Almost as important as choosing the right telescope is choosing the right mount. A wobbly mount can ruin your beautiful night no matter how good your telescope can perform. The same goes with hard to operate mounts especially if you’re not that technically inclined. On the other hand, a good mount can augment your stargazing experience a lot even you have a not-so-good telescope.In this article, we will try to show you the pros and cons of some of the most popular telescope mounts. There are generally two types of mounts – the alt-azimuth mount and the equatorial mount. Both have their advantages and disadvantages depending on your observational needs as well as your technical skills. (more…)

As each day goes by, Comet Pojmanski climbs higher and higher in the sky.  This day – February 28 – at 5:00am, Comet Pojmanski was already at about 15 degrees from the horizon making it easier to look at.

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Hi my dear readers. I wasn’t able to observe Comet Pojmanski yesterday (Feb 27) simply because I was so tired to wake up but here’s an excellent report and photo by a fellow amateur astronomer and ALP member Eric Africa. (more…)

Do you want to prevent your PC from being fried? One solution is to submerge it in cooking oil. Check out the video below from Tom’s Hardware.

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This is my second day of observing Comet Pojmanski and it’s February 26, 2006. If you haven’t read my first post yet, then feel free to read it here.

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Here’s my first observation of Comet Pojmanski.

Before anything else, thanks for fellow ALPer Jun Lao for posting in the Phil Astronomy Forum Yahoogroups that a new comet is visible. As soon as I saw his post, I got so excited that I immediately asked questions. I then went to Space.COM as I’m pretty sure that they are almost always updated of such events and as expected, I found rough coordinates of where to find the comet. According to the Space.COM article, Comet Pojmanski would be visible at roughly 7 degrees to the left and slightly below of Venus on February 27. It’s only February 25 so I have to look around the vicinity if I were to spot the comet.

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When we speak of satellites, we usually think of high-tech machines launched by human beings out into space.  We can also think of the International Space Station and more conservative people will immediately think of our very own moon when the word ’satellite’ is mentioned.  But here’s something new and unique.

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For years, the Turing Test was used to determine if a computer is intelligent or not. The Turing Test was described by Alan Turing in the 1950s and simply put, it states that “a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test.” So what is the Turing Test testing for? Since Alan Turing introduced in a seminal paper on the topic of Artificial Intelligence, then it is easy for me to say that the Turing Test was meant to test if a computer is intelligent. And this is where the flaw is.

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Recently, I’ve grown some interest on AI (Artificial Intelligence) programming especially those that have to do with text inputs and outputs only. In other words, chatbots. What I did was search the internet for chatbots and came across ALICE and Jabberwacky. Jabberwacky is the more complex and interesting one (to me) so I will talk about him here.

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It is pretty amazing to realize that a lot of modern technology were the brainchild of early science fiction writers. In fact, sci-fi stories are a good source of ideas for modern day inventors.

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