Interesting Finds

The 200 GB Photo

Believe it or not, there's a photograph of Budapest,Hungary that is 70 gigapixels in size! That's 70 billion pixels, around 70,000 standard digital photographs, and probably the size of the entire city itself! If you dare, you can download the photograph from this link and it will only occupy a measly 200 gigabytes of hard drive space (and probably an entire year's worth of bandwidth as well)

100 million Facebook Profiles in a torrent

A hacker from an alleged cyber-security company just downloaded 100 million Facebook profiles, or around 1/5 of the global Facebook population, and compressed it into a cool 2.8 gb file that can be downloaded via torrent. So there's a one in five chance that anyone's profile could have been mixed up there. Gives me the chills to think that somebody half the world away could be torrenting my profile now. This open, connected world has already forgotten about the value of privacy. Facebook = Big Brother.

The god particle

Scientists are getting closer to discovering the god particle. Remember in high school when we studied how matter is made up of molecules, which we later discovered to be made up of atoms, which in turn is made up of even smaller particles called electrons, protons, and neutrons, which in fact are composed of quarks, gravitons, gluons and other primordial particles? Well, with the help of the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, the seemingly endless scales of smallness could end with the imminent discovery of the smallest possible particle called the Higgs-Boson. It's probably called the god particle because it is already the most basic ingredient God used to weave the universe. And it can't get any smaller already since that would already be a photon or light particle. In short, the Higgs-Boson is also the particle that draws the line between light and matter. Interesting...

The Blackpad???

Moving on to tech, Blackberry is purportedly brewing up its version of an Ipad Killer, to be called (what else) the Blackpad. Talk about originality. Will it prove to be the Darth Vader to Apple's Luke Skywalker? It's been reported that the original king of smartphones has been lagging behind its more aggressive rivals - Apple and Google. Right now, Blackberry is simply playing catch-up. Meanwhile, Apple is reaping the fruits of its creativity and innovation, as it has already overtaken Microsoft to be the world's largest tech company, and will probably soon overtake Exxon Mobil to become the largest US company by market cap. To think that in 1997 they needed a bailout from rival Microsoft just to avoid bankruptcy. And to think that before the Iphone in 2007 Blackberry had a virtually insurmountable lead in the smartphone market. Amazon was also at the forefront of the ebook market with the release of the Kindle a few years back, but now it has to come out with a lower-priced and revamped Kindle 3 in order to survive against the Ipad onslaught. It's really amazing, how volatile the tech world is. At this point, every product release can potentially turn the world upside down with the scale and magnitude of changes. Oh well, the competition and the paradigm shifts can only be good news for the consumers.