By Antoine, on August 6th, 2010%
It looks like a cockroach but it has no antenna and appears to have its abdomen shell sutured preventing it from flying. Nonetheless, its by far the largest insect I’ve ever encountered in nature. While at my friend’s place, I grabbed the latest issue of National Geographic, opened a random page an saw a big photo of this very bug in all its splendor. It was part of a small feature on entomophagy. Turns out this is a benacus deyrolli, or a giant water bug as its commonly referred to. I should have been more careful, the Wikipedia article mentions that
Their bite is considered one of the most painful that can be inflicted by any insect (the Schmidt Sting Pain Index excludes insects other than Hymenoptera); the longer the bug is allowed to inject its saliva, the worse the resulting bite, and as the saliva liquefies muscle tissue, it can in rare instances do permanent damage. [...] Occasionally when encountered by a larger predator, such as a human, they have been known to “play dead” and emit a fluid from their anus. Due to this they are assumed dead by humans only to later “come alive” with painful results.
When I . . . → Read More: An impressive find
By Antoine, on July 20th, 2010%
The final product
One of my friends, who creates music as a hobby, recently bought a pair of AKG 601 headphones. While I do listen to a fair amount of music, I would not consider myself an audiophile or anything close to that. However, those headphones do make a difference I can notice in the quality (or lack thereof for low bit rate MP3s) of whatever is being played. There is only one small problem with them. Being massive open headphones, my friend’s sound card is only able to put out an acceptable level of sound at maximum volume; his MP3 player, on the other hand, is simply incapable of driving them. The AKG 601 have a rated impedance of 120 Ohms while normal earbuds seem to be around 20. As a result of a soundcard’s output impedance being too high, a normal speaker output is not capable of providing enough current to the headphones.
They are huge, expensive and leak a lot of sound, so he does not plan to use them on bus rides, but there are still some serious downsides with having to drive them at maximum volume:
Levels of distortion . . . → Read More: CMoy headphone amplifier
By Antoine, on February 18th, 2010%
In Wikipedia, articles are evolved word by word by contributors to a stable form that reflects consensus. Hence, the rate of change in articles not about ongoing events will tend to diminish over time. Trough having spent a considerable amount reading a vast array of articles, I am confident in claiming that Wikipedia maintains a consistent agnostic point of view with regards to religion (as mandated by its encyclopedic nature). Divinity is definitely present, but it is constrained to where mentions of it are pertinent. In other words, Wikipedia is a secular organization and has become so solely by the consensus of its members; consensus trough discussion and reason.
On the hypothesis that Wikipedia is contributed to by people of all walks of life but with the common characteristics of having been educated in a modern schooling system and being intelligent enough to achieve the level of writing implicitly required. I think I can advance that any society or group of individual that attains a similar level of knowledge, regardless of where they started will, given enough time, necessarily become exempt from irrational belief. Only with Wikipedia, this stabilization came about much faster due to its relatively small size, its virtual nature . . . → Read More: Wikipedia as hope of an agnostic society
By Antoine, on January 25th, 2010%
If the world really is seven thousands years old or not no one can say for sure. But then again, we might all live in a Matrix and our lives are only a massive conspiration… Conjecture aside, I found out that Evolution is in a sense compatible with Creation. Actually, not the Creation as portrayed in the Bible but nonetheless an act of creation. Anyway, the Bible is a big metaphor and thus should not be taken word for word: the world is way too complicated to have been created piece by piece. I would want my God to be a smart individual, and just like any other individual with brains, this God would have devised a technique to generate this universe without making too much of an effort.
However, there are absolutely no signs that would make Creation remotely plausible. Creation is in a sense only a philosophical possibility. Everything points towards Evolution as the key process that generated complexity. But what if God had used it to save a bit of time? As a process and most likely a mathematical one, Evolution could be an equation that feeds back on itself, be chaotic and would self-generate complexity. It also would . . . → Read More: Reconciliating Creation and Evolution
By Antoine, on December 4th, 2009%
In America, Most of the people are atheistic about gods like Thor, some daring individuals go one god . . . → Read More: Atheistic about Thor
By Antoine, on November 30th, 2009%
The link between demographics and climate, although logically evident (more humans -> more pollution), has been spoken of very little during the whole debate until now. The new report on the state of population and climate change that has been published by the UN, while being full of euphemisms and very careful about its words, it finally challenges the taboo and sheds the light on this issue. We can attribute the difficulty of bringing this argument to the table on the bad reputation population control policies have and it’s obvious conflict with more conservative religious organization, but the time for screwing around is up. This problem, while caused entirely by our actions as a race, can have consequences that are far bigger than humanity and only science has so far been capable of solving problems of inhuman scale. Now, I can see from miles away the great organized religions coming to interfere with resolving this crisis.
Everyone with a half-decent knowledge of psychology and philosophy will know perfectly well that us humans have a natural aversion to all that is dehumanizing. Yes, I can understand why birth control and abortions are considered immoral by some, but now is not the time . . . → Read More: Climate, demographics and religion
By Antoine, on November 20th, 2009%
My mind is almost set on getting rid of my Mac, there are just a few bits here and there I need to get over with. I got convinced by the viral Windows 7 campaign and will be swi… No, I will actually start using Linux as my desktop OS. It have been soliciting its services for quite a while on a bunch of servers and only now have I got to fully appreciate its power and architecture. So much that it has lately become overly tempting to make the plunge. In fact, I had been contemplating this as a necessary outcome only a few months after purchasing that 2400 CDN$ Macbook Pro and cementing my switch from Windows XP to *nix only. Yes, Mac OS X is a great OS, but I knew deep down that I would get over all its bells and whistles pretty soon; what really amazed me was its Unix core and that my next machine would not be a Mac but something with Linux on it.
Mac OS X is kind of like a pretty but stupid girlfriend. When the charm dissipates, all that is left is a hollow shell of a human. Linux, on the . . . → Read More: Farewell Mac
By Antoine, on October 27th, 2009%
I recently did a bit of thinking about the relation between consciousness and evolution and how both of them are certainly the main causes of the human self-importance syndrome, or a necessary bias towards what favors us. I got this idea from this TED talk, which is very well worth taking 15 minutes to listen to for it is a very good lesson in humility.
We all pride ourselves of being conscious creatures. It is what seems to differentiate us the most from other animals and is pretty much the only advantage we have over them; a human without his intelligence is defenseless against nature and certainly near the bottom end of the food chain. Some may think this mental capacity was a gift of some higher being but this is entirely debatable and completely biased since as sole owners of consciousness, we find ourselves incapable of making an objective statement about it. If it wasn’t the case, then anything could claim consciousness but thanks to reason and logic, we know the answer cannot come from us but from observation so we should try adopting an outsider’s perspective if we wish to find a reasonable explanation.
If we look in other living . . . → Read More: Tricked by consciousness
By Antoine, on October 9th, 2009%
Twitter describes itself as a micro-blogging service, which tends to be a bit misleading in my opinion. To me, a blog is (amongst other things) a personal journal with which you can share anything, from emotions to ideas. I guess I could use Twitter for that purpose, but the shortness of the tweets (140 letters limit) gives me the impression it is better suited for advertisement and petty conversations.
As I mentionned in a previous post, I really like what I write to remain pertinent troughout time and Twitter just drops the ball on this; I do not care about my opinion of the weather a few months ago (people tweet about this a lot it seems(and it’s the alma matter of office conversations)). There is no blogging whatsoever involved in twittering my state, or else, I should be able to consider all the content that sits in /var/log (on unix machines) to be blogging.
A blog post gives me the opportunity to sit back and think about specific events, thoughts or places that marked an otherwise normal day; its intellectual retrospection and makes me a better individual. On top of . . . → Read More: Twitter is just a cacophony
By Antoine, on September 14th, 2009%
A few days ago, I got fed up with the firmware of my MP3 player (Sansa e250) acting all quirky and refusing to mount under Linux 90% of the time. I searched the Web for an alternative solution, stumbled on RockBox and promptly installed it. There are plenty of RockBox reviews around the web so it would be pointless to give my own or get into writing a tutorial, but I must say that if you even feel slightly dissatisfied of your MP3 player firmware or just want more, then you ought to give RockBox a try. Its obscenely easy to install and uninstall and using it for the first time felt like a breath of fresh air and even got me that strange empowering feeling I always get whenever I install Linux on a computer that did not know any better. It’s too bad there its not more publicized, people should be aware that alternatives exist even for their MP3 player firmware. RockBox comes with all options you could ever think of and supports a huge amount of formats. As an example, the speaker in my right ear bud is damaged and does not play as strong as the . . . → Read More: RockBox
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