Soylent-Greenbucks

Ted Rall tweeted: Body 'liquefaction' unit unveiled - http://t.co/9A4qmlN Soon we'll be drinking corpse juice.

My reply: Place your order with the barista at Soylent Greenbucks!

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Swarmanoid-Prey

Roger Ebert tweets:
Swarmanoid: Humanoid Robotic Swarms. What could possibly go wrong? http://t.co/ysykIWb

And my reply:
@ebertchicago Ah, yes... Michael Crichton's "Prey" http://t.co/oSjoqM1

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"I learned to play guitar on this song"

From a Roger Ebert tweet:

Paul Simon invites a Toronto fan onstage to play his guitar. She is *so* happy--and pretty good, too.
http://bit.ly/lhQ1l0

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Christopher Hitchens on finding your own voice

In this Vanity Fair article Christopher Hitchens notes that
"When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen."
And,

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect.

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You know you're wacky...

...when the KKK thinks you're wacky

According to some little noticed 2010 press releases on the KKK's main website, which turned up this week on Reddit, it seems as if America's most famous hate group is actually very concerned about being mistakenly lumped in with other zealots on the right, including Koran-burning churches, the Westboro Baptists, and the Tea Party.

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Renewable Energy: 2011 is different than the 1980s

In an recent post on his Informed Comment blog, Juan Cole argues that "... 2011 is different than it was in the 1980s. Now it is possible to replace hydrocarbons with renewable energy."

Japan, which has no oil or gas of its own, gets about a third of its electricity from nuclear power as a result of a government push to build nuclear reactors after the energy price spike of the 1970s. The ratcheting up of petroleum prices because of the instability in Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East shows that the need for an alternative to hydrocarbons is still there. (And in addition to price considerations, we now know that the world faces a dire threat from carbon dioxide-caused climate change). But the answer in 2011 is different than it was in the 1980s. Now it is possible to replace hydrocarbons with renewable energy.

Germany generates 17 percent of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar, in both of which it is a leading innovator. The achievement is largely owed to government policies giving incentives for use of alternative energy, policies implemented when the SPD/ Green Party coalition was in power.

In contrast, Japan’s government has done little to promote alternative sources of energy such as wind, an area in which the country has fallen behind leaders such as Germany and China. Projects at harnessing the power of ocean waves are planned off Scotland and Oregon, but apparently not Japan (surely a natural in this regard).

Portugal gets 45% of its electricity from renewables, mostly because of government policy and investments in a smart grid. Lisbon has demonstrated that renewables are practical sources of a majority of a country’s electricity even now.

The Japan crisis has renewed fears among environmentalists in India about that country’s plans for 21 nuclear power plants. Given that solar energy is now reaching grid parity in some markets, at $4 per watt, sun-rich India is daft to subsidize expensive and dangerous nuclear plants.

The Peter King Hearings

In an essay titled Peter King's Subversive Fantasy, Wajahat Ali comments  online at guardian.co.uk that

Congressman Peter King, who has rationalised his past defence of IRA terrorism without a hint of self-awareness or irony, is now the self-appointed protector of America from future terrorist attacks by holding a congressional hearing on the "Extent of Radicalisation in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response." King presiding over this hearing would be like asking Mel Gibson to chair an impartial session on Jewish American loyalties. King has in the past claimed there are "too many mosques" in America and that 85% of American mosques and its religious leaders are radicalised, a statement that has been thoroughly discredited.

Despite a recent study showing that 40% of all extremist plots in America were thwarted as a result of Muslim American help, King ignores this evidence and stubbornly asserts there is a "lack of cooperation" by Muslims with law enforcement. The intent, scope and framing of King's hearing have been criticised by law enforcement officials, counter-terrorism professionals, civil rights organisations, interfaith leaders and political commentators as being misguided, ineffective and potentially dangerous

And Juan Cole argues that King's witch hunt takes its precedent not from McCarthy, but Nixon:

Some are comparing King’s witch hunt against American Muslims to McCarthyism. But I would argue that it is to Richard Milhaus Nixon that we should look for the precedent here. King is appealing to ethnic bigotry (and yes, because of intermarriage and lifeways, American Muslims are best seen as an ethnic group). And arranging the world in the terms of ethnic bigotry was the hallmark of Nixon’s career.

And so it goes.

"Then they take a nap."

Roger Ebert's essay, Why the meaningless of the Universe consoles me

There is more than one way to see. A leaf turns to the light. A chimpanzee selects a piece of fruit. A fish sees a smaller fish. An eagle sees a rabbit. A dolphin rescues a sailor. A dog welcomes us home. While all of these actions are guided by a process falling under the general heading of Intelligence, humans seem to be fairly unique in our ability for conscious thought. We see, we know, and we know we know.
This is a blessing and it carries a price. To know you live is to know you die. Having studied several cats at close range over a period of years, I've concluded they don't give it a moment's notice. They know they want to live, which is why they get out of trouble as fast as they can. Then they take a nap.

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"We are going to rescue your shit"

This is the credo of the Archive Team, whose existence was brought to my attention by a post in The Long Now Blog, Where does the data go when the host dies?

In the wake of the crumbling Yahoo! behemoth and the clamor of mass Delicious data dumps, it’s worthwhile to stop and ask ourselves just how “archived” is the data that we create and share in these free hosting sites? What kind of promises do these sites make to preserve our information and to care about the hundreds of hours we spend uploading, tagging, and arranging it? In the case of Yahoo! and all of its affiliate sites, none whatsoever.

The funny thing is, we were warned about this over two years ago. In January 2009, the Archive Team said in no uncertain terms, “Please do not use Yahoo or Yahoo-owned sites for any non-retrievable personal data.”

 From the Archive Team page, Why Back Up?

• Because they don't care about you
• Disaster will strike
• But there is still hope

Luckily, a few basic (and cheap) precautions can bring the long-term care of your data into your own hands, away from the short-term world of the Internet.

More "Ideas about Long-term Thinking" related to digital technology may be found at The Long Now Blog category Digital Dark Age.

"An Apology For Roger Ebert"

The title of a talk (transcript here) by Brian Moriarty, delivered 4 March 2011 at the 25th Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, an intelligent defense of Ebert's remark that "video games can never be art."
Among other things, I found this interesting:

Back in 1900, the trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned a beautiful new auditorium.

Around the edge of the gold proscenium they mounted a series of nine flat plaques, three on the left, three on the right and three overhead.

The plan was to inscribe these plaques with the names of the world's nine greatest composers.

We can imagine the names that were being thrown around. Bach, Handel and Haydn, Mozart, Brahms.

But when it came time to actually sit down and determine which composers would be honored, the trustees couldn't make up their minds.

And so, for the past 111 years, visitors to Boston Symphony Hall sit before a gold proscenium with eight empty plaques. Only one, at the very top, contains a name, the only one the trustees could all agree on: Beethoven.

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Discovery's last mission

The space shuttle Discovery lands for the last time. From the AP article:

Perhaps more than any other shuttle, Discovery consistently delivered.

It made its debut in 1984 following shuttles Columbia and Challenger, dispatched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, flew the first shuttle rendezvous to Russia's Mir space station and carried the first female shuttle pilot in 1995, and gave another ride into space to John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, in 1998.

It got NASA flying again, in 1988 and 2005, following the Challenger and Columbia disasters. And it flew 13 times to the space station, more than any other craft. On its last trip, it delivered a new storage compartment packed with supplies and a humanoid robot.

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Read Ken Kremer's blog post for the Planetary Society.

Altogether, Discovery spent a full year (365 days) in space during the 39 missions, orbited Earth 5,830 times, and traveled 148,221,675 miles during a career spanning 27 years.

Ebert reviews the Oscarcast

Roger Ebert's review:
King wins, Oscar loses: My coverage of a baaaad Oscarcast.

Again, I have to say this was the worst Oscarcast I've seen, and I go back a while. Some great winners, a nice distribution of awards, but the show? Dead. In. The. Water.

But Ebert has a compliment for Randy Newman:

Randy Newman won for the best song Oscar for "We Belong Together," a title that might describe the many of the works that received his 19 previous nominations.

An inconvenient irony

Pulitzer Prize-winning Leonard Pitts writes that CNN's Anderson Cooper called out the Mubarak regime's lies, and politically correct Fox News scolds him for telling truth.

For that, Cooper was ridiculed by James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times. CNN media critic Howard Kurtz questioned whether Cooper should be “taking sides.” And one Liz Trotta said that “any correspondent worth his salt knows that you shouldn’t be making editorial comments.” She, amusingly enough, is employed by Fox News.

All three critics concede Cooper was accurate: The regime did lie. Yet they question whether it was journalistically ethical to say it.

Take a close look. You will seldom see a clearer portrait of the timidity and obsequiousness that have infected and, increasingly, defined, American journalism.

Here is my pet theory: After years of criticism for their liberal bias -- some of it merited – news media, eager as a puppy to be liked, have corrected by over correcting. Which is to say that in the search for that mythical beast, objectivity, they have sought to banish from the news-gathering process an indispensable element: judgment. Excluding, of course, Fox, for which a reluctance to judge has never been a problem.

The rest of the journalistic world seems to have embraced its own version of those robotic, idiotic zero-tolerance policies where some kid gets suspended for bringing Midol to class. Meaning, in other words, a paradigm from which human reasoning and common sense are exiled.

So, on any given story, a reporter is encouraged to get the facts, make sure the liberal and conservative talking points are represented and, once those boxes are checked, to feel as if she has done her job, has been objective. No thinking required.

Me, I have no idea what objectivity means, at least insofar as news reportage goes. What I do understand is fairness, the requirement to give voice to both sides, all sides, of a given issue: abortion, immigration, gun control, the budget, whatever.

Real WMDs (Or, Ignorance is Bliss)

In an online commentary, Building a Nation of Know-Nothings, Timothy Egan uses John McCain's primary victory against "the flat-earth wing of his party" as the launching point to discuss the rather depressing trend in the Republican party to pander to imbeciles. (Okay, he was more delicate, referring to people with "head[s] stuffed with fabrications that could be disproved by a pre-schooler.") He writes,

It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush. 


Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.


Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.

The source of this "knowledge" is "the media" - in fact, a "lamestream media" all its own.

In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the media. But no reputable news agency — that is, fact-based, one that corrects its errors quickly — has spread such inaccuracies.


So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:


“Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday — not that we’ve seen any proof of that,” he said on Aug. 3. “They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that.”


Of course, there is proof as clear as that baseball box score. Look here, www.factcheck.org, for starters, one of many places posting Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate. [More specifically, http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html -jwj]
...
Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily. The founder of Politifact, another nonpartisan referee to the daily rumble, said two of the site’s five most popular items on its Truth-o-meter are corrections of Glenn Beck.
...
It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?


But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.


It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?

IdeaFestival 2010

The IdeaFestival will be held 29 September - 2 October at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in Louisville, KY.  Here's a quick link to this year's program.

Founded in 2000, the IdeaFestival (IF) is a world-class event that attracts leading global innovators and thinkers to discuss and celebrate imagination, new perspectives and transformational ideas.
The IdeaFestival provides a unique stage to explore the cross-cutting nature of innovation involving a range of diverse disciplines, while supplying the creative tools needed to “see”, synthesize and apply this knowledge in new, dynamic ways.

Highly efficient solar cells from quantum dots

The 22 August 2010 edition of Texas Science reports on research by chemist Xiaoyang Zhu at The University of Texas at Austin suggesting that conventional solar cell efficiency could be more than doubled, from the current limit of 30% to more than 60% using semiconductor nanocrystals, or quantum dots to capture the energy from "hot electrons."

The maximum efficiency of the silicon solar cell in use today is about 31 percent. That’s because much of the energy from sunlight hitting a solar cell is too high to be turned into usable electricity. That energy, in the form of so-called “hot electrons,” is lost as heat.
If the higher energy sunlight, or more specifically the hot electrons, could be captured, solar-to-electric power conversion efficiency could be increased theoretically to as high as 66 percent.

 “If we take the hot electrons out, we can do work with them,” says Zhu. “The demonstration of this hot electron transfer establishes that a highly efficient hot carrier solar cell is not just a theoretical concept, but an experimental possibility.”

Captured in a Flash: The Insect Photos of John Abbott

Very cool slide show of insects around Texas, captured in motion by Dr. John Abbott using high speed flash photography.

To see more of his images, visit www.flickr.com/abbottnaturephotography.

Planck telescope image "a thing of beauty"

The first full-sky image from the European Space Agency (ESA) Planck telescope has been released, and "It's a spectacular picture; it's a thing of beauty," Dr Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency's (Esa) Planck project scientist, told BBC News.

Planck, launched in May 2009, occupies an observing position more than one million km from Earth on its "night side." (Technically, Planck's operational orbit is around the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, L2.)

The detectors of Planck's High Frequency Instrument have an operational temperature of -273.05°C, only 0.1°C above absolute zero - the coldest temperature theoretically possible in our Universe. Such low temperatures are necessary for Planck’s detectors to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the first light released by the universe only 380 000 yrs after the Big Bang, by measuring its temperature across the sky. Specifically, Planck will look for evidence of "inflation," the faster-than-light expansion that cosmologists believe the Universe experienced in its first, fleeting moments. Theory predicts this event ought to be "imprinted" in the CMB and its detail should be retrievable with sufficiently sensitive instruments.

For more information on the Planck mission, visit the ESA - Planck Web site.

For something extra cool, visit the Chromoscope site, which lets you explore our Galaxy (the Milky Way) and the distant Universe in a range of wavelengths from X-rays to the longest radio waves.

Update (2010-07-09) Uncovered this article (PDF, subscription required) in Science describing the Planck mission. Planck is the third to study the CMB, following the earlier COBE (1992) and WMAP (2003) satellites. From the Science article:

Planck will chart the temperature variations in CMB with 10 times WMAP's sensitivity and three times its angular resolution. The microwaves are also polarized so that the electric fields in waves coming from any particular spot in the sky wiggle in a definite direction—just as ordinary light waves reflected from a pond are polarized so they oscillate horizontally as they zip into your eye. WMAP sketched the polarization of the CMB; Planck will render it in great detail.

Planck will be far more sophisticated than its predecessors. WMAP sampled microwaves at five frequencies; Planck will monitor nine of them over a range 12 times wider. WMAP cooled its detectors by exposing them to the frigidity of space; some of Planck's detectors must be cooled to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero with a liquid-helium refrigerator. As WMAP did, Planck will circle the sun in synchrony with Earth, hovering at the so-called second Lagrange point, or L2 .

. . .
But the prize quarry for Planck researchers is the B modes. These features are swirls in the CMB polarization mapped across the sky, and spotting them would essentially clinch the case for the mind-bending theory of inflation.

The notion that the universe briefly expanded at faster than light speed might seem absurd, but it solves some thorny problems in cosmology, including a big one posed by the CMB itself. The temperature of background radiation is almost exactly the same—2.725 kelvin—all over the sky. That's perplexing because the distant reaches of the universe in opposite directions are so far apart that not even light has had time to travel between them. So they could not have interacted and should have no reason to have reached so nearly the same temperature. Inflation solves this problem by positing that opposite ends of the universe were cheek-by-jowl until the sudden expansion pulled them very far apart.

Although inflation fits the facts so far, researchers do not yet have direct proof that it occurred. The B modes would provide that. Current theory predicts that inflation should have generated gravitational waves and that those waves should have left lingering swirls in the polarization of the CMB.

John Wooden (1910 - 2010)

John Wooden died last Friday at the age of 99. From the New York Times obituary:

Wooden was a dignified, scholarly man who spoke with the precise language of the English teacher he once was. He always carried a piece of paper with a message from his father that read:

“Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.”

In An Appreciation, Harvey Araton writes

Wooden won a record 10 national titles, including seven straight from 1967 through 1973. His teams reached 12 Final Fours, and they won 88 straight games between 1971 and 1974. He had supreme talent, including the most dominant centers of the era, Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton.

He also had critics, who reason that there was little competition out west and remind us that Sam Gilbert, a U.C.L.A. booster, served as friend and fixer for many a Bruin star, landing the university on probation six years after Wooden retired in 1975.

Who knows what Wooden knew or didn’t want to know? Temptation was not invented with John Calipari or Jim Calhoun, but there was one compromise Wooden absolutely refused to make.

His players never took control of the gym. Great as they were, Pauley Pavilion never became their stage to pose for the pros, and doing it the coach’s way was about more than getting a haircut.

“His skills as a coach are overlooked because everyone focuses on the talent,” Geno Auriemma, the Connecticut women’s coach, whose team currently has a 78-game winning streak, wrote in an e-mail message. “He taught the game as well as anyone ever has or will.”

It must have been during the run of championships that I had occasion (I don't remember the circumstances) to attend the NCAA regional being held in Freedom Hall in Louisville. At some point in the game the public address announcer, John Tong, came on and announced (in that wonderfully distinctive voice of his): "This score just in from the West Regional. Santa Clara, 52..." At this my mind jumped ahead and assumed Santa Clara had played a slowdown, and won in an upset, probably 52 - 50. But after a pause of just the right length, Tong continued, "... UCLA, 90."

Cassini images

Here are some amazing images from the Cassini imaging team, courtesy of Emily Lakdawalla's Planetary Society Blog last week.



Dione and Telesto
Dione, Saturn's third largest moon at 1,123 kilometers in diameter, shares the frame with Telesto, a tiny "rock," about 35 kilometers across, that orbits Saturn in the leading Lagrangian point of Tethys' orbit. Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI

(Full blog post at: Dione and Telesto, close on camera but far apart in fact )




Peering through the fountains of Enceladus
Here, unmannedspaceflight.com forum member Astro0 has combined two frames captured by Cassini during its May 18 encounter with Enceladus to include both the backlit plumes and the background imagery: Titan and the rings. Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI / processed by Astro0/unmannedspaceflight.com

Here's Emily's annotated version:



(Full blog post at: The most amazing image of Enceladus Cassini has captured yet )