Category: Here & There

Life On Mars?!

Could be…

A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.

What was found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.

[Source: Space.com]

My thoughts on this issue have always been mixed although most of the times I’m more inclined to believe that there must be life on other planets than earth.

I mean, come on, with all the planets, solar systems, galaxies and never-ending space, how can it be that life only exists on this little planet earth.

What do you think?

Cory Doctorow’s “I, Robot”

Cory Doctorow has a new short story called “I, Robot”. Why? Here’s what he says:

Last spring, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of Fahrenheit 451 to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf’s classic narratives.

Today, Infinite Matrix magazine published the latest of these, a story called “I, Robot”, which describes the police state that would have to obtain if you were going to have a world where there was only one kind of robot allowed and only one company was allowed to make it.

I think this should be very interesting.
I really liked Cory’s last novel “Eastern Standard Tribe”, and will sure be reading this short story.

[Via: Boing Boing]

HIV Aids vs. Cancer

Sometimes two wrongs can make a right…

US scientists hope to be able to use a harmless form of the Aids virus to seek and destroy cancer cells.

In the laboratory, the scientists took HIV and removed the parts of the virus that causes disease.

They then stripped off the virus’ outer coat and redressed it with the outer suit of another virus. By doing this, the researchers had changed the target of the virus.
HIV normally infects immune cells called T cells. The new outer coat instead directed HIV to hunt down molecules present on cancer cells, called P-glycoproteins.

The next step would be to insert a gene into the virus that would kill the cancer upon contact.

[Source: BBC News]

I always believed there was a lot of medical promise in genetics, and hopefully great scientists like these will use it to come up with ways to cure these haunting diseases and illnesses without turning people into mutants.

MBC4

In response to the launch and success of One TV, the guys at MBC have redefined their Channel 2 as the first free 24h/24 movie channel and launched MBC4 to group a bunch of imported sitcoms, soap operas, talk shows and news shows.

By doing this they’ve made both channels more interesting to watch. And aside One TV they’ve made leaving the couch in front of the TV a harder task to accomplish.

I especially enjoy the variety of sitcoms available now.
And it’s nice when I catch a movie here or there that I haven’t watched already or that I feel like seeing again.

Happy New Hijri Year 1426

I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Hijri Year 1426.

May it be a blessed, happy and joyful year for you all bringing you prosperity, success and great health.

On another note…
Even though this occasion is still marked all over the Islamic world, people are giving it less and less importance. It’s becoming more and more like one of those meaningless days off.
What is weird is that muslims are now celebrating all sorts of things from valentine’s day to halloween to christmas to almost everything, but they fail to truly celebrate the start of a new year in the Islamic calendar.

It’s been 1426 years since the muslims, led by prophet Mohamed (PBUH), migrated from Mecca to Yathrib (now Al Madina El Munawwarah), marking a very important point in the history of Islam.

I think muslims should give more importance to this day and teach their children more about their religion and its history.
I know that we’re all modern people of the future, but our history is part of who we are and that should never be forgotten or taken lightly.

Google Blogger Fired

Yet another blogger bites the dust for blogging about his job…

Mark Jen, a blogger whose candid comments about life on the job at Google sparked controversy last month, has left the company.

“Mark is no longer an employee at Google,” a Google representative said in response to an inquiry Tuesday. Efforts to reach Jen for comment were not immediately successful.

Jen’s departure comes less than a month after he joined Google as part of a wave of new hires and began recording his impressions of his new employer, including criticisms, in his blog.

[Source: CNet News]

I’m not sure what this guy wrote about Google and working there that got him fired. But I do know from previous stories of other people that it doesn’t always have to be a good enough reason.

Anyway some people do take it too far and deserve to be fired for what they blog.

My stand on this whole issue is that if you’re going to blog about your job, you might as well keep yourself anonymous and make sure no one from your company knows about it.
You never know what it is that you’ll write that will piss them off.

PalestineBlogs

It’s always a delight to see a new pro-Palestine blog being born, and this time it comes in the form of PalestineBlogs.

This new blog is an effort by our friend Sabbah, and it will provide users with a comprehensive overview of Palestine’s current and previous issues; news clippings; reblog news; a debate forum and a lot more.

It seems that some invitations will be sent to some pro-Palestine bloggers to join the editing team, which I think is a really great idea.

So, good luck to PalestineBlogs.
You can always count on me to help in anyway that I can.

Jailed For Using A Nonstandard Browser

A Londonder made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx — a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others — on Sun’s Solaris operating system.

British Telecom, the site-operator, misread an access log and saw it as a non-standard browser not identifying it’s type and doing strange things. They decided that this “unusual” event in the system log indicated a hack-attempt, traced the user’s IP and had the police go in SWAT style to arrest the donor while he was having his lunch.

The man is out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR for BT and the Police.

I think this is very dumb of British Telecom. They should know better than that.

Anyway, there’s one more good reason to move to Firefox. Either you do or you risk being arrested and jailed 😛

[Via: Boing Boing]
[In The News: BBC News]