Holyfuckingshit this it amazing

What's funny is that some months ago a was fantasizing about humans having the ability to create a time-lapse of earth from the beginning of its life to present time. This is not that, however it is a couple of days of earth spinning and you can see the aurora borealis which is still awe inspiring.

Catchy Song+Typography=Win

Mark Hamill & Harrison Ford interview from 1980

this guy is awesome. (NSFW)

Furthest Picture of Earth Ever Taken.

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

if you haven't already read the caption on the picture above, that image was taken in 1990 (on valentines day actually) by the voyager 1 space craft and is the furthest picture of earth ever taken. period. it also has a quote by Carl Edward Sagan who was an astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist and a hero of mine and many others. it was his idea to have the voyager turn towards earth and take that photo as it says nearly 4 billion miles away since the spacecrafts primary mission had been completed. Our entire planet takes up just .12 pixels. the sun is just off camera so thats why you see those large lens flare type streaks there, one of which dominates our little insignificant planet.

look at this picture and try to really understand what you're looking at. the shit is from a 4 BILLION mile vantage. in other words, if each mile represented 1 year back in time, it would go back to when LIFE STARTED ON EARTH. It would only be around 500,000 years old. 4 billion miles is like going around earths equator over 146,000 times.

Keeping those insane distances in mind it's crazy to think about how little those miles mean on a cosmological scale. I mean, light could travel four times further IN A SINGLE DAY. It took us 13 years. thirteenfuckingyears! and in that amount of time light could go 76 trillion miles. thats just incredible but still pathetic because the closet galaxy to us is 14 quintillion miles away or in other words 150,000 times further.

what im getting at here is that space is huge. That picture up there was taken from unimaginably far away from here and it's nothing but an insignificant micrometer in the grand scheme of things and that is fuggin sweeeeet.

stream of mind (just exploring my thoughts)

sometimes i like to put my hands over my eyes and instead of thinking that i'm looking at my eyelids, or just not seeing anything, i like to pretend im looking waaayy out somewhere in space. somewhere millions of light years away.

i love space and astronomy. the cosmos. i love science i love existence. i love nature. i love awe. i love things that are infinitesimal. i love things that are infinite. i love evolution. i love matter and energy, things with incredible mass and i love the massless. i love technology. i love design. i love innovation. i love questions. i love answers. i love curiosity. i love beauty. i love art. i love expression. i love pointless blog posts. i love doing things for me. i love understanding. i love numbers. i love happiness. i love time. i love the like minded. i love thinking. i love exploration. i love discovery. i love truth. i love light. i love sound. . . . i love you.

More science: Scientist discover missing link in cell mitosis!

First off, I only post things from science daily if they're at least an interesting story. But most of them are major discoveries/developments that have the power to change the world, and I don't mean that in any gay ass spiritual way. They could literally change the fucking world, and this is one of those discoveries:

source: "ScienceDaily (July 26, 2010) — A major discovery, led by researchers from The George Washington University Medical Center, promises to revolutionize the way scientists think about key aspects of cellular lifecycle and offers a new avenue for cancer researchers to explore in their quest to one day slow down the progression of cancer.

The discovery furthers the science world's understanding of what happens during the fundamental process of mitosis, when cells divide. The article was published in the current issue of The Journal ofCell Biology.

"This represents a crucial moment when the division of genetic material is still equally distributed. An even exchange is critical for stable genetic changes," said Rakesh Kumar, Ph.D., chair of the GW Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. In mitosis, cells begin to divide and genetic material coalesces around separate poles to form new cells. If all goes well that material is evenly distributed and two genetically identical "daughter cells" are formed. If something goes awry, however, it can result in the cascading production of aberrant cells with unequal and less ordered DNA and possibly cancer."

Fermi Lab narrows down higgs boson mass!

The Higgs boson is an undiscovered subatomic particle that scientist believe is responsible for giving matter mass. It has been extremely difficult to create one in the laboratory because it's as hard to detect as it is elusive. Today however, scientist have at narrowed down the possible range of the higgs' own mass, putting it somewhere between 158-175 GeV/c2. I read also that the LHC has been up and running lately and so far scientist are taking it slow, just rediscovering other confirmed subatomic particles and they say thus far things are going great. All of their data is reconfirming the parts of the standard model we have correct, and they've even found candidates for the top quark for the first time in europe. Of course we've already produced a top quark in the states in 1995 but better embarrassingly late than never right?

source: "ScienceDaily (July 26, 2010) — New constraints on the elusive Higgs particle are more stringent than ever before. Scientists of the CDF and DZero collider experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab revealed their latest Higgs search results at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, held in Paris from July 22-28. Their results rule out a significant fraction of the allowed mass range established by earlier experiments.

The Fermilab experiments now exclude a Higgs particle with a mass between 158 and 175 GeV/c2. Searches by previous experiments and constraints due to the Standard Model of Particles and Forces indicate that the Higgs particle should have a mass between 114 and 185 GeV/c2. (For comparison: 100 GeV/c2 is equivalent to 107 times the mass of a proton.) The new Fermilab result rules out about a quarter of the expected Higgs mass range."

By the way, the picture at the top is what the computers display at the LHC and other particle accelerators. Scientist shoot protons around a huge circular tube at 99.9999% the speed of light, in opposite directions and then collide them head on to break them into the even smaller particles. Each line represents the flight path of an individual subatomic particle as they fly through the air from the collision.

Jane Austen's Fight Club (available in HD)

A fake trailer for a fight club parody based in 1810 and made up entirely of women. thought it was cool.

Let freedom ring!: Gov't rules that jailbreaking is legal.

Doesn't really mean anything, just that now if you have a freed phone, apple cant fine you. applies to all devices.

"NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- IPhone users can now legally hack their phones to download applications that aren't in Apple's App Store.

The U.S. Copyright Office, a division of the Library of Congress, has authorized several new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), one of which will allow mobile phone users to "jailbreak" -- or hack into -- their devices to use apps not authorized by the phone's manufacturer. The new rules will be published on Tuesday in the Federal Register.

Jailbreaking iPhones in order to download apps that are unavailable in Apple's App Store had been a legal gray area: Apple technically had the right to request a $2,500 government fine for damages every time a user violated the law that bans "circumvention of technological measures" controlling access to copyrighted works -- in this case, the iPhone's iOS software.

It's unclear if Apple actually ever requested that fine be levied on an iPhone customer. But it fought to preserve its right to: Apple filed an objection last year to the rule the Copyright Office has now adopted."

WATCH IN HD!!: Short space shuttle launch video.

I fuggin love shuttle launches. I fuggin love high definition quality. This is both so you should what it because A) it's awesome. and B) because the announcer explains why the shuttle is being launched and he wraps it up nicely with a little tidbit. They actually do this with every shuttle launch, and in longer videos they continually give you really cool statistics about the shuttle such as mph, altitude, distance downrange and things like that.

Cell phone wallpaper

Admittedly, i'm a wallpaper whore. It all stems from my love for art I guess...So naturally when I got my first phone that could properly display a sick picture I used the power of the internet to search for images that I liked. I quickly found that when it comes to cell phone wallpaper its best to have a homogeneous feel through out the image or one to two focal points. that being said there are always exceptions.
Here's but a teeny tiny fraction of some I have saved in a convenient enough spot on my hard drive to upload and they are yours for the taking my friends. of course now that I have a phone with a high res. display I try to stick exclusively to images with higher quality although none of these are HD some things are too badass to go unflaunted. steal as necessary...

It should also be noted that these images are all optimized for that iphone in particular but they shouldn't have a problem fitting on any other display properly, especially if you have the most basic of editing skills. enjoy, ill put more up another time i'm sure.

Living away from home

I've lived on my own, at least in part for one or two years now and I thought i'd share a bit on the trials and tribulations of independence. I use the term loosely mind you, because up until a couple of months ago my grandma paid my cell phone bill among other expenses. Let me back track some though to paint a better picture. I moved to LA in October 2008 (pretty sure anyway) lived there, going to school for music, for 8 months living solely off of whatever my grandma and mom could muster up. It didnt take too long for a lot of money to go with the high cost of living (in total rent was almost 3 times higher than here and my portion was over 5 times more than my portion here.)

So suffice it to say that times got hard. Eventually, I literally went days without being able to eat, I had to pay rent extremely late and the stress definitely affected my grades in school. The first couple quarters I was a beast in almost all categories. I had nice gpa and was doing better than I ever had in school in my entire life but oh how the mighty can fall. After failing some finals from not being able to pay attention in class since all i could think about was if id be able to eat that day or how i'm gunna pay overdue rent. I decided that school was just stress on top of stress and took a leave of absence.

I just tried to survive for awhile then, looking for a job but still not feeling like it could happen because i had pretty much never had a job before. So of course since we're poor my grandma couldn't pay my phone and I had no way of contacting her since shes was a bit computer illiterate, she gets down on msn and yahoo though. I guess through word of mouth my best friend jacob's mom heard enough about my predicament to make a myspace page solely to contact me so she could bring me home. and thats just what happened. At the time I could not have been happier seeing as how i was starving and in emotional ruins.

I moved back in where I left off. living with jake and his parents! since they're some of the greatest most hospitable people in all time it was just as awesome as before only this time I hung out with a particular girl pretty much every night and eventually we started dating but thats another story. One night me and Jake were hanging in the city, as we did often if not everyday and our great friend Dustin mention that his apt. neighbor was moving out. Since he's related to the landlord we figured we could give moving in a shot and sure enough under the condition that we all have a job, me, jake, our great friend James and my sweet leigh moved into a three bedroom 1 bath on the south siiiiiide!

It goes something like this: Me and my sweet shacked up of course, jakes got a room, james too, and then our other close friend got tired of his moms boyfriend being a piece of shit and so eventually we converted the basement into his bedroom. So that means currently there are five mugs living here and its all good. My gf is happy to live with four boys because bitches are caddy and evil. and of course us guys are just fine.

And now the dirt: here's the dirt... what little dirt there is.

the only ACTUAL complaint I have about our living situation is that we have both a washer and dryer that work and all we have to do is call the gas company to hook up the dryer because we dont have the proper fittings however, for some reason everybody seems to think its stupid. i am literally the only one that doesn't think its more convenient to either drive home (bout 25 miles for jake, 4 or so for james) or get a ride to the laundromat (for me, mike, and leigh).

heres the thing, the time between washings, because of the lack of transportation, is ungodly.

I go through all of my 6 shirts or so in about a week and then i'm just wearing a filthy shirt for about one or two months. don't get me wrong i'm a man so i can definitely deal with it but there's a limit i've come to learn. after awhile it just brings my mood down DRASTICALLY to put on dirty clothes EVERYDAY for two months. it's pretty fucking gay. it easy to see that my clothes are dirty and as much as i've tried to steer clear of being the dirty kid, it seems to have thrust itself upon me and i gotta say it can knock anybody off their high horse. anybody.

if you're saying to yourself "not a big deal to me you little bitch" then fuck you because you're dirty anyway and dont have the exceptions I have for myself. not everybody think being filthy is cool.

So there's that... Any other inconvenience is fine with me. We could use more food more often but we're all broke so its no biggie, we do what we can, help each other out and we get by.

The dishes, as with many a household, could be done more often but we're getting there. Mike holds them down most of the time. I stopped because these mofos tried to make it out like I never did them a couple of times so I showed what never doing them looks like and that shit got baaaaaaad. the dishes were a mile high and smelled terrible. since then mike has been the bigger man and cleaned them so i'll help keep them up.

Anyway we've lived here for 276 days as of today and there has never been a real argument or anything like that. Back to my specific situation, long story short, my mom has a problem with spending money. she cant stop. ever. regardless of what's available. so she stop being able to support me around the time I moved back here i think and now that she cant possibly ruin her bank account anymore she's set her sights on my granny's so i decided that i can no longer rely on anybody but me. I get paid weekly but i'm lucky to make over 110 bucks a check. I buy food when I can, took over my cell phone bill (about 100 a month), and it's awful, haha. i've always paid rent myself because thats the only thing I could afford and I wreck my car in April so I no longer have one. The silver lining is not that I dont have to pay anymore, but that I don't pay anyway because A) I couldn't if I wanted to (its 255.66 a month.) and B) because it probably need over 1,000 dollars worth of repairs. No I didn't have insurance! remember that whole "poor" thing. i couldn't afford it, nor could i afford to lose my car (or so I thought). So the situation is that i dont have a car, my credit is plummeting everyday because I cant pay a thing on what's left of it (about $2,000), I cant get another one since i'm poor and now have terrible credit anyway, and though I need another job I can't really look for one without a reliable way to get there. I trying to stay up though, i plan to move back to LA within the year with my girlfriend leigh (shes got stacks cuh) and there id live close enough to hollywood blvd to land a decent job or two. Things will hopefully get better for me so leighmur and I can chase our dreams together like we want so badly.

theirs a little bit about living independently. i'll be sure to mention more details as they unravel.

Sitting down is still unhealthy

Awhile back I read about how pretty much ANYTHING is healthier than sitting down on a website dedicated to real science. I visit the site pretty much every day because it's Fn' awesome and because I make it a point to learn something new everyday. Anywho, heres a lil' excerpt.

" A new study from American Cancer Society researchers finds it's not just how much physical activity you get, but how much time you spend sitting that can affect your risk of death. Researchers say time spent sitting was independently associated with total mortality, regardless of physical activity level. They conclude that public health messages should promote both being physically active and reducing time spent sitting."

Yup, there you have it. playing video games and watching tv all day STILL make you an unhealthy loser. Hell i've started standing while playing guitar cuz i could end up doing that for hours.

hit the link for the full article.

Demystifying the Iphone 4 Rumors

(photo via engadet)

Lets just jump right into this. The iphone 4's antenna is on the outside of the phone. It's the aluminum band that wraps around the side of the device itself ok? ok. there are three little black lines, one at the top towards the left and two near the bottom on either side. still with me? ok. the little black line at the bottom left seen in the photo above in front of the gentleman's ring finger is the one that's responsible for the shit storm that the media has unleashed on apple.

Here's the low down: every cellphone has an antenna, and when that antenna is covered by your hand YOUR RECEPTION DIMINISHES regardless of your make, model, or carrier. apple posted videos on their website demonstrating this with a blackberry bold, htc eris, samsung omnia 2 and even their own iphone 3gs. it's just physics. However, because the iphone 4's antenna is on the outside of the phone, the drop in reception is more than your average phone (i guess) but only if you're covering that black strip on the lower left side we talked about.

Before the iphone 4 no one cared but because the iphone is the iphone-or in other words the best phone ever people blew the whole thing out of proportion, and i mean way the fuck out of proportion. I heard some one ask if touching the strip made your phone SHUT OFF. not their fault. any combination of the media and stupid people can make things like that happen.

Of course more shit comes when Consumer Reports says that they cannot recommend the iphone 4 for that very reason AND they did some independent test experiments themselves to make sure. fine i guess thats fair but the one thing nobody seems to do is ASK PEOPLE WHO ALREADY OWN ONE. like me!

So is it as bad as they say? not on your insignificant little life it isn't. i got my I4 the day that shiz dropped son. straight pre-ordered it cuh-uh erm! anyway, heres some of my personal iphone 4 facts for you: the very first call i made DID drop (har har). I had an iphone 3G for two years and i'd say my dropped call rate started at occasional and slowly went to rarely. I have dropped others calls since but maintained just as many. or should i say just as few? what i mean is that i RARELY RARELY RARELY ever use my phone to talk. As a matter of fact I checked my minutes today and despite only getting 450 minutes a month i've managed to collect nearly 4,000 rollover minutes and thats not counting the couple thousand expired minutes that at&t has taken. this is my third year with at&t and although i don't care for the carrier (at&t) i'd put up with the worse for the iphizzle. also it is safe to blame at&t for dropped calls as well but not entirely.

Does that mean i'm not worth asking? fuuuuck naw, i still use the damn phone. i'm addicted to the internet and i'm constantly in my phone. i like my phone more than people and other than telephone usage I must say the whole "antennagate" thing is people trying to hurt the guy on top as with all number one competitors.

final words... iphone 4 is an EPIC win. the only other phone I can be happy with is the iphone 4x when or whatever that is.

heres a few or so videos showing other phones dropping bars when covering the antenna:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zft3-Lwh2bo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP67VXXJ79Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOVuf8WlBXo

ps. expect plenty of more iphone rambles!

77% of Iphone users plan to re-up

(photo courtesy of engadget)

Read today that 77% of iphone users are sticking with it for their next phone! why should you care right?! because the same articles (yes plural. I get my read on) said that a measly 20% of android users are willing to stay with that operating system or "OS" for those with a blank stare.

The funny part is that in an attempt to explain all of this (by one of the articles), they chalked it up to iphone users being distracted by the beauty of the phone and not caring about all of the problems it has... yeah no, it has nothing to do with all the reliability, simplicity, wonderfully executed everything (almost). i could go on but its more of a show and tell knida thing. Anyway, all i know is that ive owned, used, and watched sooo many reviews on other phones and there is no other choice for me personally. Shit I saw a app today that waits on hold for you when you're on the phone and calls you when you get connected FTW!

Yeah ive used an evo, it crashed TWICE in the time i spent with it. All of the transitions suffer from clipping is display looks like a joke after owning an iphone iv and combined with 4G it murders battery life. FAIL. your phone does cool stuff but only for the time you can use it. of course you can be one of those fools that carry their charger everywhere, but i digress..

I'll say this: people who own and understand the true nature the iphone will stick with it. the HTC EVO is definitely a good phone-great even, but the iphone 4 has truly set the bar again and unfortunately the evo came out first so they could copy what apple has done yet again: made every phone on the market look and feel like garbage.

formalities

First off, name's Corey Ernst-Davis, not e-r-n-E-s-t-Davis goddamn it, just E-r-n-s-t [hyphen] davis, and yes i have two last names. my parents never married.

Secondly, fuck blog spot for not having at least SOME auto correct (so if you expect a capital "i" an apostrophe or anything like that ALL the time, id just start reading something else.)

And third, here are things to expect from this blog and reasons for starting it!

Things to expect: well im a nerd so there will be tons and tons of nerd talk. (technology, science, math, philosophy, etc..) Also cars, guitar, comedy, art, fuckin' star wars and allllll that. ill put it to you this way, IM A GEEKOLOGIE FAN and ive got a shit ton of personal interest.

Reasons for making a blog: Surprisingly not narcissism. almost the opposite actually, ALMOST.

its more like..... hmmm... like i find few people that i know personally interesting and id rather talk to myself out loud on the internet via blog than talk to them. Should anyone want in on this action go right ahead, but be warned that your opinion means as much to me as Alderaan meant to Darth Vader. BA DUM CHING! see?! told this kinda thing would happen! but seriously lets do this shiz...