After having watched a couple of things from Dr Lawrence Krauss. I have recently brought his book to go with said subject and i would highly recommend it from what i have read so far.

The good thing about Lawrence Krauss is that he makes science fun. He likes to drop in jokes now and then, which makes watching him all the better.

Dreamweaver CS5.5

I have noticed that the newer version of Dreamweaver now allows you to create apps.

And the thing is that although i found installing the Android SDK onto your machine and setting it up via Eclipse can be a pain, but with Dreamweaver its no problem at all. Of course the fact you have to pay for Dreamweaver is a pain i know, but hey, its worth a trial run.

Things to look into

If you find yourself interested in learning how to make apps for your phone. Then i can suggest looking at the following:

http://phonegap.com/
http://jquerymobile.com/

I think at some point i shall write a small tutorial on how to make a simple app with the tools mentioned. So i guess watch this space.

* Comments can now be toggled (hidden)
* WYSIWYG editor has now been added to allow for HTML (safely)
* Style has been updated
* JQuery is now used to make system flow better and look better
* Copyright has been added to system (with link to my website)

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You can find more information on the NewsBook page

Dr Paul Stysley says

“Experiments have shown that laser-based trapping of particles is not beyond us”

Who is the principal investigator on tractor beam research at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

“If we can figure out the best way to do it, then scale it up, we could collect samples from, say, comet tails over greater distances and longer time periods than is possible.”

The first technique being explored is “optical tweezers”, which is already used on Earth. Others include solenoid beams, Bessel beam, but of course it’s still early days.

Just trying to move tiny particles at the distances required for sample collection is an ambitious goal, which is probably 10 years away”

Apparently it was first thought to use it for cleaning up orbital debris. But to control something so large is far beyond current technology. So it would seem that soon Star Trek will become a thing of fact, rather than fiction! (in terms of actually producing the technology involved in Star Trek).

Understanding the IF

At some point your program will need to make a choice to where it should go and what code to run depending on a condition. So we can create a small C++ program that uses a simple If statement.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
	int age = 23;

	if(age < 18)
	{
		cout << "You're under age!";
	}

	system("PAUSE");
	return 0;
}

So we have created a simple condition. The condition used within the ( ) of the If statement is as follows:

IF AGE IS LESS THAN 18 THEN SAY YOU’RE UNDER AGE

It does help to try and visualize how IF statements look and one way to do that would be as shown below.

The diamond shape represents a decision that has to be made by the program, it can either go straight down or to the right. So the value stored in the variable age determines how the program will flow. Sometimes however, you want your program to make a choice between certain conditions. So say we wanted to display a website content depending on age. So if they are over a certain age, the website will display something different.

int main()
{
	int age = 23;

	if(age > 40)
	{
		//DISPLAY OVER 40 CONTENT
	}
	else
	{
		//DISPLAY CONTENT FOR ANYONE 40 OR UNDER
	}

	system("PAUSE");
	return 0;
}

So we have introduced the ELSE, this means that if the IF statement condition fails it will move down and run the else (the else does not have a condition, but only runs if all else fails).

An if statement can be very long and you can also use something called else if as shown below.

int main()
{
	int age = 23;

	if(age > 40)
	{
		//DISPLAY OVER 40 CONTENT
	}
	else if(age < 10)
	{
		//DISPLAY UNDER 10 CONTENT
	}
	else
	{
		//DISPLAY CONTENT FOR ANYONE 40 OR UNDER
	}

	system("PAUSE");
	return 0;
}

Now this Else if can be pictured as below:

So you can see that the else if will only be reached if the first IF is not true. If the first one is true, then the else if is not reached. However, if you where to get rid of the else from in front of the else if. Then we would have a different result. The two if statements could be considered separate, rather than one block of statements.

int main()
{
	int age = 23;

	if(age > 40)
	{
		//DISPLAY OVER 40 CONTENT
	}

	if(age < 10)
	{
		//DISPLAY UNDER 10 CONTENT
	}
	else
	{
		//DISPLAY CONTENT FOR ANYONE 40 OR UNDER
	}

	system("PAUSE");
	return 0;
}

So the else belongs to the if(age < 10) block and not the if(age > 40). So we have two separate statement blocks.

Because astronauts tend to lose body due to muscle atrophy (lack of using muscles in space). So astronauts have to exercise 2 hours per day in order to prevent this. The current system to weigh them is cumbersome and uses precious resources.

So now the Kinect can be used to create a 3D model of an astronaut, then using calculations from a statistical model that links weight to body measurements from a database of 28,000 people. It is about 97% accurate, but some would suggest that the micro gravity shifts water around inside the body, which means their density may not match the assumptions.

The system has yet to be tested in space, but it does look good for the future of such devices. I hope to see such things in the future. Although of course without the people who like to jump around their living room with such a device, then i guess we wouldn’t have the connect in the first place.

Read More

After a while the trend died down, but a lot of people thought it was because Twitter censored it, but that is not the case. They have nothing to do with trends and preventing them, they simply use an algorithm and because trends never last that long, so it was of course obvious that it would eventually die down. You can read more here.

Some shameful reactions

WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?, Whoever started #GodIsNotGreat needs the shit beat out of them! >:I HOW DARE YOU!

#GodIsNotGreat Gotta kill the person who said this..!

If you’re really comin up with reason why #GodIsNotGreat, kill yourself.

My favorite of course, which just proves my point about being glad to be an atheist.

#Whoever said #GodIsNotGreat shoot yourself! U sound real stupid. His the Greatest:*

The educational system at its best there. I could more than likely make a safe bet that most of these comments are from the pleasant people of the USA, but that’s just a guess of course.

(In no particular order)

Sir Isaac Newton - Considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived

Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus - Won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1928 for his work on sterols and their relation to vitamins.

Orlando Gibbons – English composer, virginalist and organist of the late Tudor and early Jacobean periods

Chevalier de Saint-George – Composer, conductor, and violinist. Prior to the revolution in France, he was also famous as a swordsman and equestrian. Known as the “black Mozart”

Claude Chappe - Demonstrated a practical semaphore system that eventually spanned all of France

Noel Odell - Odell spent two weeks living above 23,000 feet (7,000m), and twice climbed to 26,800-ft and higher, all without supplemental oxygen. Indeed, his performance on Everest was so remarkable, it was taken as proof that the weight of oxygen equipment nullified any possible benefit.

Ernst Ruska – Won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 for his work in electron optics, including the design of the first electron microscope

Gerhard Herzberg – Won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1971, “for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals”.

Robert Ripley - Created the world famous Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

Quentin Crisp - Became a gay icon in the 1970s after publication of his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant.

You can take the 2010 stats (gathered based on www.dalemooney.co.uk hits). Internet explorer does seem to have the most amount of users (more users used IE to use my website). That was last year and I think over the last year or so. That has changed, so we can look at the 2011 stats as well.

We can see that Chrome has grown hugely and IE seems to give dropped dramatically. I am very much liking this. Of course versions also play a vital role in wither or I can start using HTML 5 and CSS3 and not having to worry about those poor souls who seem to want to continue using older versions of browsers.

As you can see there are still people using IE 5!, now that’s just plain crazy, but you can see more people are starting to use the latest version of IE. So this is good news, although IE still does not support all HTML5 features (or at least nowhere near the amount the other browsers do).

For some reason my stats pointed out that a VERY old version of firefox was being used this year (Version 3!). I am not so sure how correct that is, but if that is true…then that is very scary, but of course some of the newer versions are not being used as much as i thought they would have been.

You can still see people using older versions of chrome also, the most being version 10, but also a good sign is seeing more people using the newer version of 15. So we still have a fair way to go before people start using the correct browsers. I can see it taking sometime before HTML5 & CSS3 will be safe to use. I just hope that developers will help encourage viewers to change to the latest versions of browsers and make life easier for us programmers an designers.