Life elsewhere

Interesting poll and interesting results....
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/channel/extraterrestrial/poll.html

Now, this was a poll on whether extra-terrestrial life exists and whether we (as in, humans) would make contact with above mentioned life forms and so on; and it was conducted via live TV with respondents sending in their opinions through SMS (and maybe through a telephone survey). I don't know about you but I don't really think that the "great unwashed masses" are the right people to be asking about aliens. I can understand polls for what should happen to the evil 'bahu' on the many serials-starting-with-the-letter-K on Indian TV channels, but aliens...?! I'm sure the general TV-watching public in any country wouldn't be all that different from that out here. It would be really amusing to have this poll on Indian TV too... but I would love to ask people to send in detailed answers (100 words, 10 marks anyone?) explaining their choice(s).

Here's an example:

15. If beings from another planet sent a message to us through deep space, do you think we would be able to figure out what they were saying?

50% Yes
38% No
11% Don't Know

I wonder how so many people (going by the percentages, of course) can have strong positive or negative views about something that is essentially unknown. Even if I were to have to make a decision about either of the first two choices, I would tend more towards the No than the Yes - people can barely understand others speaking the same language with a different accent, but here they are, claiming that we would positively be able to undertand what beings from another planet have to say!

Slashdot always has something to say about everything. Here are some choice comments on this topic:

"I read somewhere (lost the link) that on some surveys more young people believe that aliens exist than that they will get anything from the social security system."

"They should also ask if the Earth is flat or the Sun revolves around the Earth. This would separate the science types who base their 'Yes' on sound scientific reasoning and the new-age type who will believe anything just so long as the government denies or refuses to comment on it."

"Do you really believe that the average person even knows that UFO is an acronym and tell you what it stands for? Most people probably believe that UFO means alien aircraft, not anything else. As for whether "aliens exist", again, your question is pretty specific. Unless the poll was asking the scientific community, the average person doesn't consider the odds of life existing based on the large number of planets, but rather they exist or not, period."

"Meanwhile, only a resounding 5% of life on other planets believes that there is intelligent life on Earth."

Assembler

Spent some time this weekend helping to get my friend's new PC up and running. Unlike most of my upgrades over the past few years, this was a new system altogether; that's always an experience in itself.

We would have done this long ago, except that the parts that my friend wanted were not really available all in one shot. He was even thinking of ordering a motherboard and a graphics card from a dealer in Kolkata... but finally we got everything out here in Bangalore.

His new system is an Athlon64 3200+ with 512MB x 2, 120GB SATA disk, MSI Platinum motherboard with SLI (though I don't think he's ever going to use that feature) and an MSI 6600GT graphics card (with 128MB of DDR3 RAM). Cost him a lot of money, come to think of it. Putting the heat sink onto the CPU was a nightmare in itself, I kept thinking that the plastic arm would break off altogether. Then we had a lot of fun opening up the front of the case to put together the front-USB ports, one works while the other one doesn't. His cabinet has openings for USB at the top as well, but we didn't put anything there yet.

Got myself a new monitor too: http://www.samsung.com/in/products/monitors/CRTMonitors/professionalrange/997df.asp

Interesting device?

Nokia's 770 Internet Tablet : 800x480 widescreen display, runs Linux

Blogspot?

Just noticed that I've got some random hits by people clicking on the blogspot bar at the top to go to the "next blog". I've never done that myself, but the fact that some people do it shows... what?

Voyager I and II

I've been following the reports from these two spacecraft since I was a child. Of course all that almost came to a stop when I was in college and later, probably because there wasn't much excitement once they left the planets behind.

Voyager Enters Solar System's Final Frontier

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered the solar system's final frontier, a vast, turbulent expanse where the Sun's influence ends and the solar wind crashes into the thin gas between stars.

Here's the link, the site has some nice photos too...
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/voyager_agu.html

Long time no write

I haven't posted to this blog for a VERY long time. Meanwhile, I was monitoring the hits to this site. I have an average of 2 visitors per day, even without anything new in here! The referral logs show that most of them are from search engines that somehow find random words in my blog matching very odd search queries.

For example, there's this person searching for "murga punishments"! I won't hazard a guess to why he needs this information, but the fact is that he keeps hitting my site every so often. Of course, I absolutely decline to post anything that might interest him here.

Then there are the poor souls trying to find drivers for the M6805. The drivers are all there on the DVD that came with the system, and are probably available on many places on the web too. If you need anything specific, leave a comment and I'll try to help. If you need video drivers for the Mobility Radeon 9600, they are not there on the ATi website. ATi wants you to download them from your system manufacturer's site, and of course they are not there on emachine's site. The normal 9600 drivers from ATi's site don't work. You can try the Omega drivers instead, just google for "Omega drivers ATi", you can't miss it.

Finally, I did see a few people redirected from Veera's blog. Since the time I stopped writing here and started posting random links (and then stopped that too), I've seen that my friends' blogs are collecting a small but loyal readership. The key is certainly frequent updates, but I'm not motivated enough to do that unless I know I have readers and I won't have readers unless I update, etc.