Archive for March, 2009

The more I read about this stuff, the more I wonder if technology truly has any place on Earth. If our precious electronics are so easily taken away by random spurts of electromagnetic energy from our mother Sun, well, why bother in the first place?

Go buy a sword, learn to use it, and read on.

It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma – charged high-energy particles – some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see “When hell comes to Earth”). If one should hit the Earth’s magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer’s magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer’s copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Envision a world where every computer is rendered useless, manufacturing capability is at a standstill, and bullets are slowly but surely running out. It wouldn’t be long before we’re in dusty streets fighting with swords and knives again.

We’d be bitch-slapped right back into the dark ages, most of our current knowledge useless.

Read the rest here.

My bother and I always go crazy during the Easter months because that means our favorite confection – Cadbury Eggs – are sold in stores. And here we have a genius (or a guy with simply WAY too much time on his hands) figuring out the perfect way to destroy them.

I always thought there was something more going on with this stuff than met the eye…seems I may have been right.

PORTLAND, Ore. — U.S. Navy researchers claimed to have experimentally confirmed cold fusion in a presentation at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting.

“We have compelling evidence that fusion reactions are occurring” at room temperature, said Pamela Mosier-Boss, a scientist with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (San Diego). The results are “the first scientific report of highly energetic neutrons from low-energy nuclear reactions,” she added.

Read the rest here.

WE MUST SAVE THE BANANA!

That sameness is the banana’s paradox. After 15,000 years of human cultivation, the banana is too perfect, lacking the genetic diversity that is key to species health. What can ail one banana can ail all. A fungus or bacterial disease that infects one plantation could march around the globe and destroy millions of bunches, leaving supermarket shelves empty.

A wild scenario? Not when you consider that there’s already been one banana apocalypse. Until the early 1960s, American cereal bowls and ice cream dishes were filled with the Gros Michel, a banana that was larger and, by all accounts, tastier than the fruit we now eat. Like the Cavendish, the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike,” accounted for nearly all the sales of sweet bananas in the Americas and Europe. But starting in the early part of the last century, a fungus called Panama disease began infecting the Big Mike harvest. The malady, which attacks the leaves, is in the same category as Dutch Elm disease. It appeared first in Suriname, then plowed through the Car- ibbean, finally reaching Honduras in the 1920s. (The country was then the world’s largest banana producer; today it ranks third, behind Ecuador and Costa Rica.)

Read the (sad and disturbing) rest of the article here.

…er, I mean, how to turn things invisible!

Xiang Zhang remembers the day he recognized that something extraordinary was happening around him. It was in 2000, at a workshop organized by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to explore a tantalizing idea: that radical new kinds of engineered materials might enable us to extend our control over matter in seemingly magical ways.

The goal at hand, changing how objects interact with light, seemed at first blush to be routine; people had been manipulating visible light with mirrors and lenses and prisms nearly forever. But Zhang, a materials scientist then at the University of California at Los Angeles, knew those applications were limited. Based overwhelmingly on a single material, glass, the technologies were restricted by the laws of optics described in standard physics texts. The engineers in the room hoped to smash through those barriers with materials and technologies never conceived of before. The proposals included crafting what amounts to an array of billions of tiny relays; in essence, the relays would capture light and send it back out. Depending on the specific design of the array, the light would be bent, reflected, or skewed in different ways.

What could you do with a tool like that? An amazing amount, Zhang soon discovered. For one thing, you could render objects invisible.

The rest is here.

Juxtaposed against Run DMC is an old vid of Russian Folk Dancing. Perhaps the coolest things you’ll EVER see.

Zetsubo Billy

Maximum the Hormone

…or, why the world of finance is a big fucking joke.

It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s 2008 losses).

Read the rest here.

Note that these people use a lot of complicated technobabble to hide behind the fact that they were selling shit. Clarity is an anathema to people who work and sell in this industry.

Any wonder why I’m an avowed anarchist?

Meanwhile, another FACETS group is developing simplified mathematical models that will accurately describe the complex behaviour that is being uncovered. Although the neurons could be modelled in detail, they would be far too complicated to implement either in software or hardware.

The goal is to use these models to build a ‘neural computer’ which emulates the brain. The first effort is a network of 300 neurons and half a million synapses on a single chip. The team used analogue electronics to represent the neurons and digital electronics to represent communications between them. It’s a unique combination.

The rest of the article is here.

…you’re feeling too cheerful today, here’s some sobering news:

The Outstanding Public Debt as of 16 Mar 2009 at 12:15:01 PM GMT is:

The estimated population of the United States is 305,825,123
so each citizen’s share of this debt is $35,958.21.

The National Debt has continued to increase an average of
$3.72 billion per day since September 28, 2007!

From The US National Debt Clock.

What does a brain do when it sees a friend across the street?
Answer: It gives a brain wave.

Ok, maybe that wasn’t funny. I thought it was, so there.

From a Yahoo! News Story:

“Surprisingly, just by looking at the brain data we could predict exactly where they were in the virtual reality environment,” said Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at the University College London in the U.K. “In other words, we could ‘read’ their spatial memories.”

Maguire and her colleagues focused on the hippocampus, or a small part of the brain that deals with navigation, memory recall and imagining future events. Neurons known as “place cells” activate in the hippocampus and inform people of where they are as they move around.

The rest can be found here.

Two hilarious clips from his show last week – one lampooning the laughable Ayn Rand philosophy, and the other an interesting talk with a scientist about the future of biofuels – biofuels done right, that is.

Jon Stewart gives both Jim Cramer and the world of Finance (a world filled with dubious half-cocked bullshit) a complete bitch-slap. Observe that Cramer can only sit in silence as Jon easily refutes and negates all of his excuses and arguments.

Watch the rest at www.thedailyshow.com

A friend of mine had a “similar idea” a while back (similar idea in quotes because I’m fairly sure that someone had long ago thought of this before us) to live in gigantic self-sustaining pyramids, but it seems that Dubai has once again beaten us all to the punch.

Read the article here. (No, it’s not an actual picture, before you start freaking out.)