Sometimes I wonder how things work. For example the "Doppler effect". The doppler effect the phenomena you hear when an ambulance drives by and the sound of their horns sounds deeper after it passed by you then before.

I had a look at the Wikipedia and found this animation:

But I really don't think it explains anything and I would like to explain it "the other way around".

Lake example

Suppose you're on a lake in a small speedboat. In the middle of the lake there is a really big machine which every 5 seconds (this means at a static rate/speed) drops a big stone into the lake.

You drive the boat at a constant speed directly in in the direction to where the machine drops the stones and measure the time between you hit every wave.

Then after you drove by the machine at the middle of the lake you carry on in the same direction and the same speed and measure the time between each wave hits you.

I wrote a little interactive simulation to demonstrate it:

(Sadly you need a browser capable of svg and html5. Or you can watch the video.)

As you can see the rate at that the waves hit the boat is much greater before the center and much lesser after it passed it. And because the tone pitch is just the frequency of a soundwave it is a different tone before the ambulance has driven by you and after that. When you sitt within the ambulance, the tone pitch doesn't change.

Try to change the speed of the (green) boat to see what happens. Per default it has the same speed as a wave.

Boring theory?

But to be honest, the ambulance example is probably the most boring example of this effect.

There are plenty of very cool examples, and not only with sound waves but all sorts of waves like radar or light waves.

The bat, for example, can sense in which direction the insect is moving based on the pitch of the echo. If the insect is moving away from the bat, the returning echo will have a lower pitch than the original sound, while the echo from an insect moving toward the bat will have a higher pitch. The bat of course uses sound waves and this is also called sonar. They are so specialized to calculate where their pray is that they "see" it, even when they are flying and moving on their own.

Have you ever been stopped by the police who drove behind you for some time and they said that you were speeding? Then they also have used the Doppler effect in exactly the same way the bat did but not with sound waves but with electromagnetic waves and their radar instead.

Or have you ever wandered how the scientists found out that the universe is expanding? They too used the doppler effect; Not with sound waves or electromagnetic waves but with light waves. Depending on which frequency the light wave has it appears as a different color in our brain. But the Doppler effect does work on all kinds of waves, therefore on light too.

Because light always travels with the same speed (speed of light) it should have exactly the same wave length independently of where from it comes. But if you measure the wavelength you can see that light from all other galaxies shifted to red, which means the waves are longer and therefore the source of the light is moving away from us (like the center of the sea on the boat on the second half of your journey). (More info)

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I was listening to Christopher Hitchens (audio-) book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and he was talking — among other things — about male circumcision (which of course is mild and gentle in comparison to the female genital cutting. I'll not get into this here but you should read the Wikipedia article!).

He was, as I found out after some research, talking about the Jewish "metzitzah".

What is Metzitzah?

The mohel brings the baby’s organ into his mouth immediately after the excision of the foreskin and sucks blood from it vigorously.

See Metzitzah B’peh Controversy: The View from Israel.

As far as I understand it: After cutting of the skin of a baby-boys penis the mohel — often a rabbi — takes the penis in to his mouth and sucks on it, so the bleeding stops.

I know, it sounds disturbing and like pedophile child abuse and that's how it is done today in America, Israel and other countries.

As you probably have already guessed, serious health problems are accompanied by this ritual. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene puts it like this:

… the Health Department has documented several cases of herpes infection in newborns after circumcisions that included metzitzah b'peh. Metzitzah b'pehis a religious practice performed by some mohelim (religious circumcisers) in the Jewish community. Some of these infants became seriously ill. One baby died, and another suffered brain damage.

… In metzitzah b'peh, the mohel places his mouth on the freshly circumcised penis to draw blood away from the cut. If the mohel is infected with oral herpes (as most adults are), metzitzah b'peh can expose the infant to the herpes virus.

… Because the immune system of newborns is not developed enough to fight serious infection, herpes infections pose grave risks to infants.

In this video a rabbi tries to explain why it is done and it undergirds my presumption that you only can do such a thing when you are religious disturbed:

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Before you read this article check the website http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/ if it says something like "YEPP." or "YES." don't bother to to continue reading.

If it on the other hand says "NOPE." check the website http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html to verify that the first site is really up to date. It is a live webcam which shows the LHC in Switzerland. Don't panic if it is offline, it could have a perfectly normal explanation like that they temporarily are out of electricity or the webcam is down for some service time.

If everything seems normal then you are of course allowed to read on my dear reader.

LHC at "The Big Picture" check out their pictures, they are mind blowing!

Every time scientists talk about the string theory I spectacularly fail to understand a word of what they mean. And this time is no exception. In the article Collider gets yet more exotic 'to-do' list – The Large Hadron Collider could throw up evidence of new physics earlier than expected. (via Jesper) the author states:

If his ideas are correct, then the LHC will soon start to access a two-dimensional universe.

What do they mean by "start to access a two-dimensional universe"? Are there new universes just popping into existence and one can, with help of the LHC, just "access" them? That would certainly explain how our universe came into being. But as Richard Feynman said:

If you think you understand string theory you don't.

So I asked a friend of mine, he is a physicist and even if his main field is not string theory and particle physics he always has great answers for me which I understand. He explained it like this to me:

They do not simulate the big bang with help of the LHC (everyone who claims that is either an idiot and has no clue about it or overstated his analogy extremely). With the LHC surly no new universes pop into existence. Mini black holes are just plain speculation at the moment – there are some theories which predict them but all of them are completely speculative and never been confirmed experimentally somewhere else. (And especially in particle physics speculations often were completely wrong. I'll believe in mini black holes when I see the experimental data.)

About the dimensions; They claim (and I am very skeptical about it), that the universe got more dimensions as it got bigger and you can reduce the amount of dimensions when you turn up the energy density like it was ("shortly") after the big bang. You can see it happening when the collision points not accurue in all direction in space but just in a plane (for each collision another i assume and if you continue just on a line, etc.).

This is when their speculation is correct and then only on a really small local scale. And even if it's right it would not trigger the end of the world; This will be – as, thanks to Apophis, we all know – in the year 2036.

I hope I got the translation from German to English fairly right, it wasn't easy.

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I want to quote a quote Richard Dawkins makes in his book The Greatest Show on Earth (Video). It is about a lady who didn't believe in evolution:

… He was asked by a lady:

Even given the billions of years that you say were available for evolution, I simply can not believe it is possible to go from a single cell to a complicated human body.

He replied:

But madam you did it yourself, and it only took you nine months.

…

Amazon - The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Btw. and I can not believe that the Kindle Edition is more expensive then the Paperback version.

Homer Simpsons shows how it is possible.

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In my opinion the The Oatmeal is the new and far superior XKCD.

I really enjoy the excessive drawings and trully funny descriptions of real life happenings like the fabulous comic: What it's like to own an Apple product

The first time I discovered how great The Oatmeal is was when someone over there on Twitter, I think it was @ttepasse mentioned the comic: Wow to use a semicolon

You too really should read it! It is impressively accurate and amazingly illustrated. In fact, the illustrations are what you will remember for a long time and with them also "How to use a semicolon".

I have gone one step further and bought the poster he offers. I got this poster today by (old school) mail and now it hangs in my bathroom. The idea behind this is that people who visit me can learn a thing or two while taking a dump.

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We had a great time today watching the England vs. Germany game in my backyard today. I bought 25 meters of antenna cable so we could put out the TV and sit in the sun and watch the game. And we had a lovely barbecue.

Anyway, here is the prove that it was not a goal (quite contrary to the Wembley goal):

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In my free time I am often writing or tweaking some open source software. Today I would like you all to meet two of them.

Plistifier

Plistifier is my first Ruby on Rails plugin which allows you to use binary Property Lists, such ones like Apple uses for all kinds of stuff, to send to your client. Mostly it is a cool thing for iPhone developers who have to talk to a server to get some data. But it is the same little effort for desktop OS X applications.

The cool thing about it is, that you just need one line on each side, server and client, to get them to communicate. Lets say you have a PostsController and a Post model in your rails application. And you would like to get a list of post items on your iPhone to show them in your UITableView. So after you installed the plugin, you have to add this line to your controller:

format.plist { render :plist => @posts }

And in your iPhone controller you add this:

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://example.com/posts.plist"];
NSArray *posts = [[NSArray alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:url];
NSLog(@"Title: %@", [[posts objectAtIndex:0] objectForKey:@"title"]);

The second line is the one which does all the work, it gets the data from the network, parses it and saves it as a native NSArray in the variable posts. Thats it, you're done, no SAX-parser, no JSON-frameworks, nothing. And its fast, the binary format is very efficient, it reduces the size down to 1/10 of the verbose XML variant.

The plugin uses Christian Kruses CFPropertyList to generate the plists and is based on chuyeows jsonifier. Thank you guys for releasing the stuff open source, you rock!

Timr

Timr is a simple timer or count down for OS X. Just today I released a new version of it which finally looks nice and polished.

I often forget somethin in or on the oven, once I even started a fire in the kitchen just because I forgot the oil on the cooking oil and sat by the computer and just surfed the web.

But such kind of things doesn't happen to me anymore because I just set the timer alarm to for example 30 minutes and get a annoying sound when it's time to get the pizza out.

I hope you like some of my applications, I will present some of the other ones in the future :-).

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I'm sitting here at the Vanadis Hotell and find it weird that there are hotel rooms without windows. And I don't mean that they use Linux or OS X on their computers which they have in each room so the hotel guests can surf porn and stuff on them. I mean windows to the outside world, no, stop thinking that, I do not mean the internet! Yo know windows you can open to get fresh air or puke when you're drunk or something.

It's not that I care, I mean, I payed for much worse; last year I payed € 10 to sleep on the roof of a youth hostel next to their boiler and was happy:

And it is really near to the office, like a 3 minutes walk or something so I get up 8:30 do the morning wash get some breakfast and off I go to work. It is just so unexpected at a hotel.

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Takeshi Kitanos Brother is really my favorite movie. I saw it in 2001 at the cinema with my best friend and we were two of the four people who where watching it.

The movie is about a Japanese Yakuza gangster exiled to the United States. Takeshi settles in Los Angeles where his younger, half brother lives and finds that although the turf is new, the rules are still the same as they try to take over the local drug trade.

So I wanted to buy this movie on bluray because I've bought this awesome full HD TV and a PlayStation 3 just to be able to play such videos but there is no such thing like Brother on bluray damn it. The only alternative version to DVD I found was VHS, wtf?! Do people still know what VHS stands for? Or what am I saying, what VHS even is? Nobody wants to buy this shit so just let it die already, would you Amazon?

So what should I do, buy the DVD for € 5,22 or should I buy the Takeshi Kitano Collectors Box 3 DVDs for € 27,99 and just shut up and stop whining about bluray and stuff?

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This site uses HTML5, CSS3, Webfonts, CSS-transitions, Ajax ond all the other buzzword-bingo stuff you've heard about on the interwebs. And it uses <canvas>!

And that is great because now I can call out a drawing contest! On the right side of this text there is, depending on your browser window size, a a lot of space. you can draw cool things on it, think of it as a wipeable toilet wall. Everytime you come in it is clear and you can write or draw on it (with the mouse), but when you leave all this things will automaticly be wiped out and nobody sees them. Happy creativity to you!

But sometimes there comes something good of all this toilet wall stuff and you would like to share it with others. Therefore this contest "Posh this site up biatch!". Draw something cool, play with the red dott-stuff, make a screenshot and post a link to it as a comment.

But you need a real browser, it doesn't work with IE yet, hopefully they build in canvas into IE9.

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I am blogging in german since 2004 on http://jeenaparadies.net/weblog/ about webdesign, programming, private stuff and so on. But I feel that it is time to start something new and in english because there are far more readers who understand english than german, and since I live in Sweden it will be more interesting for the people I know here to read in a language they understand.

I already started to blog in english on my old blog but I think mixing english and german in one blog is odd so I will not post anything in english there anymore, I will concentrate on things which concern only germans on the old blog and all the other stuff here.

I know the old design is much prettier then this and it is because it was my brother who did all the cool graphics stuff, and it is a pitty, but I am not a good graphic designer so you have to stand out with this design. But I'm shure you get used to it too.

This new site doesn't use Jlog anymore it uses a simple rails app like the one you can see on the Creating a weblog in 15 minutes with Rails 2 video. But I will use it to test cool new rails stuff because it is much easier to extend then Jlog was. At least if you already worked with rails for a while.

I will try cool new CSS3 and HTML5 stuff here too, perhaps some funny JavaScript and so on, we'll see.

For now it looks like the content will be rails and iPhone development because this is what I am working with on a day to day basis. Sometimes I work on small OS X programs like Twittia and I will blogg about politics, mostly european politics but who knows what the future brings.

And btw. you're welcome to correct my bad english because that's the only way I will learn to write correctly ;)

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