A History of man-made Lunar Impact

Hit the Moon

An incomplete list of lunar impact by human being.

2009.10.9 7:31 EDT
Nasa LCROSS
http://www.nasa.gov/

2009.03.01 16:13 CST
嫦娥一号 ChangE1
http://baike.baidu.com/view/32160.htm

2008.11.14
The Moon Impact Probe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Impact_Probe

2006.9.3 05:42 UT
SMART-1
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=39961

Distinguish the two words in reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a great idea, but people can `easily` distinguish the known word from the unknown one.

Moebius Gears

Here's a picture of Moebius Gears.

Look cool? If you are on a Linux box, you might already have a lively demo installed. For Ubuntu users, it is located at /usr/lib/xscreensaver/moebiusgears.

Press Alt+F2 and type /usr/lib/xscreensaver/moebiusgears and run!

The xscreensaver source code could be downloaded from here.

The Risk of OpenID

OpenID seems a promising standard for user authentication. If service providers support OpenID, users can login without creating another pair of account and password. Ideally, a user need only remember one pair of account and password. However, such convenience comes at a cost. The only pair of account and password or the OpenID provider becomes a Single Point Of Failure. If you ever forgot your password or the Identity Provider withdrew your account because you didn't login in the past three months, you will have no way to login to any of the services. Here, we assume that the service providers only accept authentication from OpenID providers. This also applies to other forms of third party authentications.

For users, care should be taken on choosing OpenID providers. Users should keep their OpenID account active and secure the password. For service providers, they should allow other ways of authentication besides OpenID. Users should not lose the service if they lose their OpenID.

OpenID is not that open, not even as open as telephone numbers which could be transfered among telephone service providers.

Inventions: Fancy Disk Copier and Fancier Copy Dragger

Here are our two new inventions: the Fancy Disk Copier and the Fancier Copy Dragger.

The Fancy Disk Copier is a CD/DVD copy machine. It works like a photo copier. You put in a source CD/DVD, and press "COPY"; the copy CD/DVD will come out instantly. Unlike a photo copier, the Fancy Disk Copier will copy with absolutely no loss of quality. The differences between copies and the original CD/DVD is not distinguishable by anyone except the Fancy Disk Copiers. This will, hopefully, prevent copyright abuse.

Our second invention, the Fancier Copy Dragger, is a dragging controller of copy speed. The Fancier Copy Dragger not only supports dragging forward at any pace, but also enables user to drag back in case a user would enjoy the copy process again. What's more, the Fancier Copy Dragger allows users to undo all copies by dragging to the very beginning. Those undo-ed CD/DVDs can be used as if they are new ones. Unlike photo copiers, hundreds of pieces of paper got wasted once any error occurred. The Fancier Copy Dragger will help protecting our environment.

Thanks for your interest in our new inventions. We will send out our "beta" products to selected users starting from next week. Get involved.

Happy New Year 2009

Today is January 1st, 2009. The sun raises as usual, but there's a leap second added after GMT 23:59:59 Dec. 31, 2008. At that time spot, you might notice something like XX:59:60. XX depends on your timezone. If you are using Beijing time, it should be 07:59:60, and if you locate in central America, it should be 17:59:60.

Talk to foreigners (even aliens) in your language seamlessly

Proposal

Build an automatic translation mechanism into instance message system (and other Internet communication system), as if a simultaneous interpreter were there.

It would be exciting if you master three languages. However, one could not master all languages. Even if such an interpreter exists, hiring him/her would be expensive. Internet helps people communicate easily from every corner around the world, and if it were an even probability to talk to anyone on earth, the chance a talker speaks foreign language is much higher. If we have such an automatic translation system, as if a simultaneous interpreter is ready, negotiation should be much simpler.

The problem currently is that a machine could not translate as good as an average interpreter. Languages are not one-to-one mapping, and machines are not good at analyzing and choosing which words to use and in what order. And this is why interpret is still a career.

Whenever a computer is not good at something, we could try to train it in hope that it will eventually learns and masters it. The source of training material would be from thousands of millions of people. As in image recognition, tags from Internet users helps classify and recognize pictures a lot. If, in one day, computers could seamlessly translate one language into another, we would be happy that we no longer need to learn a second language, and we would be equally sad that we will never drive to learn other than native language.

Currently, machine translation in instance message system should be more than experimental, but at least it could provide some information which might be helpful to international talkers. And, have fun to laugh at silly computers.