Leonardo Da Vinci

This dude was made famous by Monalisa, the world's most famous drawing...



And the Da Vinci Code.



Ah... last year (2009) July there was a Da Vinci The Genius Exhibition in Pusat Sains Negara. (They are not supposed to use "Da Vinci" at all... Da Vinci means "From Vinci" referring to his kampung la... His full name was "Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci" meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci".





I went there and there were only a handful of people... There was hardly anyone at all... the room, the equipment and all the inventions were there, the exhibition went on without receiving much attention from the public.



Let's not give excuses like "I was busy on weekdays", "I got no time". Well the darn exhibition went on for 3 months, and extended for another month and yet our proud Malaysian public were so ignorant. What a shame for a country aiming to become a developed country by 2020.

Anyway, this guy is a genius, well known and widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.


This portrait is widely considered to be the image of Leonardo, although he himself did not leave any definitive image of himself, which is quite usually for a painter.

Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio.

He left the studio when he was 26 years old and started his journey as an amazing jerk~~

He conceptualized a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, and so on. His mind was ahead of his time..


Leonardo's tank


Leonardo's helicopter


Leonardo's calculator

As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. Leonardo was also the first to explain why the sky is blue(It's because of the way air scatters light).

He was one of the adversaries of the Catholic Church. His studies of river erosion convinced him that the Earth is much older than the Bible suggests. He argued that falling sea levels, not Noah's Flood, left marine fossils on mountains. This study alone is already a feat equaled only by our modern method of carbon dating....


The Vitruvian Man.
The drawing is based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry, for example a palm is the width of four fingers, a foot is the width of four palms (i.e., 12 inches),a cubit is the width of six palms and etc..

Alright, enough of his ingenuity, let's write something that you do not usually find in wiki or books. (They are all biased towards praising him =P)

Leonardo was a chronic procrastinator; Out of so many drawings he was commissioned to complete, only 15 survived(or made complete). He had no close relationships with female, and his private life was kept secret. He was charged by his male model for sodomy; in which he narrowly escaped o.O gayish genius is not my cup of tea.



An ambidextrous, paranoid dyslexic, he could draw forward with one hand while writing backward with the other, producing a mirror-image script that others found difficult to read, i.e. he wrote things backward, and you have to read it in front of a mirror in order to understand o.O



Only when he was writing something intended for other people did he write in the normal direction. No one know exactly why did he write the way he did, but one suggestion was that he was trying to make it harder for people to read his notes and steal his ideas.

For all his brilliance, sometimes he could be such a dick: He was a big fan of puns and word games, and Folio 44 of his Codex Arundel contains a long list of playful synonyms for penis =.= such unlawful thoughts...

Leonardo was a wildly unsystematic thinker, and his limited education meant that even simple mathematical operations such as division were beyond him... o.O question like 17 ÷ 8 and he'd have gone mad~



A lack of mathematical knowledge also prevented him especially in his extensive endeavors to design a flying machine. No one know whether Leonardo ever attempted to build a full-scale glider, or did he ever he lobbied any renaissance daredevils to try it out. However, modern reproductions suggest that if he did, then his pilot would not have survived the first flight, though Discovery Channel did try it out and announced it to be a success, another ironic contradiction?


Leonardo's glider - duplicated by Discovery

In some ways, nevertheless, this makes his achievements all the greater: after all, few of today's hydraulic engineers could build a working lock, as Leonardo did, without being able to calculate the flow of water through it.



For some things, it seems, simply being a genius is not enough...



Malcolm

info:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/43320
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/may/10-da-vinci
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci

Sharks

Ah.. two days have passed and I haven't written anything yet~

Anyway I was busy with life and...ah... just now I skipped Dr Chin's class wtf I didn't want to because I was so attentive today and she praised me cuz I was the only one doing the assignment (she sortta like randomly ask the whole class to do it but they didn't seem to get it and I was the only one doing it and wuahahaha praise went to the deserved one - this is my blog~ kill yourself if u find it offensive =P) but too bad I had to skip or else I could never make it to Science Fac Convo at 5pm wth remorse is creeping up on me....

sorry that was a moment of SS-ness.

This entry contains awful image la... viewer's descretion ah... consider yourself =P

Superorder Selachimorpha

Sharks can be found throughout the world...Should we skip the technical?? Ah nvm~~ Do you know that sharks are older than dinosaurs? The earliest known sharks date from more than 420 million years ago, before the time of the dinosaurs. Then baby Dino came, and then went extinct but sharkiess survived the ordeal, and lived on to this day.



The Megalodon is an extinct shark that existed around 25-1.5 million years ago. A fossil shows that this animal could be the largest shark ever lived, reaching up to 20.3 meters in length, and the worst thing is that it looks like a Great White Shark...


A Megalodon tooth

All of us know at least one species of shark; the Great White Shark.



This giant can grow up to 6 meters in length, and weighs at least 2000 kilograms. It reaches maturity at around 15 years of age and can have a life span of over 30 years.
This is the star of the movie Jaws and since then people have been killing this animal for fun, and for the lucrative shark fin market.



Despite its ferocious look, the Great White is a shy animal and they often shy away from boats and human.



The largest shark, the Whale Shark, which is also the largest living fish in the world (approximately 12.6 meters), is a gentle giant that survives on tiny plankton and basically they are harmless to human.



Sharks are really special... One of the most interesting fact is that stingrays are related to sharks.


A frilled shark, considered to be "living fossil"


A Manta Ray

Stingrays and sharks belong to a group of fishes called the elasmobranchs. It is easy to spot this type of fish, all you have to do is to observe the shape of their tail. Sharks have large upper lobe which delivers maximum power for slow cruising or sudden bursts of speed, and if you observe clearly, all sharks have the same tail shape.



Also, when talking about sharks in freshwater, we must talk about Bull Shark. Bull Shark is also known for its aggressiveness and often unpredictable behavior. Most shark attacks are committed by Bull Shark and not the Great White.



The bull shark is the best known of 43 species of elasmobranch in ten genera and four families to have been reported in fresh water.



Elasmobranchs' ability to enter fresh water is limited because their blood is normally at least as salty as seawater, but bull sharks living in fresh water reduce the concentration of salty solutes by up to 50%. Even so, bull sharks living in fresh water need to produce twenty times as much urine as those in salt water. So, never think that swimming in river is safe cuz there is no shark.... a 3.4 meter Bull Shark, though not as huge as a Great White, could inflict serious wound and possibly death.

right right, what else I wanna say... AH hah~!

Some sharks lay eggs, and some give birth to pups.


Shark's egg

The mating process of sharks has never been captured on film until the Nurse Shark, a type of shark harmless to human got its porno captured by some silly human interested to watch shark porn and it got aired in a DOCUMENTARY called the DISCOVERY CHANNEL!!! and I watched it.... =.=


Nurse Shark mating

When mating, male sharks would bite on the female's pectoral fin and try to turn her to penetrate her from the side.... and so researchers find it easy to spot a sexually matured female; by looking whether it has got bite marks on its pectoral fins.

When a shark is turned upside down, it goes into a paralysed mode called the tonic immobility.


A tonic-immobilized Lemon Shark

This is caused by large amounts of serotonin being released into the shark's brain in order to calm it through this unusual experience, but the excess amounts act like an incredibly strong anaesthetic. Upon turning back over the shark regains its senses rapidly and continues as normal.



This is very important for shark researchers because handling shark has never been easier =) but turning it for too long will cause it to suffocate because sharks need constant influx of seawater so that the seawater would pass through its gill and thus it could breathe...

And as we all know, sharks are very sensitive to blood. They could sense blood from up to a quarter of a mile away.

Apart from that, sharks have an organ called the Ampullae of Lorenzini. The ampullae pores are plainly visible as dark spots in the skin.



They provide sharks with a sixth sense capable of detecting electro-magnetic fields as well as temperature gradients. There are other types of animal with this organ, but sharks may be more sensitive to electric fields than any other animal, with a threshold of sensitivity as low as 5 nV/cm. That is 5/1,000,000,000 of a volt measured in a centimeter-long ampulla.



Since all living creatures produce an electrical field by muscle contractions, it is easy to imagine that a shark may pick up weak electrical stimuli from the muscle contractions of animals, particularly prey.



Also, some sharks have eyelids, which function as a protective layer when the prey struggles..it's not actually eyelids la.. sortta like a membrane like tat~~

Shark Attack



There are roughly 10 deadly shark attacks reported worldwide annually.. It's not a big number though(highways and even railways claim more lives than sharks). Falling coconuts kill 150 people worldwide each year, 15 times the number of fatalities attributable to sharks.



Note that the number of attack is not equal to the number of casualty.

So, are we frightening ourselves for no reason?

Most shark attacks are committed by the Bull Shark, due to their notorious inconsistant behavior and aggressiveness.



There are reports of Great White attack but most of the time the shark didn't attack for food. They are just satisfying their intuition... by investigating the flapping of water on the surface(surfers swim out to the ocean to ride the wave, and that triggers the shark below), by using their bloody mouth of course(they have no hands like us... =.=) by gentle bite to see whether that something is edible...
and too often, a gentle bite from a 6 meter giant is too deadly for any human.. and the bite would produce blood, and the rest you should know...


A Great White jumping out of the sea, combining speed and brute force to kill its prey

Secondly, a surfer swimming on a surfing board looks like a seal from below.. Thus the shark would mistaken the surfer for its favourite prey, the seal.. Come on people.. you blame an animal that has no knowledge about optical illusion for killing someone, why not you blame yourself for emulating its favourite prey?

Extinction



The number is dropping fast. We kill 100 million sharks annually for shark fin soup. Like I mentioned in previous entry, every second spent typing here and there are 3 sharks getting killed by fishermen.


Finned sharks - unable to swim without their mutilated fins, the sharks, normally still alive, struggle to breathe and finally die from suffocation



Shark fin can easily be replaced by other material, we can stop the killing of shark when we stop consuming shark fin soup. Shark is the top predator in the ocean. Losing the shark means losing the whole ecosystem.


A man finning a dead Hammerhead

Moreover, when compared to most bony fish, sharks reproduce and grow relatively slowly. Sharks have relatively few (zero to around 100) offspring each year, and the mother invests much energy in each to increase the chance that it will survive. Some female sharks put so much energy into a litter that they must take two years to recover their strength before breeding again.



Although young sharks are born relatively large and able to take care of themselves, they grow slowly, sometimes only a few centimeters a year. It may take 15-20 years for an individual to reach sexual maturity. In fact some adult sharks also devour baby sharks, cannibalism is common among fish. Such low reproductive rates and slow growth combine to make sharks highly vulnerable to overfishing.





Sharks have walked thus far in the evolution cycle, only to be ruthlessly eliminated by a younger species. We can do something to stop all this. But are you ready to take that step forward?



Malcolm

info:
http://www.unisci.com/stories/20022/0523024.htm
http://science.jrank.org/pages/6118/Sharks-Reproduction-growth.html

郑和下西洋

郑和（我也姓郑 =P），中国人（alamak =.=）1371 年出生于雲南昆陽（今晉寧昆阳镇），原姓马，小名三宝。

郑和下西洋的故事相信大家都听多了。
郑和乃中國独步古今最伟大的航海家、外交家、和宦官。



鄭和出生於明洪武四年(1371年)，是馬哈只第二子。洪武十三年1381年冬，明朝軍隊進攻雲南，当年马三宝10岁，被擄入明營而閹割成太監，之後進入朱棣的燕王府。
郑和有智略，知兵习战，过后的明成祖对郑和十分信赖。

1405年7月11日（明永樂三年）明成祖命郑和率領龐大的240海船、27400名船员组成的船隊遠航（每艘船大约500人），訪問了30多個在西太平洋和印度洋的國家和地區，加深了中國同東南亞、東非的相互了解。他一共遠航了有七次之多。



郑和在探访其他国家的同时也扩大中国当时的势力，将中国出产的布料和茶叶送给他们。而中国也因此得到其他国家的进贡；斑马，长颈鹿，鸵鸟，象牙等等。


长颈鹿

Zheng He, as mentioned above, was leading an army of 27400, and that number generally awed most would-be enemies into submission. There was one program on Discovery Channel that showed a scene in which Zheng He's fleet emerges from the mist.. and that was so awesome; the whole sea was covered by ships of different sizes and you couldn't see the horizon.

But as an admiral, he did not shrink from violence when he considered it necessary to impress foreign peoples with China's military might. He ruthlessly suppressed pirates who had long plagued Chinese and southeast Asian waters and waged a land war against the Kingdom of Kotte in Ceylon(modern day Sri Lanka, and the King Alagakkonara of Ceylon later came to China as a captive to apologize to the Emperor.), and he made displays of military force when local officials threatened his fleet in Arabia and East Africa. Such was the power and influence of China during that era... why are they producing vast amount of pirated products in this modern age? =.=



Zheng He died during the treasure fleet's last voyage. Although he has a tomb in China, it is empty: he was, like many great admirals, buried at sea.

Alright, history aside, now the facts;
Zheng He was a Muslim. His Arabic name was Hajji Mahmud Sham (马三宝). He was a eunuch, he lost his balls to the emperor and thus he had no descendants (pity pity....). One particular topic that has brought much debate is the size of his fleet, and the size of his ships.

Zheng He was the first man to sail half way across the world, he was half a century earlier (1405) than the first European navigator, Christopher Colombus(1492).


Christopher Colombus

He used compass and astronomical knowledge to guide the ships across the vast barren sea. (In fact Chinese navigation compass was invented in 1117, and it appeared in Europe in 1190)


Compass used by Zheng He


European compass


Oldest form of compass invented by the Chinese

There are seven types of ship in the fleet, each with its own purpose. The largest being the treasure ship, used by the commander of the fleet and his deputies. The ship was so huge you could place a football field on the ship~ just imagine a ship the size of our Bukit Jalil Stadium! The ship is around 126.73 meters long, 51.84 meters wide, and a football field is 100 x 50 meter in size. =.= Other ships are smaller in size and some carry food, one month supply of fresh water, horses, weapon, etc..


Zheng He's ship compared to the one used by Christopher Colombus

Christopher Columbus's ship?? well... it's only 1/10 of Zheng He's ship.. it's only 17 meters long wuahahahaha XDDDDD why am I so bad? =P


Zheng He's ship and Vasco Da Gama's ship.

Ok, the above stuff is not that fresh anymore, we could see all those in discovery or sorts, what's fresh is that; someone has proposed that the European Renaissance (5th Century to 15th Century was the Dark Ages... 10 centuries of dumbness) was ignited by the Chinese~~~~ interesting??

It was proposed that the Chinese were advanced in knowledge of all sorts, they brought books together with them as they sailed half across the globe, and as they anchored from place to place they gave the books away as gifts... and so the Renaissance... WOW!!! I was so surprised when I saw the book.



1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance


I guess now we all know that Zheng He was so influential that to this day we owe him much. Without renaissance then we're still living under the influence of the Catholic Church today... but too bad, he lost his crotch and has got no baby boy to pass down his superior leadership gene... Too bad for a man of his stature.. and the perverted King Henry VIII has got six wives =.= but he did not get a male heir neither~~~ =P


King Henry VIII and his six wives






Malcolm