city and temples of Karnak. What he and his companions saw overwhelmed them and produce a fascination of a lifetime. In that walls he was able to read and decipher the meaning of the messages printed many eras ago.

From that moment on the clouds that were blocking our understanding were lifted revealing the apogee of the egyptian civilization.


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Universal Mind

A beautiful song by The Doors

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Moonlight Drive, a poem by Jim Morrinson

Let's swim to the moon,
Let's climb through the tide
Penetrate the evening
That the city sleeps to hide
Let's swim out tonight, love
It's our turn to try
Parked beside the ocean
On our moonlight drive

Portuguese Culture

I warn you about some postings about Portugal: Here's one.