remko caprio


home home
home aboutme
home writing
      dull boy jack
      ophelia's love
      the birth of ego
      theombrotus
      the shield of achilles
home music
      bs
      carackus
      blockbuster noise
home other
      drawings
home technology blog

RSS

The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. The project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics. Another project that visualizes the phylogeny of life for the plants phylum is Deep Green by the Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group of Berkeley University.
comments (0) | category: notes | tags: ,

The Pico Project

The Pico Project makes accessible a complete resource for the reading and interpretation of the Discourse. “The Discourse on the Dignity of Man (1486) by Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) is considered the “Manifesto of the Renaissance.” Indeed, it exalts the human creature for his/her freedom and capacity to know and to dominate reality as a whole. Far from being simply that, however, the Discourse deals with the vocation of the human creature who, possessing no determinate image, is urged to pursue its own perfection. Such a pursuit begins with moral self-discipline, passes through the familiar, multifarious world of images and fields of knowledge, and strives toward that most lofty goal which defies representation. Pico believes that this paradigm, by virtue of the fact that it is to be found in every tradition, is universal.”
comments (0) | category: notes | tags:

The Genographic Project

The Genographic Project is a cooperation between IBM, the National Geographic Society, Spencer Wells, and the Waitt Family Foundation. Its aim is to collect genetic information of populations, isolated indiginous peoples and modern peoples, and to offer consumers the opportunity to trace back their genetic journey over time and geographies. The genetic markers, the Y-chromosome for men and the maternal metochondriae for women, allow to directly trace back descendencies, and by mapping DNA geneticists are able to calculate common ancestors between people. Richard Dawkins describes this process in an easy to understand fashion in his bestselling book The Ancestor’s Tale.
comments (0) | category: notes | tags: ,

Another look at Vega

Dean Peterson from the Stony Brook Astron Group published a paper in Nature on the calibrator star Vega. He was able to show convincingly that Vega is, contrary to what was thought so far, a rapidly rotating star that is visible at a 5 degree pole-on angle. His paper Vega is a rapidly rotating star was published in Volume 440 of Nature, 13 April 2006.
comments (0) | category: notes | tags:

 
     
 

The Death of Literature
Death in literature is an elementary metaphor, as the fear of death is one of our Id’s primal impulses, together with the sexual urge to reproduce and overcome it. The resurrection of our mind is the symbol for the cycle of life, the seasons, birth and death, crucifixion and resurrection, destruction and creation, night and day, there’s probably nothing more universal, nothing more primal than death and life. The article in the Guardian In theory: the death of literature is a great short essay that analyzes the perspective of the Romantics on death in literature as an elementary original perspective that lays at the root of the birth of the modern novel. It’s a very original view with lots of references in high overview, which makes it easy to make any argument, but it’s convincing until midway when the argument becomes an old man’s lamentation on modern times. Here is where the author Andrew Gallix the other essence of the Romantics in my opinion, namely the overcoming of the fear of death in favor of a naive and blind will for creation, this resurrection of the conscious mind is what represents the true power of the Romantic era. In the face of death we are not afraid to throw ourselves in the abyss and love.

Der Zauberberg (1982)
An international production of Thomas Mann’s 20th century classic about the first world war, Der Zauberberg (1982).

Divine Mathematics: George Cantor and Infinity
In Dangerous Knowledge – BBC, Georg Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis and Georg Cantor‘s life is described. Cantor was obsessed with the problem of infinity. Cantor reminds me Pythagoras, who founded a religious school of Pythagoreans who searched the divine truth by revealing the mathematical formulas that described nature. Boltzmann defined a breakthrough in the field of probability, which is crucial for the theory of entropy and chaos.

Solve Puzzles for Science - Fold.it
Solve puzzles for science with Fold.it. Crowd-sourcing scientific problems.

The Master and Margarita - Russia TV
The Master and Margarita – Russia TV Russia’s first television production of The Master and Margarita, the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. Vladimir Bortko is the director and screenwriter of the new adaptation. The mini-series of ten 52-minute episodes was first screened on the state television channel “Россия” (“Russia”) on December, 2005. The Master and Margarita is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven about the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider the book to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, as well as one of the foremost Soviet satires, directed against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order.

Hunting the Hidden Dimension
Hunting the Hidden Dimension Pt. 1 This film is about looking at the world around us in a completely different way. If you pay attention, you can see that fractals appear throughout nature. But until Benoit Mandelbrot came along, no one really understood what was there all along. more...

Benoit Mandelbrot, Father of Eternity, Coined the Term 'Fractal'
Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician, Dies at 85 Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.

Comparative Democracy
Originally, I was playing with the idea that representatives should have to pass an exam to become eligable to run for political office. While listening to C-SPAN broadcasts of Congress committees, or members of Congress giving interviews to NPR, where on some shows they are allowed more speaking time than the 20 or 30 seconds, I am too often shocked by the lack of depth and the absence of fact in their statements. more...

The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. The project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics. Another project that visualizes the phylogeny of life for the plants phylum is Deep Green by the Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group of Berkeley University.

Litarary Word Comparison
Introduction This is one of the small research projects that I am currently conducting. I am not pretending to offer or accomplish any scientific added value to the research community in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) but humbly submit my efforts to gain further personal learning. While the research remains unfinished and until I publish it formally, I will keep this post as a mini-post. As a Universal Man, a Humanist, a Renaissance Man each individual man has an obligation to question and further his or her knowledge and understanding, as it lies within our capacities. Learning is a tool to humble our heart, and most of all we should mistrust brave hearts. Matt Ridley in his book Nature via Nurture says (says Richard Dawkins in his The Ancestor’s Tale in The Mouse Tale chapter) that “the list of words in David Copperfield is almost the same as the list of words in The Catcher in the Rye.” Springing from this saying, I concluded that it would be an interesting project to create a plotter diagram in which the major works in literature (written, translated or edited into modern English for reasons of ease of comparison) are set out as number of total words versus the number of different words used and another network graph that displays the relative closeness of literary works by words used. The first diagram is the easiest to create of course, so I will start with this first, then moving on to the next network diagram. more...