Knowledge

By Philip Memmer

My philosopher friend is explaining again
that the bottle of well-chilled beer in my hand
might not be a bottle of beer,
that the trickle of bottle-sweat cooling in my palm
might not be wet, might not be cool,
that in fact it’s impossible ever to know
if I’m holding a bottle at all.
I try to follow his logic, flipping the steaks
that are almost certainly hissing
over the bed of coals – coals I’d swear
were black at first, then gray, then red –
coals we could spread out and walk on
and why not, I ask, since we’ll never be sure
if our feet burn, if our soles
blister and peel, if our faithlessness
is any better or worse a tool
than the firewalker’s can-do extreme.
Exactly, he smiles. Behind the fence
the moon rises, or seems to.
Have another. Whatever else is true,
the coals feel hotter than ever
as the darkness begins to do
what darkness does. Another what? I ask.

To all Junior New Inventors

Go to this site ,
it is a very useful site for junior new inventors as well as others.
Got any new idea? Go there...
http://www.inventnow.org

SLAX - OS in the pocket

I installed slax to my pen drive yesterday. it's a smart and a beautiful OS. and it also have a good booting speed. But the sad thing is there are no much modules which are compatible to slax. i downloaded many but some are not working.
Try it, it is a good OS...

Go to Slax official site >>
Some more KDE apps >>

Invisibility cloak one step closer, scientists say

I jst saw this on web.

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have created two new types of materials that can bend light the wrong way, creating the first step toward an invisibility cloaking device.

One approach uses a type of fishnet of metal layers to reverse the direction of light, while another uses tiny silver wires, both at the nanoscale level.

Both are so-called metamaterials -- artificially engineered structures that have properties not seen in nature, such as negative refractive index.

The two teams were working separately under the direction of Xiang Zhang of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Berkeley with U.S. government funding. One team reported its findings in the journal Science and the other in the journal Nature.

Each new material works to reverse light in limited wavelengths, so no one will be using them to hide buildings from satellites, said Jason Valentine, who worked on one of the projects.

"We are not actually cloaking anything," Valentine said in a telephone interview. "I don't think we have to worry about invisible people walking around any time soon. To be honest, we are just at the beginning of doing anything like that."

Valentine's team made a material that affects light near the visible spectrum, in a region used in fiber optics.

"In naturally occurring material, the index of refraction, a measure of how light bends in a medium, is positive," he said.

Read the full article >>>

Love

--
H.Madhawa Ranga
"No one knows what he can do till he tries."