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A poke in the eye for
social-network friends Chicks have skills that even 3-year-olds fail to match Prof Yash
Pal
THIS UNIVERSE  Europe prepares to search for life on Mars Japan mulls hosting global collider project NASA wants backyard astronomers to help track asteroids |
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A poke in the eye for
social-network friends
ARE you fed up with social networking and bored of people “checking in” every hour of the day with Foursquare at some location you really couldn’t care less about? If so, you’re in luck because there’s now a new anti-social network called Hell is Other People. Most social networks are designed to help you connect with your friends (or online admirers) but Hell is Other People promises to keep you as far away from your pesky online friends (and genuine ones) as possible. To keep you off-grid, the app takes your friends’ check-in data from your Foursquare account and then works out “optimally-distanced locations” to make sure you don’t bump into any of them on your way around town. Designed by developer Scott Garner, who describes it as “partially satire, partially a commentary on my disdain for ‘social media’,” it highlights various “safe zones” on a specially adapted Google Maps screen and gives you critical information on your friends’ check-in so you, you know, don’t have to actually see them. Unsurprisingly, Garner says he has a “love-hate relationship with social media that’s mostly hate”. “Up until recently, this problem was mostly theoretical, but now I’m finding that my aversion to social media is actually affecting my life-not being on Facebook, for example, now means that nobody invites you to anything and nobody remembers your birthday.” Paradoxically though Hell is Other People depends entirely on you and your friends using Foursquare and your mates checking in regularly enough throughout the day, but with more than 30 million people worldwide using the app there’s obviously some potential there. Garner is a masters student at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and describes himself on his website as “basically unemployable in a conventional sense” but does seem to realise the biggest floor in his app is its users. In an online video tutorial for the site, he takes an afternoon stroll around New York — the only city it is currently available for — and says: “Most frustrating of all is that nobody is checking in today. I hate doing things that depend on other people because they are so unpredictable and unreliable.” Perhaps that’s why it’s described as more of an art project than a functional app. Would Garner every try and make money from it? “As far as going commercial, it never occurs to me to try and make money from my work until it’s already in the papers and I think, ‘Man. I should have thought of a way to sell this.’ Also, I’m much more focused on making beautiful (or at least interesting) things than useful things and maintaining websites is the absolute pits. Users are the worst kind of people.” There’s one awkward real-world conversation that Garner hasn’t accounted for though. What happens when your best mate asks why he hasn’t seen you in your local for months? Meanwhile, in London, a new billboard campaign has kicked off in Shoreditch with the tagline: “You have no friends and no one likes you.” It’s promoting Rando, a random photo-sharing app which has ditched all social-media norms so there’s no sign-in process, no comments, no likes and, most importantly, no friends or followers to worry about. Is this the start of an anti-social networking backlash? Perhaps not. Ironically the billboard campaign has got lots of people talking… on Twitter. Sigh. — The Independent
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Chicks have skills that even 3-year-olds fail to match NEWLY hatched chickens are capable of skills that it can take human babies months or even years to master, new research has revealed. Fields of intelligence, ranging from structural engineering to self-control, appear to come more naturally to chicks than toddlers, and Professor of Animal Welfare Christine Nichol said we should no longer think of chickens as stupid. In one test, the birds were allowed access to more food the longer they waited to start eating. While 93 per cent of hens were able to grasp this skill, comparable studies have suggested many humans cannot exhibit this kind of self-control until the age of four. The study, supported by the Happy Egg Co., suggested that chicks are born with the ability to keep track of numbers up to five — preferring larger groups of eggs — a skill which babies need to be taught. Chickens also reportedly have an instinctive ability to recognise structurally sound objects, favouring these over ones which seem dubious or inconsistent. And they show awareness of objects which fall out of sight, keeping track of them in a way that is alien to babies up to the age of about one. Professor Nichol, who reviewed 20 years of research on the topic for the University of Bristol, said: “Despite their familiarity, few people think of domesticated chickens as intelligent birds. “Chickens may not be about to make a significant mathematical, scientific or literary contribution to the world, but the study shows that chickens have the capacity to master skills and develop abilities that a human child can take months and years to accomplish.” — The Independent
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THIS UNIVERSE Of course, another powerful animal could have also been chosen as a popular unit for the power of mechanical machines. I think the horse got preference because this was the common draft animal used for pulling carts and most of other agricultural operations, in countries in which industrial revolution first prospered, and the need for quantifying power arose. If we had been a leading country in this area, it would have been natural to evolve measures named after bullocks and elephants. Why does the boiling point of water remain same? We could think of the boiling point of a liquid as the temperature at which the kinetic energy of most of the molecules becomes greater than the attraction of the molecules with each other. That is the temperature beyond which molecules cannot stay confined within the liquid state. The boiling point depends on the strength of the intermolecular forces of the liquid concerned; it is one of its intrinsic properties. Why can't we see atoms? Is there a possibility of seeing them? Depends on what you call ‘seeing’. We detect and observe the interaction of atoms all the time. It is just that we have to use proper means. We know that sunflower turns its face towards the sun. Is it true that when the sun is very hot, the sunflower turns its face away from it? Do not know what you say is correct. I think the sunflower is quite happy to sense the light of the sun. I would be happy to get the source of your information. Readers can e-mail questions to Prof Yash Pal at palyash.pal@gmail.com
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Trends PARIS: The European Space Agency (ESA) signed final contracts with Thales Alenia Space Italy for work on a pair of missions to assess if the planet Mars has or ever had life, officials said at Paris Airshow this week. Until last year, the ExoMars programme was a joint project between ESA and the US space agency NASA. But NASA dropped out, citing budget problems. The Russian space agency Roscosmos stepped in to provide two Proton rockets to send an orbiting atmospheric probe and test lander to Mars in January 2016, and a follow-on rover in August 2018 that will drill below the planet's surface to look for spores and bacteria. Roscosmos also is providing a landing system for the rover and scientific instruments. Japan mulls hosting global collider project
BANGALORE: The government has decided to solicit construction in Japan of the International Linear Collider (ILC), a next-generation particle accelerator that will allow physicists to explore rudimentary questions about the universe, the Nikkei said. The ILC will complement the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson — a particle understood to impart mass, the business daily said. The project is seen to measure up to the International Space Station and the ITER nuclear fusion project. Building the ILC in Japan would mark the first time that the country plays the central role in a major international research project, the Nikkei said. NASA wants backyard astronomers to help track asteroids WASHINGTON: NASA has called on backyard astronomers and other citizen-scientists to help track asteroids that could create havoc on Earth. The US space agency has already identified 95 per cent of the potentially planet-killing NEOs — near Earth objects — with a diameter of .62 miles or more, a size comparable to the space rock many scientists believe wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. Now NASA wants to work with individuals, government agencies, international partners and academia to “find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them”. — Reuters |
