Links Dump
drorzel | May 4, 2010
Online civility: between 10,000 cliques and 2 cultures, where's the neutral ground? : bioephemera
"Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the blogosphere abhors a neutral and nonpartisan blog. For whatever reasons, cultural or historical, participants expect partisanship. They want to know if you're with them or against them; the dedicated communities at various blogs can be pretty defensive of their space, and sometimes stream like lemmings through the aether to attack a blogger that they perceive as threatening. It's human nature: when our friends get attacked, we get mad. The problem is, we're…
drorzel | May 3, 2010
Clive Thompson on Why We Should Learn the Language of Data | Magazine
"Statistics is hard. But that's not just an issue of individual understanding; it's also becoming one of the nation's biggest political problems. We live in a world where the thorniest policy issues increasingly boil down to arguments over what the data mean. If you don't understand statistics, you don't know what's going on -- and you can't tell when you're being lied to. Statistics should now be a core part of general education. You shouldn't finish high school without understanding it reasonably well -- as well, say,…
drorzel | May 2, 2010
tongodeon: Fun With Secret Questions & Answers
"My new bank, Ally Bank, configures a security question and answer for customer service calls. In addition to your SSN, date of birth, and mother's maiden name they also ask you the question you specify and wait for the answer you've provided. This is good, because many standard questions are guessable in a way that user-defined questions may not be.
A real live human operator always asks the question and waits for a real live answer. This measure has the potential to not just improve my account security but add entertainment value as well…
drorzel | May 1, 2010
slacktivist: Empathy and epistemic closure
"The stupidity of the tea partiers has nothing to do with innate intelligence or with acquired intelligence. It has nothing to do with smartness or brainpower or where anyone falls on the bell curve of Stanford-Binet test scores. It is, rather, a moral stupidity, a moral imbecilism that produces simple imbecilism -- the inevitable intellectual consequence of a selfish refusal to listen to what empathy is shouting from all sides.
The correlation between bigotry and stupidity has been widely observed, leading to much speculation that there is likely…
drorzel | April 30, 2010
The Science and Entertainment Exchange: The X-Change Files: Zap! Or, Where Would Science Fiction Movies be Without Lasers?
"Science fiction was right on top of this new development and even foresaw it. In 1898, H. G. Wells introduced an invisible but powerful heat ray as the weapon of choice for invading Martians in his story The War of the Worlds. Today, that would be an infrared CO2 laser. In the 1930s, space swashbucklers Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon used hand-held ray weapons in their movie serials. In the 1950s, The Day the Earth Stood Still and the film version of The War of the…
drorzel | April 29, 2010
Skipping class? NAU high-tech system will know
"Students who are thinking about sleeping late and skipping that morning class may have a new incentive to roll out of bed at one Arizona university this fall.
Northern Arizona University will install an electronic system that detects when each student with an ID card walks through the door to some large classrooms. The system will produce an attendance report for the instructor."
(tags: academia education technology gadgets privacy)
The Art of Onfim
"One of the most fascinating archeological finds in Russia has been the discovery of hundreds…
drorzel | April 28, 2010
Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War - PowerPoint - NYTimes.com
""PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
"It's dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control," General…
drorzel | April 27, 2010
News: Science for Non-Scientists - Inside Higher Ed
"Next January, Bard's science and math faculty - along with postdoctoral students and faculty from other institutions -- will try to change all that with the Citizen Science Program, three weeks of science learning modeled on the success of Language and Thinking. Also required of all 500 of the college's freshmen, and ungraded, Botstein hopes it will become similarly entrenched as a landmark of students' first year at Bard.
"We'll give young people in their first year of college a real understanding of what science does, what it's about,"…
drorzel | April 26, 2010
Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 163601 (2010): Direct Observation of Coherent Population Trapping in a Superconducting Artificial Atom
"The phenomenon of coherent population trapping (CPT) of an atom (or solid state "artificial atom"), and the associated effect of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), are clear demonstrations of quantum interference due to coherence in multilevel quantum systems. We report observation of CPT in a superconducting phase qubit by simultaneously driving two coherent transitions in a Î-type configuration, utilizing the three lowest lying levels of a local…
drorzel | April 25, 2010
One-third of Americans may be obese, but we're not too fat to fight. - By Daniel Engber - Slate Magazine
"Yet fat soldiers are sometimes given the boot for reasons that have nothing to do with their abilities in the field. According to military guidelines, even someone who's fit as a fiddle can be drummed out of camp for having the wrong body dimensions. Consider that a young man who's 6 feet tall must weigh less than 195 pounds, or have a body fat percentage below 26, in order to serve in the Army. [...] That's true even if he excels on the U.S. Army's Physical Fitness Test. [...] When it…
drorzel | April 24, 2010
slacktivist: Establishment
"Here is what the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says about religion:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ..."
Sometimes a comma is just a comma and not a vast chasm separating two competing and incompatible ideas. The two clauses there do not conflict. At all. They are logically necessary counterparts of one another. Congress may not make any law establishing religion and Congress may not prohibit the free exercise of religion. Congress may not make any law establishing…
drorzel | April 23, 2010
Don't ignore the Tea Party's toxic take on history. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine
"And it suddenly occurred to me that Tea Partiers really should read this pamphlet, because it would teach them something about what "tyranny" is actually like. It would teach them something about what "communism" was really like. It would make them ashamed of themselves for whining about a health care bill turning America into a tyranny, for slandering liberals as communists who want to impose tyranny on them. It might snap them out of the intoxicated hysteria they whip themselves into. "
(tags: history…
drorzel | April 22, 2010
Scathing Amazon Reviewer Revealed as Author Orlando Figes' Wife - AOL News
Why didn't I try-- oh, right. Because Kate has integrity, as do I. That's why.
(tags: books literature history stupid internet)
Backreaction: It comes soon enough
"I think of the future frequently - and more often than not I think it could come sooner. But sometimes I am stunned when I read things I've been talking about actually become reality."
(tags: computing internet society culture technology science)
A gassy mystery: Researchers discover surprising exoplanetary atmosphere
At what point does "New planet…
drorzel | April 21, 2010
We Are Not Alone § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
"From illusory "canals" spied through blurry 19th century telescopes, to today's high-endurance robotic rovers, in the search for life beyond Earth, Mars is the perennial favorite target. It is, after all, the most hospitable planet we know other than our own.
But despite the Red Planet's watery, warm ancient past and more than a century of Earthlings' increasingly sophisticated scrutiny, no clear evidence of Martian life has ever been found. At least, that's the mainstream scientific consensus. But according to a new book by astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-…
drorzel | April 20, 2010
Ptahhotep
"The Instruction of Ptahhotep to his son survives in papyrus copies. It is a collection of maxims (not all are given here) dealing with human relations. The maxims do not cover all aspects of Egyptian life. For the most part, they touch on the peaceful virtues of kindness, justice, truthfulness, moderation and self-control.
A man by the name of Ptahhotep was a vizier under King Isesi of the Fifth Dynasty. If he authored the instruction under this name, then it dates from 2450-2300 BCE. On the other hand, Miriam Lichtheim argues that the style of the document puts its origin close…
drorzel | April 19, 2010
Rev. Mod. Phys. 82, 1155 (2010): Introduction to quantum noise, measurement, and amplification
"The topic of quantum noise has become extremely timely due to the rise of quantum information physics and the resulting interchange of ideas between the condensed matter and atomic, molecular, optical-quantum optics communities. This review gives a pedagogical introduction to the physics of quantum noise and its connections to quantum measurement and quantum amplification. After introducing quantum noise spectra and methods for their detection, the basics of weak continuous measurements are…
drorzel | April 18, 2010
EXCLUSIVE: The Day Einstein Died - Photo Gallery - LIFE
"Albert Einstein, the genius physicist whose theories changed our ideas of how the universe works, died 55 years ago, on April 18, 1955, of heart failure. He was 76. His funeral and cremation were intensely private affairs, and only one photographer managed to capture the events of that extraordinary day: LIFE magazine's Ralph Morse. Armed with his camera and a case of scotch -- to open doors and loosen tongues -- Morse compiled a quietly intense record of an icon's passing. But aside from one now-famous image (above), the pictures…
drorzel | April 17, 2010
The Secret of L.A.'s 10-Year-Old Fake Freeway Sign - Traffic - Jalopnik
"An artist named Richard Ankrom had the same experience, and so he did what any fed-up Los Angeles driver would do: He created a simple directional tool to help drivers prepare for the 5's poorly marked hairpin exit. He designed and sewed a Caltrans uniform, cut the shield-like "5" shape as well as a "NORTH" from sheet metal, and affixed reflectors to match the existing system. He even gave the signage a nice dusting of L.A. smog sheen so it wouldn't look glaringly new. On August 5, 2001, in broad daylight, he hoisted a…
drorzel | April 16, 2010
YouTube - Real Word Problems From My Physics Book - PH17
Amazingly, this isn't the silliest problem I've seen in an intro physics book...
(tags: education physics science silly video youtube)
Twitter / @busynessgirl/Calcwars
Newton, Leibniz, meet Twitter. Twitter, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.
(tags: silly math science history internet)
Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 153202 (2010): Scattering in Mixed Dimensions with Ultracold Gases
"We experimentally investigate the mix-dimensional scattering occurring when the collisional partners live in different dimensions. We employ a binary mixture…
drorzel | April 15, 2010
The Virtuosi: Would a laser gun recoil?
"Let's motivate our question a little bit. I've wondered about this question since I saw star wars. Though I'm no firearms expert, the recoil in guns must come from conservation of momentum principles. Momentum is conserved in a system. The gun starts with zero momentum. We fire, give the bullet momentum, and so to keep the system at zero momentum, the gun must gain equal and opposite momentum. That is, the gun will move backwards.
All of that was for conventional guns. Light carries momentum, so if we fire a pulse of light, we expect our laser gun…