How Do Microscopes Work?
A microscope is a device which allows one to view something which is too small to be seen by the naked eye. Items which are often studied under a microscope can include a single hair, blood or skin cells. With the naked eye these are hard to see, and impossible to view in any detail. However, by using a microscope the intricacies of these and any other object are much more clearly revealed. This kind of detail is often required in science and so those who use microscopes most in their work are often scientists of some shape or form.
Knowing what a microscope is used for is only half of the story though. It is also interesting to consider how the technology works. The technical alignments of the components of a microscope are very detailed and can be incredibly hard to get right. However the basic principles of the function of a microscope are actually surprisingly simple. A magnifying lens is situated in the part of the microscope which is placed near to the object being studied. This lens creates an enlarged image of the subject just inside the tube from the light which it reflects. This is quite a complex area of physics but the image of the object which is created inside the microscope is what is actually enlarged to enable a more in depth view of the subject. Most microscopes actually contain two lenses, one at each end of the eye tube. Between them is an air separated couplet. This is known as a compound lens microscope. The image of the subject is created between the two lenses. The one closest to the subject is used to bring the image into focus while the one closest to the eye is used to help the eye focus on that image.
When viewing an object through a microscope correctly your eye should be focused to infinity. For those who use a microscope frequently, or for prolonged periods of time, and experience headaches or tired eyes it is usually as a result of incorrect focusing of the microscope. If it is focused correctly there should be no adverse affects to using a microscope often and for long periods at a time.
The invention of the microscope is shrouded in mystery as many have claimed to have been responsible for it but there is no real evidence to confirm any one individual. Names such as Galileo Galilei and Zacharias Janssen have been suggested but nobody knows for certain who it should be attributed to.
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Evolution Theory And Humans’ Nature
We all learn evolution theory in schools. Well most of us do.
However, what’s taught in schools are just basic. What most people, especially religious fundamentalists do not want you to know is that evolution theory can very naturally explain human nature.
It’s not in school. So I’ll tell you here. I’ll start from the least shocking conclusions first and then we’ll go to the most politically incorrect ones people have been trying to hide from you.
Why Cheetah run fast? Simple. In ancient time, some Cheetah run fast, some Cheetah ran slow. Cheetahs that run fast, gather more food, and live. Such Cheetah, then get married, form a family, and life offspring.
The slow Cheetah die. Got it so far? Here we go…
Here, we see that evolution fine tuned Cheetah traits, namely, promoting Cheetahs that run fast.
It turns out, evolution do not only govern physical traits, like how fast you can run and other capabilities. Evolution also fine tuned preferences. Preferences that are working out in the gene pool are preferences that are hard wired in our genes.
Those are preferences that we don’t even have to think about. We just feel like doing it.
For example, most of us have strong preferences to have sex with the opposite sex. Why? Because those who do live have decendants and those who don’t went extinct.
Nothing strange, nothing bizzare.
Now here we go…
Say one male make 1000 kids. Say another male make 1 kids. Which one will survive better in the gene pool? The one making 1000 kids.
You see, gene pool survival is not a boolean value. Survival is not for the fit but for the fittest.
Preferences that work in the gene pool in the past are preferences that are common nowadays.
Ugh, I can sense that the conservative will start going back to their bible. Not yet. Here’s more.
One obvious way to make genetic copies of ourself is by making kids.
Now, if you’re a male, how would you maximize the number of kids you make?
You do so by mating with as many females as possible. Males that mate with more women, and produce more kids, like Genghis Khan, will survive better in the genepool, in the past.
In fact, a genetic testing shows that the y chromosome of Genghish Khan is the same chromosome with 1 out of 4 people in Asia. Now that’s, success.
Let me repeat. Preferences that used to work in the past are preferences that are common nowadays. So, what do common typical males want nowadays? Mate with as many females as possible.
Not necessarily making kids. Our preferences are set up in the past, where sex and kids are inseparable. There are no contraception whatsoever.
So males want as many females as possible. It is normal to want as many females as possible. In fact, the “normality” of those who are homosexual is not far different than the normality of males that are monogamous.
Successful males are males that can make a lot of money, gain huge political power, and mate with many females. That’s what males want.
What do women want? Women want the best genes. Those women that pick the best genes will produce more successful sons. How do women measure the quality of a male’s genetic material? By success. Got so far?
Now, we got an issue. There are the same number of males and females. If one male is successful, the others don’t get any.
And that’s the main sources of conflicts all over the world. When we’re not at war, we’re in a race. When we’re in a race, those who are not competitive will want to knock down those running fast. Such preferences are called envy.
Different societies then have different ways to balance tolerance toward success and some socialism to appease those who are not successful.
The conservative, for example, allow economic success but demand socialism through life long monogamous relationship. The liberal, for example, allow sexual success but demand socialism in economy.
None of which are optimum, in my opinion. I wrote plenty of articles suggesting how better social contracts can benefit both the rich and the poor.
For example, taxing kids, rather than income and paying dividend to all citizens, will allow the poor to postpone making kids and have enough capital to get them rich.
Now, that’s the basic of evolution theory on humans’ nature and preferences. I guess that’s all for an article.
Properly understood, evolution theory can be very useful. We can understand why there are many criminalization against consensual acts. We’ll see that those laws are there to protect disgruntled competitors.
We’ll see why there are so many wars over religious doctrines. That happens because to be successful in countries heavily influenced by envy, the wise need to keep pitting people against each other.
Many more are like this. Properly understood, we can correctly predict the outcome of our choices more accurately. Then we can come up with strategies that will result in what we want more. On the other hand, those who are blind will be eaten by those who see.
It’s toward ones’ best interest to learn and understand evolution theory. Ignore evolution theory at our own peril.
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Artificial Intelligence is 50 years old
Artificial Intelligence as a research field was born in the summer of 1956 during a seminal workshop at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. It was just a year before that when Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude Shannon and John McCarthy proposed that they should hold a workshop to put together a roadmap about how to make machines think and learn similarly to humans. The ultimate goal was to discover computational models in order to enable machines to do commonsense reasoning. Today, John McCarthy is rightly considered the father of AI. I should note that the term “Artificial Intelligence” appeared for the first time in the proposal put forth by the previously mentioned scientists. And so this new discipline that would eventually captivate everyone’s imagination was born.
Artificial Intelligence had its ups and downs in the last 50 years. Early success solving small problems in simulation ignited a flurry of predictions about super intelligent machines taking over the world before the coming of the 21st century. Hampered by a lack of a good understanding of how commonsense reasoning works in people and a lack of computational resources, computers being very slow up until the mid nineties, AI research stalled in the 80s. Many people rushed to dismiss it as nothing more than hot air.
However, science is all about proposing and testing new theories in order to find the best ones. Since the mid-90s, AI research has advanced by leaps and bounds. We now have a better understanding of how the human brain works and that has helped us to find and test better computational models for AI. These in turn have also helped us to better understand the functions of the human brain. New techniques such as statistical analysis are helping intelligent agents to copy with large amounts of information and noisy sensors. Faster computers with vast amounts of storage are allowing us to experiment in more challenging domains and solve larger problems.
It is true that AI has not yet been able to produce a machine capable of commonsense reasoning. However, by specialization, many AI systems are actually running our world today. AI helps us fly airplanes and drive our cars. It aids doctors perform surgery. It helps us find information in the vastness of the World Wide Web. It helps us discover spam email and promptly delete it. It helps us schedule traffic lights and public transportation. It helps us analyze financial markets and make predictions about the outcome of sports events. It aids in surveillance of public spaces improving security and safety. These are only a small sample of the penetration of intelligent systems in our daily lives. Artificial Intelligence is here to stay and I bet it won’t be long before we have the understanding, methods and resources to finally construct thinking and learning machines. Let us wish and hope that such technology would only be used to benefit mankind and not destroy it.
You can find lots of information about AI’ and its50th birthday on the Internet. However, I think that best reading about this topic is the 1955 proposal for the AI workshop. You can read it here.
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