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Friday, November 25, 2011
"When I saw this list - and especially the last agenda item - the scales fell from my eyes. Of course these unarmed people would be having the shiat kicked out of them." Syria? Egypt? Guess again [Interesting]
"When I saw this list - and especially the last agenda item - the scales fell from my eyes. Of course these unarmed people would be having the shiat kicked out of them." Syria? Egypt? Guess again [Interesting]:
Monday, November 21, 2011
Lisa Randall on extra dimensions, the Large Hadron Collider, and weird physics
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz on 11/21/11
Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, author of the mind-bending 2006 book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, has a new book out. Knocking on Heaven's Door sounds like an entertaining way to knock you right out of your existing reality tunnel. Smithsonian interviewed Randall:
There are a lot of bizarre ideas here, from string theory to a "brane" of extra dimensions right next to our own. Why should we regard these ideas as more than fanciful constructs?
I'm certainly not asking anyone to take on faith any of the ideas that I present. That's part of the point of the book: science proceeds, and we systematically end up with new ideas and explanations, going from the human scales we're very familiar with to scales that are so remote it's hard to have intuition about them. Science is a self-correcting process, too, something that I expect will happen with the recent announcement of neutrinos that may move faster than the speed of light.
Can you describe the essence of your idea about extra dimensions? There could be more to the universe than the three dimensions we are familiar with. They are hidden from us in some way, perhaps because they're tiny or warped. But even if they're invisible, they could affect what we actually observe in the universe. There are lots of things we cannot see with the naked eye that turn out to be based in reality.
Extra dimensions could be relevant to one of the questions we're trying to answer at the (Large Hadron Collider): how particles get their mass, and why they have the masses that they do, which are far smaller than physicists would expect them to be. So our idea is there's an extra dimension that's so warped, the masses would be big in one place and small in another. In other words, gravity could be weaker in one place and stronger in another. If so, it could be a natural explanation both for why particles masses are what they are, and why gravity is so much weaker than the other elementary forces we observe.
This extra dimension could be separated from ours by a million trillion trillionth of a centimeter. Is this a parallel yet inaccessible universe?
It interacts with our dimensions only via gravity. And gravity is extremely weak. An elementary particle at ordinary energies exerts negligible gravitational force. But at the LHC, if this idea is right, we would see evidence of this extra dimension. Particles could carry momentum into the extra dimension, and that could actually be observable.
"Opening Strange Portals in Physics"
Egypt Justifying Renewed Oppression By Pointing To #OWS Crackdown
via ThinkProgress by Zaid Jilani on 11/21/11
As a part of renewed crackdowns on nonviolent activists in Egypt, the military-run government injured hundreds and killed several people over the weekend. Renowned Arab journalist Sultan Al Qassemi points out on a Twitter that an Egyptian television anchor on state television justified the crackdown by pointing to the crackdowns against Occupy Wall Street in the United States and similar crackdowns in Germany:
Friday, November 18, 2011
Now a Soap Opera, Heavily-Backed SOPA Copyright Bill Gets New Bipartisan and...
via TechCrunch by Eric Eldon on 11/16/11
The “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) had looked set for a quick and quiet passing through the House after it was introduced late last month. A string of Democrats and Republicans, and various big-media affiliated interest groups had lined up behind it, while the internet had mostly stayed on the sidelines. But a major outcry this week — and especially today — could change that.
The bill, which has been presented by its supporters as a bipartisan effort to punish “rogue” infringing sites, is now being questioned by members of both parties for the potential damage it could also do to innovation. That’s on top of a concerted effort by major web companies to communicate their opposition, via their own sites and an open letter to Congress yesterday (that’s being run as a full-page ad in The New York Times).
Popular opposition has continued to mount, led by web services and various advocacy groups under the banner of American Censorship Day. Among other efforts, Tumblr censored user dashboards to show what users might not be able to publish under SOPA, and Mozilla and a range of publications put “stop censorship” banners across their logos.
Among numerous other issues, SOPA and its Senate counterpart, the PROTECT IP Act, would allow copyright holders to easily obtain court orders to stop US payment and ad providers from doing business with foreign sites, force search engines to block links to allegedly infringing sites, and require domain service providers to block domains of allegedly infringing sites from being accessible. Be sure to check out Devin Coldewey’s excellent teardown of SOPA and PROTECT IP for more details on why we and many (but not all) other internet users are opposed.
Six witnesses, mostly hand-picked supporters of the bill, spoke before the House Judiciary Committee today in a 3.5 hour session that ended up revealing confusion and disagreement among the committee members and their peers.
Google, the lone witness fully opposing the bill, was characterized by chairman and bill sponsor Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and others as being pro-piracy. But a top colleague, Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), responded to the hearing by shooting down the bipartisan consensus theme.
“What [lawmakers are] realizing is there are so many unintended consequences that they can’t just use Google as a piñata and bash on it here,” he told The Hill. ”I don’t believe this bill has any chance on the House floor. I think it’s way too extreme, it infringes on too many areas that our leadership will know is simply too dangerous to do in its current form.”
Later in the day, he tweeted that he’s working on a separate plan designed to combat copyright infringement:
Follow @DarrellIssa@DarrellIssa
Darrell Issa
Darrell Issa
As for me, I'm hitting ctrl+alt+delete on this flawed #tech bill: bit.ly/sCy3PK Stay tuned, #geeks. I'm working on a smarter solution
That solution, as he had sketched out in a press conference Tuesday together with Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), would be to create a complaint process for copyright infringement similar to the International Trade Commission’s patent infringement investigation system.
More cracks also started to appear among the bill’s proponents. Rep. Dan Lungren, who heads the Homeland Security subcommittee on cybersecurity, said at the hearing that SOPA and PROTECT IP “undercut the real effort that would practically help us secure the Internet” through Domain Name System Security Extensions. DNSSEC provide a set of authentication extensions to the internet’s domain name system, so web sites can certify that they are who they say they are. According to security experts, the technology would be broken if SOPA required domain service providers to block domains.
Smith’s response to the issue was that “I’m not a technical expert on this,” followed by “I’m trying to ferret this out.” None of his panelists understood the issue either. It’s concerning that he hadn’t done this research before sponsoring the bill.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
LHC results may solve riddle of how universe can exist
via The Register by Lewis Page on 11/15/11
Antimatter bombshell set to explode physics applecart
Top boffins at the Large Hadron Collider – mightiest particle-punisher and largest machine of any kind ever assembled by humanity – say that they may have uncovered a vital clue explaining one of the greatest mysteries of physics: namely, how is it that matter itself can exist?…
Anti-Hacking Law Criminalizes Most Computer Users, Former Prosecutor Says
via Wired Top Stories by Kim Zetter on 11/14/11
The nation's premier anti-hacking law poses a threat to the civil liberties of the millions of Americans who use computers and the internet and could lead to the arrest and prosecution of many if not most computer users who violate it on a regular basis, says a former federal prosecutor who wants the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act revised.
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