The Samsung Omnia smartphone uses a touch screen

The technology for touch screens comes in a variety of different forms. There is resistive, surface acoustic wave, capacitive which includes surface capacitance and projected capacitance touch (PCT), infrared, strain gauge, optical imaging, dispersive signal technology, and acoustic pulse recognition. PCT touchscreen technology is used in a wide range of applications including smart phones, kiosk, and point-of-sale systems.

Most touch screens are typically operated by using the finger to interact with the images on the screen. However in some situations touch screens can suffer from the problem of fingerprints on the display. Also the images all buttons that need to be selected on the touch screen can be very small, such as in smart phones, making it difficult to use the finger. In that situation a stylus is quite often use. Even the fingernail can be used as a stylus if it is long enough.

Touch screens combined with haptics provides the user feedback when certain keys are pressed on the screen. For example the Samsung Omnia smart phone can make a slight vibration and buzzing sound to let the user know that a key has been selected. Study shows that is this reduces input errors and increases input speed.

Some people do find touch screens a little bit difficult to use with their fingers where the display is small. However when ergonomically designed, touchscreens make it easier for the user to interact with the device or gadget while saving space which would otherwise be used with a keyboard or mouse. Touch screens are definitely here to stay.

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Toshiba 200GB Portable HDD

Toshiba is going to start selling portable hard drives in addition to laptops and DVD players. The USB 2.0 external hard disk will be available in capacities ranging from 100 GB to 200 GB – the largest capacity yet available in a portable, compact form factor.

The device itself is less than 2.5 cm thick and smaller than a 10×15cm photo. It is designed to be used as a back up for computer documents, photos, videos, and music files. With its size, it is also rugged enough to be able to carry on business or leisure trips.

The price is thought to be around $130 for the 100 GB up to $230 for the 200 GB model. The previous top capacity for a portable hard disk was 160 GB.

Toshiba is already the 5th leading manufacturer of hard drives, and while the 200 GB disk makes it have the largest portable, it certainly won’t be long before capacities reach and surpass it.

Portable hard disks are a growing specialized market niche – 3.8 million units were sold in 2006, with over 6 million predicted to be sold in 2009. Then so much more in 2010. Stay tuned for the latest portable hard drive figures as soon as we get them.

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2012 Doomsday, coming soon.

There is a somewhat wideheld belief that the end of the Mayan Calendar – December 21, 2012 – will be the end of the world as well. Sure, it could be just another “doomsday” prophesy tossed out there, but there are quite a few interesting coincidences.

First, December 21, 2012 is the winter solstice. It is well known that the Mayans were advanced mathematicians and astronmers, so this might not be quite so coincidental. It should also be noted that there is an eclipse of the sun scheduled for November of 2012 – while not matching up exactly, the timing of celestial events with the ending of the calendar can be considered interesting. Some scientists also believe that when the Mayan Calendar finishes, it will simply start again for its second cycle with no apocalyptic ending to the world.

So, if the world is going to end, how will it happen? The prevailing theory seems to have to do with the Earth’s magnetic fields. This basically states that either the Earth’s magnetic field will reverse all at once, or that the Earth will slowly stop spinning, sit “still” for a few days, then begin spinning the opposite direction. The result of reversing magnetic fields are very very bad – mass flooding and earthquakes kind of bad. This theory is supported by the sunspot cycles of the sun which seems to be heading for a climax around 2012.

It has been proposed that the Earth occassionally reverses magnetic fields – the last of which theorized as having occrred around 780,000 years ago. It’s a bit difficult to say this with any degree of accuracy however, and until we actually witness (if?) this, it is just a theory.

Perhaps more interesting is the apparent dates of other “doomsday” prophecies – most notably Revelations. The 7-year Apocalypse is apparently scheduled to happen starting December 21, 2008, and run to 2015. So you’ll want to clear your calendars for that. While the exact date of the Apocalypse is never explicitly given, this site/book is interesting in that it takes a scientific approach moreso than a strictly religious one. Naturally, Nostradamus weighs in, but he’s been predicting disaster for how many years now – and considering his predictions run until around A.D. 3797, I think it’s safe to say that he’s not banking on the world ending.

Yet another popular argument to support this end of the world scenario is to look at past advanced civilizations. The Mayans essentially disappeared, the Romans and Egyptians eventually fell, and did Atlantis really exist? We can certainly consider our current state of advancement to be at least on par with what our ancestors were, so are we due for a regression as they were?

In the end, there’s really no way to know about this until it happens – sure, you can build that bunker and stockpile it with canned goods, but you’ll probably just end up wasting a bunch of time and money. As a final note, you should take everything above with a boulder of salt.

NOTE – This site details quite of bit of the 2012 doomsday predictions – assuming your eyes don’t burst from it, if you’re interested in this it’s a great resource.

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Mathematics and the fundamentals of the Cosmos

The object, called E8, was originally discovered in the 19th century. It has required the combined effort of 18 mathematicians from America and Europe over 4 years to unravel. It’s effects could be so far-reaching, that scientists cannot even comprehend what they could be. It may be years before we can truly understand what, if any, effect this object could have on our understanding of the universe.

To further understand why this group of symmetries is so revolutionary, you have to look at nature. Interestingly, at the heart of E8, are different bits of physics. Of all the symmetries that mathematicians have discovered, it is still unclear why Nature chose this exceedingly complicated object to the basis.

For more on this, check out this article.

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Google Phone

In what is sure to affect their stock ratings, Google has admitted to having a “phone project” in the works. Now, in typical google fashion, they are rather tight lipped about the details, and speculation has people guessing that they’re introducing their own phone to compete with Apple’s upcoming iPhone. However, there is a pretty good chance that the phone project has nothing to do with hardware, and will instead focus on what has already made Google billions – advertising.

Google already has a number of applications that take advantage of mobile browsing. And with exponentially more people using cell phones than the internet, it’s only a matter of time before more people starting browsing the web from their cell phones.

Other sources, however, have claimed that it will be an actual phone – and not like the iPhone, Apples ultra expensive, ultra trendy upcoming device. Instead, it will be a mass market phone aimed at bringing the search engine to users who don’t necassarily have a PC. It is thought that if Google chooses this approach, it will be partnering with an existing handset maker and not doing all the development on its own.

If Google does develop its own phone, it has the potential to make it even more money. With the mobile internet market still relatively undeveloped, if Google gets a foothold in the door early on, it will be exceedingly difficult to get it out, much like Microsoft is with its operating system.

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Bull Lyre invented by Ancient Sumarians of Iraq

The bull lyre is one of three excavated from the royal cemetery of Ur. Each lyre had a different animal head protruding from the front of the sound box to denote its pitch: the bull lyre was bass, the heifer lyre was tenor and the stag lyre was alto, with all three being made of wood. The bull lyre stood roughly 1.2 meters high. The sound box was defined by a broad border of mosaic in shell, lapis lazuli and red paste, and this border continued onto the rectangular upright arms. The strings were tied to the crossbar and strung down over the bridge to connect at the base of the sound box. Researchers believe the notes constituted the same scale as Queen Shub-Ad’s harp and were achieved by the tension of the strings rather than the length.

The Sumerians were also believed to have invented their own system of writing, as well as the wheel. However, it can be difficult to give distinct credit because other civilizations have also “invented” the wheel and systems of writing, without prior contact to the Sumerians. As such, it can be assumed that they were invented independently of one another.

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When the conquistadores invaded in 1518, they ran across Aztec prostitutes chewing gum on the corners.


The actual discovery of chewing gum came a few hundred years earlier, however, by the Mayans. They found that chicle, a thick milky liquid that oozes out of cuts made in the wild sapodilla tree and then hardens into gum, was extremely tasty when chewed. As with many other popular pastimes, the importance of chicle to the Maya is clearly from their mythology: The culture hero Kukulkan (”the Feathered Serpent”), who conquered the Maya and changed their way of life to such an extent that he became worshiped as a god, was a great chewer of gum.

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British inventor William Sturgeon was the inventor of a device that would be the foundation for later electronic communications. This invention was called the electromagnet. The power of this was demonstrated when he used a seven once piece of iron with wires wrapped around it to lift nine pounds – the electric current was generated by a single cell battery.
Then, in 1830, Joseph Henry, an American, sent an electronic current over one mile of wire to which caused a bell to ring. This can be thought of as the moment that the telegraph was born. Next up was Samuel Morse.

In 1835, while he was a professor at New York University, Morse proved that signals could be transmitted via wire. By using pulses of currents to deflect an electromagnet, he was able to move a marker and produce written code on a piece of paper – commonly known as Morse Code. The following year, the device was modified to include dots and dashes. In 1838 he gave a public demonstration, but it was not until 1843, five years later, that he received $30,000 to construct an experimental telegraph line from Washington D.C. to Baltimore, a distance of 40 miles.

The first public message sent was on May 1, 1944, when Henry Clay was nominated at the Whig party national convention. Morse’s partner, Alfred Vail, wired this news to the capital, thus making it the first ever news dispatched via electronic telegraph.

The message sent, “What hath God Wrought?” was sent from the old Supreme Court Chamber to Baltimore opened the line telegraph line on May 24, 1844. Annie Ellsworth, the daughter of one of Morse’s friends, chose the message from Numbers XXIII, 23. The early Morse telegraph produced a paper printout of dashes and dots, which were then translated by an operator.

By this time Morse and his partners began to receive private funding to extend the line to Philadelphia and New York. Smaller telegraph companies also began to spring up throughout the US. In 1851, another landmark accomplish occurred – trains were dispatched using the telegraph. Western Union also began business in this year, and in 1861 completed the first transcontinental telegraph line.

Originally, Morse code was printed on paper. Eventually this advanced to trained operators who could receive transmission by ear, and tape was discarded in favor of human operators, who could transmit up to 50 words per minute.

Advancements continued with the Telegraph, but it all started with a British inventor.  Samuel Morse applied what was already known in a different, and ultimately brilliant fashion.

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Amazing architecture of a Mayan Temple

Mayan inventions include a calander and a complex heiroglyphics system. While it cannot be said that they were the sole inventors of such advancements, they did invent them independently in the Western Hemisphere, and their calendar and wrintings differed from that of the Egyptions and Chinese.

While not strictly an invention per se, Mayan art is widely considered to be some of the most beautiful created in the ancient world. The jade pictured can be seen to be inscribed with very specific details.

Also interesting is that the Mayans independently developed a concept of zero in their numbering system. While not generally considered a civilization known for their mathematics, they did nonetheless have an advanced grasp of it. Many of their dates and measurements are surprisingly specific.

Astronomy is another field that the Mayans. Again, the Mayans are not as well known as other ancient civilizations for their astronomy, but data suggests they were surprisingly advanced in their findings. They are thought to be the only pre-telescopic society that realized the Orion Nebula is fuzzy. While this is not known for certain, the information comes from a folk tale that references the Orion constellations part of the sky.

The Mayan’s were a surprisingly advanced race, and usually are not mentioned with the likes of the Chinese and Ancient Greeks for inventiveness. But they actually had much in common with their European and Chinese counterparts.

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Bifocal Lens

As most people know, Benjamin Franklin had numerous inventions that ranged from small convienences to incredible things that changed how people lived. The bifocals didn’t necassarily change how people lived, but they were more than a small improvement for anyone who had multiple sets of glasses to wear.

He is credited with the invention somewhere in the 1960’s, with the first evidence of them coming in a 1964 political cartoon. His first reference to his double spectacles came in a letter in 1984, quite a few years after the original invention.

His original design had the more convex lens placed on the bottom of the glasses (close viewing), while the lesser convex lens was placed on the upper half. Originally the lens’s were actually 2 seperate ones put into the same frame – it wasn’t until the 20th century that lenses were fused together to create bifocals.


While the bifocals are a great convienence for many, they are known to cause dizziness and headaches because of the differing perspectives. This is similar to how you may feel after wearing glasses that aren’t your prescription for an extended period of time.

By their very nature, bifocals offer a limited field of vision for the differeing distances. This can cause wearers to move reading material instead of their heads when reading, to make sure that what they are reading stays in the correct perspective.

This is just one of the examples of how Ben Franklin took a problem that people had, and found a solution.

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