I was wandering in SmugMug website and found a good gallery by user ‘sbarge‘. It’s about the fall color at Cameron Pass area in Colorado. The photos were taken in the week of 9/20/2008. Both the color and the scenery are wonderful. Contrasting the warm tone with the green color makes the pictures rich and vivid. It is a good candidate for the future fall trip.
Burn After Reading:
Witty, Smart, and Hilarious.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona:
Spain’s buildings and gardens are fresher than the story.
Microsoft recently lauched a series of Ads featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. The following is the long version of its 2nd episode, New Family.
The feedbacks from the Internet community are almost negative since the first episode. Users critize the Ads. being ambiguous as a marketing attempt - not mentioning ‘Vista’ even once; attack its worthiness – spending 300 million instead of fixing the problem in the product; or just simply label it as ’stupid’ and ‘lame’.
However, the intention of the comercial is not to promote Vista or any Microsoft product directly, but to restore the public image of the company. Microsoft has been depicted as an “evil empire” for long time. It is a fashion that if you don’t say something negative about Microsoft then you are not cool. Looking at Slashdot website, it is easy to find many posts that talk something else but at the end add, “BTW, Microsoft sucks”. Although tech people have the tradition of being anti-authority, it has gone beyond that and become a bias. As an engineer in the network security industry, I know attacks that target Windows and its software are hundred times more than those to Apple’s OS. Not because Apple is safer, just attacking Windows can reach more so it is more profitable. In fact, it’s lucky that Microsoft won the OS war in 1980s, otherwise, a PC would cost $1000 instead of $300, and we could never order case, CPU, fan, memory, harddisk, power supply online and make our own PC – everything would be made by Apple.
It is unlikely that Microsoft could fix its image by this campaign, but it steps to a right direction. In the ad., Microsoft doesn’t put itself at the incumbent position, but more like a humble underdog who is easy to access and eager to learn. Because it doesn’t mention any product, the consumers feel it is not pushing anything, so they want to follow the story and feel the connection. To Microsoft, with 90% of market share, this is more important then a few Windows licenses.
As I am writing this blog, I read some articles that state Microsoft will stop the campaign because of the negative responses as planed. If that is true, what a shame.
Large Hadron Collider, built by CERN at Franco-Swiss border, started circulating its first beam on September 10th. It earned world-wide coverage and Google even dedicated a logo to the day (left). However, what made the event famous is not the fact that it is the highest energy particle accelerator in the world, but the controversy that the energy could create vacuum bubbles that expand in light speed and bring the world to the end. I was first introduced by this idea when I was in high school, through the book “The Last Three Minutes” by Paul Davies. It was translated by 方励之, who was also a controversial figure at that time of China. Here is the excerpt in chapter “Sudden Death – and Rebirth” from the book:
The worry is that the very high-energy collision of subatomic particles might create conditions – just for an instant, in a very small region of space – which would encourage the vacuum to decay. Once the transition had occurred, even on a microscopic scale, there would be no stopping the newly formed bubble from rapidly ballooning to astronomical proportions.
The book actually gives the exactly same answer as the LHC safety review committee:
… cosmic rays achieve higher energies than we can make inside our particle accelerators, and that these cosmic rays have been hitting nuclei in the Earth’s atmosphere for billions of years without triggering vacuum decay. … The real issue, however, is not whether bubble formation could occur on Earth but whether it has occurred anywhere in the observable universe at any time since the big bang. …
It’s funny while listening to LHC countdown, a voice of one scientist, “Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Zero, Nothing. OK.”
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