(insert blog name here)

Semester 1

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 05:20:00 -0500

Semester 1

Hello again, People of Tumblr

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 21:55:00 -0500

Finished my last final today and with it, my first semester of college. Greetings to the people who decided to follow me in my absence spanning the last several months and to the lovely folks who have stuck around. Not sure how often I’ll be posting much of anything over break due to a few projects I have going on as well as me just returning home and getting distracted, but I’ll maybe try to get a post about the semester or maybe a collection of various pictures of things that happened over the last few months. Stay awesome, guys.

And the results are in:

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 22:20:00 -0400

92 on the first chemistry exam from a class average of 71. To say I am pleased with this is an understatement.

aastronaut replied to your photo: SCIENCE TIME! Sexy as fuck.

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 23:18:08 -0400

aastronaut replied to your photo: SCIENCE TIME!

Sexy as fuck.

Are you wearing a bow tie??? <3

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 22:42:00 -0400

And it’s a robot bow tie.

SCIENCE TIME!

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 22:25:10 -0400

SCIENCE TIME!

Hello, Everyone (and Perhaps Goodbye for Now)

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 20:57:00 -0400

It recently occurred to me that I haven’t really posted anything in a little over a month, and for the few of you who may or may not care, I came back to say that I apologize for my absence, but also I have come to report that I’ve been having the most spectacular time. When I left you, I departed west and experienced some of the most magnificent things. I saw the beauty of land sculpted by wind and water, high mesas, arches, natural bridges, I walked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, saw the dwellings of the Ancient Puebloan peoples, the grandeur of the Milky Way in a night sky far, far away from the lights of cities, mountains, deserts, and explored slot canyons. I did it all with my mentor and one of my best friends: my father. I’m really happy that I’ve been able to salvage our relationship after the turbulence of much of my adolescence. Simply put, the trip was spectacular. Life changing.

Almost immediately after I returned home, I geared up for the next adventure: college. It’s almost the end of week two of school for me and I’ve been having a wonderful time. Everything is falling into place and I’m meeting fascinating people who have the passions that I have. I’m currently contemplating adding the second major of Computer Science to my Neuroscience major given my technical status of sophomore with all my advanced credits I earned in high school and simply because I feel that the skill set that Computer Science can lend me will be invaluable to my future aspirations. I’m already seeking out professors who will let me get in the laboratory and groups that will satiate my interests. How great it is to have ambition and the tools you seek all around you.

So, my friends, this is hello and perhaps goodbye for some time. I’m preoccupied living life outside of the internet and I’m loving it. I invite you too to pursue your dreams and live life. If any of you wish to still keep in contact, feel free to contact me and it will be done. Thank you, everyone, for inspiring me in one way or another. Here’s to the future, I’ll see you on the other side.

-Allan

expose-the-light: 20 Things You Didn’t Know...

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 15:13:22 -0400

expose-the-light:

20 Things You Didn’t Know About Relativity

Galileo invented it, Einstein understood it, and Eddington saw it.

1 Who invented relativity? Bzzzt—wrong. Galileo hit on the idea in 1639, when he showed that a falling object behaves the same way on a moving ship as it does in a motionless building.

2 And Einstein didn’t call it relativity. The word never appears in his original 1905 paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” and he hated the term, preferring “invariance theory” (because the laws of physics look the same to all observers—nothing “relative” about it).

3 Space-time continuum? Nope, that’s not Einstein either. The idea of time as the fourth dimension came from Hermann Minkowski, one of Einstein’s professors, who once called him a “lazy dog.”

4 But Einstein did reformulate Galileo’s relativity to deal with the bizarre things that happen at near-light speed, where time slows down and space gets compressed. That counts for something.

5 Austrian physicist Friedrich Hasenöhrl published the basic equation E = mc² a year before Einstein did.

6 Never heard of Hasenöhrl? That’s because he failed to connect the equation with the principle of relativity. Verdammt!

7 Einstein’s full-time job at the Swiss patent office meant he had to hash out relativity during hours when nobody was watching. He would cram his notes into his desk when a supervisor came by.

8 Although Einstein was a teetotaler, when he finally completed his theory of relativity, he and his wife, Mileva, drank themselves under the table—the old-fashioned way to mess with the space-time continuum.

9 Affection is relative. “I need my wife, she solves all the mathematical problems for me,” Einstein wrote while completing his theory in 1904. By 1914, he’d ordered her to “renounce all personal relations with me, as far as maintaining them is not absolutely required for social reasons.”

10 Rules are relative too. According to Einstein, nothing travels faster than light, but space itself has no such speed limit; immediately after the Big Bang, the runaway expansion of the universe apparently left light lagging way behind.

11 Oh, and there are two relativities. So far we’ve been talking about special relativity, which applies to objects moving at constant speed. General relativity, which covers accelerating things and explains how gravity works, came a decade later and is regarded as Einstein’s truly unique insight.

12 Pleasure doing business with you, chum(p): When Einstein was stumped by the math of general relativity, he relied on his old college pal Marcel Grossmann, whose notes he had studied after repeatedly cutting class years earlier.

13 Despite that, the early version of general relativity had a major error, a miscalculation of the amount a light beam would bend due to gravity.

14   Fortunately, plans to test the theory during a solar eclipse in 1914 were scuttled by World War I. Had the experiment been conducted then, the error would have been exposed and Einstein would have been proved wrong.

15 The eclipse experiment finally happened in 1919 (you’re looking at it on this very page). Eminent British physicist Arthur Eddington declared general relativity a success, catapulting Einstein into fame and onto coffee mugs.

16 In retrospect, it seems that Eddington fudged the results, throwing out photos that showed the “wrong” outcome.

17 No wonder nobody noticed: At the time of Einstein’s death in 1955, scientists still had almost no evidence of general relativity in action.

18 That changed dramatically in the 1960s, when astronomers began to discover extreme objects—neutron stars and black holes—that put severe dents in the shape of space-time.

19   Today general relativity is so well understood that it is used to weigh galaxies and locate distant planets by the way they bend light.

20   If you still don’t get Einstein’s ideas, try this explanation reportedly from The Man Himself: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”

Perhaps Greenland will actually be green in the future. Humor...

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 03:15:02 -0400

Perhaps Greenland will actually be green in the future.

Humor aside, this is terrifying.

picapixels: 水道橋重工 | Suidobashi Heavy Industry

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 02:32:02 -0400

picapixels:

水道橋重工 | Suidobashi Heavy Industry

cybergirlfriend: wow so the dolphin asked her to marry him and...

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 02:31:49 -0400

cybergirlfriend:

wow so the dolphin asked her to marry him and she kisses the other guy right in front of her rude ass bitch

insane-mathematician: The single most important thing I will...

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 02:05:05 -0400

insane-mathematician:

The single most important thing I will ever reblog.

I’ve had this distinct thought many times before. I also...

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 01:57:58 -0400

I’ve had this distinct thought many times before. I also wonder about similar thoughts of being a computer program or a brain (or something altogether different) attached to electrodes hallucinating existence as I know it.

Looks like the drugs are kicking in.

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 01:55:24 -0400

Looks like the drugs are kicking in.

beautiful-anomaly: lordoftheinternet: nepeter: lordoftheinternet: inventing lightning was the...

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 01:52:20 -0400

beautiful-anomaly:

lordoftheinternet:

nepeter:

lordoftheinternet:

inventing lightning was the worst thing benjamin franklin ever did

Clearly you’re very uneducated. Lightning was on the world all the time, because the merciful God created it (if you don’t praise Him I don’t want to know you). Benjamin Franklin only created a lightning rod (:

um

o

…

What?

I really, really hope this guy was joking.

anoncentral: “An anthropologist proposed a game to children in...

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 08:49:40 -0400

anoncentral:

“An anthropologist proposed a game to children in an African tribe. He put a basket full of fruit near a tree and told the children that whoever got there first won the sweet fruits. When he told them to run, they all took each others hands and ran together, then sat together enjoying their treats.

When he asked them why they had run like that when one could have had all the fruits for himself, they said, ‘UBUNTU, how can one of us be happy if all the other ones are sad?’ (‘UBUNTU’ in the Xhosa culture means: ‘I am because we are.)”

via Occupy Sweden

the-sunbird: This gets funnier the longer I look at it and try...

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 08:48:34 -0400

the-sunbird:

This gets funnier the longer I look at it and try NOT to laugh.

Ordered My First Labcoat for College

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 02:19:53 -0400

SCIENCE!

wildcat2030: The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired...

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 05:17:12 -0400

wildcat2030:

The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University today announced that it has received a $2.6 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a smart suit that helps improve physical endurance for soldiers in the field. The novel wearable system would potentially delay the onset of fatigue, enabling soldiers to walk longer distances, and also potentially improve the body’s resistance to injuries when carrying heavy loads. Lightweight, efficient, and nonrestrictive, the proposed suit will be made from soft wearable assistive devices that integrate several novel Wyss technologies. One is a stretchable sensor that would monitor the body’s biomechanics without the need for the typical rigid components that often interfere with motion. The system could potentially detect the onset of fatigue. Additionally, one of the technologies in the suit may help the wearer maintain balance by providing low-level mechanical vibrations that boost the body’s sensory functions. The new smart suit will be designed to overcome several of the problems typically associated with current wearable systems, including their large power requirements and rigid overall structures, which restrict normal movement and can be uncomfortable. (via Smart suit improves physical endurance | Harvard Gazette)

dawnawakened: Passing Cloud Passing Cloud is a recently...

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 03:44:44 -0400

If you’re not worried about where you go

Predominant winds would determine the ro

Passengers would board the cloud using l

dawnawakened:

Passing Cloud

Passing Cloud is a recently submitted project for the international ideas competition: Life at the Speed of Rail, organised by the Van Alen Institute and partly funded by the Department of Cultural Affairs of New York City.

Although it wasn’t one of the winning proposals, Passing Cloud reveals a strong conceptual approach that is worth noting: It is a new vision on traveling, based on the old Zeppelins.

Nowadays, traveling is achieved with this idea of having a fixed destination and an estimated time of arrival. Passing Cloud completely inverts this system. A floating device is introduced that travels around the entire USA territory according to current predominant winds. It has no fixed time of arrival or place for arrival. The journey becomes the essence. Imagine traveling at wind speeds in a totally sustainable object that leaves no Human trace behind.

This project envisions a distinct approach towards moving around the United States being also a revival of the act of traveling. Why traveling at high speed? Why having the final destiny always defined? And why always departing and arriving on a tight schedule? Nowadays, everything is set and everyone is always running around. It is time to reconsider the act of traveling and start enjoying it accordingly.

The Passing Cloud is an innovative and environmentally friendly method of transportation that doesn’t require expensive steel tracks or concrete highways. It is made of a series of spherical balloons that form the shape of a cloud. Its inner stainless steel structure is covered with heavy weight tensile nylon fabric. During the journey, It moves according to prevailing winds speed and direction at the time of travel. Since it moves with the wind, no wind is ever felt during the trip, offering the passengers a full “floating sensation”.

It’s an unique journey. The feeling of floating in the atmosphere – on top of a cloud – with an open schedule and unknown final destiny. All National Ground would be potentially covered at virtually no cost and the help of the wind. The journey becomes your destiny.

Project data:

Organiser: Van Alen Institute

Competition: June 2011

Design Team: Tiago Barros

Location: USA