I would like to wish Dumas a very very happy birthday. Hope you have an awesome day Dumas.

China will be sending ‘pig sperm’ on board the Shenzhou VI spacecraft in October. Some of the sperm will be kept outside the biological capsule and some inside and the experiment is being carried out to study the effect of cosmic rays on pig sperm. China became the third country behind U.S and Russia to launch a human into space two years back but it will be the first to do this (the things people do to be the first in anything). During the mission in October, two astronauts will orbit the planet five or six times. These two Chinese astronauts were last seen in Hollywood looking for Porky Pig. I wonder why Porky Pig is pointing up in the picture. Maybe they did find him.

Move over Linux, here comes ‘Vores Øl’. ‘Vores Øl’ is the world’s first open source beer and Version 1.0 is a medium strong beer (6% vol) which is deep golden red in color. Here is the good thing about open source, people are free to use the recipe to make beer and sell it in stores but they will have to publish the recipe under the Creative Commons License and give credit to the group of students from IT University of Copenhagen. That’s not asking much, is it? The reason for the creation of this open source beer is not to get the world drunk but to see what happens to the open source structure for a universal product like beer.
Click here to get the recipe and start making your own beer. You know what you will be getting at my parties

Those of you who interpreted the headline in a way it was not meant to be interpreted, shame on you. An ‘Edeka’ store in the German town of Ruelzheim has introduced a paying system by which a customer needs to place his/her finger on a scanner in order to pay for their merchandise. All the customers need to register at first by sampling their finger print and giving their bank or credit card details. The shopping chain is confident that the system will be successful as the chance of two people having the same fingerprint is about one in 220 million. Looks like the whole world is going biometric.

The beta version of my new blog space is made active today. Please visit the site and let me know what you think. Although ‘all’ the suggestions may not be accommodated but they will definitely be appreciated. There are many reasons that made me turn to WordPress and backups of the blog was one of them. There is also more control over the design and the search functionality makes it easier for readers to find what they are looking for. Oh, let’s not forget the categories function and tons of other plug-ins that can be downloaded from the internet and if anyone wants to try out WordPress, let me know, I would be glad to help. I have tried and maintained the same look for the new page as many people hate change (and I like the earlier design and color combination). Both the blogs will run in parallel till I get the bugs out of the new one.

Also, here is a story about a pill that will improve memory and increase intelligence. I know some people who can be recommended for the tests. Do you?

The nemesis of the music industry, the MP3, turned 10 years old yesterday. This file format which instigated the birth of the peer to peer file sharing network was named on the 14th of July, 1995 by researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS. The researchers agreed to use MP3 as the file extension for their new audio coding technology following an internal poll. (MP3 stands for MPEG Audio Layer 3)
In the picture: The audio team 1987 (from left): Harald Popp, Stefan Krägeloh, Hartmut Schott, Bernhard Grill, Heinz Gerhäuser, Ernst Eberlein, Karlheinz Brandenburg and Thomas Sporer. (Photo: Kurt Fuchs / Fraunhofer IIS)
Here is the letter announcing the decision to use the file extension (it is translated from German of course)
“Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 12:29:49 +0200
Subject: Layer3 file extension: .mp3
Hi all, this is the overwhelming result of our poll:
everyone voted for .mp3 as extension for ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3!
As a consequence, everyone please mind that for WWW pages, shareware, demos, and so on, the .bit extension is not to be used anymore. There is a reason for that, believe me
Jürgen Zeller”