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Meet captain Miracle, Chesley Sullenberger: If The Economist was right in 2006, he is the first pilot to land a commercial airliner on water without causalities. This is definitely a miracle of human scientific achievement, technology, and skills. (*)Today I did make a quick search in air crash databases, and could not find a non-fatal water landing.

Everyone's first address for quick information is Wikipedia. They are in a donating round, and aim at 6 million dollars. You can donate with Paypal. Have you donated yet? You can do it with the link on the right side of my Blog.

This is a real lifehack. I've been saving pretty much everything interesting in my del.icio.us account. Now with this hack I can search them with tags from the address bar of my Firefox. As a matter of fact, you can use this hack to search on any searchable field in any webpage. 1- Go to any searcahble field in a webpage. Say www.imdb.com 2- Right click on the field, and click Add a keyword for this search. 3- Add the keyword you want to use -imdb- and a name. Basically what it does is it saves a bookmark to the search URL, with a %s placeholder for the search term, which is replaced with the actual search term when you type keyword searchterm in the address bar. I love open source.

The companies and the public bodies spend a lot of effort allocating electromagnetic spectrum (frequency) to new wireless technologies. For those that don't know what electromagnetic spectrum is, the easiest way to understand would be the radio station frequencies. All know that two radio stations cannot transmit or be received at the same frequency. What about the audio spectrum? Sound waves, just like electro-magnetic waves have a frequency. The beautiful process of evolution has provided the millions of species that are competing for audio frequencies like radio stations an almost perfect allocation of sound frequencies. As this great article in Wired Magazine explains, if you scan the audio frequencies in a forest, each species have their own. If not their mating calls would be lost, and they would not be able to produce. Pretty straight forward. Until the humans came up with their machines that produce sound in all the frequencies that you can think of. It looks like there ar...

There is a common saying among the guys. When you want to underline the unattractiveness of a female, you say "I wouldn't be with her, even if she payed." Microsoft will be paying -in terms of rebates- users if they use Microsoft Live Search. This should be a sign how bad it is. I've never used it, but this news will keep me away from it for sure.

Pumped up with 280 million dollars by CBS my favorite music site last.fm is going into the "new artist promotion" territory occupied by myspace. Artists or labels can now upload video and audio to last.fm servers with its Promote Your Music program. Developed as a software to match music taste of users to new artists, I believe last.fm has a competetive advantage over myspace. It will be interesting to watch if this technological -and stylistic in my opinion- advantage will suffice last.fm to penetrate myspace territory.

My computer was giving me the blue-screen pretty often lately. After the blue-screen Windows was giving me the extremely informative problem messages (Problem at 0xaddf50329923092302, yes I can speak machine language). I clicked more info button for a change. I was directed to a web-page which told me that the problem was due to an out-of-date IBM application running on my computer and I could solve it if I download an update. What a wonderful surprise. Windows was being user friendly. So I did what I was told to do. For some reason, during the install phase the installer asked me to run the Windows defragmenter. For those who don't speak Geekish defragmeter is a hard-disk re-organizer. Windows does not store the parts of a single application next to each other on the hard disk. So when the an application runs, the hard-disk reader has to jump from one position on the hard-disk to another, which slows the system. Defragmenter tries to put the parts of applications close on the ha...

I battled hard against the i-pod fever. I was honing my Linux skills. Then I used my sisters Powerbook, that was the first blow. Then this came. I've got not much to say but: Apple, I surrender... More pics and specs on: http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/the-apple-iphone/

Conceptual artist Johnaton Keats has released a cell-phone ring tone cover of the legendary 4' 33'' by John Cage . 4' 33'' consists of three movements, which are actually the conductor turning the pages, and 273 seconds of silence, a reference to -273 degrees - Absolute Zero . The idea is that the audience are actually both creating the piece by making sounds, and are listening to the piece, so that each performance is unique. Cage was influenced by a series of blank paintings by Robert Rauschenberg , where different light conditions and the shadow of the observer created unique paintings for each observer. Here is an interesting symphonic version of 4' 33'' from BBC. Note how the audience tries to be silent, but fails to do so when the conductor turns the pages.