MPJ

In short it goes like this: "There's a cat in a box... That has, like, a 50/50 chance of living because there's a vial of poison that's also in the box. Regular physics would say that it's one or the other. That the cat is either alive or dead, but quantum physics says that both realities exist simultaneously. It's only when you open the box that they collapse into one single event." This quote is me paraphrasing James Ward Byrkit, writer and director of the movie "Coherence" I've just watched. Although Erwin Schrödinger back in 1935, when he first wrote his famous thought experiment, invented pretty complex radioactive trap for the poor cat inside the box, I think that "vial of poison" and James' full description in the script is one of the best interpretation of the quantum paradox there is. The quantum weirdness is one of the most intriguing areas in science, that is still buzzing our minds for about a century now. I wrote ab

Have you ever felt (medically or ... some other way) sick and tried to find all the symptoms online? Desperately searching to find what's wrong with you and to catch the disease by its name and to seek for the ultimate cure on the net? If you did, don't worry, you are not alone. Internet is the smartest thing ever invented so its only logical to check your smartphone every time you need and everything will be fine. Or it seems... Well... Sometimes what you find online is too vague or written with too scholar words.. Other times it looks like you have symptoms of multiple diseases. Sometimes the cure you found online can only be bought on the other side of the planet. And in most cases not in regular or even legal pharmacies... What to do? Well, don't worry, there is a way out. Do what you did before the internet. Make the appointment with your doctor and if he or she is your good friend you will get out with the ultimate cure for every single disease out there. Th

Couple of weeks ago, we went out for usual supermarket shopping. The routine that everybody loves and what we people from big cities, from the time when first mall was invented, consider as a sort of entertainment. Thankfully we have one big supermarket just close by so that rainy day we stopped by again for the umpteenth time. I left my son in the toys department and checked my wife at the other part of the store, and found her pretty happy and busy with browsing for, well something, probably important we ran out from our home supplies. I didn't know what else to do so I decided to check couple of book shelves they like to call 'Bookshop and Entertainment'. Genesis, the first book of Moses Well, I surly don't have to describe in details what I have seen in there. The majority of book covers were designed with pastel colors, pretty girls and tender flowers of all sorts. Just for fun, I randomly opened one of the novels and read something like this " Her lip

Once, long, loong, loooooong ago in the days of Late Jurassic period in the world of Pterodactylus, famous flying dinosaur, mother Earth was pretty busy with the works of creating continents, large mountains, seas and oceans like we know today. At the time the place we know as Europe was mostly covered by large sea by the name of Paratethys. About hundred millions of years later, dramatic tectonic changes started producing large mountain formations today well known as Alps and Carpathians, which made Paratethys to loose connection with Mediterranean to the south and to form separate large inland sea in today's central Europe. Millions of years later, there are two remnant seas that still exist with names of Black and Caspian Seas. But there was one more in nowadays Pannonain basin, that lasted almost 9 millions years and finally disappeared in the middle of the Pleistocene Epoch, about 600,000 years ago with remnant lakes here and there especially in Hungary today. During its long

The road this summer took us approximately 700km south to the Greek second large island of Evia (Εύβοια). Starting from this year we decided to leave Macedonian Greece and start spending our vacations and visiting other regions of the country and this southern part of the Balkans. Our vacation resort was located only about 100km from the spot where famous 'Battle of Thermopylae' took place and where in late summer of 480 BC, king Leonidas of Sparta confronted large army of Persian Empire lead by Xerxes the Great, who was trying to occupy ancient Greece in Persian second attempt. The Greeks was vastly outnumbered and faced with imminent collapse after the betrayal during the second day of battle, Leonidas dismissed majority of his army and in the most famous last stand, remained to guard the narrow pass of Thermopylae only with 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans. We all know what happened next. At least many of you saw the movie and although it was diverted from the re

In the past couple of years, every now and again I was uploading video clips to the YouTube that I made either for the blog intentionally or for some other "publishing" reasons and I've just realized that they piled up to the number big enough I can safely pronounce almost two dozens of them today to their public status and officially publish them. It's not really that big "contribution" to the video community but still here they are. Hopefully some of you would find them inspirational and interesting. If you do, following is the home page of the official channel where you can subscribe for the future or contribute with new YouTube community social features. Milan's Public Journal YouTube Channel Similar to the blog's threads and for better classification of all videos within the channel I created several playlists and filled them with videos of mutual theme or place or event. One of latest video files, the short movie Viktor and I made this su

Do you remember United Nations? The worldwide organisation created just after the sunset of World War Two with mainly one goal - to prevent global warfare in the future and to deal with our planet outside the boundaries of it's members? United Nations Security Council* Yes, it still exists, somewhere on the island of Manhattan, with its powerless debates and Security Council decisions without much responsibilities for those who signed them as well as for those affected in any way. Sadly, the power of global government never actually made to UN, despite all the good efforts throughout the years and it always staid with those in individual countries, or groups of them, either politically or geographically or ideologically divided. The truth is that there was no big decision in the history of the mankind, either good or bad, that is made by some mutual organisation of any kind. Those are all made by either one man alone in some sort of dictatorship, or by a small group of li

What do you think is THE fastest thing on Earth and beyond? I am sure if you first thought of a heavy rocket capable of taking astronauts to the orbit in less than 2 minutes or the fastest spacecraft we ever built with its speed of almost 90000 miles per hour, the answer would easily be NO. Comparing to what I am referring to right now, all those great man made machines are traveling only little faster than snails. Not even the motion of a planet or a star is even close to the speed of .... one little thing traveling as fast as human thought ... and simply called ... TIME. The time is the only thing that travels so fast that sometimes it seems that some memorable event engraved in our memory banks years ago, looks so vivid in the present like it happened only yesterday. If we look our children and how rapidly they grow, or ourselves, for that matter, caught on some picture in the past we simply can't get rid of the feeling and obvious question of how on Earth, time passed that

Approximately 15 years ago I was working as a lab assistant in the programming department of micro assembly and object oriented languages within " College of Applied Technical Sciences " in Niš, Serbia. I was engaged with all five semesters and was teaching students from their freshman year to the graduation and every now and again, along with board of professors, I was asked to attend their final exams followed by sort of social celebration in form of small festivity with table full of food and drinks. On one such occasion, student who came from Pirot, one of the biggest cities of eastern Serbia, asked us if we ever tried before a sausage called "vitamin bomb" which, he said, was one of the oldest delicacies from the region he came from. I spotted that one of the professors, who was actually known that he tried almost everything when it came to food and drinks, started nodding his head but it was clear that the rest of us heard it for the first time. Stude

It was May 20th of the 1883rd year of AD when people living in Dutch East Indies, back then in 19th century, started to feel more intense earthquakes and to spot first steam venting out of one of three volcanic cones, just above the powerful caldera in today's Indonesian archipelago of Krakatoa. In the following days of May eruptions started from the one of volcano peaks and after a week or so calmed down only to issue a warning for what would come in following months. What started happening on June 16th and culminating in August 27th is now well known as the most massive and powerful volcano eruption in the documented history of mankind. William Ascroft's pastel sky-sketches* The eruptions were so powerful that the most intense explosion was heard all the way down in Perth, Australia, which is almost 3000km south of Krakatoa. On the west, across the Indian ocean, people located almost 5000km on the islands not far away from Madagascar thought it was cannon fire from n

Not so long ago I mentioned great city of Alexandria in post Constantine & Naissus when I described the horrible misfortune and death of Hypatia, one of the greatest philosopher and astronomer of 4th century AD, who lived at the very end of classical Greek era of prosperity. Within the same city walls, couple of centuries before, one of the equally greatest and famous scientists of all times, Claudius Ptolemy was living, exploring, teaching and dedicating his life in various disciplines including astronomy and, of course, unavoidable astrology which was considered to be "connected science" for centuries, especially in the old ages. Rachel Weisz as Hypatia of Alexandria in Agora (2009) Among other things, Ptolemy will be remembered as the one of first scholars who described and identified 48 constellations of clear and unpolluted nightly skies above Alexandria so many centuries ago. One of the biggest constellations in his list was the great constellation of Gem