Adventures of an inquiring mind

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to drive a Model 3. It was my first close-up experience with an all-electric car, and I would like to share my impressions. While I have been following Tes...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2018/09/tesla-model-3.html

If there is one thing I would like to say about experiencing a totality, it is this: a total solar eclipse is one of the very few things in life that no matter how overhyped they are, they provi...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2017/08/totality.html

Last month I went on a 10-day trip to Asia (Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong). I wanted to test whether it was possible to have only a carry-on backpack with me instead of a suitcase, in order to min...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2014/06/travelling-on-backpack.html

> The reason scientific skepticism developed is that the world is > complicated. It’s subtle. > Everybody’s first idea isn’t necessary right. Also, people are > capa...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-case-for-scientific-skepticism.html

In this post I try to decipher the seemingly inexplicable art of painting, by identifying the original ideas used by the artists. For the purposes of this discussion,  by “painting” in thi...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-brief-history-of-painting.html

BBC's Sherlock, a modern re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes, is probably the best British series out right now. It just completed its third season, and there are only 3 movie-long episodes per seas...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2014/01/bbcs-sherlock.html

> We all change. >  When you think about it, we are all different people, all through > our lives. >  And that's OK, that's good, so long as you remember all the p...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2013/12/we-all-change.html

Στο πιο σημαντικό βιβλίο που ίσως έχω διαβάσει, το Guns Germs and Steel , ο Jared Diamond αναφέρει πως η εξέλιξη μιας χώρας ...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2013/11/blog-post.html

In the next month, it will be 10 year since I got my first digital camera, an Olympus C750UZ. Since then I went through a Canon S2 in 2007 and a dSLR Canon 500D/T1i in 2009. In 2008 I also intro...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2013/08/organizing-and-preserving-10-years-of.html

There is a not-so-visited spot along the river Thames that has majestic views of the Houses of Parliament. You get there by crossing the Westminster bridge right in front of Big Ben, and then, i...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2013/08/kids-revisited.html

Three weeks ago we had our twin girls born. I was inside the delivery room for the whole process of natural delivery, which lasted about 20 hours. The final 3 hours that included all the p...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-live-birth.html

An interesting thing happened the other day. I forgot my MacBook Air 13" inside the aircraft on my flight back from Greece. I was using only Windows 7 in that machine. The laptop was thankfu...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2013/07/switching-to-osx.html

The are two reasons why I love the above painting by Joseph Wright of Derby from 1768. First, the painting depicts a scientific experiment. These air pump devices were common in the 18th ce...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2013/06/an-experiment-on-bird-in-air-pump.html

I started watching Game of Thrones recently. While it is a medieval fantasy world, I cannot avoid thinking that many practices depicted in the series have strong elements of truth from the actua...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2013/05/game-of-thrones-and-united-states-of.html

In my last post I argued that believing in an anthropomorphic God is not a choice, where the two options are of equal value. This is because there is no reliable evidence yet on the presence of...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2013/04/science-is-not-democracy.html

I am an atheist. I used to think that believing in God or not was a choice. I admired people that didn't, and didn't care about people that did. Not anymore. I have come to think that belie...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2013/04/apology-to-theists.html

fxguide.com on how a digital Ted presented the sound Oscars last night: > With five nominees in each category, 10 different outcomes were > rendered (Tippett relied on Dell Pre...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2013/02/ted-at-oscars.html

I always wondered why modern astronomy didn't flourish in the sunny, warm climates of the Mediterranean during the renaissance and beyond. The birth of modern astronomy was dominated by Nort...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2013/02/it-was-church-stupid.html

I have been a Windows user for quite some time now (since 1995, to be exact). The only other major OS I used was iOS when I got an iPhone in 2008. But lately, I am using on daily basis a Samsung...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2013/02/testing-operating-systems.html

Last week I had the opportunity to visit one of the weirdest city in the US, Austin in Texas. It's a 1.5M city in the heart of Texas, yet extremely different than the culture that surrounds it. ...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2012/11/austin-texas.html

Κρίμα. Σήμερα έλαβα στο email μου ένα από τα πιο τρανταχτά παραδείγματα της Ελλάδας αυτής που δεν θέλει να αλ�...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2012/10/blog-post.html

So a movie is forcing me to write a new blog post after almost three months. (spoiler free) Very few movies get to blend together action, science fiction and great storytelling as smoothly a...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-looper.html

What do scientists do in their free time? I found out about TED in 2007, a few months after they started releasing the talks online for free (this was my first). Thankfully, only a few dozen ...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2012/07/myted-favorite-ted-talks-so-that-you.html

I couldn't help but notice how this text from 50 years ago applies to the current situation in Greece. > However complex and solid it seems, civilization is actually quite > fragile....

http://themos.blogspot.com/2012/06/fear.html

There are many things common to both Richard Feynman and Steve Jobs. Here's an interesting one, relating to their fathers. From "What do YOU care what other people think", Feynman accounts the...

http://themos.blogspot.com/2012/01/mel-feynman-paul-jobs.html