BS: Random Traces From All Over

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 16 Oct 10 - 10:40 AM

A new study suggests the universe and everything in it could end within the Earth's lifespan -- less than 3.7 billion years from now -- and we won't know it when it happens.

But one expert says the result isn't valid because the researchers chose an arbitrary end point.

The universe began in a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding at an ever accelerating rate ever since.

According to standard cosmology models the most likely outcome for the universe is that it will expand forever.

But a team of physicists led by Raphael Bousso from the University of California, Berkeley, claim their calculations show the universe will end.

Writing in the prepublication blog arXiv.org Bousso and colleagues say there's a "measure problem" in the cosmological theory of eternal inflation.

Eternal inflation is a quantum cosmological model where inflationary bubbles can appear out of nothing. Some expand and go on forever, others collapse and disappear again.

These bubbles, each being a universe, pop in and out of existence like bubbles in boiling water.

They argue, in an eternally inflating universe, every event that is possible will eventually occur -- not just once, but an infinite number of times. This makes predicting when each event will occur impossible, such as the probability that a universe like ours exists.

"If infinitely many observers throughout the universe win the lottery, on what grounds can one still claim that winning the lottery is unlikely?" they write.

Bousso's team have being trying to determine the number of bubbles that exist at any given time and the number of 'observers' in each bubble to come up with the relative frequency of observers that can live in one universe compared to the relative frequency of observers who can live in another universe.

But the "measure problem" makes calculating this value impossible.

According to Bousso and colleagues, the only way to avoid this conundrum is to introduce a cut-off point, which then helps make sense again.

By introducing this cut-off, they say there is "a 50-50 chance of the universe ending in the next 3.7 billion years."

Charles Lineweaver from the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory says Bousso's team are simply imposing a catastrophe for statistical reasons.

He says the need for a better statistical solution has led the researchers to a false conclusion about the end of the universe.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 13 Oct 10 - 11:40 PM

"Natalie Angier writes in The Hindu that it is now becoming clear that Newton spent thirty years of his life slaving over a furnace in search of the power to transmute one chemical element into another. Angier writes, 'How could the ultimate scientist have been seemingly hornswoggled by a totemic pseudoscience like alchemy, which in its commonest rendering is described as the desire to transform lead into gold?' Now new historical research describes how alchemy yielded a bounty of valuable spinoffs, including new drugs, brighter paints, stronger soaps and better booze. 'Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry,' says Dr. William Newman, 'and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation.' Newman adds that Newton's alchemical investigations helped yield one of his fundamental breakthroughs in physics: his discovery that white light is a mixture of colored rays that can be recombined with a lens. 'I would go so far as to say that alchemy was crucial to Newton's breakthroughs in optics,' says Newman. 'He's not just passing light through a prism Ñ he's resynthesizing it.'"

Slashdot

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 13 Oct 10 - 07:46 PM

n 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose.

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

(Full article can be found here at Red Ice on Myspace).

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 12 Oct 10 - 08:44 PM

A team of linguists announced Tuesday that they have discovered a new and unique language, called Koro, in northeastern India, but immediately warned that it was highly endangered.

Only around 800 people are believed to speak the Tibeto-Burman language, and few of them are under the age of 20, according to the researchers who discovered Koro during an expedition as part of National Geographic's "Enduring Voices" project.

The language, they said, has never been written down.

"We found something that was making its exit, was on the way out," said National Geographic fellow Gregory Anderson, one of the leaders of the expedition that discovered Koro.

"If we had waited 10 years to make the trip, we might not have come across close to the number of speakers we found," he said.

Koro is so distinct from other Tibeto-Burman languages -- around 150 of which are spoken in India alone -- that the expedition team was unable to find any other language from the same family that was closely related to it.

It was discovered in the Arunachal Pradesh region of India, a rugged and hilly part of the subcontinent which visitors require a special permit to enter. Few linguists have worked in Arunachal Pradesh and no one has ever drawn up a reliable list of languages spoken there.

The National Geographic expedition, which also included Indian linguist Ganesh Murmu of Ranchi University, was, in fact, in search of two other languages, Aka and Miji, known to be spoken in a small district of Arunachal Pradesh.

Going door to door among the bamboo houses that sit on stilts in the hillside villages of the region, the team spoke to villagers and recorded their vocabularies.

And while they were doing so, they began to detect a third language, which was not listed in standard international registries or even in Indian language surveys. That third language was Koro.

The linguists made the first-ever recordings of Koro, capturing thousands of words during their expedition, which began in 2008.

The new language has a completely different inventory of sounds than other languages in the region, and its own way of putting together words and sentences.

For example, in Aka, the word for "pig" is "vo." In Koro, a pig is a "lele."

Despite their geographic proximity, the two languages "sound as different as, say, English and Japanese," National Geographic fellow David Harrison, one of the leaders of the expedition, said in the recently published book "The Last Speakers."

With Koro, linguists now count 6,909 languages worldwide.

But around half those languages are endangered, the victims of cultural change, ethnic shame, government repression and other factors, according to linguists.

One of the aims of National Geographic's Enduring Voices project is to document vanishing languages. The team that discovered Koro plans to return to India in November to continue studying the new language.

A scientific paper on Koro will be published in the journal Indian Linguistics.


http://news.discovery.com/human/new-language-india.html

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 11 Oct 10 - 11:16 PM

A small asteroid will fly past Earth early Tuesday within the Earth-moon system. The asteroid, 2010 TD54, will have its closest approach to EarthÕs surface at an altitude of about 45,000 kilometers (27,960 miles) at 6:50 EDT a.m. (3:50 a.m. PDT). At that time, the asteroid will be over southeastern Asia in the vicinity of Singapore.

During its flyby, Asteroid 2010 TD54 has zero probability of impacting Earth. A telescope of the NASA-sponsored Catalina Sky Survey north of Tucson, Arizona discovered 2010 TD54 on Oct. 9 at (12:55 a.m. PDT) during routine monitoring of the skies.

2010 TD54 is estimated to be about 5 to 10 meters (16 to 33 feet) wide. Due to its small size, the asteroid would require a telescope of moderate size to be viewed. A five-meter-sized near-Earth asteroid from the undiscovered population of about 30 million would be expected to pass daily within a lunar distance, and one might strike EarthÕs atmosphere about every 2 years on average. If an asteroid of the size of 2010 TD54 were to enter EarthÕs atmosphere, it would be expected to burn up high in the atmosphere and cause no damage to EarthÕs surface.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 08 Oct 10 - 02:40 PM

THere are occasions when it seems the depth of human psychic connections is too complex and rich with Jungian harmonics to settle for the normal materialist explanations. Here's one from a Wikipedia article on the death of the beloved John Lennon:

"Two films depicting the murder of Lennon were released in close proximity of each other more than 25 years after the event. The first of the two, The Killing of John Lennon, was released on 7 December 2007 (one day before the 27th anniversary of the murder). Directed by Andrew Piddington, the movie starred Jonas Ball as Mark David Chapman. The second film was Chapter 27, released on 28 March 2008. Directed by J. P. Schaefer, the film starred Jared Leto as Mark David Chapman. Lennon was portrayed by an actor named Mark Lindsay Chapman.

Of the two films, the low budget The Killing of John Lennon was considerably better received,[57] while Chapter 27, with its higher budget, was roundly hammered by critics.[58]"

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Oct 10 - 08:50 PM

Does thinking about time or money make you happier? A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people who are made to think about time plan to spend more of their time with the people in their lives while people who think about money fill their schedules with work, work, and -- you guessed it -- more work.



To find out how thinking about time or money makes people feel, Cassie Mogilner of the University of Pennsylvania designed an experiment, carried out online with adults from all over the United States, in which they concentrated on money or time. In this experiment, volunteers were asked to unscramble a series of sentences. Some participants were presented with sentences containing words related to time (e.g., "clock" and "day"), whereas others' sentences contained words related to money (e.g., "wealth" and "dollar"). Next all participants were asked how they planned to spend their next 24 hours. The ones who had been primed to think about time planned to spend more time socializing. People who'd been primed to think about money planned to spend more time working.
She also carried out the experiment on low-income people and found that having them think about time had the same effect, but having them think about money did not. This may mean that low-income people already live concerned about and, therefore, highly focused on money, Mogilner speculates.

But Mogilner wanted to test the effect in the real world, seeing how people actually spent their time. So her research team approached people going into a cafŽ on campus to ask them to take part in a questionnaire, which included the word-scrambling task that primed them with thoughts of time or money. These individuals were then watched to see how they spent their time in the cafŽÑwhether they chatted with people there or on a cell phone, or whether they worked. When they left the cafŽ, they filled out a second questionnaire about how happy and satisfied they felt. The results were similar: People who were primed to think about time spent more time socializing and were happier, while people who were primed with money spent more time with their noses buried in books and were less happy when they emerged.

Although focusing on money motivates people to work more, passing the hours working does not generally make one happy. Spending time with loved ones does, and thinking about time might motivate people to pursue these social connections. "There is so much discussion and focus on money, optimal ways to spend and save it, and the relationship between money and happiness," says Mogilner. "We're often ignoring the ultimately more important resource, which is time." She does not suggest that people stop working altogether, but she does say that people need to be reminded to make time for friends and family. ...


(Phys Org)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Oct 10 - 01:10 PM

The title of World's Smallest Man is now about to be transferred to a seventeen-year old from the back country outside Kathmandu, who is two feet tall and proud of his dance moves and karate skills.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 29 Sep 10 - 10:27 PM

Earth-Like Planet Can Sustain Life

A new member in a family of planets circling a red dwarf star 20 light-years away has just been found. It's called Gliese 581g, and the 'g' may very well stand for Goldilocks.

Gliese 581g is the first world discovered beyond Earth that's the right size and location for life.

"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it," Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, told Discovery News.

The discovery caps an 11-year effort to tease out information from instruments on ground-based telescopes that measure minute variations in starlight caused by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets.

Planet G -- the sixth member in Gliese 581's family -- orbits right in the middle of that system's habitable region, where temperatures would be suitable for liquid water to pool on the planet's surface.

"This is really the first 'Goldilocks' planet, the first planet that is roughly the right size and just at the right distance to have liquid water on the surface," astronomer Paul Butler, with the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., told reporters during a conference call Wednesday.

"Everything we know about life is that it absolutely requires liquid water," he added. "The planet has to be the right distance from the star so it's not too hot, not too cold... and then it has to have surface gravity so that it can hold on to a substantial atmosphere and allow the water to pool."

With a mass three times larger than Earth's, the newly discovered world has the muscle to hold atmosphere. Plus, it has the gift of time. Not only is its parent star especially long-lived, the planet is tidally locked to its sun -- similar to how the moon keeps the same side pointed at Earth -- so that half the world is in perpetual light and the other half in permanent darkness. As a result, temperatures are extremely stable and diverse.

"This planet doesn't have days and nights. Wherever you are on this planet, the sun is in the same position all the time. You have very stable zones where the ecosystem stays the same temperature... basically forever," Vogt said. "If life can evolve, it's going to have billions and billions of years to adapt to the surface."

"Given the ubiquity of water, it seems probable that this thing actually has liquid water. On the surface of the Earth, everywhere you have liquid water you have life," Vogt added.

The question wouldn't be to defend that there is life at Gliese 581g, says Butler. "The question," he said, "would be to demonstrate that there isn't."

Current technologies won't allow scientists to study the planet's atmosphere for chemical signs of life, but astronomers expect many more similar life-friendly planets to be discovered soon. If one or more of those cross the face of their parent star, relative to our line of sight, then it's possible to gather atmospheric data.

"This system is not in an orientation such that this planet would ever transit, so unfortunately this is not a case where nature has thrown us a bone," Vogt noted. "That being said, it is so close and we have found this thing so soon that it suggests we will start finding a lot of these things in the future and eventually we will find systems that do transit. This is a harbinger of things to come."

The research appears in this week's issue of Astrophysical Journal.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 29 Sep 10 - 07:03 PM

The story of the double helix's discovery has a few new twists. A new primary source -- a never-before-read stack of letters to and from Francis Crick, and other historical materials dating from the years 1950-76 -- has been uncovered by two professors at the Watson School of Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL).


The letters both confirm and extend current knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the epoch-making discovery of DNA's elegant double-helical structure, for which Crick, James D. Watson (now CSHL's chancellor emeritus) and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. Unlike the structure itself, which amazed even its discoverers in its simplicity, the story of the discovery has revealed a complex tangle of people, ambitions and institutional politics behind the process of scientific investigation.

"It's primarily the insights these new letters provide about the personalities of the discoverers that people will find most fascinating," says Alex Gann, Ph.D., who along with Jan Witkowski, Ph.D., uncovered the new Crick materials and co-authored a paper on them that appears in the journal Nature Sept. 30.

Following the publication of landmark works including Watson's confessional The Double Helix in 1968 and Horace Freeland Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation 11 years later, most historians have been content to believe that the archives had been fully explored and would not reveal much more about the double helix story. But 34 of the newfound letters are between Crick and Wilkins and draw attention to what Gann and Witkowski have described as Wilkins' "tortured soul" during the critical period 1951-53, when Watson and Crick were alternately put on, taken off and then restored to an effort to discover DNA's structure.

"We are really between forces which may grind all of us into little pieces," Wilkins wrote to Crick in one letter. As Witkowski explains, "Maurice Wilkins on the one hand wanted to be open - he believed science should be open and was all in favor of cooperation, the exchange of ideas and data; but on the other hand, he was also mindful of his own career: he knew he had to get results and publish papers." As the upstarts Watson and Crick, then unknowns, jockeyed for permission at Cambridge to explore the DNA structure problem, Wilkins, at King's College, was already well engaged in experimentation that would prove vital in determination of the solution. Wilkins' boss at King's, John Randall, hired Rosalind Franklin and had, unknown to Wilkins, assured her that she was in "sole charge" of the DNA work at King's. This led to conflicts between Franklin and Wilkins, who assumed he and Franklin would be partners.



This was but the beginning of a series of now historic misunderstandings. Between the lines of the newly discovered Crick letters with Wilkins, one grasps, on Wilkins' end, the anguish, and on Crick's, what at times comes across as the self-assurance and jocularity of the player possessing superior position.

This is but a fraction of the newly found letters, which were uncovered unexpectedly in the midst of an archival collection of materials donated to Cold Spring Harbor by Sydney Brenner, the distinguished molecular biologist and Nobel laureate, who worked alongside Crick following discovery of the double helix. The two shared an office at Cambridge from 1956 to 1977. Coincidentally, the CSHL Press has just released a new biography of Brenner by Errol Friedberg.

Among the new letters there are some 30 between Crick and George Gamow, dating to 1953-64. Other of his correspondents included Leo Szilard, C.P. Snow, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, among many others. The most important of the new letters, cited in the Gann-Witkowski paper, are now in the process of being digitized at the CSHL Archives (http://library.cshl.edu) to facilitate public access. Mila Pollock, Executive Director of the CSHL Library and Archives, says it is her hope that digitization will proceed so that the Crick correspondence in its entirety will be accessible to all via the Internet. The greater part of the collection resides at the Wellcome Library (http://library.wellcome.ac.uk)
More information: "The Lost Correspondence of Francis Crick" appears in Nature September 30, 2010. The authors are Alexander Gann and Jan A. Witkowski.

The paper can be accessed online at http://www.nature.com

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 29 Sep 10 - 02:16 PM

Time Likely To End Within Earth's Lifespan, Say Physicists

There is a 50 per cent chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years, according to a new model of the universe

Look out into space and the signs are plain to see. The universe began in a Big Bang event some 13 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. And the best evidence from the distance reaches of the cosmos is that this expansion is accelerating.

That has an important but unavoidable consequence: it means the universe will expand forever. And a universe that expands forever is infinite and eternal.

Today, a group of physicists rebel against this idea. They say an infinitely expanding universe cannot be so because the laws of physics do not work in an infinite cosmos. For these laws to make any sense, the universe must end, say Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley and few pals. And they have calculated when that is most likely to happen.

Their argument is deceptively simple and surprisingly powerful. Here's how it goes. If the universe lasts forever, then any event that can happen, will happen, no matter how unlikely. In fact, this event will happen an infinite number of times.

This leads to a problem. When there are an infinite number of instances of every possible observation, it becomes impossible to determine the probabilities of any of these events occurring. And when that happens, the laws of physics simply don't apply. They just break down. "This is known as the "measure problem" of eternal inflation," say Bousso and buddies.

In effect, these guys are saying that the laws of physics abhor an eternal universe.

The only way out of this conundrum is to hypothesise some kind of catastrophe that brings an end to the universe. Then all the probabilities make sense again and the laws of physics regain their power.

When might his be? Bousso and co have crunched the numbers. "Time is unlikely to end in our lifetime, but there is a 50% chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years," they say.

That's not so long! It means that the end of the time is likely to happen within the lifetime of the Earth and the Sun.

But Buosso and co have some comforting news too. They don't know what kind of catastrophe will cause the end of time but they do say that we won't see it coming. They point out that if we were to observe the end of time in any other part of the universe we would have to be causally ahead of it, which is unlikely.
..."


(MIT Technology Review)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 29 Sep 10 - 01:45 PM

A desktop black hole created in a lab in Italy has been shown to emit light, a discovery that could seal one of the biggest holes in theoretical physics and pave the way for physicist Stephen Hawking to win a Nobel prize.

The eerie glow is called Hawking radiation, and physicists have been hunting it for decades. In 1974, Stephen Hawking calculated that, rather than gobbling up everything in their path and giving nothing back, black holes can radiate like the heating element in a toaster.

But astrophysical black holes, the ultradense gobs of mass that lurk at the centers of galaxies and are left behind when stars collapse, radiate too dimly to be seen. So instead of looking at real black holes, a group of physicists led by Francesco Belgiorno of the University of Milan, Italy, created a miniature analog by shooting short pulses of intense laser light into a chip of glass. The results will appear in Physical Review Letters.

"This is an extremely important paper," said physicist Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews in Scotland, who built an artificial black hole in a phone line in 2008. "The experiment confirms that Hawking radiation can exist in principle."



Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/hawking-radiation-in-the-lab/#ixzz10wReuwso

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 Sep 10 - 04:44 PM

Historical changes show up in unexpected places:

"The Federal Communications Commission's new approach to dealing with white spaces spectrum has gone from "proceed with utmost caution" to "if a channel looks open, use it."

In its second memorandum opinion on white spaces issued Thursday, the FCC removed the requirement that devices operating on TV bands have built-in sensors that would automatically shut down the devices if they came into contact with an adjacent television signal. That requirement had originally been put in place to satisfy concerns of television broadcasters that were worried that unlicensed use of white spaces could interfere with their broadcast quality.


Instead of requiring white-space devices to have sensing technology, the FCC now says that giving devices geolocation capability and access to a spectrum database will be sufficient to protect broadcasters' spectrum from interference. Geo-location databases are designed to track mobile devices by locating them through their specific IP address, media-access-control address, radio-frequency identification or other location-based information. Once the database has a fix on the device's location, it then selects the optimal white-space spectrum for the device and can even switch the device to a different spectrum once it moves to a different location.

The FCC said its reason for eliminating the sensor technology requirement was that the technology had not yet evolved to the point where it would be especially useful in helping to preserve television broadcast quality. Additionally, the FCC said that requiring sensing technology would place an unnecessary burden on manufacturers when simply providing access to the spectrum database would be sufficient.

"The geo-location and database method is already the primary means for preventing interference to TV stations," wrote the FCC in its order. "We continue to believe that spectrum sensing will continue to develop and improve… however, at this juncture, we do not believe that a mandatory spectrum sensing requirement best serves the interest of the public."

Television "white spaces" are pieces of unlicensed spectrum that are currently unused by television stations on the VHF and UHF frequency bands and that have long been seen as prime spectrum for unlicensed wireless Internet services. In 2008, the FCC, then headed by former chairman Kevin Martin, voted to let carriers and other vendors deploy devices in white space spectrum that operates unlicensed at powers of 100 milliwatts, as well as on white space channels adjacent to existing television stations at powers of up to 40 milliwatts."
(PC Mag)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 Sep 10 - 01:24 PM

More than 30 years after Stephen Hawking predicted the existence of radiation emitted by black holes, physicists say they've finally observed the phenomenon for themselves, not in the heavens, but down here on Earth.

The universe is filled with particle/antiparticle pairs that form and almost immediately mutually annihilate, releasing their energy. Hawking radiation, as it's known, occurs when these pairs form near the edge of a black hole. As the pair of particles crosses the black hole's event horizon, one member is sucked in, while the other is set free -- before they are able to annihilate each other. The observed effect is that the black hole is radiating particles, and actually losing mass.

Researchers at the University of Milan claim to have observed Hawking radiation in their lab by creating the inverse of a black hole – the aptly named white hole. Rather than all light being sucked inside, as happens with a black hole, in a white hole, light waves come to a complete halt, creating a different sort of event horizon.

Having formed this event horizon by sending an infrared laser pulse through fused silica, the researchers say they were able to rule out other phenomena and conclude that what they had observed was, in fact, Hawking radiation.

If this is true, the discovery could have huge implications for cosmology and many other fields. The only known way for black holes to evaporate is through Hawking radiation, so its effects on the eventual end of the universe could be huge.

(Pop Sci)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 Sep 10 - 01:21 PM

For the past 40 years, CPR has been composed of two things—rescue breaths and chest compressions—and this formula for cardiac survival can revive around 25 percent of patients without a pulse. However, emerging evidence suggests there may be a more effective protocol for resuscitation that can save even more lives, and it's simpler than traditional CPR.

Cardiocerebral resuscitation, or CCR, differs from CPR in that for the first 5 to 10 minutes after cardiac arrest, a rescuer does not breathe for the patient at all. Instead, the focus shifts to performing unrelenting chest compressions at a rate of 100 per minute. One clinical trial in Wisconsin showed this technique saved 30 percent more lives when compared with traditional CPR. Better yet, patients who receive CCR instead of CPR were found to be 24 percent more likely to be neurologically intact upon release from the hospital.

"It's one of the first times in medicine something has gotten simpler," says Dr. Amal Mattu, professor of emergency medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center.

There are two main reasons why it works: One, constant pressure on the chest maintains a constant blood pressure, which insures blood flow to vital organs. In CPR, when a rescuer turns from his chest compressions to give the breaths, the blood pressure quickly drops to near zero and the blood stops flowing to the brain and other vital organs. Blood pressure is built up slowly over the course of the compressions, so when the rescuer returns to them, he or she has to make up for lost time.

Second, ventilations actually counteract the effectiveness of chest compressions. When a rescuer breathes for a patient, he or she forces air into the lungs, which increase the pressure inside the chest. Then, this force squeezes on the veins that return blood to the heart. "That results in less filling of the heart," Mattu says. "If there is less blood coming back to the heart, there is going to be a lower output from the heart, lower blood pressure, lower perfusion of the coronary arteries and the brain." Constant blood flow to the brain increases the chances for survival, and that is one reason why the studies are finding CCR patients to be more neurologically intact. The more time the brain spends without oxygen, the greater the chance for brain damage.

"Chest compressions, early on, are much more important than airway issues. When people are focused on airway issues, they tend to not do as good chest compressions, or their chest compressions are too slow," Mattu says. What rescuers need to realize, he says, is when the heart stops beating due to cardiac arrest, the blood has enough oxygen to support the organs for around 5 or 10 minutes.

Quality chest compressions are just as important as having a defibrillator early on. Dr. Comilla Sasson, professor of emergency medicine at University of Colorado Denver, and her colleagues found when EMS arrives on the scene, doing immediate chest compressions is as beneficial as shocking a patient with a defibrillator right away. Furthermore, they found if the EMS personnel arrived more than 5 minutes after the onset of the cardiac arrest, chest compressions first had a slight advantage.


(Popular Mechanics)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 Sep 10 - 01:19 PM

Galaxy clusters are monstrous things, but they can be difficult to detect as they get further and further away. However, the interesting physics that occurs in these clusters has made a new galaxy cluster visible to two orbiting space telescopes, Planck and XMM-Newton.

Galaxy clusters appear to be exactly what they sound like: groupings of galaxies physically bound together by gravity. There is, however, so much more that they eye cannot see. Galaxy clusters appear to be dominated by dark matter, which was famously detected in the merging galaxy clusters known collectively as the Bullet Cluster. But neither Planck nor XMM-Newton are set up to detect that.

If you just look at the "normal" matter in a cluster, the galaxies themselves only make up a small percentage. The cluster is instead dominated by hot gas between the galaxies. In fact, the mass of this gas is typically around five times the mass of all the galaxies in the cluster put together! This gas is so hot that it glows in X-rays, which is why many distant clusters have been detected by x-ray telescopes.

Planck, however, works in the radio and microwave regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Its mission is to study the cosmic microwave background (CMB), or the signal from when the universe was just 300,000 years old. In order to do that, astronomers need to weed out any sources that may lie in front of the CMB, such as emission from our own Milky Way Galaxy. Galaxy clusters also show up in the microwave in their own way.

Photons (or, roughly speaking, particles of light) from the CMB travel across vast distances and may slam into a galaxy cluster. They specifically can hit particles of the hot gas in the cluster. Hot gas moves quickly, and some of that energy is imparted to the photon in a process called "scattering." The photon then flies off to continue its journey, now with higher energy and higher frequency. In this way, when you look at the CMB in lower frequencies, galaxy clusters show up as dark spots or "holes," whereas at higher microwave frequencies, they are bright spots. This process is called the Sunyaev-Zel'dovic Effect, or SZE.

Planck is in the process of detecting galaxy clusters with the SZE as it has frequency coverage both there they show up as holes and bright spots. The scientists then go and match these spots to known clusters. One such cluster seen with the SZE had no known counterpart, so astronomers pointed the x-ray telescope XMM-Newton and did detect the cluster (see top image). In fact, it's a real whopper, being called a supercluster as it appears to be comprised of three smaller galaxy clusters.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 27 Sep 10 - 04:46 PM

...When SWAT officers checked the apartment they found a 9mm handgun inside, according to the lieutenant, who said shell casings also were located outside the home but they did not find a gunshot victim.

"I seen lights and I walked outside and people have guns in my face, talking about, 'get on the floor; put your hands behind your head,'" said Jaycup Lopez, one of the many detained and let go.

Lopez, who lives at the home, said there was no violence at the house and does not know the victim. He said they were celebrating his brother's 21st birthday and claimed they had no idea they were wanted for questioning.

"If they were trying to get us out of the house, we got a doorbell," Lopez said. "They could of rang it."

---

The world goes up and down and sideways, simultaneously.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 27 Sep 10 - 01:27 PM

The decline in the amount of ice floating on the Arctic Ocean is clearing the way for new shipping routes to Asia. Traffic was already brisk this summer. New ships are being designed to cope with icebergs during the voyage.

They were expecting pack ice, icebergs and storms. As a precautionary measure, a Russian icebreaker had been dispatched to protect the freighter MV Nordic Barents from the ravages of the Arctic Ocean.


In the end, though, only a few broken up ice floes drifted by on two occasions. "The nuclear icebreaker was more for decoration than anything else," says Felix Tschudi from the shipping company that chartered the freighter loaded with iron ore concentrate. This week, after traveling 5,700 km (3,500 miles) through the Polar Sea, the ship will arrive in the Chinese port of Lianyungang -- "and we didn't have to stop once," says Tschudi with satisfaction.

With a mixture of hope and suspicion, shipping companies, politicians and environmentalists have observed how far the sea ice has withdrawn towards the North Pole this year. Will the shrinking polar ice cap soon turn global shipping routes on their head?

Just a few weeks ago, the Russian tanker Baltika, laden with 70,000 tons of gas condensate, sailed without problems from the Russian port of Murmansk, through the Arctic and on to the Chinese city of Ningbo. Shipping via the polar route is gradually becoming routine. This brings Asia closer to Europe. The route of the MV Nordic Barents, for instance, from the Norwegian port of Kirkenes to China, was shortened by roughly 50 percent. "That saved us 15 days at sea," says Tschudi.

Is the world's eighth ocean actually becoming a "trans-Arctic Panama Canal," as the delighted Icelandic President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson recently said? Indeed, in addition to opening up the Northern Sea Route along the Russian Arctic Coast and Siberia to the Far East, climate change is unblocking the Northwest Passage -- and blazing a trail through the heart of the Canadian Arctic. In the 100 years between 1906 and 2006, only 69 ships, primarily sailed by explorers and scientists, ventured the harrowing voyage through these ice-filled waters. Last year alone, however, Canadian maritime law expert Michael Byers counted a total of 24 vessels.

---

And for just one time...

Well, historic moments are upon us. This one is a tarnished silvery lining. Gawd knows how large and ugly the actual dark cloud will turn out to be.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Sep 10 - 05:02 PM

In a major physics breakthrough with international significance, University of Otago scientists have developed a technique to consistently isolate and capture a fast-moving neutral atom - and have also seen and photographed this atom for the first time.

The entrapment of the Rubidium 85 atom is the result of a three-year research project funded by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, and has already prompted world-wide interest in the new science which will flow from the breakthrough.

A team of four researchers from Otago's Physics Department, led by Dr Mikkel F. Andersen, used laser cooling technology to dramatically slow a group of rubidium 85 atoms. A laser-beam, or "optical tweezers", was then deployed to isolate and hold one atom - at which point it could be photographed through a microscope.

The researchers then proved they could reliably and consistently produce individual trapped atoms - a major step towards using the atoms to build next-generation, ultra-fast quantum-logic computers, which harness the potency of atoms to perform complex information-processing tasks.

Dr Andersen says that unlike conventional silicon-based computers which generally perform one task at a time, quantum computers have the potential to perform numerous long and difficult calculations simultaneously; they also have the potential to break secret codes that would usually prove too complex.

"Our method provides a way to deliver those atoms needed to build this type of computer, and it is now possible to get a set of ten atoms held or trapped at the one time.

"You need a set of 30 atoms if you want to build a quantum computer that is capable of performing certain tasks better than existing computers, so this is a big step towards successfully doing that," he says.

"It has been the dream of scientists for the past century to see into the quantum world and develop technology on the smallest scale - the atomic scale.

"What we have done moves the frontier of what scientists can do and gives us deterministic control of the smallest building blocks in our world," Dr Andersen says.

The results of the landmark study have today been announced in the leading scientific journal Nature Physics.


(Vox News)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 23 Sep 10 - 08:04 PM

Student Makes History with First Ever Human-Powered Ornithopter Flight

A Canadian university student has done what Leonardo da Vinci had only dreamt of: piloted a human-powered "wing-flapping" plane! Called an ornithopter, and the inspiration for modern day helicopters, the machine was first sketched by Da Vinci way back in 1485 and never actually built.

Todd Reichert, an engineering student at the University of Toronto, made history by sustaining flight in his ornithopter--named Snowbird--for 19.3 seconds and covering 475.72 feet. Snowbird is made from carbon fiber, balsa wood and foam. The 92.59 pound vehicle maintained an average speed of 15.91 miles per hour.

Todd and his plane made the accomplishment on August 2nd at the Great Lakes Gliding Club in Tottenham, Ontario. The crew kept the achievement quiet for nearly two months to get the data finalized. Todd and some 30 other students had been working on the plane for 4 years.

Pics and video

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 Sep 10 - 11:35 AM

High fashion meets high tech with this new spray-on clothing designed by a Spanish fashionisto. The design team also hopes to use the technology for spray-on bandages and hygienic upholstery.

Manel Torres worked with scientists at Imperial College London to invent the silly-string-like spray, announced just in time for Fashion Week.

The sprayable shirt consists of short fibers mixed with polymers, dissolved into a solvent that allows it to be sprayed from an aerosol can or high-pressure gun, according to the Guardian. Torres can use wool, linen or acrylic fibers to change the texture of the fabric, the Guardian reports. The resulting fabric can be removed and washed with the rest of your laundry.

Don't like the color or feel? Simply dissolve it, using the same solvent, and start over.

Demonstrating the technology for British media, Torres sprayed it on two models to create form-fitting shirts. The spray is very cold when it hits the skin, but it dries instantly upon impact.

He takes care to spray extra fibers on the sleeves, ensuring it will be strong enough to withstand normal movement. Initially, it resembles body paint in the way it fits against the skin, but as soon as you start moving, it wrinkles just like a normal shirt.

Torres will display the fabric as part of his spring/summer collection at the Science in Style fashion show in London next week.

The Guardian says he worked with chemical engineers to design the system, and the ultimate goal is a sanitary spray-on bandage system to instantly deliver medication, dress wounds or soothe burnt skin.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 20 Sep 10 - 02:45 PM

Popular Science:

" In a monumental step for chocolate lovers — ah, let's be honest, the whole of humankind — scientists announced today they have completed a preliminary genome sequence for the cacao tree.

OK, maybe it's not that monumental; new genomes are sequenced all the time. But this one is special — cacao is no ordinary plant. Who cares about the corn genome when you can study chocolate instead?

The genome sequence, which enters the public domain today, is the result of a partnership among a few unlikely bedfellows: Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms, Milky Way bars and other treats; the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service; and IBM. The trio hopes international agricultural researchers will immediately start refining the sequence. As with any gene mapping project, decoding the complete genome will take some time.

In a twist, the New York Times reports that a competing team, led by Mars rival Hershey, is also working on its own genome sequence. That team won't discuss its findings until they are published in a scientific journal, however.

The Mars team's preliminary results will be available via the Cacao Genome Database, to ensure that the data remains perpetually patent-free. The Times quotes Hershey's team saying they will also make their sequence available, but won't restrict patents.

Mars hopes its $10 million investment will pay off eventually, said Howard-Yana Shapiro, the firm's global staff officer of plant science and research.


Although it may not benefit the bottom line in the short term, in the long run, it will ensure mutually beneficial results for the company, cocoa farmers and tree crop production in key regions of the world," he said."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 17 Sep 10 - 06:41 PM

AP) -- Better catch Jupiter next week in the night sky. It won't be that big or bright again until 2022. Jupiter will pass 368 million miles from Earth late Monday, its closest approach since 1963. You can see it low in the east around dusk. Around midnight, it will be directly overhead. That's because Earth will be passing between Jupiter and the sun, into the wee hours of Tuesday.


The solar system's largest planet already appears as an incredibly bright star - three times brighter than the brightest star in the sky, Sirius. The only thing brighter in the night sky right now is our moon. Binoculars and telescopes will dramatically improve the view as Jupiter, along with its many moons, rises in the east as the sun sets.
"Jupiter is so bright right now, you don't need a sky map to find it," said Tony Phillips, a California astronomer under contract with NASA. "You just walk outside and see it. It's so eye-catching, there it is."

Phillips has never seen Jupiter so bright. "To an experienced observer, the difference is notable," he said Friday.

Coincidentally, Uranus also will make a close approach the same night. It will appear close to Jupiter but harder to see with the naked eye. Through a telescope, it will shine like an emerald-colored disk less than one degree from Jupiter.

Jupiter comes relatively close to Earth about every 12 years. In 1999, it passed slightly farther away. What's rare this time is Uranus making a close appearance at the same time, Phillips said. He called it "a once-in-a-lifetime event." While seen right next to Jupiter through a telescope, Uranus actually will be 1.7 billion miles from Earth on Monday night.
Phillips urges stargazers not to give up if it's cloudy Monday night. Jupiter will remain relatively close for many weeks, he noted, providing good viewing opportunities for some time. And for those who are early risers instead of night owls, Jupiter will be visible setting in the west just before sunrise.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 17 Sep 10 - 06:37 PM

During an expedition into the Canadian Rocky Mountains in 2008, a Canadian-led team including Swedish researchers from Uppsala University found a new site with exceptionally preserved fossils. The site and its fossils have now been made public in this month's issue of Geology.

The discovered fossils, including a new form of giant predator, are equivalent in age to the world-famous Burgess Shale. However, the sediments of the new site have been deposited in an entirely different environment than the Burgess Shale, where nobody would have expected such exceptional preservation.

Following reports by hikers of unusual fossils in the Stanley Glacier area of Kootenay National Park (British Columbia, Canada), a 2-week expedition was initiated by the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto, Canada) in 2008 to investigate the area. On board the team of five scientists led by Jean-Bernard Caron (ROM) were Uppsala researchers Allison Daley and Michael Streng. The discoveries made, after just a few days, were far beyond the expectations of any team member.

Hundreds of fossils were found at Stanley Glacier, including eight completely new animals and dozens of beautifully preserved specimens of arthropods, brachiopods, trilobites, molluscs, and sponges. A photograph of a particularly well-preserved sponge called Diagoniella was chosen to adorn the front cover of SeptemberÕs issue of Geology. One of the new animals, Stanleycaris, belongs to a group of monster predators called the anomalocaridids. These creatures were up to one meter in length and had a segmented crayfish-like body with spiny head appendages and a circular mouth with sharp teeth; they were undoubtedly the most formidable predators of the Cambrian seas. Also found at Stanley Glacier is a wide multi-segmented arthropod similar to an animal from the Chengjiang biota of China but found for the first time in North America, and the first example of the elusive appendages of Tuzoia, a Cambrian arthropod previously only known from its spiky body shield and large eyes.

Although the new site is part of the same rock unit the Burgess Shale belongs to, the discovery of such spectacular fossils at Stanley Glacier was a complete surprise. The ancient ocean, in which the rock unit was deposited ca. 505 Ma ago, was characterized by a submarine cliff called an escarpment that divided the area in a deep basin and a shallow shelf. This escarpment was thought to play a decisive role in the remarkable preservation of the Burgess Shale biota, as all previous localities yielding Burgess Shale fossils were found in the deep basin crowded close against the base of the escarpment. The site at Stanley Glacier, however, was deposited in the shallower shelf area above the escarpment. This throws the importance of the escarpment for exceptional preservation into question and opens up many opportunities to find more new fossil sites.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 16 Sep 10 - 02:48 PM

The history of the top hat revealed.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 11:33 AM

The flood waters that have devestated Pakistan have continued to the south and have reached the base of the Taj Mahal which is now in danger of flood damage. The reflecting pools appeared to be under water.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 14 Sep 10 - 10:57 PM

Not just Vioxx, Celebrex etc... but a similar brand name COX 2 inhibitor called Bextra caused heart attacks.
I know from personal experience.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 Sep 10 - 10:57 AM

Before the year is out, SpaceX will likely have conducted the first orbital demonstration of the Dragon capsule, which is intended to transport cargo, and ultimately humans, to the International Space Station (ISS). Next year, Orbital Sciences is expected to launch its cargo vessel, Cygnus. By 2014, two more spacecraft, the Dream Chaser and CST-100 are on track to have maiden voyages, launched by the Sierra Nevada Corporation and Boeing, respectively. And even more spacecraft are being developed by companies such as Blue Origin and PlanetSpace, as well as suborbital vehicles being built by Virgin Galactic, XCOR, and others.


Space oasis: An artist's impression of the spaceport terminal that Virgin Galactic is planning to build in the Mojave Desert.
Credit: Virgin Galactic

On the ground, there are seven federal and eight nonfederal launch sites licensed by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration; most of the latter are new and owned by a combination of private enterprise and state and local governments. Additional applications for even more spaceports are likely.

When these developments were reviewed at last week's American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Space 2010 conference, some attendees began asking: is the space industry building too much capacity?

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 14 Sep 10 - 07:56 AM

3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution

A 3-D printer, which has nothing to do with paper printers, creates an object by stacking one layer of material — typically plastic or metal — on top of another, much the same way a pastry chef makes baklava with sheets of phyllo dough.

These days it is giving rise to a string of never-before-possible businesses that are selling iPhone cases, lamps, doorknobs, jewelry, handbags, perfume bottles, clothing and architectural models. And while some wonder how successfully the technology will make the transition from manufacturing applications to producing consumer goods, its use is exploding.

A California start-up is even working on building houses. Its printer, which would fit on a tractor-trailer, would use patterns delivered by computer, squirt out layers of special concrete and build entire walls that could be connected to form the basis of a house.

It is manufacturing with a mouse click instead of hammers, nails and, well, workers. Advocates of the technology say that by doing away with manual labor, 3-D printing could revamp the economics of manufacturing and revive American industry as creativity and ingenuity replace labor costs as the main concern around a variety of goods.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/technology/14print.html?_r=2&src=twr

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 08:08 PM

"Scientists find link between arthritis pain reliever and cardiovascular events
September 13, 2010
(Phys.org)

A research team from the University of California, Davis and Peking University, China, has discovered a novel mechanism as to why the long-term, high-dosage use of the well-known arthritis pain medication, Vioxx, led to heart attacks and strokes. Their groundbreaking research may pave the way for a safer drug for millions of arthritis patients who suffer acute and chronic pain.


Using metabolomic profiling to analyze murine (rodent) plasma, the scientists discovered that Vioxx causes a dramatic increase in a regulatory lipid that could be a major contributor to the heart attacks and strokes associated with high levels of the drug and other selective COX-2 inhibitors, known as "coxibs."
"This is a major breakthrough that can lead to a better medication for people suffering from acute pain," said entomologist-chemist Bruce Hammock, a distinguished professor of entomology with a joint appointment at the UC Davis Cancer Center. The research took place in the laboratories of Hammock, cell biologist Nipavan Chiamvimonvat, UC Davis Division of Cardiovascular Medicine; and physiologist Yi Zhu, Peking University.
The research is to be published the week of Sept. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Our metabolomics study discovered that 20-hydroxyeicosatetrasanoic acid, also known as 20-HETE, contributes to the Vioxx-mediated cardiovascular events," said UC Davis bioanalytical chemist Jun-Yan Liu, the senior author of the paper and a five-year member of the Bruce Hammock laboratory.

Millions of arthritis patients took Vioxx before its withdrawal from the global market in 2004. Vioxx, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) and coxib for acute and chronic pain, particularly for arthritis and osteoarthritis, was on the market for five years. Merck & Co. voluntarily withdrew it in September 2004 due to concerns about the increased risk of heart attacks and strokes.

The chronic administration of high levels of selective COX-2 inhibitors, particularly rofecoxib, and valdecoxib, increases the risk for cardiovascular disease, Liu said.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 08:05 PM

Scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have uncovered how a structural component inside neurons performs two coordinated dance moves when the connections between neurons are strengthened.

The results are published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience, and will appear in a future print issue.

In experiments with neurons in culture, the researchers can distinguish two separate steps during long-term potentiation, an enhancement of communication between neurons thought to lie behind learning and memory. Both steps involve the remodeling of the internal "skeletons" of dendritic spines, small protrusions on the surface of a neuron that receive electrical signals from neighboring cells.

The results hint at why people with Williams syndrome, a developmental disorder caused by a deletion of several genes, including one that alters dendritic spine remodeling, have such an unusual blend of cognitive strengths and weaknesses.

The senior author of the paper is James Zheng, PhD, professor of cell biology and neurology at Emory University School of Medicine. The paper's co-first authors are graduate student Jiaping Gu, now a postdoctoral researcher at New York University, postdoc Chi Wai Lee and graduate student Yanjie Fan.

"We've been looking at the remodeling of dendritic spines, which is a fundamental process for reshaping circuits in the brain," Zheng says. "The anatomy of dendritic spines is altered in many diseases, such as fragile X syndrome and schizophrenia, as well as neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's."

During the process of long-term potentiation, dendritic spines both enlarge and display a greater density of neurotransmitter receptors, the receiver dishes that allow neurons to detect the waves of chemicals other neurons are sending them.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 11 Sep 10 - 05:48 PM

In an article called "Dear Fellow Improbable", Dick Cavett writes:

"Back to Monterey. A genial, humorous and brilliant geologist, and the kind of professor too few ever experience, is onstage. His name: Walter Alvarez, of the University of California, Berkeley. He and his Nobel-prized father, the late physicist Luis Alvarez, gave the world the Òimpact theoryÓ that explained the demise of the dinosaurs.

Near the end of his talk, he refers to you and me as belonging to a species called Òastronomically improbables.Ó

HasnÕt almost everyone, sooner or later, hit upon the realization that because you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and so on into near-infinity, you are related to practically everyone on earth?

Here, for now, are just a few of AlvarezÕs astonishers regarding this, which made everyone gasp.

(Fundamentalists may wish, at this point, to switch to some other reading material to avoid distress.)

He pointed out that we each have millions of ancestors and that, at conception, your sex is determined randomly. If any single one of that galaxy of ancestors had chanced to have a different sex, you would not be here to read this. (Presumably, someone else would. Unless of course one of my millions of ancestors met with a mishap.)

Keep that word ÒgalaxyÓ in mind.


NASA
Do we have more ÒancestorsÓ than there are atoms in several galaxies?
Just how many of your forebears were there, that the wrong gender accident could have happened to, thereby snuffing any chance of your existence? Brace yourself.

Alvarez led us gently to the wowing fact: An imaginary space ship travels through our galaxy. Each of the millions of heavenly bodies in our galaxy represents one ancestor. But it gets better. (Or worse.)

The ship leaves our galaxy and journeys through the next. And the next.

And É

Even typing this next bit makes me glad IÕm sitting down. Not only does each planet, star, Milky Way and what-have-you in every galaxy represent numerically a member of your family tree, so does each atom in all those galaxies. Every one representing a chance for each of us not to exist.

Had any one of those parents died before maturing, or been sterile, or not met the wife by chance in handing her a dropped glove, or shared a woolly mammoth bone with her on a date leading to bed, or been carried off in the plague or killed by some forerunner of a New York bicycle rider on the sidewalk . . . the mind boggles. (Not to mention the near-infinite number of people who might have been born down through the end of time but werenÕt Ñ because your particular chain went on unbroken.)

Can any mind this side of EinsteinÕs accommodate this thought?

How many ancestors, going back millions and millions of years Ñ each of whose specific wiggly was in each case the only one among millions that got through to make you . . . how many of those ancestors are there?

Help me, math guys and gals. WhatÕs the answer? What to the 10th power?

ThereÕs more good stuff on this.

But for now, I have to lie down."


(NYT)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 10 Sep 10 - 11:13 AM

In August, people spent 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, accounting for 9.9 percent of the total number of minutes they spent online for the month. That inched past the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 percent of total time, that Net users spent on all of Google's sites combined, including its search engine, YouTube, Gmail, and Google News, ComScore said Thursday.

For the month, Yahoo proved the third most popular online hangout, with people spending 37.7 million minutes, or 9.1 percent of total time, on Yahoo sites. In July, Facebook slipped past Yahoo in the number of minutes spent online for the first time, noted ComScore.

The latest stats contrast with August 2009 in which Internet users spent less than 5 percent of their time on Facebook, about the same amount on Google sites, and almost 12 percent of their monthly minutes on Yahoo.



Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20016046-93.html#ixzz0z8i9oQnZ

---

My gawd. 28,541.6 human-days spent on effing Facebook in AUgust alone.

27,638 human days spent on Google. In one month!

Wahake Upp, AMurica!!!

A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 09 Sep 10 - 02:40 PM

At least eight new kinds of Earth's earliest animals from the mysterious and controversial Cambrian Explosion have been discovered in a unexpected section of ancient rock 30 miles from the famous Burgess Shale of Canada. The discovery suggests such old, rare fossils are more common than previously thought.

Like the fossils of the original Burgess Shale, the new discoveries are remarkable because they preserve features of animals which had no hard parts — like gills and eyes — and remained intact for more than half a billion years.

That's a time when animals evolved from being very small, simple organisms into a wildly creative, explosive variety of sometimes bizarre creatures.

These were culled by natural selection over time, leaving the more familiar main animal groups we see today.

Among the more dramatic discoveries is a new kind of "anomalocaridid" — the monster shrimp-like top predator a half-billion years ago. Some of these sorts of beasts have been found up to two meters long in shale from Chengjiang, China.
...

MSNBC

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Sep 10 - 02:22 PM

"...The explorations of the Theban Desert Road Survey, a Yale University project co-directed by the Darnells, called attention to the previously underappreciated significance of caravan routes and oasis settlements in Egyptian antiquity. And two weeks ago, the Egyptian government announced what may be the survey's most spectacular find.

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the archaeologists had uncovered extensive remains of a settlement — apparently an administrative, economic and military center — that flourished more than 3,500 years ago in the western desert 110 miles west of Luxor and 300 miles south of Cairo. No such urban center so early in history had ever been found in the forbidding desert.

Dr. John Darnell, a professor of Egyptology at Yale, said in an interview last week that the discovery could rewrite the history of a little-known period in Egypt's past and the role played by desert oases, those islands of springs and palms and fertility, in the civilization's revival from a dark crisis. Other archaeologists not involved in the research said the findings were impressive and, once a more detailed formal report is published, will be sure to stir scholars' stew pots.

The 218-acre site is at Kharga Oasis, a string of well-watered areas in a 60-mile-long north-south depression in the limestone plateau that spreads across the desert. The oasis is at the terminus of the ancient Girga Road from Thebes and its intersection with other roads from the north and the south.

A decade ago, the Darnells spotted hints of an outpost from the time of Persian rule in the sixth century B.C. at the oasis in the vicinity of a temple. "A temple wouldn't be where it was if this area hadn't been of some strategic importance," Ms. Darnell, also trained in Egyptology, said in an interview.

Then she began picking up pieces of pottery predating the temple. Some ceramics were imports from the Nile Valley or as far away as Nubia, south of Egypt, but many were local products. Evidence of "really large-scale ceramic production," Ms. Darnell noted, "is something you wouldn't find unless there was a settlement here with a permanent population, not just seasonal and temporary."

It was in 2005 that the Darnells and their team began collecting the evidence that they were on to an important discovery: remains of mud-brick walls, grindstones, baking ovens and heaps of fire ash and broken bread molds.

Describing the half-ton of bakery artifacts that has been collected, as well as signs of a military garrison, Dr. Darnell said the settlement was "baking enough bread to feed an army, literally." This inspired the name for the site, Umm Mawagir. The Arabic phrase means "mother of bread molds."

In addition, Dr. Darnell said, the team found traces of what is probably an administrative building, grain silos, storerooms and artisan workshops and the foundations of many unidentified structures. The inhabitants, probably a few thousand people, presumably grew their own grain, and the variety of pottery attested to trade relations over a wide region. Umm Mawagir's heyday apparently extended from 1650 B.C. to 1550 B.C., nearly a thousand years after the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza and another thousand before any previously known major occupation at Kharga Oasis.

"Now we know there's something big at Kharga, and it's really exciting," Dr. Darnell said. "The desert was not a no man's land, not the wild west. It was wild, but it wasn't disorganized. If you wanted to engage in trade in the western desert, you had to deal with the people at Kharga Oasis."

Finding an apparently robust community as a hub of major caravan routes, Dr. Darnell said, should "help us reconstruct a more elaborate and detailed picture of Egypt during an intermediate period" after the so-called Middle Kingdom and just before the rise of the New Kingdom.

At this time, Egypt was in turmoil. The Hyksos invaders from southwest Asia held the Nile Delta and much of the north, and a wealthy Nubian kingdom at Kerma, on the Upper Nile, encroached from the south. Caught in the middle, the rulers at Thebes struggled to hold on and eventually prevail. They were succeeded by some of Egypt's most celebrated pharaohs, such notables as Hatshepsut, Amenhotep III and Ramses II.

The new research, Dr. Darnell said, "completely explains the rise and importance of Thebes." From there rulers commanded the shortest route from the Nile west to desert oases and also the shortest eastern road to the Red Sea. Inscriptions from about 2000 B.C. show that a Theban ruler, most likely Mentuhotep II, annexed both the western oasis region and northern Nubia.

..."(NY Times Science section)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 03 Sep 10 - 03:35 PM

"...Our current best description of the physics of this event, they explain, is the so-called "M-theories," which predict that there is not a single universe (the one we live in) but a huge number of universes. In other words, not only is the Earth just one of several planets in our solar system and the Milky Way one of billions of galaxies, but our known universe itself is just one among uncounted billions of universes. It's a startling replay of the Copernican Revolution.

The conclusions that follow are groundbreaking. Of all the possible universes, some must have laws that allow the appearance of life. The fact that we are here already tells us that we are in that corner of the multiverse. In this way, all origin questions are answered by pointing to the huge number of possible universes and saying that some of them have the properties that allow the existence of life, just by chance.

I've waited a long time for this book. It gets into the deepest questions of modern cosmology without a single equation. The reader will be able to get through it without bogging down in a lot of technical detail and will, I hope, have his or her appetite whetted for books with a deeper technical content. And who knows? Maybe in the end the whole multiverse idea will actually turn out to be right!

James Trefil is a professor of physics at George Mason University. His next book will be an illustrated tour of the multiverse. "

From this book review on a new book by Hawkings.

---

I can't wait for that guided tour, but I wonder where he's going to get his data from!!!!

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 02 Sep 10 - 04:02 PM

String theory has finally made a prediction that can be tested with experiments — but in a completely unexpected realm of physics.

The theory has long been touted as the best hope for a unified "theory of everything," bringing together the physics of the vanishingly small and the mindbendingly large. But it has also been criticized and even ridiculed for failing to make any predictions that could be checked experimentally. It's not just that we don't have big enough particle accelerators or powerful enough computers; string theory's most vocal critics charge that no experiment could even be imagined that would prove it right or wrong, making the whole theory effectively useless.

Now, physicists at Imperial College London and Stanford University have found a way to make string theory useful, not for a theory of everything, but for quantum entanglement.

"We can use string theory to solve problems in a different area of physics," said theoretical physicist Michael Duff of Imperial College London. "In that context it's actually useful: We can make statements which you could in principle check by experiment." Duff and his colleagues describe their findings in a paper in Physical Review Letters September 2.

String theory suggests that matter can be broken down beyond electrons and quarks into tiny loops of vibrating strings. Those strings move and vibrate at different frequencies, giving particles distinctive properties like mass and charge. This strange idea could unite all the fundamental forces, explain the origins of fundamental particles and connect Einstein's general relativity to quantum mechanics. But to do so, the theory requires six extra dimensions of space and time curled up inside the four that we're used to.


To understand how these extra dimensions could hide from view, imagine a tightrope walker on a wire between two high buildings. To the tightrope walker, the wire is a one-dimensional line. But to a colony of ants crawling around the wire, the rope has a second dimension: its thickness. In the same way that the tightrope walker sees one dimension where the ants see two, we could see just three dimensions of space while strings see nine or ten.

Unfortunately, there's no way to know if this picture is real. But although string theorists can't test the big idea, they can use this vision of the world to describe natural phenomena like black holes.

Four years ago, while listening to a talk at a conference in Tasmania, Duff realized the mathematical description string theorists use for black holes was identical to the mathematical description of certain quantum systems, called quantum bits or qubits.

Qubits form the backbone of quantum information theory, which could lead to things like ultrafast computers and absolutely secure communication. Two or more qubits can sometimes be intimately connected in a quantum state called entanglement. When two qubits are entangled, changing one's state influences the state of the other, even when they're physically far apart.

"As I listened to his talk, I realized the kind of math he was using to describe qubit entanglement was very similar to mathematics I had been using some years before to describe black holes in string theory," Duff said. When he looked into it, the mathematical formulation of three entangled qubits turned out to be exactly the same as the description of a certain class of black holes.

In the new study, Duff and his colleagues push the similarity one step further. They used the mathematics of stringy black holes to compute a new way to describe four entangled qubits, an open question in quantum information theory.

"We made statements that weren't previously known using string theory techniques," Duff said. "Whether the result is some fundamental principle or some quirk of mathematics, we don't know, but it is useful for making statements about quantum entanglement."

What's more, these statements are precise and experimentally provable, unlike previous suggestions for ways to test string theory, Duff says.

"So in a way, there's bad news and good news in our paper," he said. "The bad news is, we're not describing the theory of everything. The good news is, we're making a very exact statement which is either right or wrong. There's no in between."

Duff emphasized that this is only a test of string theory as it relates to quantum entanglement, not as a description of the fundamental physics of the universe. The battle over string theory as a theory of everything rages on.

"Already I can imagine enemies sharpening their knives," Duff said.

And they are. A chorus of supporters and critics, including Nobel laureate and string theory skeptic Sheldon Glashow and string theorists John Schwarz of Caltech, James Gates of the University of Maryland, and Juan Maldacena and Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton agree that Duff's argument is "not a way to test string theory" and has nothing to do with a theory of everything.

Mathematician Peter Woit of Columbia University, author of the blog Not Even Wrong, thinks even claiming that the new paper is a test of quantum entanglement is going too far.

"Honestly, I think this is completely outrageous," he said. Even if the math is the same, he says, testing the quantum entangled system would only tell you how well you understand the math.

"The fact that the same mathematical structure appears in a quantum mechanical problem and some model of black holes isn't even slightly surprising," he said. "It doesn't mean that one is a test of the other."

Witten takes a more optimistic view of the theory's chances, pointing out that the mathematics of string theory have turned out to be coincidentally useful in other areas of physics before.

"In general, this kind of work shows that string theory is useful, and in fact by now it has been useful in many different ways," Witten said in an email to Wired.com.

"One might surmise that a physics theory that has proved to be useful in so many different areas of physics and math is probably on the right track," he added. "But that is another question."




Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/stringy-quantum/#ixzz0yP82CIbg

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 02 Sep 10 - 01:22 PM

The first printed books came with a question: What do you do with these things?
(courtesy of Alan Richardson)
By Tom Scocca
August 29, 2010
In the beginning, before there was such a thing as a Gutenberg Bible, Johannes Gutenberg laid out his rows of metal type and brushed them with ink and, using the mechanism that would change the world, produced an ordinary little schoolbook. It was probably an edition of a fourth-century grammar text by Aelius Donatus, some 28 pages long. Only a few fragments of the printed sheets survive, because no one thought the book was worth keeping.

Tweet 44 people Tweeted this people Dugg thisdiggYahoo! Buzz ShareThis "Now had he kept to that, doing grammars...it probably would all have been well," said Andrew Pettegree, a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews and author of "The Book in the Renaissance," the story of the birth of print. Instead, Gutenberg was bent on making a grand statement, an edition of Scripture that would cost half as much as a house and would live through the ages. "And it was a towering success, as a cultural artifact, but it was horribly expensive," Pettegree said. In the end, struggling for capital to support the Bible project, Gutenberg was forced out of his own print shop by his business partner, Johann Fust.

Inventing the printing press was not the same thing as inventing the publishing business. Technologically, craftsmen were ready to follow Gutenberg's example, opening presses across Europe. But they could only guess at what to print, and the public saw no particular need to buy books. The books they knew, manuscript texts, were valuable items and were copied to order. The habit of spending money to read something a printer had decided to publish was an alien one.

Nor was print clearly destined to replace manuscript, from the point of view of the book owners of the day. A few fussy color-printing experiments aside, the new books were monochrome, dull in comparison to illuminated manuscripts. Many books left blank spaces for adding hand decoration, and collectors frequently bound printed pages together with manuscript ones.

"It's a great mistake to think of an absolute disjunction between a manuscript world of the Middle Ages and a print world of the 16th century," Pettegree said.

As in our own Internet era, culture and commerce went through upheaval as Europe tried to figure out what to make of the new medium and its possibilities. Should it serve to spread familiar Latin texts, or to promote new ideas, written in the vernacular? Was print a vessel for great and serious works, or for quick and sloppy ones? As with the iPad (or the Newton before it), who would want to buy a printed book, and why?

Pettegree explores this time of cultural change by looking at the actual published matter it produced. Drawing on the power of 21st century information technology, he and a team of researchers pulled together the catalogs of thousands of small, scattered libraries, assembling the broadest picture to date of the earliest publications.

What made print viable, Pettegree found, was not the earth-shaking impact of mighty tomes, but the rustle of countless little pages: almanacs, calendars, municipal announcements. Indulgence certificates, the documents showing that sinners had paid the Catholic church for reduced time in purgatory, were especially popular. These ephemeral jobs were what made printing a viable business through the long decades while book publishers — and the public — struggled to find what else this new technology might be good for.
...

---

From this article in the Boston Globe.

I find it charming to think of people wondering what they might use this new thing, the booque, for. "What earthly good is it?" "Why should I look at letters on a page when I can ask my neighbor?"

I am reminded of the prediction of Watson of IBM, I think, that the world might have a market for perhaps ten or twenty computers...

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...

A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 28 Aug 10 - 09:18 PM

Bits Pics: Kodak's 1975 Model Digital Camera
By NICK BILTON


It might not be pretty on the eyes, or easy to carry around on a vacation, but what do you expect? It was the first digital camera Kodak ever made.

Yes, that's right, the contraption pictured above was put together in Kodak's Elmgrove Plant labs near Rochester, N.Y., during the winter of 1975.

A post on Kodak's Web site from 2007, written by Steve Sasson, the inventor of the digital camera, explains exactly how this camera was created, from a mishmash of lenses and computer parts and an old Super 8 movie camera.

Mr. Sasson called it "film-less photography" and took a "year of piecing together a bunch of new technology" to create a digital camera that ran off "16 nickel-cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter."

One of my favorite factoids about this snazzy digital camera is the fact that it took 23 seconds to record a single digital image to its cassette deck. To view the filmless photo, Mr. Sasson had to remove the cassette from the camera and place it in a customized reader that could display the image on an old black and white television.

When the team of technicians presented the camera to Kodak audiences they of course heard a barrage of curious questions:

    Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? How would you store these images? What does an electronic photo album look like? When would this type of approach be available to the consumer?

And although Mr. Sasson and his team tried to answer some of these questions, he concludes with the statement that the digital camera they created could "substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future."

Pic HERE

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 20 Aug 10 - 11:10 AM

P.J. O'Rourke talks about the attitude of freedom and the important things that get confused as "promoting democracy". Excerpt:

"People must, of course, feel free of physical and economic oppression. But first they must feel free of ignorance.

People need to be able to look around, people need to see. Even people who are locked in a room are more free in a room with the lights on than they are in a dark room — where they're bumping into each other and the furniture.

There's power in the Attitude of Liberty — a sense that one has some knowledge, some understanding, and therefore some control, if only control over one's own ideas.

The strength of America is not economic, military, or diplomatic. The strength of America is an idea — an idea of a place where people have information, understanding, and control over their lives. Once, during the civil war in Lebanon, I was stopped at a Hezbollah checkpoint by a teenager with an AK-47. When the young man saw my American passport I was subjected, with a gun muzzle in my face, to a twenty minute tirade about "great American satan devil." I was told that America had caused war, famine, injustice, Zionism, and poverty all over the world. Then, when the boy had finished his rant, he lowered his gun and said, "As soon as I get my Green Card I am going to Dearborn, Michigan, to study dentist school."

Information is the source of citizenship. Without information no one can even attempt to build a civil society. ..."

Full article can be found here at the World Affairts Journal and is an interesting read.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 Aug 10 - 07:52 PM

A list of free college courses on-line and other things.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 Aug 10 - 07:15 PM

Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.
Here's how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.
About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.
I'm very disappointed in Terence Sejnowski for going along with that nonsense.

See that sentence I bolded up there? That's his fundamental premise, and it is utterly false. Kurzweil knows nothing about how the brain works. It's design is not encoded in the genome: what's in the genome is a collection of molecular tools wrapped up in bits of conditional logic, the regulatory part of the genome, that makes cells responsive to interactions with a complex environment. The brain unfolds during development, by means of essential cell:cell interactions, of which we understand only a tiny fraction. The end result is a brain that is much, much more than simply the sum of the nucleotides that encode a few thousand proteins. He has to simulate all of development from his codebase in order to generate a brain simulator, and he isn't even aware of the magnitude of that problem.

We cannot derive the brain from the protein sequences underlying it; the sequences are insufficient, as well, because the nature of their expression is dependent on the environment and the history of a few hundred billion cells, each plugging along interdependently. We haven't even solved the sequence-to-protein-folding problem, which is an essential first step to executing Kurzweil's clueless algorithm. And we have absolutely no way to calculate in principle all the possible interactions and functions of a single protein with the tens of thousands of other proteins in the cell!

Let me give you a few specific examples of just how wrong Kurzweil's calculations are. Here are a few proteins that I plucked at random from the NIH database; all play a role in the human brain. ...

(Excerpted from this article at Gizmodo which slices through Kurzweil's optimistic baffle gab...


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 17 Aug 10 - 06:13 PM

Children are natural psychologists. By the time they're in preschool, they understand that other people have desires, preferences, beliefs, and emotions. But how they learn this isn't clear. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that children figure out another person's preferences by using a topic you'd think they don't encounter until college: statistics.

In one experiment, children aged 3 and 4 saw a puppet named "Squirrel" remove five toys of the same type from a container full of toys and happily play with them. Across children, the toys that Squirrel removed were the same (for example, all five were blue flowers). What varied, however, were the contents of the container. For one-third of the children, 100 percent of the toys were the same type (so, in this example, all were blue flowers). For another third of the children, only 50 percent were that type (that is, half were blue flowers and half were red circles). Finally, for the last third of the children only 18 percent were of that type (that is, 82 percent were red circles). Later on, children were asked to give Squirrel a toy that he likes. The children were more likely to give Squirrel the blue flowers if he had selected them out of the container that had other toys in it.

More amazingly, the proportion of other toys mattered as well; they gave Squirrel the blue flowers more when the container included only 18 percent blue flowers, and slightly less often when the container had 50 percent blue flowers. When the container had 100 percent blue flowers, they gave him toys at random. That means the child inferred that the puppet liked blue flowers best if the sample of five toys didn't match the proportion of toys in the population (the container). This is a statistical phenomenon known as non-random sampling.

In another experiment, 18- to 24-month-olds also learned about the preferences of an adult experimenter from non-random sampling. They watched the adult choose five toys that were either 18 percent or 82 percent of the toys in a box. The adult played happily with the toy either way, but the toddler only concluded that the adult had a preference if they'd picked the toys from a box in which that toy was scarce.

Of course, statistical information isn't the only way children learn about the preferences of other people. Emotion and verbalization are also importantÑbut this is a new cue that no one had identified before, says Tamar Kushnir of Cornell University. She carried out the study with Fei Xu of the University of California, Berkeley and Henry M. Wellman of the University of Michigan.

"Babies are amazing," says Kushnir. "Babies and children are like little scientists. Mostly they learn by observing and experiencing the world. Just let them do it. Later on, there will be time for formal instruction, but when they're really young, this sort of informal learning is critical."

---

Seems to me this kind of backwards reasoning, resulting in the assertion that babies use statistics, is really lame and ignores the gaping absence of understanding of the human mind. Perfidious unreason, if you ask me.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 17 Aug 10 - 01:08 PM

Reexamining nothing: is the vacuum of space really empty?
By Matt Ford | (From Ars Technica)

Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory that describes the strong nuclear force, is odd even by quantum mechanical standards. QCD dictates that, unlike pretty much any other particle, when you pull apart two quarks—the constituent particles of hadrons and one of the base particles of QCD—the energy between them does not decrease. Instead, it increases, a property known as confinement. This means that if you pulled hard enough on two bound quarks, the energy between them could become so great that it would cause a quark-antiquark pair to pop into existence and alleviate the strain.

Quark-antiquark pairs are also thought to be a major component of the vacuum that pervades our Universe. Instead of being empty, the vacuum is thought to be teeming with a complex mix of these fundamental particles. However, a new paper suggests that this view of the Universe may have things wrong.

QCD is also an oddity in that, at higher and higher energies, the interactions between its constituent particles becomes weaker and weaker, a phenomenon known as asymptotic freedom. Given the (proven) existence of asymptotic freedom, physicists can directly model QCD at high energies.

The weakened interactions at high energies allows physicists to solve the complex mathematical equations through perturbative expansions. This is a technique where you can assume the answer has a simple algebraic form, plug it back into the original equation, drop all terms that are "complex," and solve the resulting, simplified equation. However, this only works when interactions are weak.
...

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 17 Aug 10 - 09:56 AM

A computer chip that performs calculations using probabilities, instead of binary logic, could accelerate everything from online banking systems to the flash memory in smart phones and other gadgets.


Probability chip: This computer chip uses signals representing probabilities, not digital bits.
Credit: Lyric Semiconductor

Rewriting some fundamental features of computer chips, Lyric Semiconductor has unveiled its first "probability processor," a silicon chip that computes with electrical signals that represent chances, not digital 1s and 0s.

"We've essentially started from scratch," says Ben Vigoda, CEO and founder of the Boston-based startup. Vigoda's PhD thesis underpins the company's technology. Starting from scratch makes it possible to implement statistical calculations in a simpler, more power efficient way, he says.

And because that kind of math is at the core of many products, there are many potential applications. "To take one example, Amazon's recommendations to you are based on probability," says Vigoda. "Any time you buy [from] them, the fraud check on your credit card is also probability [based], and when they e-mail your confirmation, it passes through a spam filter that also uses probability."

All those examples involve comparing different data to find the most likely fit. Implementing the math needed to do this is simpler with a chip that works with probabilities, says Vigoda, allowing smaller chips to do the same job at a faster rate. A processor that dramatically speeds up such probability-based calculations could find all kinds of uses. But Lyric will face challenges in proving the reliability and scalability of its product, and in showing that it can be easily programmed.
(MIT Tech Report)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 16 Aug 10 - 01:00 PM

From a NYT Book Review:

"...(Winston) Churchill was born in 1874 into a Britain that was coloring the map imperial pink, at the cost of washing distant nations blood-red. He was told a simple story: the superior white man was conquering the primitive dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of civilization.

As soon as he could, Churchill charged off to take his part in "a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples." In the Swat valley, now part of Pakistan, he experienced, fleetingly, an instant of doubt. He realized that the local population was fighting back because of "the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own," just as Britain would if she were invaded. But Churchill soon suppressed this thought, deciding instead that they were merely deranged jihadists whose violence was explained by a "strong aboriginal propensity to kill."

..."


Ahhh-hmmmmm!


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 Aug 10 - 06:44 PM

Ninety years ago in the battle for equal voting rights for women:

"...It's the middle of August, and women finally got the right to vote 90 years ago this month--which makes this story about the passage of suffrage through the Tennessee Legislature quite a propos:

Ninety years ago this month, all eyes turned to Tennessee, the only state yet to ratify with its Legislature still in session. The resolution sailed through the Tennessee Senate. As it moved on to the House, the most vigorous opposition came from the liquor industry, which was pretty sure that if women got the vote, they'd use it to pass Prohibition. Distillery lobbyists came to fight, bearing samples.

"Both suffrage and anti-suffrage men were reeling through the hall in an advanced state of intoxication," Carrie Catt reported.

The women and their allies knew they had a one-vote margin of support in the House. Then the speaker, whom they had counted on as a "yes," changed his mind.

(I love this moment. Women's suffrage is tied to the railroad track and the train is bearing down fast when suddenly. ...)

Suddenly, Harry Burn, the youngest member of the House, a 24-year-old "no" vote from East Tennessee, got up and announced that he had received a letter from his mother telling him to "be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt."

"I know that a mother's advice is always the safest for a boy to follow," Burn said, switching sides..."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 13 Aug 10 - 12:40 PM

"Forget Old Spice deodorant--the best way to get laid is to tote around an iPhone, especially if you happen to be female. And while iPhone users are screwing like rabbits, Blackberry and Android users appear to be relatively chaste."

Full report here

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 13 Aug 10 - 11:40 AM

Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett noted that with the idea of a massively parallel architecture, which would be capable of exploring a different part of the space of possible computations, Hillis opened up a vast area:

What the British mathematician Alan Turing did, with the concept of the Turing machine, was to provide a succinct definition of the entire space of all possible computations. The machine developed by John von Neumann was a mechanical realization of Turing's idea. A von Neumann machine is the computer on your desk — the standard serial computer. In principle, the von Neumann machine — which is, for all practical purposes, a universal Turing machine — can compute any computable function; but if you don't have a billion years to wait around, you can't actually explore interesting parts of that space. The actual space explorable by any one architecture is quite limited. It sends this vanishingly thin thread out into this huge multidimensional space. To explore other parts of that space, you have got to invent other kinds of architecture. Massive parallel architectures are everybody's first, second, and third choices.

What Danny did was to create if not the first then one of the first really practical, really massive, parallel computers. It precipitated a gold rush. We had a new exploration vehicle, which was looking at portions of design space that had never been looked at before. Danny was very good at selling that idea to people in different scientific fields and demonstrating, with some of the early applications, just how powerful and exciting this vehicle was.

Two years ago this month, Hillis instigated an interesting Edge Reality Club conversation cross-referenced with a discussion on the Encyclopedia Britannica website on Nicholas Carr's Atlantic Essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid" (now expanded into Carr's book The Shallows). Hillis wrote:

We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings. This is still true, but our surroundings have grown. We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize, we skip the fine print and, all too often, we miss the fine point. We know we are drowning, but we do what we can to stay afloat.

As an optimist, I assume that we will eventually invent our way out of our peril, perhaps by building new technologies that make us smarter, or by building new societies that better fit our limitations. In the meantime, we will have to struggle. Herman Melville, as might be expected, put it better: "well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown."

We create tools and then we mold ourselves in their image. With The Hillis Knowledge Web he has proposed something new, something different. I can make a case that his "Aristotle" (The Knowledge Web) essay is the kind of seminal document, such as Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and MuCulloch et al's What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain that appears a few times in a century. But now, with the Google announcement, we will all find in Internet time, how his ideas play out in the real world.

..."


From The Edge.Org archive

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 10 Aug 10 - 11:40 AM

So true.

Hey, I think its time to update global swarming disasters.
With all the methane from the Gulf oil blowout now floating in the air and all the smoke from the Russian fires I think we have been dealt a crushing climate blow.