Last night God told me not to send a contribution to Oral Roberts University to help them out of their financial jam. I was so disappointed.
I reminded her that Richard Roberts – Oral’s son – had just reported to the students that God had told him to resign. She just laughed.
I mentioned that Richard had quoted her. He said God had told him, “We live in a litigious society. Anyone can get mad and file a lawsuit against another person whether they have a legitimate case or not. This lawsuit…is about intimidation, blackmail and extortion.”
God said, no, she doesn’t talk like that. She said when she really does talk to people she says things like, “Thou shalt not embezzle money that good people have donated to do the Lord’s work.”
She said she used to talk to Richard’s dad, Oral, but that it was just a joke.
“I was thinking, what would happen if we assembled 5,000 of the most gullible kids in America all in one place, and then zapped them with about 30 more points of IQ?”
I asked when the zapping would happen.
“It won’t,” she said. “I changed my mind. Since I know everything, I know that if you suddenly turned 5,000 young Republicans into young Democrats in Tulsa, there would be bloodshed.”
Some days you get science. Some days you get fiction. On a good day, the science is more fun than the fiction – especially for us non-scientists who can play with the ideas and not have to make them work. Today’s haul is a trifecta.
The first two entries were reported in last week’s Economist (which maintains a first-rate Science & Technology section):
Cloaking Devices
One is a project to slow down light until it stops. The researchers show how they could fill tapered optical fibers with light and just keep it there, like canned peaches.
The core of each fiber would be made of a material with a negative index of refraction. No, I don’t want to think about that either, but most materials have a positive refractive index – water, for example – which is why objects at the bottom of a swimming pool appear to be closer than they really are.
Negative-refractive materials have already been made — and made to work, at least in the infra-red end of the light spectrum. Eventually, they could be woven into an invisibility cloak, or a cloaking device to hide a space ship, as they like to do on Star Trek TNG.
That’s likely to take a while. The other breakthrough is nearly ready.
The Upside-Down Telescope
Researchers from Stony Brook University are building a telescope called Ice Cube at the South Pole. Its job is to detect neutrinos, the ghostly subatomic particles that stream in from the sun and from deep space and typically go right through the earth.
Here’s the neat part. The new telescope won’t be looking at the sky. It will look straight down. Since the neutrinos come through the earth – and nothing else does — looking down into the ground provides a clear view, uncluttered by any other radiation.
Why the South Pole? First, because the only time you can see a neutrino is the rare occasion when one strikes an atom in a molecule of water – in this case, ice, which is easier to observe – and makes a flash.
Second, one variety of neutrino is formed when cosmic rays collide with energetic particles in the upper atmosphere, which are concentrated around the North Pole. These neutrinos don’t always make it through the earth. Their energy level is such that they’re sometimes absorbed by masses of solid rock.
Know what that means?
The neutrino picture these will form will be like an X-Ray of the earth’s interior, profiling the rock concentrations that blocked the neutrinos from getting through.
Sincerest thanks to the idiot savants who dream this stuff up and are willing to live like penguins long enough to make it work. We should erect a giant brass monkey in their honor outside the Smithsonian.
Giraffic Park
Finally, this from Science News (Nov. 24). In Niger, paleontologists found the 80 million year old fossil of a dinosaur with 500 teeth, arranged in 50 rows across its jaw.
Nigerosaurus had a long, snaky neck, but instead of feeding from the treetops, it munched on ground vegetation, like a cow. How do they know? Because its inner ears pointed downward. The ears of tree feeders like giraffes point skyward.
Don’t look at me. That’s what they said.
So if you’re having trouble finding a good place to eat, just follow your ears.
Two years ago, writing in the New York Times about the inflating housing bubble and soaring American debt – with China’s central bank nearing a trillion dollars in U.S. treasury bond holdings –Paul Krugman made a comment someone should have listened to:
“These days Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn’t seem like a sustainable lifestyle.”
Buried in the ad copy for Amazon’s new ‘Kindle’ electronic book device is the phrase: “From Melville to Morrison, your favorite authors can always be with you.”
Free marketing advice: Make that “From Asimov to Zola.” Your market consists of people who read books, and some of them have gotten past the M’s.
“If we sent 30 percent of the doctors in this country to Africa, we might raise the level of health on both continents.”
Elliott Fisher,
physician and researcher
(as quoted in The Atlantic)
The article notes that in the U.S., the quality of healthcare is better in areas that do not have a high ratio of specialists to general practitioners. It’s not that the specialists are bad doctors, just that there’s a lack of coordination in calling on their services.
At the very mention of Lululemon, my spell-check had a myocardial (which is better than urocardial) infarction.
It refers, in case you missed your last Yoga class, to the Canadian company Lululemon Athletica, a recent darling of post-spandex stretchable anti-toxin stress relief aficionados – and thus of Wall Street, as Lululemon sales topped $150 million.
Latest craze is the company’s VitaSea line of garments made with seaweed fiber which, on contact with moisture – and you know how much moisture there is in the sea — is said to release antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, hydrating and detoxifying natural chemicals.
As Billy Batson used to say, Holy Moley!
Even if it were all true, it turns out there isn’t any seaweed fiber in the fabric. The New York Times sent samples out for testing by two independent laboratories, neither of which could find any difference (except for a 300% price increase) between VitaSea fabric and ordinary cotton T-shirts.
That was published Wednesday, a day after Keith Olbermann reported that the war in Iraq, which the Bush Administration says has cost $800 billion dollars, has actually cost twice that — $1.6 TRILLION and still counting. That’s $20,000 per American family. It’s more than the oil industry paid to buy the government, and we never got the proceeds from that sale anyway. The Bushies ate it.
There was a saying when I was growing up: you get what you pay for. If an $80 T-shirt will keep you free of bacteria and toxins, well maybe it’s worth it. And if a 1,600 billion dollar war will keep you safe from terrorists, maybe it’s worth all the lies and deaths and the bankrupting of America.
Unless the truth is that there’s no seaweed in VitaSea and no anti-terrorism in the Iraq war. In the Bush/Cheney political and corporate ethos of 2007, they spend all our money and our children’s money and their children’s money and still leave us completely vulnerable to toxins and bacteria and terrorists – and eavesdroppers and exploding balloon payments and Katrina and corruption and disastrous shrinkage in healthcare and civil liberties and our good name in the world at large.
Then there’s the 36,000 young Americans killed or seriously wounded in Iraq.
You get what you pay for? No, but I’d be willing to give up even that golden rule if we could revert to another old standby – and Bush/Cheney & Co. would get exactly what they deserve.
We’re not often at a loss for words around here, but there are days.
Organizers of the Long Beach Veterans Day parade ruled that veterans who oppose the Iraq war can’t march. The head of one such group is a marine who served three tours in Iraq. He’s out. Others are Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out.
Why were they turned down? Because, as a city councilman who is also one of the organizers put it, “They have a political agenda.” His name (attention, documentary film-makers) is Val Lerch.
They have a political agenda? And he doesn’t? The parade doesn’t? What Lerch obviously means is that they have a political agenda that differs from HIS political agenda.
And guess which councilman will be waving and smiling from a bunting-encrusted limousine at the head of the parade.
Depending on the poll you consult, 60% to 70% of Americans – thus a healthy majority of Long Beach residents — are against the war. And the city’s money as well as the city streets are provided for the parade. Staffing, flags, banners, utilities, and police protection are all paid for by the citizens, like it or not, whatever their views.
It’s not just Long Beach. No doubt the same ignorant arrogance has been played out by self-appointed parade marshals in cities across the land.
But, hey, it’s Veterans Day.
Let’s honor the veterans – all of them.
And let’s start sending some parade organizers to Iraq.
Guest columnist Gib from Chicago has given us a brief, non-paranoid backgrounder on some of the electronic bugs infesting modern life. Gib is a scientist, electronics engineer, and former designer of electronic circuitry and instrumentation.
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I just got my new passport. It has an embedded RFID chip, and is therefore classified as an “electronic device.” For anyone wondering about the great swarms of bugs colonizing this Orwellian age, here’s some basic information.
Definitions:
RFID. Radio Frequency IDentification An automatic data capture technology. Can be a passive chip powered by transmitted radio energy from the interrogating reader (short range), or a transponder (long range). IPASS and EZ-PASS use RFID technology, as does IFF (Identification - Friend or Foe) for military IDs.
Transponder. A data storage device containing both a receiver and a transmitter. When it receives a properly coded query signal it responds by transmitting back information stored inside it. For highway toll use it sends back the identity of the vehicle and it’s owner. It also sends back the amount of money remaining in the user’s toll account as stored in the transponder. The querying signal then deducts the amount of the toll from this balance. When the balance gets low, the Highway Authority is authorized to charge the user’s credit card to replenish the toll account. If you go through the toll booth with no active transponder, a photo is automatically taken of your license plate and the report sent to a processing center for action. You can go on line and download a complete record of your toll usage.
This technology is the wave (no pun intended) of the future. I don’t think I like it — shades of Big Brother watching you. Our toll roads in Illinois have now enforced its use by making tolls paid by coins twice as much as those paid via a transponder. In the military, such a system has been in use since WWII to make the echo of friendly planes show up on the radar display with an identifying mark. Any plane not showing such ID then is considered suspicious, and a potential target for anti-aircraft fire. That could include you if your IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) system was not working properly, or you forgot to turn it on.
Systems with transponders are called “Active” systems.
The usage now building up at a great rate is of “Passive” systems. Here, an electronic chip is embedded in a store’s product, or now in your new passport. Since there is no battery in the device to supply the transmitter, the power to do so is derived from the querying radio signal. Consequently, passive systems are short range. These systems will speed up store check-out, replacing bar code scanning in many instances, and should also speed-up passport lines in entering another country. They will, of course, also improve border security.
There is, however, concern that people could build a device called a “skimmer” that would beam a brief, powerful Radio Frequency (RF) signal at RFID chips containing private information, and use extra-sensitive receivers to pick it up at a distance. The new passport information claims that they have technology (probably sophisticated coding) to prevent skimming.
Once the chips show up in your driver’s license, and maybe your credit cards, you will be open to having your identity and other information stolen my yet another mechanism. I do not have my IPass (Illinois Toll transponder) mounted up on the windshield as instructed; I keep it down inside the car in a metal box, and only hold it up when passing a toll booth. There is absolutely no reason that they cannot eventually set up speed traps that query your transponder for your identity, and then automatically take a photo of your license and mail out traffic tickets. Great for city income, and no cop’s salary to pay.
Welcome to the future!
The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, the Tonight Show, and Late Night with David Letterman all are threatened with immediate lockjaw if the writers go on strike.
The Writers Guild has 12,000 members, not all of them active. But most writers in America are bloggers — millions of us. So to cast this news coverage in its proper scale, let’s look at how the strike might affect a typical blog. Ours.
How will the strike impact The Horse You Rode In On?
It’s complicated. Unresolved disputes in the Writers Guild strike revolve around how revenues and profits are to be apportioned among the creators, the spokespeople, and the distributors or media owners.
Since each of us at The Horse occupies all of these roles, negotiations tend to be chaotic.
Still, we’re not that far apart. All three parties have agreed on the basic numbers. Revenues are zero. Profits are zero. The question is how to split these infinite sums among the three writers/owners/media czars.
Then there’s the issue of pension benefits. We’re all agreed that they’re desirable.
Revenues are non-existent because, as a matter of principle, we don’t accept advertising. Should an advertiser ever show up and ask, we might re-examine our principles, especially if the ads in question were to favor impeachment of Bush/Cheney or to oppose abstinence.
Other sources of revenue for media empires such as ours would include selling lists of members or subscribers, but we give our readers the ironclad privacy protection of having no idea who they are.
Then there are the potential box office revenues on films made from our posts, foreign rights, endorsements, and merchandise like coffee mugs and T-shirts. How we’ve escaped such windfalls is beyond us.
Our best guess is that a strike would have little effect on us because all three writers would cross the picket line. If they could find one.
