The researchers who slowed light to 38 miles/hour a couple of
years ago have taken the startling but logical next step, and
made it
stop
completely until they shine a second beam into the
rubidium gas and restart it.
Slow
Glass, anyone?
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
--Phil Agre
The researchers who slowed light to 38 miles/hour a couple of
years ago have taken the startling but logical next step, and
made it
stop
completely until they shine a second beam into the
rubidium gas and restart it.
Slow
Glass, anyone?
It's in the Onion, but this
speech
by the incoming president is frighteningly plausible:
Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over."
Quote of the day: "I suspect that everything
you know is wrong and that the opposite of
everything you know is also wrong." Jon Carroll,
writing about the California
energy
crisis.
The banns were posted for three weeks, the minister read
the vows, and two same-sex couples are now
married
in their church, and under Ontario law.
It's not clear yet whether the Minister of Consumer and Commercial
Relations will register the marriages, but that may not matter to their
legality: posting the banns is explicitly permitted under Ontario law
as an alternative to getting a marriage license.
[plucked from Metafilter]
Hundreds of years ago, a new kind of plow changed the
face of northern Europe. Now, farmers are finding even better
ways to plant
without
plowing or weeding. It's relatively cheap, increases crop yields, and
might even reduce global warming.
Geoffrey Nunberg has written a good analysis of the
technical
and constitutional problems of Internet filtering software.
He suggests, at a minimum, that no filter should be installed in
libraries without passing basic tests of how well it works, and
providing the librarians with a list of blocked sites and categories,
so they can decide whether it is appropriate for their purposes:
This is a simple matter of consumer protection: If a piece of software fails to block 40 percent of a random sample of pornographic sites, parents have a right to know that before they entrust their children to it for protection. And software makers ought to be held accountable for the claims they make about their products' efficacy, just as the makers of tires and cough syrup are.
If you have to get caught using drugs, be rich and get cocaine
delivered to your office: the DEA can't get the US Attorney
to prosecute
any
of the hundreds of doctors, lawyers, and professors caught
in a sting, because they're "genteel users" and can cope. The
US attorney says this is because the feds don't go after buyers,
but
Other law-enforcement officials said they were surprised by White's decision, especially since the NYPD regularly busts buyers in undercover operations."So, basically this means that if you buy loose joints in Washington Square Park, you're going to get charged, but if you are a regular cocaine customer, you don't," one said.
I'm no supporter of the War on Some Drugs, but rarely do they make it so blatant that it's not even on some drugs, it's about locking up poor people. [via Ethel the Blog]
More micro-moons:
S/2000
J1 through J11 are all thought to be less than five miles
in diameter, and most are retrograde.
If you've always wanted to eat your
hat. Except that
the FAQ recommends against it, though there is advice on
keeping flies away.
The anti-drug offensive in Colombia hasn't even started
officially, but the fighting is already spilling over to
the streets of sleepy
Ecuadoran
border towns.
"If Colombia is going to be another Vietnam, as everyone keeps saying, then Ecuador is going to become the Cambodia of this war," Máximo Abad Jaramillo, the mayor here, warned. "We are not ready for this war, we don't want to be a part of it, but we are being dragged into the conflict against our will."
Remind me, again, what we hope to gain by this. Is anything at stake here worth the likely price? [registration required]
NASA is looking for volunteers to
classify
Martian craters. You need to "know a mountain from
a hole in the ground," and you need a mouse and a
recent Web browser.
Some of the missing mass of the universe may be in
dark
galaxies, with no stars to make them visible.
Neil Trentham and his colleagues suggest that there are
far more of these small, invisible galaxies than of the large,
bright ones we can see. Certainly, something is pulling stars
and gas off UGC 10214, apparently into the dark void.
"Rage is the new drug." Jon Carroll discusses
what
this means for us, especially those of us who don't
enjoy being angry. When your national politics are dominated by
rage-heads, abstention is not the answer.
The sea
mouse is a predatory annelid worm
about which little is known. That little includes one delightful
and perhaps useful fact:
its spines, extruded the way spiders make silk, are fine
photonic crystals, glowing red, green, or blue to warn off
predators.
Happy millennium! The
monolith
has appeared in a Seattle park.
[update 1/5/01: The monolith has been moved to
a
different park, by forces unknown. Some People say it wasn't
them.]
Samples of mud are being used to create a
history
of the Hudson River, including oyster-shell reefs, cesium
from nuclear testing,
and a devastating storm a thousand years ago.
[registration required]
Andrew Plotkin
welcomes
the future, on rec.arts.sf.fandom.
In states that have the death penalty, prosecutors are allowed to
challenge
any
juror who opposes that penalty. In practice, this
eliminates more women than
men, and more blacks than whites. It also leads to a higher conviction
rate: jurors who support the death penalty tend to believe prosecutors,
and are less likely to remember the presumption of innocence.
What has become of
Afghan
antiquities during the civil war? Some have been destroyed, not
always accidentally,
some are in the black market, and some may be in locked trunks in
Kabul.
[via Metafilter]
Copyright 2001 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.