They're still working
on the
color of the universe. It's
pretty definitely not turquoise. It might be salmon, or a sort of beige/cream
color, or (if you're indoors) a nice bright blue: the hard part is defining white.
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
They're still working
on the
color of the universe. It's
pretty definitely not turquoise. It might be salmon, or a sort of beige/cream
color, or (if you're indoors) a nice bright blue: the hard part is defining white.
Also, the average color changes over time: "The universe started out young and blue, and grew gradually redder as the population of evolved 'red' giant stars built up."
Here's a clever
99009 - Reality not
found error page.
Fossils of a very early--and very
small--relative
of Triceratops have been found. The adult Liaoceratops yanzigouensis was about
a foot tall and three feet long, with only a rudimentary frill and horns.
I suspect that this page on
Antarctic
orchestral music it's incomplete: this is the British Antarctic Survey's site,
and both composers they mention are British. Ten minutes ago, it hadn't occurred to
me that there was such a thing, and now I'm wondering what they've left out.
Here we go again: the Shrub wants to
allow
Colombia to use "anti-drug" aid against the rebels there. The administration
argues that the rebels are involved in drug trafficking.
Congressional aides of the two major U.S. parties expect a fight over the proposal this spring because some lawmakers fear that broadening military aid could leave the United States mired in a conflict that has raged for 38 years.Critics believe that the budget request language permitting use of the money for "counter-terrorism" defines its purpose so broadly that the Colombian government "could use it for almost anything," in the words of one aide.
"Stability" has been a major goal of US foreign policy since the Cold War.
Ralph Peters argues that this is not only
morally
suspect, it's bad practical politics:
We even forgot our own history: For almost two centuries, instability abroad worked to the benefit of the United States - from bringing us allies in our struggle for independence to destroying Europe's empires and thus opening the world's markets for America's goods.... We need not embrace global anarchy to recognize that change is inevitable - and essential....Our support of human rights and self-determination - even at the cost of occasional instability - is not only moral; it's good policy and good business. The shah really does fall in the end - and it's a lot easier to work, trade and negotiate with those whose quest for freedom you have advanced than with those whose oppression you ignored.
Instability can be painful to live through--but so can violent efforts to impose order from above. Peace is more than not fighting, and a stable civil culture is not brought about by curfews, mass arrests, and arbitrary executions.
Quote of the Day: "We never would have allowed a passenger
who had passed away
to board an aircraft." Corpses need different paperwork than the rest of us.
I wish this surprised me: poor patients are
more than
twice as likely to die from heart disease after being sent home from the
hospital. This isn't anecdotal. It's based on a clinical trial:
"In a clinical trial, patients are supposed to receive similar care, but actually did not," said lead investigator Sunil Rao, M.D., who prepared the results of the Duke study for presentation today (March 17) at the 51st annual scientific sessions of the American College of Cardiology. "Despite the standardization of many treatments, poverty was associated with a lower rate of some evidence-based medications at the time of hospital discharge and lower rate of some procedures during the hospitalization."Emphasis added."After adjusting for these differences, poverty was still associated with a generally worse outcome, suggesting that the situation these patients return to may be responsible," he continued. "It may be that once out of the hospital, these patients return to risky habits such as smoking or bad diet, or more likely they cannot afford the medications prescribed for them to treat their heart disease."
The problem isn't just bad patient habits. It's not even the high cost of medications--though Rao emphasizes that, and it is important: people who can't afford life-saving medicine die. In a clinical study where everyone was supposed to get the same treatment, poor patients received inferior treatment. The poor patients tended to be older, and more of them were female.
This probably wasn't deliberate discrimination, a doctor deciding not to bother with an elderly woman because a younger, richer, or male, patient mattered more. It may not even have been a conscious "this treatment doesn't work on women" when either it's been proven to, or it isn't known because it's only been studied in males. But prejudice doesn't have to be explicit and conscious to lead to discrimination and even death.
Astronomers at the University of Hawaii have found a
galaxy
with a redshift of 6.56, meaning it is 14 billion light-years away, and
dates to when the universe was only
780 million years old. This is a new age/distance record; in recent years, the record
has generally been held by quasars.
The
second
law of thermodynamics has its own Web site (thanks, Menolly).
The
final resting
place of Ambrose Bierce? [with thanks to Wicked Uncle Lane and the potsmaster]
In Britain, the
Liberal Democratic party has just come out for the
legalization
of marijuana--and an end to prison sentences for possession of any drug, including
heroin.
The party leadership recommended decriminalization of cannabis, but the delegates to
the party's spring conference went further.
The party's leader Charles Kennedy has previously backed legalisation but did not take part in Saturday's discussion or vote.The article quotes people both for and against legalization, and discusses the likely effects of this vote on Lib Dem attempts to recruit disaffected Tories.Afterwards, Mr Kennedy said that taken as a whole, the package - which calls for more rehabilitation facilities and tougher sentences for those caught selling drugs near schools - was an appropriate response to the problem.
Some very clever engineers have restored the
Far-Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer satellite to operation by giving it
a new
guidance
system that relies on the Earth's magnetic field.
I liked turquoise--but it turns out the
universe
is beige.
The mistake was caused by a bug in the software Glazebrook had used to convert the cosmic spectrum into the colour the human eye would see if it was exposed to it. "There's no error in the science, the error was in the perception," says Glazebrook.
The latest approach to nuclear fusion involves
bubbles in
deuterated acetone.
Currently, the level of neutron emissions with the characteristic fusion energy appears to be lower than would be expected from the tritium signals observed in the experiment. Further tests are needed to account for this discrepancy, and to verify the observed relations between the neutron emissions, tritium production, and bubble collapse.This isn't cold fusion--the temperatures in the collapsing bubbles are close to those inside the sun. And it doesn't look like a useful energy source: the hard part with fusion is getting out more energy than you put in. But with a tabletop apparatus, it might a very convenient way to study nuclear fusion.
Having spent a lot
of time and energy shouting about Osama bin Laden, the US government is
now telling us that
he's
irrelevant: they don't care where he is, aren't in the man-hunt
business, and have no idea of whether he's dead.
They may be right that Al Qaeda will go on with or without bin Laden. They're suffering from the success of their own PR, though: spend enough time telling people that someone is Public Enemy #1, mastermind of the organization that's trying to kill them, and they're likely to believe you and want to know what you're doing to get him.
Copyright 2002 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.