GIOVE-B Launched

Second test satellite is in orbit. I will not further comment on that. There’s already enough people talking (and silently laughing) about Galileo. Someone said it is a loser, the commentators (obviously Europeans) said it is not, and other said it is susceptible to military radar. Anyway, congratulations for the launch of Giove-B.

Any question?

A friend of mine said that it is time for us to start asking questions; why, what, how, …

I said, OK, good for him. I’ve been in his position before. Once the intention to ask questions is there, the next step would be to learn how to formulate a question. A good one, that is. As absurd questions will only lead to absurd answers. Ridiculous output only comes from ridiculous input. “What is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?” “42″. If you know this quote, you certainly know what I mean.

There’s one problem. In a multicultural, multiple background environment, where exact same words may have different meanings to different people, it is not always easy to find the “right” question. I’m still struggling in this aspect, and I have fear to the risk that this struggle may be an endless one.

Virtually virtual

For poor experimentalists who don’t have enough money to buy a lot of computers, but yet still want to do experiments with computer networking, there’s a way to build a virtual network which runs on one computer only. Check out this page.

And if it’s not enough, I mean, if these experimentalists are too lazy to setup a dedicated computer to run the experiments, the virtual network can also be built on a virtual machine! Check it out here. That is, virtual network running on virtual computers… hah!

But don’t get too excited, this bunch of virtual-computers-in-a-network-which-runs-on-a-virtual-machine are, for obvious reason, useless for high performance computing (a.k.a cluster-based supercomputer) =)

Stuck

Mohon maaf para pemirsa sekalian, udah lama ga ngisi blog. Lagi mentok nih. On one hand, there’s a lot of interesting things to do, but not enough resource available to do them. On the other hand, procrastination rules. Both lead to the same effect: do nothing. Let nature do its task: keep the time running. And me? I’ll simply trust the creativity theorem…

Creativity Theorem

There’s a very well known and fundamental relation known to both academia and industry, which is probably more fundamental than Newton’s three laws of motion. It is:

where:

= creativity

= current time

= time of deadline

Thus, it is easy to show using simple calculus manipulation, that:

How’s BHTV today?

An excerpt from a book entitled “Smart Questions – Learn to Ask the Right Questions for Powerful Results” by Gerald Nadler and William J. Chandon.

So, how is Bandung High Tech Valley (BHTV) today? =)

Fad

From Cambridge dictionaries online:

fad
noun [C]
a style, activity or interest which is very popular for a short period of time:
    the latest health fad
    There was a fad for wearing ripped jeans a few years ago.

faddism
noun [U]
a tendency to like a style, activity or interest for a very short period of time

faddist
noun [C]

The Muslim’s Past

Again today, I watched a presentation on the glorious past of muslim scientific development and contribution from muslim scientists. I don’t exactly remember how many times I have seen such typical presentation. Countless sources in the Internet, German magazines, Welt der Wunder, History Channel… They’re everywhere. We’re not lacking of them.

I like the “western” presentation style better, because they’re usually presented as a sort of acknowledgment to the contributions made by extraordinary people in the past. My muslim “colleagues”, however, have a different style of presentation. They almost always end by persuading the audience to seek the wonder of the past (THE, that, their past, I mean), so that they can improve their (our) situation in the future.

Of course, 7 centuries of remarkable science and engineering achievements is something not to be ignored. But it is not the ONLY thing that bring changes to the world. The Egyptian, the Greek, the Roman, the French, the English, the German, the American, just to mention some, they have done pretty much the same thing. And thus, I think, it is not something to be overly worshiped. It is one step (a very big step indeed) in the course of science, but it is not the only step.

Moreover, many things have happened since 1492 AD. Gauss, Newton, Leibniz, and hundreds of other mathematicians have laid the ground for modern mathematics, and through it we have, among others, answered the 2000 years question posed by Diophantine equations and Fermat’s last theorem; Two waves of industrial revolution had changed the world of engineering for ever; Wernher von Braun had invented rocket, and man had gone to the moon with it; The wave-particle duality nature of light has been discovered through quantum theory; Modern optics have enabled man to build telescopes to observe the very far end of the universe. And thus, not only our good-old-mother-earth has been mapped, a large part of the UNIVERSE also has; The discovery of DNA, the better understanding on human brain, nervous, and hormonal system, have brought a giant leap from 15th century’s medication system; Navigation? think of GPS for God’s sake!

And 600 quintillion of other bla bla blas…

Therefore, believing that bringing back the knowledge of the 15th century science, and hoping that the future can be better because of it, is, I think, a complete nonsense. There has been a lot of improvement and complexity in science since then, and, I think, these are the things where we need to put our focus on.

It’s “dependent”, not “dependant”

I can always tell that the author of a paper or an article is a French, if they write, for instance “the approach is technology dependant”, instead of “the approach is technology dependent”. The word “dependant” (with ‘a’) exists both in English and in French, but it has different meanings. Here’s the English definition from Cambridge online dictionary:

dependant, MAINLY US dependent
noun [C]
someone who depends on you for financial support, such as a child or family member who does not work:
    My pension will provide for my dependants.

In French it can be used as a noun (means someone who depends on, e.g. drugs), or as an adjective (means not independent). See for instance Wordreference.com.

The problem is that some (usually French) people use the English word “dependant”, in places where there is supposed to be adjective, as in the example above. So, when you write in English, as general rule of thumb, just remember: “dependant” -> noun, “dependent” -> adjective.

Superman

We are not superman, my dear. There can only be one instance of our being, in one place, at a particular instant of time. Well, the same rule applies for superman as well, after all he is still a “man”. But the fact that he can move (and necessarily, think) very quickly, enables him to define a finer resolution on the notions of “space” and “time”. We can’t, unfortunately.