A clipping service without
portfolio*,
compiled and annotated by
Vicki Rosenzweig
since March 1999
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
15 March 2006
Another victory: the Czech Republic is giving
legal recognition to
same-sex partnerships. The Czech Parliament overrode a presidential veto on
this one--the president had called the law excessive regulation by the state of
people's private lives, which is nonsense, but suggests that he didn't think
he could say, outright, that he was opposed to people forming families, raising
children together, and inheriting property from their partners. (The bill
doesn't allow for adoption, but if I read the BBC story right, does recognize
a right to keep custody of one's children.)
I am not terribly surprised that the Netherlands and Canada are ahead of
the U.S. on this--but it's odd looking to South Africa and the Czech Republic
as good examples in such matters. Not that I begrudge the Czechs, or anyone--I
just wish the United States would join them in doing the right thing.
14 March 2006
The
comet samples brought back
by the Stardust mission contain unexpected materials that form only at high temperatures:
They appear to be abundant [in Comet Wild-2], having been found in about one
in four of the particles examined so far.
One of these minerals known as forsterite, which melts at 2,000C and condenses at 1,127C,
has been detected in a comet before.
But other minerals found in the Stardust samples resemble so-called calcium-aluminium
inclusions (CAIs), which form at even higher temperatures.
The researchers are speculating on whether the materials themselves formed near the
Sun and were transported out to the comet-forming regions, or were created near other
stars and available in the early solar nebula.
High-resolution Cassini images show icy jets and towering plumes ejecting large
quantities of particles at high speed. Scientists examined several models to explain the process.
They ruled out the idea that the particles are produced by or blown off the moon's surface by
vapor created when warm water ice converts to a gas. Instead, scientists have found evidence
for a much more exciting possibility -- the jets might be erupting from near-surface pockets of
liquid water above 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), like cold versions of the Old Faithful
geyser in Yellowstone.
[via James Nicoll]
8 March 2006
Sandia National Lab has set a
new record temperature--two billion
Kelvin--in the lab. The interesting part is that they aren't sure what's going on, or
why the reaction is producing an energy surplus. It is repeatable--they've been doing
this for fourteen months--but the physics behind it hasn't been identified.
Second, and more unusually, high ion temperatures were sustained after the plasma had
stagnated — that is, after its ions had presumably lost motion and therefore energy and therefore
heat — as though yet again some unknown agent was providing an additional energy source to the ions.
Sandia’s Z machine normally works like this: 20 million amps of electricity pass through a small core
of vertical tungsten wires finer than human hairs. The core is about the size of a spool of thread. The wires
dissolve instantly into a cloud of charged particles called a plasma.
The plasma, caught in the grip of the very strong magnetic field accompanying the electrical current,
is compressed to the thickness of a pencil lead. This happens very rapidly, at a velocity that would fly
a plane from New York to San Francisco in several seconds.
At that point, the ions and electrons have nowhere further to go. Like a speeding car hitting
a brick wall, they stop suddenly, releasing energy in the form of X-rays that reach temperatures
of several million degrees — the temperature of solar flares.
The new achievement — temperatures of billions of degrees — was obtained in part by
substituting steel wires in cylindrical arrays 55 mm to 80 mm in diameter for the more typical
tungsten wire arrays, approximately only 20 mm in diameter. The higher velocities achieved over these
longer distances were part of the reason for the higher temperatures.…
Haines theorized that the rapid conversion of magnetic energy to a very high ion plasma temperature
was achieved by unexpected instabilities at the point of ordinary stagnation: that is, the point at
which ions and electrons should have been unable to travel further. The plasma should have collapsed,
its internal energy radiated away. But for approximately 10 nanoseconds, some unknown energy was still
pushing back against the magnetic field.
Ken MacLeod has posted his
Boskone
Guest of Honor talk to his Weblog, with the heading "where I get my other ideas": some of the roots
of his thinking and writing. He starts off by saying that he's tired of talking about Trotskyism,
libertarianism, and cyberpunk, so instead he's going to talk about landscape, religion, philosophy,
and real science and technology.
At its best, secular liberal humanism is profoundly aware of the depth of human
ignorance and thus unprepared to move to options that close off further argument, whereas much
religious belief is a total system in which everything is already known and has only to be
interpreted in practical terms. If it is known that there is a god, and that there are souls
which are eternal, and that the mind of god in respect of the fate of those souls is
already laid down in a book, then it is possible to lay out your duty clearly whatever the
consequence for short-lived human bodies....
One of the things that perpetually amazes me about believers is how much more tolerant they are
of such sins as spiritual pride and downright hatred than they are of minor sexual offenses.
I don't believe in the inerrancy of scripture, but I am constantly amazed how most fundamentalist
Christians neglect the simple spiritual wisdom contained in the gospel accounts of the parable of
the Pharisee and the Publican.)
Which leads me to one of the bottom lines of this discussion. Precisely what can I, as an agnostic, and
a secular liberal humanist, say about religion that some believers somewhere are not going to find g
rossly offensive? When I talk about the prophets, I may manage to refrain from personal abuse of them,
and may bend over backwards to acknowledge the good faith in which they spoke, but, when it comes to
the question of whether they had the direct and privileged access that they claimed to the mind of
the god in whom I do not, as such, believe, I am obliged to say that I think they were mistaken.
Not mad, not lying, just wrong.
The discussion there is also interesting, though it includes the inevitable person missing
the point and insisting that atheism is a religion.
8 February 2006
British Columbia has announced an
agreement to save the
Great Bear Rainforest, a temperate rainforest on the mainland Pacific Coast that houses
the Kermode bear--a white-furred subspecies of black bear--as well as wolves, grizzlies,
and salmon. About a third of the 25,000-square-mile (64,000 square-km) region
will be a wildlife preserve; the rest will be used for logging and mining that environmental
groups consider sustainable. The First Nations of the area support the agreement as well.
5 February 2006
Researchers at the Institute of
Astronomy, Cambridge, have put some numbers on the distribution and
properties
of dark matter.
The results, based on careful measurements of star movement in 12 nearby
dwarf galaxies, are startling: rather than being cold, these particles are
moving at a velocity that equals a temperature of about 10,000 degrees:
"It comes in a 'magic volume' which happens to correspond to an amount which is 30 million
times the mass of the Sun.
"It looks like you cannot ever pack it smaller than about 300 parsecs - 1,000 light-years; this stuff
will not let you. That tells you a speed actually - about 9km/s - at which the dark matter particles
are moving because they are moving too fast to be compressed into a smaller scale.
The article doesn't mention last year's paper that challenged the dark matter hypothesis using
relativistic measurements of galactic mass and velocity, but if I'm reading this right--and it's
written accurately--the new measurements can't be explained as relativistic mass of "normal"
baryonic matter. Clearly, if there is no dark matter it has
no measurable properties. Conversely, these measurements suggest that there is a significant
amount of dark matter, even if it doesn't account for all of the otherwise-unexplained movement
and cohesion of galaxies.
27 January 2006
More problems with
the Medicare drug plan: since it's specifically a drug plan, not
a medical plan, patients are being sent IV medication
without
the necessary supplies, such as IV tubing, and told that if they need help
administering the drug, they have to go to the hospital. Until 1 January, Medicare,
like private insurers, was paying for nurses to go to patients' homes for this
purpose.
At-home IV has been common since the 1980s: ACT-UP pushed it through, but the
insurers went along not just because patients prefer it and it's safer, but because
it's a lot cheaper.
Republican Sens. Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum, both of Pennsylvania, wrote to the
Medicare agency in October, saying it "has opted to define the coverage of home infusion therapy
in a manner that does not include financial coverage for … professional services, supplies
and equipment that are required for the safe and effective provision of therapy."
In a response dated Dec. 27, Mark McClellan, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services, said the agency lacked specific legal authority to broaden the coverage
policy, in effect, handing the problem back to Congress.
"If we could pay for it, we would," said Dr. Jeff Kelman, chief medical officer for the division of
Medicare that handles the drug benefit. "Read the act yourself …. It's a drug benefit,
not a medical benefit."
Given how Congress often works these days, I wonder if those Senators--or any others--did
read the act before voting it into law.
Mark Morford reacts to the hate mail
he got for praising Brokeback Mountain by talking about
the real
gay
agenda:
This is, in fact, the most sinister gay agenda of all. Normalcy. Lack of fear.
Happiness. The right to be miserably in love just like everyone else and have it
recognized by the culture as, well, no big deal. Safe. Healthy. Beautiful, even.
What nerve.
I suspect he's mostly preaching to the choir, though also perhaps to the people
who read his column knowing that they will disagree with almost all of it, often
angrily, the "Steve" and "Larry" whose letters prompted this, who don't have room
to comprehend that when I'm IMing with my girlfriend late into the evening, I'm more
likely discussing our mutual job worries than anything that would tell a third party
that we are in fact lovers, or for that matter both women.
22 January 2006
Today's
NY Times magazine has an interesting article on the study of
animal
personality. Researchers are looking at consistent behavior and
behavior patterns in octopuses, sticklebacks, fruit flies
and numerous other species that are easy to study in the lab, and finding
similarities to the behavior of species, including ourselves, that we're
willing to use the word "personality" for. The author notes that even
while behaviorists banished the concept of "personality" from discussions
of animals--and of animals from psychology--most people, while we may
doubt that a fruit fly can have a personality, have agreed that dogs,
cats, and horses--animals we actually live near, and have bred to live
near us--have distinct personalities.
Yes, I had a "well, duh" reaction at the beginning--of course this
makes sense, we're a species of animal--but whether that idea strikes you
as obvious or as weird and irrelevant, the author goes into details about
the work now being done and published. He points out that one thing
driving this is recent progress in genetics--researchers who are curious
about how genes affect behavior can compare genes in sticklebacks or
Drosophila to those in dogs and humans.
To their amazement, the scientists found that all the textbooks written on the
biochemistry of plants had apparently overlooked the fact that methane is produced by a
range of plants even when there is plenty of oxygen.
The amount of the gas produced increased when the air was warmer, and when there
was more sunlight. The paper estimates that this unexplained phenomenon could account
for between 10 and 30 per cent of the world's methane emissions.
This doesn't mean that Earth has more methane than we thought: it means that a significant amount
of it comes from a different place--or places--than we'd previously realized. The
world is a strange and wondrous place indeed.
What this means for global climate isn't
yet clear. To go with the new lab results, there's a new report of otherwise-unexplained
methane production in the Amazon, but more quantitative data are needed.
Another victory: the Czech Republic is giving
legal recognition to
same-sex partnerships. The Czech Parliament overrode a presidential veto on
this one--the president had called the law excessive regulation by the state of
people's private lives, which is nonsense, but suggests that he didn't think
he could say, outright, that he was opposed to people forming families, raising
children together, and inheriting property from their partners. (The bill
doesn't allow for adoption, but if I read the BBC story right, does recognize
a right to keep custody of one's children.)
Ken MacLeod has posted his
