Sci-pr0n

Steganography: Hidden in Plain Sight

2010-08-04T01:42:00.003+02:00

All of us have asked our best friend to keep a secret, but if our best friend is a geek, he might have thought of encrypting the information. Encryption is the process of transforming clear text into something that cannot be understood without the right key. For instance, Julius Cesar used a simple cipher (i.e., encryption algorithm) which is to replace every letter by the third following letter in the alphabet (the key is "third letter" and it could have been any other number). There is a lot to be said about encryption but today's topic is even more interesting because steganography is the process of keeping the information in clear but in a way that, if you don't know what you are looking for, you won't find it. Ancient greeks used it, Al Qaeda uses it, and flickr and twitter can use it.

Humans are really good at perceiving movements. In fact, Massive (the software which animated the armies in The Lord of the Rings) puts more effort in credibly simulating the movements than the actual image (or texture) which represents the people. We are also really good at finding patterns. However, apart from that, we are fairly oblivious to any other kind of change. The following video illustrates my point.

Video: Colour Changing Card Trick (3:10)

Herodoto

Herodoto mentions two examples of steganography in ancient times. Demaratus, former Spartan king and advisor of Darius I and Xerxes I, was said to write in a wooden plaque and cover it up with wax. In this way, the writing was not obvious and he managed to warn the Spartans about the imminent Persian attack. Another interesting but slower method was to shave the head of a slave, tattoo the message in his head and wait till the hair grows. In one way you have to heat the wood, in the other you have to shave his head again, but in both methods the message is clear if you know where to look. Funny thing is that you might probably used it as well, but not with wax or tattoos, but with some lemon juice and a candle.

Afterwards, steganography was considered old-fashioned but it has become trendy in modern times again. Internet has boosted global communications, but also global steganography. The most common example are pictures. There are several advanced techniques to include hidden information in pictures but the most straightforward approach is to change pixels in precise parts of the image. In addition, these hidden messages should be tolerant to resizing and cropping operations, therefore the message is usually hidden in the middle of the picture and it continues in an outgoing spiral.

Images are composed of pixels, the tiniest point of the image and the ones responsible for the resolution of your camera (i.e., how many pixels are in the picture). Each pixel usually has, again, three points of color (red, green and blue or RGB) that, together, they can represent most of the range of colours we can perceive. To put it simple, these red-green-blue points can be brighter or darker to display every other color and, in this case, we can include the hidden information by modifying these points and putting them a little bit darker or lighter (for advance readers, we change the least significant bits of their RGB values). These differences cannot be seen if they are subtle and they are not present in homogeneous images or patterns, that is, you would notice changes in a big black square but not in a picture of a flower. For instance, in the following picture of some trees, if you take the least significant part of the colours of every pixel and you increment the brightness, you obtain the cute cat on the other side. Cool.

Steganography examples from the wikipedia. The cat is hidden in the trees, literally.

It works for hidden images but it works even better for hidden text. Just imagine how many secret messages you could put in your profile images in Facebook, twitter, ... By the way, there are also several ways to hide information just in 140 characters. Unnecessary blank spaces (as Álvaro pointed out, this recalls the Whitespace programming language) and different capitalisation schemas are two posible ways to accomplish it but, the one that will catch your attention is to hide information in shortened urls. You can encode in base64 any text and put it as if it were a valid shortened url like this (http://bit.ly/cGxzY29tbWVudA==). It's even better when the urls can be customised, therefore you can make them valid. I let you figure out what is the hidden message in the previous link (use this). If you find the answer, comment it. If you need help, comment for help ;-)

Lost and Numbers Stations. Real wold example of allegedly steganographic messages
The Moon, iPod Headphones and Nazis

References:

Wikipedia - Crowd Simulation. The same techniques to animate armies is used to plan emergency exits and architecture planning
Luke Hebbes' blog: RLR-UK - Twitter Steganography. Luke gave a extra-official talk during IPICS'10 where he introduced us to steganography in a very illustrative way.
Wikipedia - Steganography
Symantec - Steganography Revealed

Pachelbel, Oh, Pachelbel

2010-07-21T09:11:00.003+02:00

Click here for a full xkcd comic

Today, it's all about interesting music videos. First we will show how wild a electric guitar can go playing classical music and then a hilarious rant about famous Pachelbel's Canon in D. Then, a little oddity about the longest song ever, a six centuries long concert.

Video: Pachelbel's Canon in D by funtwo, arranged by JerryC (5:22)

The video you have above (Frets on Fire version, 5:50) is a great example of how classical music can become new again. But the popularity of this song goes beyond classical concerts and kids showing off. As Rob Paravonian puts it in the following video, no matter what kind of music you hear, Pachelbel is hunting us all from the grave.

Video: Rob Paravonian's "Pachelbel Rant" (5:15)
and here with Spanish subtitles (5:15)

Josete tells us that John Cage (on the left) is quite a polyvalent artist who, among other revolutionary ideas, he conceived to use strange rythms, instruments and noises in his compositions. In fact, some of his songs are so strange that you wouldn't notice that the music is playing even. Don't believe me? Have a look at the BBC Symphonic Orchestra performing John Cage's 4:33 (6:29).

The story I want to tell you is the so called "SLSP (As SLow aS Possible)". The thing is that, apart the subtle title, he did not tell exactly the duration of the composition. So, hands at work, some musicians and philosophers with a lot of patiente and free time aimed at playing this composition throughout six centuries (639 years) and, to overcome the little nuisance of mortality, they built an automated organ inside an unused church. So long, that the two first notes lasted almost two years, each. For obvious reasons, there is no youtube video of the whole performance but Wikipedia offers the moment when the organ changed the tone in January 5, 2006.

BTW, there are so many good videos in YouTube of people playing wild songs ("Cliffs of Dover", 4:15), funny ("Daft Hands", 3:44) songs (the Manualist) and plain absurd (but catchy) songs (Mentos and Diet Coke, 2:58). I dare you to tell us your favourite ;-)

References:

[ES] El Baúl de Josete - Un Largo Concierto de 6 Siglos

Music is Hardwired in our Brains

2010-07-14T02:30:00.013+02:00

Music can put a smile in your face

Have you ever had a tune stick into your brain? Which are those songs which make you feel happy, relaxed, excited, nostalgic, ...? It is not new that music affects our feelings but here I bring you the first of several musical entries and, to begin with, I'm introducing a musical scale (3:04) which was (and still is) spontaneously used all over the world throughout time and by very different cultures. A proof that we all share some common musical sense. In addition, and marginally related, I'll tell you about the first officially recognised cyborg which turns out to be a painter which can only see in black and white but, in his case, he sees colours through music hardwired in his head.

In the following video you can see Bobby McFerrin (a director and capella singer better known as the writer of "Don't Worry Be Happy" [play]) achieving on-live an improvised chorus from the audience of the World Science Festival. The funny thing is that he trains the audience with just two notes and, intuitively, they automatically know which are the rest of the notes of the scale they are singing: the pentatonic scale. Careful with the song, it's catchy.

Video: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale (3:04)

The pentatonic scale is so common among all humanity that it has been used equally from ancient Greeks to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" [play] solo. Maybe some of you can explain to me why this scale is so common but my humble guess is that it has as many pitches as we have fingers (quite handy for primitive instruments).

The pentatonic scale is all about music embedded in all our heads, but Neil Harbisson (the first officially recognised cyborg) literally has music in his head. Neil has a condition called achromatopsia which makes him see only in black and white (don't mix up with synesthesia which is to perceive through one sense what you should feel through another). However, after assisting to a lecture on cybernetics given by Adam Montandon (a student in Plymouth University) and explaining to him about his condition, both of them started working, and suceeded in creating the eyeborg. From that day on, Neil has a laptop on his back and a webcam in his face which, depending on the colours in front of him, it plays some tones into his ears. Therefore, he hears colours.

He is a painter, he hears colours then, why not to create paintings based on their tune? In his personal webpage you can see several paintings which, to him, they represent several famous songs ("Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor" [play], among others).

As always, I dare you to comment and I propose you two topics: tell me which is your favourite famous person with synesthesia (you can start with this list) and please share with us a link to the songs which affect your feelings the most (you could use any music sharing service such as goear, Spotify, blip.fm, ...).

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Berti for letting me know about Mc Ferrin's video.

References:

Sonic 3: 3DSound, Sonic Flashlights and Sonic Weapons

2010-07-07T01:28:00.002+02:00

How to build your own sonic weapon

My favourite three sonic challenges: you all have seen 3D movies with heavy glasses and tired eyes but, what about 3D sound? Is it possible? Yes it is, and 3D sound (4:41) works with just a regular pair of headphones! Ok, that was easy but what about whispering and only be heard by the person you're looking at 20m away? Directional sound (3:14) is there and can be quite handy during exams. Ok, and what about if I want that person to suffer? Well, it's not pretty, it's not elegant but it's even easier than the other two and it's done better by shrimps (1:37) than the police (1:06). If you forgave the Nintendo easy tricks in the title, just keep reading...

3D sound is a great example of brain reverse engineering. Please hear this virtual haircut (4:41) and watch out the scissors while you read the rest of the explanation. Scientists figured out that human beings located sound sources the same way we perceive distance in sight: by analysing the difference between two fixed receptors, that is, the eyes for sight and the ears for hearing. But, ok, eyes have a surface of sensors (the retina) therefore they receive a whole 2D image each (well, this is not entirely true because the brain makes up most of what "you see") but the ears are just two points of reception, they do not get a 2D "sonic image", just two streams of sound. Because they are two and they are horizontally placed, we can triangulate the horizontal position of the source of sound but, how do we know if the sound comes up or down? We can do it thanks to the auricle and the Haas effect, which makes the sound bounce differently depending on its vertical direction and helps to locate it properly. But still, that's only part of the trick because the sound which traverses your head is also important as also it is the sound which bounces off the walls and the surroundings. To sum up, if you record the sound in a human-like head (binaural or holophonic recording) with all its bounces then you get a 3D sound.

Apart from headphones, 3D sound playback can also be achieved with loudspeakers, but these loudspeakers should be big enough to be "a sound window" to perceive the 3D sound behind (thanks to wave field synthesis). These huge loudspeakers are composed of several synchronised speakers placed side by side, but they have another functionality: directional sound. Quick and dirty, directional sound (to transmit sound just in a straight line, like a flashlight) is possible when the sound source is way bigger than the wavelength. Audible sound's wavelength can be up to 21 meters long and we don't want loudspeakers that big. Ultrasounds, in the other hand, have wavelengths of less than millimetres so they are too short (or high-frequent) to be heard but short enough to be transmitted as a flashlight. How can we hear ultrasound? We cannot unless we use a receptor. And if we do not want to use a receptor? You cannot. But still... maybe...? Forget it. Well, you can use the air as a receptor. Ultrasounds can move the air they go through in a way that, in a sense, all the air in the ultrasound beam act as tiny loudspeakers. Maybe it is better if you watch the video below and have some fun with an advertisement (1:31) which used it.

Video: Mad Labs - Audio Spotlight (3:14)

Finally, sonic weaponry is in its infancy because current weapons are not ultrasound nor any fancy cutting-edge technology but just a simple megaphone on steroids. You can watch this annoying video (1:06) where the police uses them but there is no rocket science. Instead, I give you the video below about a nice pistol shrimp with some bad attitude (I still doubt this fellow achieves a sun-like heat attitude, though).

Video: Pistol Shrimp sonic weapon - Weird Nature - BBC wildlife (1:37)

If you liked this lovely shrimp (or anything else), please comment.

Sci-pr0n: The Moon, iPod Headphones and Nazis

References:

holophony.net How do we get 3D sound and project it to an audience (highly technical)
Wikipedia - Directional Sound
Wikipedia - Sound from ultrasound

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Álvaro who posts enough interesting daily buzzes to fuel this blog for a whole century.

Personal advices to give a presentation to small groups

2010-05-17T02:00:00.003+02:00

I'm sure that everyone that had to talk face-to-face to an audience experienced the same half nervous half excitement feeling. You start talking, the presentation begin low, slow, like humbly asking for permission to talk. Then, if you are lucky, you begin feeling more confortable, you connect with your audience, let yourself go and the event go smoothly. Otherwise, if you do not get over the initial shock, this is going to be an unpleasant experience to everybody, specially you. Here I give you my own advices to fall within the first category and end up enjoying the rewarding experience of presenting your work.

Delivering a talk is highly dependant in your experience and your attitude. There are those speakers that want to keep a low profile (and voice) and wish to be eaten by the earth and never be seen again. There are those that don't give a crap and talk they script out of their chests. And there are those who, at the beginning they wish to finish as soon as possible but they end up asking for five, ten or fifteen minutes more to keep talking. My advices are mainly for starters (because seniors would not care in reading this, to begin with). I'm barely going to talk about format or content since these advices are more psychological than estructural.

Be motivated, confident and avoid frustration. I'm not experience enough to bare with demotivation or frustration but, based on all the presentation I've attended, the major two sins of any speaker are unwillingness to communicate and willingness to confront the audience. If you don't have reasons to give the speech, why to give it? If you think the audience is plotting against you, change your mind or you'll make them that way.

However, I do know a little about confidence and shyness so we'll deal with them in the following points.
Practise, practise and practise. Practising is way more important than the content or the slides. Your slides, and even the content, are just the way to support, guide and enhance your talk. Your speech, and more importantly, your attitude, are your weapons to convince your audience that you have something which worths their time and attention.

How do you do to have a good attitude? Be confident. How to be confident and overcome your shyness? Practise even more until you have the chain of thoughts and the discourse well prepared. You might not, and you shouldn't, learn by heart your script, but practising and repeating it with flexibility will help you know what to talk about at every moment and how to guide your audience through the topic. For presentations in foreign languages, this advise has the additional benefit of reviving the vocabulary in your mind.
Know and meet your audience. It is important to have an idea of who are you talking to and to customise the level of your speech to that of your audience. More importantly, however, it is to meet your audience, that is, to talk to them prior the speech, to realise that those who listen to you are actually humans and not soul devourer daemons. And, in fact, it might even happen that they are interested in your presentation! You might not be able to, or even want to, talk with them before the presentation, but you can do it during your presentation. This leads me to the next point...
Make the audience talk to you. You are presenting for a small group so take advantage of it. This benefits both their understanding and your confidence. It is much more involving and rewarding if you know that your audience is keeping the pace and actually understanding what you are talking about.

If they are really into the topic, ask the hardest questions. If they seem lost, ask yes/no questions. If they are gone for good, try to make a rise-hand poll. If they are beyond recovery (using their Facebook, twitter, Buzz, etc) and you feel confident and familiar with them, say the name of any of them and slowly and clearly ask a basic question. Jokes and funny slides might help to catch the attention but they are tricky and require some expertise. Ah, and if you succeed to make them talk, don't screw it up by being so hard about their mistakes or nonsenses, up to a limit.
Make the audience wonder in one slide the questions you are going to answer in the next slide. It is said that 55% of our communication is non-verbal (gestures, body language, etc), 38% is vocal (tone of voice, inflexion, etc) and just a mere 7% is through actual words. That means that if you talk about your topic but do not follow with your tone, gestures and slides, the speech is easily forgotten. In fact, the best way to make somebody understand is to make him reach the same conclusions in his own way. As Confucius said, "I hear, I know. I see, I remember. I do, I understand". This is difficult to master but, if you achieved to have a communicative audience, it is very rewarding seeing them asking questions that can be answered by just saying: "I'm glad you asked because that leads me to the next slide." ;-)
Easy slide, hard slide. People agree with and like the things they know. They are usually interested in learning more about what they know. However, your presentation might not be directly focussed on their interest -we cannot please everyone- therefore let's introduce some generic, related and basic stuff from time to time to give them a hook to get involved with. People is going to disconnect from time to time, and if you go deeper and deeper in your topic, the sooner anyone disconnects, the sooner you'll never recover him from the deaths.

Reconnection slides are a good opportunity to regain your audience. Reconnection slides are usually placed in between your harder, heavy ones. Reconnection slides are those that most people should feel somehow familiar and confortable but with a special touch, a link to the rest of your topic, just to keep them intrigued. Then, you catch their attention to the following boring, heavy-stuff slide. In reconnection slides they might think, "Oh, I know that. I work/read/spoke about it. Wait, there is that detail there which is different. Intriguing... I should ask him about that, or how to apply his presentation to my interest." You get the idea.

Here you have the example of a great orator: Randy Pausch, a former professor of the Carnegie Mellon University. His presentation is captivating but, sadly, it was literally his last lecture. I let him to explain himself.

Video: Randy Pausch - The Last Lecture reprised
"Achieving your Childhood Dreams" (10:10)

This was it, but of course this is not an extensive (not even a good one) list of hints for delivering a good presentation. Every dog knows his own tricks, so please comment your own so we all can take advantage of them. Who knows, maybe you'll be the audience of someone who took your advice into account...

References:

YouTube - Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams (1:16:27). This is the real "Last Lecture", not the reprised version above.
YouTube - Randy Pausch Inspires Graduates (6:33). With all the commotion of his last lecture and all the media afterwards, he was invited to deliver an inspiring speech for graduates. This is a good example of start slow, gain confidence, and end up kissing "the audience" ;-)

Autopilot for Bullets

2010-05-12T00:15:00.010+02:00

Have you ever wondered why bullets seem to go so straight? Or why James Bond's gun has helical grooves? Or how does the autopilot of airplanes work? Ok, in FlashForward every plane without conscious pilots crashes after roughly two minutes but, let's face it, pilots are overestimated these days and the autopilot (aka "George") would have stand in just fine. Well, if you haven't guessed so far, let's talk about angular momentum.

Video: Angular momentum and the levitating wheel (0:26)

Put simply, the angular momentum depends on rotating mass and the distance from its axis, that is, if you start spinning around, you have angular momentum. The thing is that there is a physics law which states that angular momentum tries to conserve itself, and this conservation has almost magical applications. It is the reason why ice skaters spin so fast, the principle of the gyroscope, and the way to have bullets "with autopilot". You can try both the ice skater spin (1:11) and the gyroscope (0:13) in any decent science museum or playground and, hopefully, you'll never experience the spinning bullets. These bullets are forced to have angular momentum (that is, to spin) due to the revolutionary military concept of rifling (2:54) which, by the way, it was perfected during the American Independence War with the Pennsylvania Rifle, but that's another story. Maybe it is better explained with a video or two.

Video: What is the conservation of angular momentum? (2:06)

Video: Gyroscope (5:00)

Lost and Numbers stations

2010-05-05T13:00:00.006+02:00

Most of the fans of Lost, which are not yet lost in the details of every new enigma, still remember the strange distress signal presented during the first season. A radio emission where the omnipresent numbers were broadcasted and we could hear a woman speaking in French. The thing is that this is a clear example of actual numbers stations. Today I came across with a great entry in cabovolo, related to our previous entry, that tells the strange case of one of these stations: a unknown shortwave station that has been broadcasting from Russia since 1982. The emission has been, and still is a buzz, and something else...

Shortwave stations are popular among radio amateurs because they are low-cost and their emissions can bounce in the ionosphere, therefore allowing inter-continental transmissions. However, this kind of emissions is affected by several factors as day-night cycle and the weather. Which bring us to the topic at hand: numbers stations.

Number stations seems to be halfway in between urban legend and cold war legacy, as their programme usually involves synthetic voices in different languages (normally a woman or a child), series of numbers (sometimes in other numeric systems such as Chinese numerals) and even some background songs to avoid suspicions. Why should I be suspicious if I hear French mixed with German and Chinese numbers with the ING tune in the background?

Regarding the case of the UVB-76 station, its story and anecdotes, I redirect you to read from the source in [ES] cabovolo or, if you prefer it in English, you miss most of the charm but still have the wikipedia. To put you in situation, here you have the dramatisation of number stations in Lost (4:35).

Related:

The Moon, iPod headphones and Nazis

References:

The Moon, iPod Headphones and Nazis

2010-04-26T00:46:00.004+02:00

Image from "A Trip to the Moon" (12:48),
the first sci-fi movie

Communication has always been of great importance for mankind. Just ask Paul Revere warning his fellow americans about the English attack; or Pheidippides who run all the way from Athens to Sparta to call for help, but the story was changed to make the poor Pheidippides to run from Marathon to Athens to deliver the news about the victory against Darius I (battle that his "little" son Xerxes would try to avenge against 300). Either way, being a victory or a cry for help, he died of exhaustion right after delivering the message. I wonder how much they would have paid for a cell phone. There is a lot to be said about communications in history but in this entry I'll try to combine science, technology and history and talk a little bit about the radio. However, it is not going to be a copy-paste of the wikipedia and, instead, I'll try to amuse you with several side-stories which will involve the Moon as a communication satellite, nazi propaganda, a radio without battery, the weather, submarines and headphones (Yes, the "iPod" was just to catch your attention ;-)).

Let us start with the crystal radio, the simplest radio ever with the interesting advantage of not requiring any battery. In fact, this radio is so simple (some wire, an inductance, a variable capacitor and a pair of earphones) that it was used by the prisoners inside the concentration camp depicted in the movie "Stalag 17" to get the news from the war. The antenna was a volleyball net. The reason for such a large antenna is both the range they tried to reach and the long wavelength of AM signal (1 to 10km).
But why this radio does not need any battery? Again, because of the AM signal. AM comes from Amplitude Modulation (demo video 1:24) which is a fancy name to say that the signal is multiplied and added to a tone, that is, a never-ending beep. The frequency of this tone is the carrier and is the one we try to tune with the variable capacitor (the dial of our old radios) to obtain the sound from the radio. If there are two radio emissions with very close carrier frequencies, then we get a mixture of both programmes and none of them good. Anyway, the thing is that, being AM broadcasting so simple, it is inefficient because the added carrier tone is also energy that it is not useful for the message. However, this tone can be reused to fuel the radio, hence avoiding the need for batteries. The idea is simple, if you have a look at the animation beside, you see that even though the signal on the top, which could be voice or a song, is disguised by the carrier, you can still recognise it in the resulting AM signal (in the middle). The thing is that, if the carrier has a large amplitude, that is, it is a "taller" wave with more energy, then it acts as an amplifier of the voice, which can be recovered by joining all the peaks of the wave.

We said that the radio was used by the prisoners, but it was used even more successfully by the nazis, as Hitler was the one who gave the great boost the radio needed to be the machine-in-every-home as the TV is today. This was called the people's radio (on the left) in contrast to the "people's car", otherwise known as Volkswagen. This radio was cheap because of component standardisation, heavily founded by the Nazi Party and was successfully used to convince the people from Saar (a small territory which belonged to France after the WWI) to voluntarily come back to be german territory. One "bug" of this cheap radio which turned to be a feature promoted by the party was that it could receive only local signals, therefore it could not tune foreigner signals and only to broadcast nazi propaganda. This, however, did not stop counter-attacking propaganda through other media. The people's radio was the ultimate brainwasher, cleverly illustrated by the telescreen of George Orwell's 1984. The British also had their own people's radio called utility radio but, in this case, the intention was to obtain more economic electronic components due to the massive sales to the people.

This is getting long and I haven't talked about half of what I promised. If you like it (and comment about it) I'll extend any of these stories in a second post but, for now, I'll give you the links to other related ideas. I wanted to talk about Earth-Moon-Earth communication where the Moon was used as a gigantic and cheap communication satellite, like a huge mirror where the signals are reflected. I also wanted to talk about Earth-mode communications, used for military and mining purpose where the signals is transfered through rocks and soil. Or how submarines have their own twitter with extremely low frequencies to tell them to rise and communicate when they are too deep to be reached by regular signals. Shortwave radios, which bounce against the ionosphere and can reach transoceanic communications were also in the menu and they were a good introduction point to tell you about how the weather, meteors, the aurora and even the day-night cycle affect these communications. It is also interesting the efforts of some governments to track and hunt down those amateurs that try to avoid censorship with this kind of radios. And, of course, I wanted to bring the active noise cancellation headphones we bought into the conversation. The following video (1:58) illustrate the theory and practice of this. Impressive.

Well, a lot was left to be said. I hope you found it interesting (the links are way better than this humble blog entry). If you like it, say so and comment what you liked the most (therefore I'll write more about related topics). Constructive insults (if it is possible such a thing) are also welcome. Hope to see you soon as I plan to write about how a crippled defeated the English Navy, a discussion about south-american revolutions and Avatar (Pocahontas not included, promise) and a cry for help for Google.

References:

Presentation and Mission Statement

2010-04-10T17:47:00.016+02:00

Click for the rest of the comic

Welcome to my brand-new blog! I'm very excited about it so I'll try to gather all the interesting bits of information I stumble upon to synthesise the entries in this blog. It is a personal blog in the sense that I'll reflect my personal interests here but I'll try to write and focus the stories in a way that suits most of you. Because you, the reader, are the one this blog is going to live or die for. So please, if you like an entry or utterly despise it, please post as many insightful and constructive comments as possible because I hope this blog to we a forum where comments are even more fun than entries.

I dare you to comment ;-).

This entry, however, is a somehow boring entry to present the guidelines I plan to follow so you know what to expect from now on.

Content: Whatever I see fits. Something interesting to me and, hopefully, to you. I plan to have several tracks used as tags over the entries. The main ones are: science, technology, history (I bet you guessed these). I'm also thinking of including a "forgotten Spaniards", "people behind the curtains" and "elegant science" as other tracks under the main ones.

Structure:

Short entries: 3-6 paragraphs.
An image for the entry.
First paragraph is an introduction, abstract and appetiser to what is to come in the rest of the entry.
The second and following paragraphs are the body.
The last paragraph is the conclusion and personal discussion.
References and links to related pages. Most of these will be inlined with the rest of the text, though.

I'm very pleased to have your attention (the single most valuable thing in the Internet these days). Thank you for reading. Thank you very much for commenting. And hope seeing you soon.

P.D.: As a reward for reading this far, here you have one of the most clicked links in my bit.ly account: a short ad called "Embrace Life" (1:29). Just the right touch of emotiveness to end this post.

Sci-pr0n

Steganography: Hidden in Plain Sight

Related:

References:

You might like:

Pachelbel, Oh, Pachelbel

Related:

References:

You might like:

Music is Hardwired in our Brains

Acknowledgements:

You might like:

References:

Sonic 3: 3DSound, Sonic Flashlights and Sonic Weapons

Related:

References:

Acknowledgements:

Personal advices to give a presentation to small groups

References:

You might like:

Autopilot for Bullets

You might like but totally unrelated:

Lost and Numbers stations

The Moon, iPod Headphones and Nazis

References:

You might like:

Presentation and Mission Statement