People tend to believe that aliens and other life forms would be similar to life on Earth, in that it would have cells, need water, be carbon-based, etc. However, after reading about alternative biochemistry, it makes you wonder what else could be different for other life forms.
Life is simply a series of structures or patterns that continue to exist because they are self-replicating. This might sound cynical, but consider that species, through evolution, all have the “goal” of further propagating themselves. Species that no longer reproduce cease to exist.
So here’s the idea: What if there were forms of life, elsewhere in the universe, that lived in vastly different time scales? For example, most life on Earth “happens” at a certain speed, based on the rate of the specific chemical reactions that are taking place. But, if life relied on vastly different chemicals or occurred in different conditions, there would also be the possibility that the chemical processes for this life could happen at different rates. For example, on a planet with very low energy input, a different kind of life might accumulate energy more slowly, move more slowly, and live more slowly. Their lives might span thousands of years. Or, on the opposite extreme, life in high temperatures/pressures might have a life cycle of seconds. Just an interesting thought.
Inkscape is a free, open-source program for drawing vector graphics. What is “vector graphics?” Instead of representing images as a grid of pixels with different colors, vector images are composed of shapes with lines and curves. This allows it to be scaled indefinitely without losing quality.
Inkscape compares with other vector graphics software such as Adobe Illustrator. Some of Inkscape’s advantages are that it’s completely free and open-source, as well as cross-platform. It’s strongest point to me, though, is its usability. It’s controls are very well thought-out.
- Simplifying the toolbox without losing functionality. It may seem like less tools mean less flexibility, but do you really need a scissors, knife, pen, and node edit tool when all the functions can be accomplished with a single tool? Having used Adobe Illustrator before, I was frustrated by the 13×2 entire palette of tools, many of which could “expand” in a menu and become other tools! It was a constant hunt in the toolbox.
- Great keyboard shortcuts. The toolbox, for example, is mapped intuitively to the F1, F2, etc. function keys. Boolean operations, such as union, subtraction, and intersection are mapped to Ctrl-+, -, *. Duplicate an object by Ctrl-D. It saves you from constantly moving the mouse between the toolbars, menus and the work.
Here are some examples of its ease of use:
- Usable handles. When you click on an object, the standard handles appear on it for resizing it. But click on it again, and controls appear for skewing and rotating the object! No need to click through menus for “free transform” and the like.
- Selecting obscured elements. If there’s an object behind another one, simply Alt-click where it is to select it. Eliminates the need for constantly changing the Z-order of elements or hiding layers.
- Gradient editor. To fill an element with a gradient, you simply click the “gradient” icon for its fill and it automatically create a sensible default gradient–fading from the current color to transparent. The gradient fill gets handles in the artwork that can be dragged.
It has all the features necessary to easily to create “Web 2.0-style graphics,” with glossy highlights and drop shadows.
- Gradients
- Transparency
- Gaussian blur
After only playing with it a little, I used it to create the header graphic for this site.
Wouldn’t it be cool if cell phones communicated to each other and could relay calls from one to another? Perhaps cell towers could be eliminated–the mesh network formed by the phones could relay messages across the country. For privacy, you could use public-key encryption between the callers so that no one else would be able to listen to the call. Then again, it’s probably infeasible for a few reasons. 1) It would take up a lot of battery power for each phone to relay other people’s calls. 2) It would have to reach a critical mass before coverage would be good enough. 3) It would not work in rural areas where there aren’t other nodes around to relay a call.
For the past month, I’ve been volunteering for Oak Grove High School in San Jose, helping their special education robotics team. They invited me and another student from Lynbrook Robotics to go with them to their national Botball competition in Honolulu, Hawaii. I’m going to be leaving tomorrow, and will return on July 14th.
I’m finally going to start blogging again. My entire first year in high school has passed, so I’ll write a brief summary of what’s happened:
Science fair: Since the last summer, I had been researching music analysis using computers. I did a science fair project on using computers to find songs that sound similar to each other based on timbre (musical texture). I won a grand prize at the local Synopsys Championship, and went on to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF). There, I received 3 special awards totalling $1200. At the state science fair, I also got an honorable mention.
Lynbrook Robotics: I joined the Lynbrook Robotics Team this year. We participate in an annual competition called the FIRST Robotics Competition, in which we get 6 weeks to build a robot that plays a particular game. The game this year was to to hang inflatable pool tubes (“ringers”) on a 3-layer rack, in rows and columns. We competed at San Jose State for the Silicon Valley Regional, where we got 4th seed in qualification matches, and we got to the semifinalist rounds. We later competed at the Lone Star Regional at Houston, Texas. We did amazingly there–we were the 1st seed in qualifying matches, and we got to semifinalist rounds again!