Chocolate FTW!

Well right now i'm chewing a thing i like to call a "french" choco... it's gooey.. it sticks to your teeth.. and if you done the BIG mistake of chewing it hard.. you'll have your teeth stuck together for a good 5 minutes atleast. So.. where DID chocolate start up?

Well... chocolate was not actually today's chocolate. You probably know of the cocoa tree right? But did you knew this tree was first "discovered" in the rainforests of America and that the Aztecs and Mayans were drinking a kind of hot choco at that time? Polishing their weapons and drinking hot choco.. reminds me of the hamburger invented by the romans... but that's another story.

Well we all know the Spanish conquistadors (gay word btw), took over (as in pwned, killed, assimilated) the civilisatons there and since they eventually found that choco tree they figured.. hey.. let's take it back home! And that's how it reached the breast of civilisation.. Europe. There, a lot of alchemists have been working with it and it soon became a delicacy. Heh.. now if your reading this.. you can safely go and drink some hot choco or eat some chocolate and think of yourself as a prince/princess.. just remeber to turn the clock back a few centuries ;)

Chocolate will not suffer many turns until the Industrial age. Time consuming and hand made, chocolate back then was a bit hard to make and not generaly distribuited to the general population. That's until people started "enslaving" machines to do their job. From the press to the chocolate machine.. who said machines arent good for anything :)

A little dates here... 1700 choco machine made by.. who.. who? yes! A french dude! Doret by his name. It was a hydraulic machine but a bit later, Debuisson another french dude.. used a steam powered machine to make the tasty paste. Ow..yea.. dident i tell ya? Choco back then was more like a paste then actaull candybar. That latter form was invented in 1828 by a dutch dude, namely Coenraad Van Houten, (Conrad van hoot :), which made a machine that squeezed out cocoa butter (leaving the powder we call cocoa) and made cocoa both more consistent and cheaper to produce. In 1875 Daniel Peter used his condensed milk forumla to mix it with the choco powder and voila.. milk chocolate.

During the Golden Age choco was widely advertised and publicised as beeing a great energy source and a even curing latergy. It was around that time people started drinking hot choco for breakfast and quicly becoming a trend. Also the world wars helped the popularity of candy bars... in World War I, chocolate was part of every United State’s soldier’s rations.

From that period to today chocolate has become part art, part technology, and part... traditional... why? Well one thing you don't probably know is that coco is still harvested by hand. No automated machinery. There's even a Choco Stock Market for prices and transactions.

Also did you knew that the choco that you eat is also used for medicinal porposes and cosmetics? Theobromine, a chemical found in chocolate, enlarges blood vessels and is used to treat high blood pressure. In addition, cocoa butter is used in cosmetics and ointments—and even as a coating for pills. Plus, leftover cacao husks make good mulch and cattle feed. Amazing! ;p

As you can see choco is one of those few "stuffs" that really bind people of diffrent religions, skin color and beleifs by giving them a common ground... YEY for chocolate!

Now wheres my other bar...

"Common Cold" Cure?

So i'm writing this while sniffing my nose and trying to breath and eat at the same time. It's the cold, it's back.. more of a flu this time. We all hate beeing all soggy and especialy leaving the house with a fever. So i was thinking.. since this happens to be one of the oldest "diseases" on earth.. why hasent it been cured yet?
Wiki says:

The acute nasopharyngitis, often known as the common cold is a mild viral infectious disease of the nose and throat; the upper respiratory system. Symptoms include sneezing, sniffling, nasal congestion; scratchy, sore, or phlegmy throat; coughing; headache; and tiredness.

Well we recognize most of those nasties so.. why hasent there been any cures yet?

ViroPharma Incorporated and Schering-Plough have been developing an anti-viral drug that targets picornaviruses, that cause the majority of common colds. Pleconaril has been shown to be effective in an oral form, but there were safety problems with that formulation. Schering-Plough is developing an intra-nasal formulation that may overcome some of those safety issues. However it may not be until 2008 or 2009 that the drug is on the market and it is unlikely that benefit will be more than one day.

Ok.. but i think i'll get another 50-60 colds by 2008 :) So.. still.. why?
I'll cut the medical mambo jambo short and say that the common cold can be produced by quite a lot of viruses and it mutates very fast. Thus it's hard to find a common strain to fight the virus directly.

So why does the cold go away in a few days? The human body.. beeing as adaptable and amazing as it is, can produce antibodies to fight against the virus specificly based on the virus and mutation it suffered in the human body.

So... why can't the same be done in labs? Well it's a matter of logic. Making antibodies.. actually white cells that "eat" the virus, have to be done for EACH individual person and can take quite a while to make. Thus it has never been attempted to be treated since the body can do so much better then any labrats can. (No offence to any labrats reading this blog :))

All in all... from the times of early Egypt to the times of the fictional Star Trek universe, no cure for the common cold has been found. Common cold is and allways has been an ennerving disease. Damn it.. need more paper napkins. *snif* *snif*

Economy?!

Todays highlight for me was world economy. Ever since humans were neanthertalls (typo?) they had a basic trading system that has not changed from then. I got this..you have that, i'll trade you this for that. The introduction of the concept of money just made a good that was unniversaly wanted in exchage for services or objects. Soo.. what is money? Money was introduced possibly thousands of years before Christ, back then using rare metals to craft them like silver and gold. Hell.. prehistoric man maybe even traded shiney rocks for food or items :D

So what IS money? Money is the major driving factor of current human based economy but it is also the most technology stopping element known to man, it also caused enormous loss and death. How come?! Well ALL the wars were driven, one way or another, for goods. And more implicitly, "money". If you can find me a war that sais otherwise and i cannot prove my point...

Now about why it impedes technological advancement? Doctor X has a theory about quantum physics. He wants to study it and research how it chould be usefull. He dosent have the cash for a lab or even the posibility to get funds. His ideea whould have been the brakethrou of the century allowing space travel and the posibility to create perfectly void space inside a container beeing able to make a perpetuum energy machine. But no.. this ideea is left for late golf nights with his friends over in a pub... washed away. This impedance is pretty new around 1960's+. you whould be surprised to know most of the technology today relies of 10 or even more years back of tech. Little new technology is researched.

So... what effect whould money have had on the church? Or even religion and faith as a whole? I think if money whould be taken out then we whould have the foundation of a PURE faith since there whould be no gains in beleiving then to increase one's self. Churches whould be primarily based on just teaching and revitalizing.

But hell.. can we remove money?! It's hard to even think that you chould just go down to the store, say hello to the clerk, get your items and wish the man a good day. Going deeper into the problem, if luxury was made, evreyone whould want it but there whouldent be enough for evreyone so who dictates who gets what and in what order? STOP IT! We just reached a nasty point in human thinking... if we had not wanted a moneysystemical economy in the first place then i know for sure that the goods made whould be equal to the goods wanted. But wait.. if there whould be no money and evreyone chould have evreything... whouldent evreyone just sit back and relax? WRONG! Another mistake in human thinking, if we started out without a moneysystem we whoul dbe driven to work from two reasons.. we whould KNOW it was the right thing to do and go to work just to be happy and feel fulfilled, or that we whould get bored of beeing relaxed. Might sound weird but that's how and why we cannot pertrude the meaning of self supportance. Most people whould equal this to hippyes with their comunities of self supportnes. Imagine that on a world basis and lose the crack and acid... where whould we be now? How whould hiercy work? Whoud there be a goverment? How technologicly advanced might we have become?

We can't know, we can't imagine, we are only human.

PS: There was a game aswell... Hostile Waters, a nice strategy type, that presented humans as they evolved after a major change, without a moneysystem and just with the free figure i presented above. Quite a bit of fresh air but it's impossibile to change current man thinking.

And so it begins...

So i finnaly started it... few people ever thoght of ME writing a blog, less more of a scientificly challanged one. So to get things in gear in math courses today we were having a spatial lesson. About the three axis and the teacher once said.. "we can't have more then 3 axes". So i come home.. a little puzzled since i allways thought there were 5 dimmensions... and i start looking up a few webpages that confirm my theory. So the fourth dimension whould be something like "depth-of-field". A variable that can increase or diminish the size and formation of objects so that allthou they appear diffrente but beeing the same. Some examples of 4d space might be easily conceived as for example a war... in 2d an army has to send only 1vs1 soldiers since they will not be able to get past them. In 3d you can flank your enemy and move over them but most attacks still come from a 2d perspective. Now a space battle.. you can get shot from many more places at the same time due to adding a third attack dirrections. So.. i'm thinking... Well first off most people say the fourth dimension is time.. actually i'd recall a fifth dimension as beeing time, an infinity of fourth dimension items in a fifth dimensional timespace covering the entire space but have no mass to speak of or any regular form. So any 4d object in 5d space will be a 1d object with a shape. But 1d objects are indefinibale.. all are the same.. infinite nonmassable objects with no definable shapes. So... this is where the paradox struck me. 1d=5d?! I'm stumped... Now i see a sixth dimmension forming... a possibility without any possibile explanation given in words or thought. Some might call it God-Land or where infinity ends. Quantum fenomena feeling at home. Meh... Hey.. while were at it why not pretend that an infinity of dimmensions exist. But as my dad says.."if it dosent put food on the table or cloathes on your back.. i'm not interested"

See ya on my next sci babble...