Nero's Favorite NWT article

Well, this is an article from the Belgian/Dutch magazine called NWT.
NWT stands for natuur wetenschap techniek. Translated it means Nature Science Engineering (people who know Dutch, please correct me when I'm wrong) .

Calendar Misery


The Maya's used a calendar inaccurate which, according to Hollywood would end in 2012, but after all they were wrong, and it ends in 2220. If you were hoping to experience the end of the world yourself, it's not going to happen.

But are we doing that much better ourselves? Since Pope Gregorius we are screwing around with months of either 30 or 31 days, in which it is impossible to fit exactly 4 weeks. Furthermore, A February with 28 or 29 days?
As always, God could have made it much easier, if he would have made the earth turn around the suns in exactly 364 days, and we could have a year made of 13 months with exactly 28 days, in which each month fits exactly 4 weeks of 7 days.
But no, a year fits 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds in a year. Or 365,242199 days. The addition of a 29 day in February every 4 years adds 1/4 of a day. However, you don’t add a extra day in years that can be divided by 100, like 1900. This subtracts 1/100 of a day. But this rule doesn’t count when you have a year dividable by 400 (like 2000), adding 1/400 of a day.
So the Gregorian calendar counts 365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/400 = 365.2425 days.
This is 0.000301 days or 26 seconds too long. On average New year moves up its orbit by 780 kilometers per year. This means that in the year 600.000 B.C. Christmas will take place in the middle of the summer.
That’s not exactly a good thing. That’s why we made a new, improved calendar. We add days like this:
1) Add a day to years which can be divided by 3, but not by 8.
2) Add 2 days to every year that can be divided by 100.
3) These 2 rules don't affect each other, so the year 2100 counts 3 extra days.

The average year now counts 365 + 2/9 + 1/50 = 365.242222 days. This is just 0.000023 days, or 2 seconds to long. Now Christmastime stays in the winter for the next million year.


So, correct me when i misspelled or made grammatical mistakes. Hope you find it interesting, and feel free to say what you think. If you like, i will select my favorite article every month, and Type it in English and post it here.

Confusing!

lol, you liked it?

yeah nice

buuut, ever heard a guy called Nostradamus?
a guy who put hidden meanings in everyday items, for the future to reval, who also predicting the end in 2012, lost of peopls keep on doing predictions a very long time ago, makes you think will something happen?

yes as seriti said confusing but good to read.

Yep it's interesting.

You want me to post every month?

@ everyone who liked it: Thanks

Why not? A way to get more posts, isn't it Avatar??
Joking ^^
Sure, post it!

More articles?

Seriti wrote:More articles?

+1 The more things to talk about for you science fans the better! =D The world after all is a huge place, and there are many mysteries of life to be discussed! (Scientifically of course!)

Im Realy sorry it took me so long, I know I said I would post at least once a motnh, but I will try to do it this time.
Memory
Who remembers the 3.5" floppy disk? High density was written in big, proud letters on the 90*90 mm plastic box. It could hold a astonishing 1.44 Mbyte.
What did you say? Yes, 1.44 Megabytes. That's about 800 times less than those memory sticks you get for 2$. I still have a old digital camera, witch - state of the art in 1999 - had a memory card of 16 Mbyte, enough for 5 Full-resolution photos!
In 2000 you payed 1€ per Mbyte of rewritable memory, you now pay 10 cents for 1 Gbyte. This spectacular trend has loads of commercial consequences, like illegal downloading. If Harddrive space costed as mutch as 10 years ago, youd be payin more money downloading it onto you hdd than simply buying the CD.
What should we thank for this? The key word is miniaturization. The capacity of USB and flashcards follow Moors law, which says that the the size required for the same amount of memory halves every 18 months. This is both for hard drives, Solid state discs and flash memory, so also for USB stiks. The chips are made with a combination of optical, electrical and chemical techniques. The chips arte made on a silica plate, the size of a dish. The cost of one dish barly changed over the last 10 years, but as they get double the amount of data on one dish every 1.5 years, the price / Megabyte halvens.
For HDD's - magnetic memory that is read by a minuscule head - the speed is even higher. This is thanks to giant magneto resistance, discovered by Albert Fert and Peter Grünenberg . This quantommichanical effect of a magnetic field on an electric resistor made it possible to make the reading head much smaller, due to which the space needed for a certain amount of data changed too. In 2010 Data storage is in a sertain way unlimited. Who buys a 3 Tbyte hard drive, probably fails to fill it with (useful) data. This because it can hold 10.000 hours of high quality music and 50.000 High-res pictures of you last holiday to Spain and 10.000 e-books and 2.000 hours of video for the kids.
Because everything is stored by default nowadays, you easily lose track of everything. Practicly 99% of all the petabytes stored on HDD's, Flashcards, Memory cards, SSD's, … will never be looked at again.
According to professor Piet Kruit of the Charged Particle Optics Group at the Technical university of Delft Moors law will keep steady for a few ears. "Its Just a matter of time before we see 1000 gByte memory sticks. That data will probably be used for other peruses than video and audio. Im Thinking of super translators, where you would speak a sentence in English, and it would be instantly translated into Chinese." This use would not rely on a superpower full translating computer, but a huge database with English sentences and there Chinese equivalent. "It would take enormous Dataspace and superpower full searching software, something that we do not have now, but, over time, will become reality." Nero

didn't understand much thing, just the part that downloading would be more expensive than buying the CD.. xD

lol, sorry then xD

I do remember the floppy disk, in fact we were still using when I first entered high school, but less than a year later the latest trend of using USB sticks pretty much wiped floppy disks off the map once and for all. I can't think of anyone now that would use a floppy disk that isn't 'westernized' enough to know that a USB flash stick is much more versatile and has much more storage and functional use.

As for the huge storage capacities we have now for computer harddrives, flash drives, USB drives, external harddrives, I do agree that it is possible all that storage can become wasted space. Traditionally, people carefully chose what music and photos they wanted to keep because there was limited space. This way people also tended to look at them more often every once in awhile. With the huge terabyte storage spaces, it's quite true that pictures, music, and files are going to get lost in there because people don't take time to organize them any more. They just go "Yah, I got tons of storage, take lots of pics! I'll print them a few months later or something...don't have time now to organize..." Then a few months later, you won't be able to find those pictures again because they are buried underneath 3 months more of new pictures etc.

My family also has been telling me that taking family pictures, and memorable pictures of trips, birthdays, etc, are very important, but it's just as important to actually take GOOD pictures that you actually want to see over and over again. In today's age of technology, so many people just snap, snap, and snap away with their cameras, end up having 400 pictures for a small family birthday, and then get too lazy to organize them properly or to choose the best ones to print for a picture album. (At least picture albums are better than storing 400 pictures you'll never see again).

I've had to apply the same concept to Savage too. I tend to take lots of screenshots, but I have quickly learned taking so many screenshots isn't that useful unless I choose which pictures I want to take. I use to take so many screenshots each game that it wasted my time after the match trying to sort them all out, and I ended up getting too lazy to continue doing anything with them. So I never ended up using them or uploading them. Nowadays I try to only take screenshots I know I will use realistically, I also save myself time and use my computer space more efficiently. xD

Seriti i would luagh but it wasnt funny
Only jkin i pissed myself cos i know its true

I think people should realy take time to go over everything. A few weeks ago, our pc broke (it was due to a broken northbridge cooler and safety procedures prevented startup) and all my wife was thinking was "oh, all our pictures, our pictures." but when the pc was fixed, and i took a look in the spiderwebb of folders, i noticed all pictures were just watched once, and that was when they were uploaded. since the pc is back online, nobody even cared to take a shot at making backups from them. and nobody has watch'ed them since. But then again, i think the psycolodgicel side of it, the know that when you lose a member of the family, you have tonns of pictures with him/her (although i dont think they can even vagly come close to the actual person) can be a reaashuring fact. so maby, behind the mess of files, 0's and 1's, there is some use. but just sort them out, it takes 5 minuits. and saves you loads of time later onn

Yeah, I think I hoard pictures of family stuff because if someone passes away (grandmother, uncle, etc for me), then it is a psychological kind of safety net. It's actually one of the reasons why I used to (and still do sort of xD) take tons of pictures of things. It evolved from my habit of just taking a lot of pictures of stuff so I don't ever 'lose' the memory. >.< Should learn to let go...but...but...it's hard... ^^;