The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear
July 29, 2008
It is well known that panes of stained glass in old European churches are thicker at the bottom because glass is a slow-moving liquid that flows downward over centuries.
Well known, but wrong. Medieval stained glass makers were simply unable to make perfectly flat panes, and the windows were just as unevenly thick when new.
The tale contains a grain of truth about glass resembling a liquid, however. The arrangement of atoms and molecules in glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid. But how can a liquid be as strikingly hard as glass?
“They’re the thickest and gooiest of liquids and the most disordered and structureless of rigid solids,” said Peter Harrowell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia, speaking of glasses, which can be formed from different raw materials. “They sit right at this really profound sort of puzzle.”
Philip W. Anderson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Princeton, wrote in 1995: “The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and the glass transition.”
He added, “This could be the next breakthrough in the coming decade.”
The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear – NYTimes.com.
Wikipedia, Meet Knol
July 28, 2008
Seven months after Google began testing a service called Knol, a Wikipedia competitor, the company on Wednesday finally introduced it.
The search expert Danny Sullivan aptly describes Knol as “Like Wikipedia, With Moderation.” Articles on various topics are penned by individuals, and in many cases, experts — not collectively by the anonymous masses. Knol authors can choose to benefit from the “wisdom of the crowds” by letting others edit or supplement their articles. But those changes make it into Knol entries only with the author’s permission.
Knol, which, by the way, is short for knowledge, is making some people uneasy because it further transforms Google from a search engine that helps people find content into a site that helps people create and publish content.
Wikipedia, Meet Knol – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog
With No Frills or Tuition, a College Draws Notice
July 22, 2008
BEREA, Ky. — Berea College, founded 150 years ago to educate freed slaves and “poor white mountaineers,” accepts only applicants from low-income families, and it charges no tuition.
“You can literally come to Berea with nothing but what you can carry, and graduate debt free,” said Joseph P. Bagnoli Jr., the associate provost for enrollment management. “We call it the best education money can’t buy.”
Actually, what buys that education is Berea’s $1.1 billion endowment, which puts the college among the nation’s wealthiest. But unlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls. Instead, it has a no-frills budget, with food from the college farm, handmade furniture from the college crafts workshops, and 10-hour-a-week campus jobs for every student.
Berea’s approach provides an unusual perspective on the growing debate over whether the wealthiest universities are doing enough for the public good to warrant their tax exemption, or simply hoarding money to serve an elite few. As many elite universities scramble to recruit more low-income students, Berea’s no-tuition model has attracted increasing attention.
With No Frills or Tuition, a College Draws Notice – NYTimes.com.
Smaller PCs Cause Worry for Industry
July 20, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO — The personal computer industry is poised to sell tens of millions of small, energy-efficient Internet-centric devices. Curiously, some of the biggest companies in the business consider this bad news.
In a tale of sales success breeding resentment, computer companies are wary of the new breed of computers because their low price could threaten PC makers’ already thin profit margins.
The new computers, often called netbooks, have scant onboard memory. They use energy-sipping computer chips. They are intended largely for surfing Web sites and checking e-mail. The price is small too, with some selling for as little as $300.
Smaller PCs Cause Worry for Industry – NYTimes.com.
I don’t understand how this is at all bad for Intel (or Microsoft). Intel’s highly anticipated Atom processor, which just started shipping recently, is powering most of these netbooks. Either that, or it’s Celeron chip (a win-win either way). It isn’t surprising that Intel’s stock (INTC) has performed quite well recently. It was one of the few tech stocks not in the red during Friday’s tech selloff and up +7% for the week (hint, hint). Furthermore, most use these netbooks as a second laptop. If anything, it is adding to Intel’s revenue. In the same vain, it allows Microsoft to sell more Windows licenses.
Related: The Mini-Laptop Changing the Game (the more likely scenario).
For eight years, Arnold Kim has been trading gossip, rumor and facts about Apple, the notoriously secretive computer company, on his Web site, MacRumors.com.
Arnold Kim, founder and senior editor of MacRumors.com.
It had been a hobby — albeit a time-consuming one — while Dr. Kim earned his medical degree. He kept at it as he completed his medical training and began diagnosing patients’ kidney problems. Dr. Kim’s Web site now attracts more than 4.4 million people and 40 million page views a month, according to Quantcast, making it one of the most popular technology Web sites.
It is enough to make Dr. Kim hang up his stethoscope. This month he stopped practicing medicine and started blogging full time.
My Son, the Blogger – An M.D. Trades Medicine for Apple Rumors – NYTimes.com.
Hey, it’s arn from MacRumors! I had no idea he was an MD. I just assumed it was his full time job. How the heck did he manage med school and the blog at the same time?! It seems like he’s constantly updating the front page (and he’s always in the forums).
Pasties, Pasties Everywhere
July 16, 2008
Last week, I learned two important things. They both happened as the result of a post I wrote about various errors, typographical and otherwise. I noted that the excellent Economist magazine dropped an “r” from the word “pastries,” inadvertently rendering it “pasties.”
Well, The Economist was not wrong but I sure was. Many readers informed me that a pasty (pl.: pasties) is a small Cornish pie often filled with meat and vegetables.
The other thing I learned is perhaps even more valuable. In the comments section of the pasties post, a reader named Petréa Mitchell informed me that “You’ve just encountered Muphry’s Law (no, not Murphy’s).” According to this site, Muphry’s law states that “if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.”
Pasties, Pasties Everywhere – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog
The Economist has a great sense of humor (and fantastic writers too).
Can’t Find a Parking Spot? Check Smartphone
July 12, 2008
Can’t Find a Parking Spot? Check Smartphone – NYTimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO — The secret to finding the perfect parking spot in congested cities is usually just a matter of luck. But drivers here will get some help from an innocuous tab of plastic that will soon be glued to the streets.
This fall, San Francisco will test 6,000 of its 24,000 metered parking spaces in the nation’s most ambitious trial of a wireless sensor network that will announce which of the spaces are free at any moment.
Drivers will be alerted to empty parking places either by displays on street signs, or by looking at maps on screens of their smartphones. They may even be able to pay for parking by cellphone, and add to the parking meter from their phones without returning to the car.
Senate Approves Bill to Broaden Wiretap Powers
July 10, 2008
Senate Approves Bill to Broaden Wiretap Powers – NYTimes.com
WASHINGTON — The Senate gave final approval on Wednesday to a major expansion of the government’s surveillance powers, handing President Bush one more victory in a series of hard-fought clashes with Democrats over national security issues.
The measure, approved by a vote of 69 to 28, is the biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years. It includes a divisive element that Mr. Bush had deemed essential: legal immunity for the phone companies that cooperated in the National Security Agency wiretapping program he approved after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The issue put Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, in a particularly precarious spot. He had long opposed giving legal immunity to the phone companies that took part in the N.S.A.’s wiretapping program, even threatening a filibuster during his run for the nomination. But on Wednesday, he ended up voting for what he called “an improved but imperfect bill” after backing a failed attempt earlier in the day to strip the immunity provision from the bill through an amendment.
Mr. Obama’s decision last month to reverse course angered some ardent supporters, who organized an Internet drive to influence his vote. And his position came to symbolize the continuing difficulties that Democrats have faced in striking a position on national security issues even against a weakened president. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, who had battled Mr. Obama for the nomination, voted against the bill.
Obama, what gives?! So much for the 4th amendment…
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
- Benjamin Franklin
S.& P. 500 Enters Bear Market as Stocks Plunge
July 9, 2008
S.& P. 500 Enters Bear Market as Stocks Plunge – NYTimes.com
Half an hour was all it took for a dreary day on Wall Street to turn dire.
Widespread fear about the health of the mortgage industry took hold Wednesday afternoon, and investors could not shake the jitters. The Dow Jones industrial average, already swimming deep in negative territory, dived 75 points in the final 30 minutes of trading and finished down 2.1 percent at its lowest close of the year. The sell-off marked the third consecutive day that trouble at big mortgage lenders has resulted in steep volatility in the stock markets. Slumping shares of financial firms dragged the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, the broadest measure of the equity markets, into its first official bear market since 2002.
Not looking good.
Matt Harding’s Peripatetic Dance Videos Earn Him Internet Fame – NYTimes.com
There are no weekend box office charts for online videos. But if there were, near or at the very top of the list right now might well be a four-and-a-half-minute video called “Dancing,” which more than four million people have viewed on YouTube, and perhaps another million on other sites, in the just over two weeks since it appeared. It’s the online equivalent of a platinum hit, seeping from one computer to the next like a virus.
The title is not misleading. “Dancing” shows a guy dancing: a big, doughy-looking fellow in shorts and hiking boots performing an arm-swinging, knee-pumping step that could charitably be called goofy. It’s the kind of semi-ironic dance that boys do by themselves at junior high mixers when they’re too embarrassed to partner with actual girls.
The dancer is Matt Harding, the 31-year-old creator of the video, and with some New Agey-sounding music playing in the background, he turns up, grinning and bouncing, in 69 different locations, including India, Kuwait, Bhutan, Tonga, Timbuktu and the Nellis Airspace in Nevada, where he performs the dance in zero gravity.
If you haven’t already seen it, watch it here. Part two here (funny).
The Urge to End It – Understanding Suicide
July 7, 2008
The Urge to End It – Understanding Suicide – NYTimes.com
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus wrote, “and that is suicide.” How to explain why, among the only species capable of pondering its own demise, whose desperate attempts to forestall mortality have spawned both armies and branches of medicine in a perpetual search for the Fountain of Youth, there are those who, by their own hand, would choose death over life? Our contradictory reactions to the act speak to the conflicted hold it has on our imaginations: revulsion mixed with fascination, scorn leavened with pity. It is a cardinal sin — but change the packaging a little, and suicide assumes the guise of heroism or high passion, the stuff of literature and art.
Beyond the philosophical paradox are the bewilderingly complex dynamics of the act itself. While a universal phenomenon, the incidence of suicide varies so immensely across different population groups — among nations and cultures, ages and gender, race and religion — that any overarching theory about its root cause is rendered useless. Even identifying those subgroups that are particularly suicide-prone is of very limited help in addressing the issue. In the United States, for example, both elderly men living in Western states and white male adolescents from divorced families are at elevated risk, but since the overwhelming majority in both these groups never attempt suicide, how can we identify the truly at risk among them?
Very fascinating stuff.
Instant Message, Instant Girlfriend
July 2, 2008
Modern Love – Instant Message, Instant Girlfriend – Series – NYTimes.com
FOR several years I had a problem unusual among Internet geeks: I had too much success with women. I used the Internet as a means of communication with women I had already met offline in order to overcome my social awkwardness and forge romantic relationships.
Sounds healthy? It wasn’t.
It started in my sophomore year in high school. I went to one of those big Eastern public schools that pumps out students in a way that would make 19th-century industrialists throw their top hats into the air and shout “Huzzah!” Even we students thought of ourselves as a faceless mob of subproletarians waiting for the next episode of “American Idol” to take away the pain of our meaningless existence.
I was at the bottom of the barrel: a plump, silent, painfully awkward dweeb who clung to his Latin textbook as if it held the secrets to existence. The only good thing that happened to me that year was meeting Chelsea.
AKA: How to get a girlfriend/boyfriend by using instant messaging.
What a player! A well written and interesting article from the NYT. I wonder how much truth there actually is in this piece. Good read nonetheless.
Frequent Fliers Use Markets to Trade Miles
June 29, 2008
Practical Traveler – Frequent Fliers – Practical Traveler – Frequent Fliers Use Markets to Trade Miles – NYTimes.com
ANY traveler who has tried to redeem frequent flier miles for an award seat, only to be thwarted by blackout dates or limited availability, knows that attractive alternatives are hard to come by. You could spend miles for magazine subscriptions, donate them to charity or, in a few cases, purchase merchandise in an exchange that often doesn’t quite add up (17,000 miles for a coffee maker?).
Now imagine a virtual stock market for the eBay generation where the miles and points are currency, and the free market — rather than the airlines — determines the exchange rates. That’s the general idea behind some new online services that have quietly begun testing ways for travelers to leverage unused miles. Such mileage matchmaking services have popped up as airlines, including American, Continental, Delta and United, have been announcing significant capacity cutbacks — reductions that are expected to make frequent flier awards even harder to use when the cuts begin to take effect this fall.
One of the sites, Points.com, has introduced a service called Global Points Exchange that allows travelers to barter miles with one another and set their own exchange ratios (I’ll give you 8,000 American miles for 10,000 of your Delta miles).
Cool idea.
Supreme Court Rules That Individuals Have Gun Rights
June 26, 2008
Supreme Court Rules That Individuals Have Gun Rights – NYTimes.com
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.
The court’s 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision went further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.
The court had not conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its ratification in 1791. The amendment reads: ‘‘A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
The basic issue for the justices was whether the amendment protects an individual’s right to own guns no matter what, or whether that right is somehow tied to service in a state militia.
What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer
June 23, 2008
What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer – NYTimes.com
Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?
In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.
It is not clear that the approach will succeed. The Florida state prosecutor in the case, which is scheduled for trial July 1, said the search data may not be relevant because the volume of Internet searches is not necessarily an indication of, or proxy for, a community’s values.
I agree with the prosecutor, but I’m curious to see how this will actually play out.
Related: BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | What is obscene these days?
