Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Most unforgettable photos ever

Dismal World has some unforgettable photos. These are ones that have opened the eyes of nations to acts of aggression and despair. Photos that changed the world. See, feel, and reflect on how precious life is, and it's futility.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Free book summaries: wikisummaries.org

WikiSummaries.org offers free summaries of the latest books. There are only ~ 40 books at the moment, but I'm sure the list will grow in the future. David Allen's Get Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity has been summarized rather well.

Btw, if you want to read (or listen to audio books), head over to the Project Gutenberg website. They have over 17,000 books that are out of copyright.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

My photos are up on picasa!

My photo albums are now hosted on Picasa. Head over and take a look!

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Hubble Deep Space Photos

In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope peered into a blank, uninteresting part of the sky for 10 days. Scientists were searching for possibilities of distant stars. This image was known as the Hubble Deep Field. Later on in September 2003, the Hubble repeated it's attempt at deep space imaging - the Hubble Ultra Deep Field [HUDF].

The results were nothing short of astounding and humbling!

Take a grain of sand and hold it at arms length. That's the size of sky the Hubble was looking at, and in this tiny patch of empty sky, the Hubble discovered 10,000 galaxies. Many of them as far as 78 billion light years away. This is the farthest mankind has ever looked into space.

Our planet revolves around a rather unremarkable star - the Sun - which along with billions of other stars is a part of an unremarkable galaxy - the Milky Way. A piece of unremarkable sky, the size of a grain of sand, holds 10,000 such galaxies. It seems ludicrous to think that the Earth is the only living planet in the Universe.

Wikipedia has more information on HDF and HUDF and the associated research.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Joel Spolsky on Customer Support

Joel Spolsky has written an excellent article titled the Seven tips for remarkable customer support. Head over to his website for other interesting articles.