RESPECT

Last week I was in Budapest and I was amazed that the protestors are still there! I was on my way to a business dinner and I asked the taxi to drop me @ Parliament square (the HQ for the protestors). It wasn't a big crowd, 40 at max, but I respected the fact that they were peacefully fighting the system for a cause they believed is just. I hope they get the attention they deserve and most importantly an answer to their demands. I hope the protests don’t turn violent as they started, this I believe is a more effective way.

RESPECT.

The MOTHERLAND

All my life is believed home-sickness is crap, but now after relocating and living away from home for only 6 months, I must say: Home sickness is defiantly crap :D (you didn't see this coming didn't you? you were thinking I'll go for the cliché dude who had a change of heart ..han? Got you! ...but okay.. maybe a little home-sickness, keep it to yourself though!)

Well, you need to consider that all my life, my concept of a vacation was to go as far away from El-Cairo as possible. It's not that I hated El-Cairo, but I am person who LOVES change and I've been here most of my life, born, been to school, university and started working here. It's a bit too much :) Also living this long in one place tends to make you overlook the small things that make your life more fun. Be it as nice as being able to spend a little bit of time with your friends & loved ones or as simple as being able to read street names :D (My Polish SUCKS!).

I must run to indulge some more in El-Cairo, my advice to you is to plan your next vacation back to wherever that is home for you, after all, It's the best place to be.

The ONE second before the end of the world...

Why does Hollywood always try to deceive me? Unlike most ppl, I like to get my facts from my movies, its more fun that way. Now, we’ve all seen the "asteroid-hitting-the-earth" movies right? If you haven’t here’s my 1-minute summary:
1. A big-@$$ asteroid is discovered on a collision course with the Earth.
2. Governments get together and agree on a plan to nuke the asteroid in space.
3. The plan works, or not.
4. The earth is saved, or not.

So I was doing some reading and I came across the scientifically more correct version of the story, here goes:
1. Our chances of spotting the asteroid early on (1 year before impact) is less than 0.001%
2. IF we are that lucky, then nuking it won’t help much. Why? It is argued that even if successfully nuked all what will happen is that instead of one BIG asteroid heading our way, 5-7 medium ones will be. Not only this, we get them sprayed with radioactive sauce too, for FREE! yaaay!
3. IF we spot the asteroid 6 months or less before impact. We would be too late to act.
4. REALISTICALLY, in 99.999% of the cases, we will discover it only ONE second before impact.

Now, pause and reflect on that for a second…

Scientists tell us that because asteroids that are capable of destroying life on earth are relatively small (compared to other heavenly bodies: stars, planets …etc) they don’t reflect much light to be visible. The fact is they enter the Earth's atmosphere ONE second before impact and only then do they light up. Let me repeat this, you will only see the asteroid that is going to end life on earth with your naked eye only one second before it happens….. in 99.999% of the time.

See how Hollywood deceived me?! No ground shaking! No bright rock hurling in the sky! Nothing! It’s like being hit by a bullet in the head. You hear a BANG and then you’re gone. I understand why Hollywood added all those scenes, for a movie it’s defiantly more exciting, but realistically if the world is going to end; I like it quick and painless.

But hey that's me, What about you?

The MtoEtor (pronounced em-2-ee-tor)

Disclaimer: If you suffer from overconfidence in your scientific knowledge, then this post might cause you to commit suicide, it's a stupid post. If you however are not a science fan, you will love this post, you'll consider me an Alchemist. If you are my parents, pls send me money as I am broke. If you are a potential girlfriend, baby I am rich.

So I am reading in my new favorite book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and I come to this very interesting fact: Mass can be converted into Energy, just like that!

*The scientifically overconfident reader dies.

Okkay Okkay I am stating the obvious right? I mean for years we had nuclear plants that are producing vast amounts of energy from small amounts of material So I am not THAT stupid, the thing is, someone screwed up somewhere in my education and kind of convinced me that this principle applies ONLY to like those very rare radioactive elements (e.g. Plutonium , Uranium ..etc). So I went ahead to cruise through life unaware that we are actually swimming in a sea of energy! I mean you know Einstein’s famous E=mc2 and c is HUGE! so if you square that number and just multiply it by just one gram it would be huge! So the revelation I got is the fact that no matter if the element is very rare (like Plutonium) or very abundant .. say Copper or Iron .. the same principle holds! This automatically means that basically we are sitting ontop of a huge amount of energy beyond our wildest dreams!

*The scientifically-challenged reader is dazzeled by my revelation.

*The scientifically overconfident reader lost hope in anything interesting in this post.

.... but there's a catch, obviously it's way much easier for us to release energy from those heavy/unstable elements than it is to do that from more common/stable elements. But then again, I was surprised to learn that we are about 1% efficient in releasing Nuclear energy now from those heavy elements! So by a simple (and I am almost sure inaccurate) deduction I got my second revelation: What if in the future we find a way to release energy from more stable elements (again assume Iron) in a little bit more efficient way? So the drop in the total amount of energy that can be released is evened out by the more efficiency. And voila you’ve got yourself:

The MtoEtor

Note: Do you know that an average human being has around 7x10(18) joules of energy? So if I were to feed you to my MtoEtor you will generate an energy equivalent to 30 Uranium bombs in an instant... and you thought those suicide bombers with a belt of TNT explosives wrapped around them were dangerous? Think again!