giulio.ruffini's blog

Wouldn't it be great if the culture of compression had an impact in politics? What if voters rewarded efficiency and sparsity in politician's speeches? You know, if Mr Politician A were to give a talk in 3000 words, whereas Ms. Politician B rebutted with same real content in only 1000, I, for one, would vote for B!

Do you like to keep things simple?

As Virtual Reality (Presence) technology improves, ethical issues are bound to arise. Basically, future technologies will make the user strain to differentiate between what is real and what is virtual. Furthermore, as recent research shows, our bodies and brains assess reality at different processing scales. Your guts may be saying that what you are experiencing is real, while your brain knows you are part of an experiment.

Are you a fan of motor sports?

If you are, you probably enjoy viewing information about machine performance during a race or training sessions. Thanks to technology, today you can monitor at a glance parameters such as car speed, gear, engine RPMs from your living room television. The driver and support team have access to many more details, including temperature in different locations and oil and tire pressures.As a spectator, how would you like to monitor driver performance?

(Image: a plankton bloom across Ireland captured by Envisat. Courtesy of ESA).

What would a macroscope be? The opposite of a microscope, a device used to study nature at relatively small scales. A macroscope would be a tool to study things at large scales. If we focus on imaging, topics such as astronomy or remote sensing come to mind. But we can more generally think of a macroscope as a conceptual device to study large-scale phenomena.

It is probably fair to say that a virus has not clue that the cells it attacks are actually part of a very large and complex organism (sneeze).