Nikon has an annual competition called International Small World Competition which is meant for those involved in photography through the light microscope. The following picture is the second place winner. Real beauty, isn't it? The picture is a fluorescent picture of a 3 day old embryonic zebra fish brain. Michael Hendricks, has taken this picture as part of his PhD work.

Michael Hendricks, © 2007 Nikon Instruments Inc

For more great pictures go to the web page of this competition and watch these amazing photo's. On the other hand some of my colleagues might wanna take part in the next year's competition.

As I was surfing in the internet I saw these beautiful pictures of Mobula Ray, in the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. In this page you can read about them and see some more pictures.

Talking about fishes and ocean, a while ago I was discussing with a colleague that how few is our knowledge about ocean and the living things in it. Although ocean is accessible (or at least more accessible than space) we still don't know many things about it (even less than what we know of space).
I just read in "The Gear Beyond" (Nature's blog) that an international group of marine scientists met at the weekend to ask for $3 billion. Good luck for them as this money will boost up the research in this field.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
Noam Chomsky

My good friend Jadi has written in his Persian weblog that the webpage of The world's Aids day is filtered (censored) inside Iran! Isn't that amazingly stupid? Jadi has a category in his page which is called Stupid Filtering where he introduces these kind of stupid censorship.

In a previous entry here I posted an Amnesty advertisement, I found another one while surfing in the internet which is also very interesting and effective, especially I guess it is interesting for people of my country, you'll find out why when you go to the rest of this post:

Leila as part of a weblog game, has introduced (in Persian) 5 of the most effective books she has ever read, and has invited 5 others including Jadi to join the game and introduced their books. I'm not in between the invited people but after reading her post I started thinking about the books that had the most effect on me, so I jump in the game without invitation. Here are the books that first came into my mind:

1. Definitely the most effective book which also has shaped sort of my choice of studying was a novel written by Isaac Assimov, called "The Death Dealers", It is a story of a Biochemistry professor whose research student dies while performing an experiment due to wrong usage of Sodium Cyanide instead of Sodium Acetate. It was not the only book I read from Assimov, as he was one of my favorite authors, but the story had such an effect on me that I became a Biochemist.
2. One of the first long novels I ever read was Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, I guess I was about 11 years old (or younger) when my dad bought it for me. I can still remember the shop we bought it from and my happiness carrying the book home!
3. Animal Farm by Geroge Orwell is a classic and for me and many others from my country has live examples!
4. The next book is "All quiet on the Western Front" (German: Im Westen nichts Neues), written by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. This great book is about the horrors of war.
   Hmmmm I already said four books but there are so many more that I have in mind right now! 
5. I think between all the other books I'll choose Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". Novels written by Mark Twain are between the novels that I first thought about, when I read Leila's post.

This is really funny, Jeff Dunham in this video has interviewed a dead terrorist!
In his homepage you can watch other videos of his performance with "Walter".

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mass arrest and imprisonment of Women right activists continues in Iran as Maryam Hosseinkhah, Journalist and Member of the "1 Million signature Campaign" Arrested. To know more about this campaign visit their webpage.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
George Orwell

Sami Ben Gharbia of GlobalVoices has created the Access Denied Map, an interactive Google Maps mashup that provides information about the censorship targeting various online social networking communities and web-based applications. The picture above which I made from the video of his post in GlobalVoices shows countries that censor participative Web and user-generated content. For those who are living in free countries it is good to know the level of censorship by looking at this map; it will surprise you. 
If you want to know which web pages are censored in China to get an idea of the level of censorship, you can take a look at the great firewall of China. Well; personally I do understand censorship as I come from a country that is listed as one of the leaders in press suppression. Also personally I've experienced censorship as the small group weblog which I used to write in, with an average of 300 readers per day was censored inside the country, let alone other bigger websites.

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

Edith Wharton American novelist (1862–1937)

I first saw this quote in an Amnesty international commercial on YouTube. I was surfing in YouTube for the Amnesty international advertisement which you can watch here. I find it really well made,I thought I will share both with you.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product  of other activities.

Aldous Leonard Huxley
July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963

Three men who escaped the death penalty joined forces in New York to campaign for a global abolition of this irreversible punishment.
Each was sentenced to death for a crime they did not commit - and each shares a brutal experience of living on death row. Together, they lived under the shadow of execution for a combined 54 years.
Go to Amnesty's homepage to watch a slide show about the stories of death penalty with commentary of Collin Firth.

As you may have noticed I've done some changes in the appearance of my weblog. The biggest change is that now this weblog is powered by Movable type 4.01.


I moved from MT 3.33 to MT 4 so at the beginning it took me some time to understand the new system and now I can say that it is GREAT. You can watch a video about some of the great changes in the new MT here. The installation is easy, and it is even easier to manage your weblog and make global changes to your weblog, but first you have to spend some time understanding the new concepts, modules and new template system.
Most importantly MT4 is FREE, and there are lots of free plugins and other sources available in the internet.