Following the colossal battle against the Empire's warriors on the Burning Plains, Eragon and his dragon, Saphira, have narrowly escaped with their lives. Still there is more at hand for the Rider and his dragon, as Eragon finds himself bound by a tangle of promises he may not be able to keep.
First is Eragon's oath to his cousin Roran: to help rescue Roran's beloved, Katrina, from King Galbatorix's clutches. But Eragon owes his loyalty to others, too. The Varden are in desperate need of his talents and strength - as are the elves and dwarves. When unrest claims the rebels and danger strikes from every corner, Eragon must make choices - choices that take him across the Empire and beyond, choices that may lead to unimagined sacrifice.
Eragon is the greatest hope to rid the land of tyranny. Can this once-simple farm boy unite the rebel forces and defeat the king?
Well, this wonderful Novel by Chirstopher Paolioni is relesing next month, and here's a video of an excerpt from the book, gift for Inheritence Fans...!
Hello all, Here is an interesting story that no one would have imagined. Gamers, you would really like this article though it's not really regarding games...
When most of us arrived home with our newly purchased PS3, we couldn't wait to start annihilating aliens in Resistance: Fall of Man or kicking butt kung fu-style in Virtua Fighter 5. Not astrophysicist Gaurav Khanna - he used his to build a supercomputer.
Khanna now owns a total of 16 PS3 consoles, all linked together to provide the same computing power as a 400-node supercomputer. His set up, which he calls a 'gravity grid', is used to simulate the activity of very large black holes for the Physics Department at the University of Massachusetts.
The project is an attempt to estimate the properties of gravity waves generated by the collision of two black holes. Gravitational waves are 'ripples' in space-time that travel at the speed of light. These were theoretically predicted by Einstein's general relativity, but have never been directly observed. In order to run his simulation data on the consoles, Khanna had to load the PS3s with Linux. What makes the gaming console more effective than high-end computers for complex research algorithms is the Cell chip built by IBM to process high-end gaming functions.
"Linux can turn any system into a general-purpose computer, but for it to work for me I have to run my own code on it for astrophysics applications. The hard part of the job was to make sure my own calculations could run fast on the platform, which meant I had to optimise the written code so it could utilise the new features of the system."\
The 16 PS3s haven't been physically modified. They're networked together using an inexpensive Gigabit Ethernet switch. "Overall, a single PS3 performs better than the highest-end desktops available and compares to as many as 25 nodes of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer," Khanna noted. More details from Khanna's project site here.
What is real? "How do you define real? If you think real is what you see, feel, smell, hear, taste or experience, The Real is nothing but electric signals intrepreted by your brain." This is a quote from Morpheus from The Matrix Trilogy. It actually sounds stupid, but I'd really have to change my considerations after what I just encountered in yet another corner of this beautiful World Wide Web.
In addition to its phantom like nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected. The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of super hologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the super holographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.
What else the super hologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the super hologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the super hologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the super holographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development". Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.
The Editor`s Full Blog List of Posts are at the End of all The Editors favorite Picks... Remember to keep an open Mind too learn anew and beyond, For If the Truth can be told so as to be Understood, It will be Belived ! The link to the blog full of Mind openers, is here: http://universal-x-knowledge.blogspot.com/2008/07/holographic-universe.html So what do you think? Who knows what might happen right after you finish reading this..?
