WTF

It can get worse.

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Get Small

Small camera

Measuring 1x1x1mm in size, this microscopic instrument, created by a research team at Berlin's Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration, is the smallest camera ever built -- about the size of a grain of salt. A tiny square substrate with a thin layer of sensors and a lens layered over one side, this camera sends its signal through an electrical wire because a fiber optic cable would be too thick.

"As always with small-aperture, small-sensor cameras, the image quality is suspect," according to Devin Coldewey at CrunchGear. The resolution is just 250x250 pixels, but the camera is so cheap to construct that the Fraunhofer team considers it disposable. The extremely small size could make the cameras a natural go-to for invasive medical procedures, but also appeal to security experts.

Not so small camera

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Good Thing

Gojira

Peering at the post-tsunami devastation in Japan on miniature YouTube windows or video-streaming displays from Japanese news outlets provokes not only great empathy and concern, but an unmistakable feeling of déjà vu. As a scholar focusing on the place of nuclear energy in Japanese culture, I’ve seen more than my share of nuclear-themed monster movies from the ’50s onward, and the scenes of burning refineries, flattened cities, mobilized rescue teams and fleeing civilians recall some surreal highlights of the Japanese disaster film genre.

This B-movie fare is widely mocked, often for good reason. But the early “Godzilla” films were earnest and hard-hitting. They were stridently anti-nuclear: the monster emerged after an atomic explosion. They were also anti-war in a country coming to grips with the consequences of World War II. As the great saurian beast emerges from Tokyo Bay to lay waste to the capital in 1954’s “Gojira” (“Godzilla”), the resulting explosions, dead bodies and flood of refugees evoked dire scenes from the final days of the war, images still seared in the memories of Japanese viewers. Far from the heavily edited and jingoistic, shoot’em-up, stomp’em-down flick that moviegoers saw in the United States, Japanese audiences reportedly watched “Gojira” in somber silence, broken by periodic weeping.

Yet it is the film’s anti-nuclear message that seems most discordant in present-day Japan, where nearly a third of the nation’s electricity is generated by nuclear power. The film was inspired by events that were very real and very controversial. In March 1954, a massive thermonuclear weapon tested by the United States near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, codenamed “Bravo,” detonated with about 2.5 times greater force than anticipated. The unexpectedly vast fallout from the bomb enveloped a distant Japanese tuna trawler named the Lucky Dragon No. 5 in a blizzard of radioactive ash. Crewmembers returned to their home port of Yaizu bearing blackened and blistered skin, acute radiation sickness and a cargo of irradiated tuna. Newspapers reported on the radioactive traces left by the men’s bodies as they wandered the city, as well as “atomic tuna” found in fish markets in Osaka and later at Japan’s famed Tsukiji Market in Tokyo. The exalted Emperor Hirohito himself was said to have eliminated seafood from his diet.

more here:

Happiest Man in America

Discovered: The Happiest Man in America

For the last three years, Gallup has called 1,000 randomly selected American adults each day and asked them about their emotional status, work satisfaction, eating habits, illnesses, stress levels and other indicators of their quality of life.

It’s part of an effort to measure the components of “the good life.” The responses are plugged into a formula, called the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, and then sorted by geographic area and other demographic criteria. The accompanying maps show where well-being is highest and lowest around the country.

The New York Times asked Gallup to come up with a statistical composite for the happiest person in America, based on the characteristics that most closely correlated with happiness in 2010. Men, for example, tend to be happier than women, older people are happier than middle-aged people, and so on.

Gallup’s answer: he’s a tall, Asian-American, observant Jew who is at least 65 and married, has children, lives in Hawaii, runs his own business and has a household income of more than $120,000 a year. A few phone calls later and ...

Meet Alvin Wong. He is a 5-foot-10, 69-year-old, Chinese-American, Kosher-observing Jew, who’s married with children and lives in Honolulu. He runs his own health care management business and earns more than $120,000 a year.

Reached by phone at his home on Friday (and referred to The Times by a local synagogue), Mr. Wong said that he was indeed a very happy person. He said that perhaps he manages to be the happiest man in America because “my life philosophy is, if you can’t laugh at yourself, life is going to be pretty terrible for you.”

He continued: “This is a practical joke, right?”

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Pi Day, but maybe not for long

Pi Is Very Slowly and Nerdily Going Out of Style

Some sad news for pi enthusiasts on Pi Day. Apparently, something called "tau" is becoming the hot new circle-based infinite mathematical constant:

Tau, technically, is just pi multiplied by 2, so about 6.28. But Michael Hartl, a physicist by training who's now an educational entrepreneur, considers this number a more elegant and appropriate circle constant than pi and thinks pi should be replaced by tau across the field of mathematics (with the proper factors of 2, of course)....

Hartl gets e-mails almost every day from people who are excited about his ideas and say they're "converting to tauism." But, of course, there are a lot of pi loyalists out there, too.

Why are people so passionate about whether we use tau or pi? Because the difference between them is so vast, and so consequential, that the outcome of this great mathematical battle could change everything:

In mathematics, diameter is rarely used, meaning the number 2 is often used in formulas involving pi. When you think of dividing a circle, you probably know that a quarter-turn is 90 degrees and a half-turn is 180 degrees. But trigonometry uses a unit called "radians," where a quarter-turn of a circle is pi/2 and a half-turn of a circle is pi, and so on -- which is confusing for new learners. Tau makes this more intuitive, says Hartl: A quarter turn of a circle is tau/4, and a half turn is tau/2.

Okay, it wouldn't change anything.

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Special Beat Service

One tempestuous weekend in March 1979 was not only the date of the Three Mile Island nuclear incident, but also, in Birmingham, England, the very first show by a nascent band known as The Beat. Introduced as "the hottest thing since the Pennsylvania meltdown", the band had a sense that the next few years could well be explosive. The Beat hailed from working class, industrial Birmingham, England. When The Beat rushed on to the music scene in 1979, it was a time of social, political and musical upheaval. Into this storm came The Beat, trying to calm the waters with their simple message of love and unity set to a great dance beat.

Sexist Programming

Later, Aggregator

Aggregation explained:










Still waiting for the millions to pour in...  (thanks, Fred).

Guitar Heros

Legendary Craftsmen from Italy to New York.  February 9 - July 4, 2011.  Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

New York City and nearby New Jersey, Long Island, and Westchester County have been home to a vibrant Italian American population since the late nineteenth century. Within this community, a remarkable tradition of lutherie (stringed-instrument making) has flourished. Italian American craftsmen have produced an enormous variety of musical instruments, from traditional European-style violins, mandolins, and guitars to newer American instruments such as archtop guitars and mandolins and even electric guitars. Since the 1930s, makers from this tradition in the New York region have become especially well known for their extraordinary archtop guitars. This exhibition examines the work of three remarkable craftsmen from this heritage—John D'Angelico, James D'Aquisto, and John Monteleone—their place in the extended context of Italian and Italian American instrument making, and the inspiration of the sights and sounds of New York City.

Photos, interviews, performances here:

Alaska Edition

This year, the conservative intelligentsia doesn’t just tend to dislike Palin — many fear that her rise would represent the triumph of an intellectually empty brand of populism and the death of ideas as an engine of the right.

Sarah Palin has played the sexism card, accusing critics of chauvinism against a strong woman.

She has played the class card, dismissing the Bush family as “blue bloods” and complaining that she is the target of snobbery by people who dislike her simply because she is “not so hoity-toity.”

Most famously, she has played the victim card — never more vividly than when she invoked the loaded phrase “blood libel” against liberals and media commentators in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.

Palin’s flamboyant rhetoric always has thrilled supporters, but lately it is coming at a new cost: a backlash, not from liberals but from some of the country’s most influential conservative commentators and intellectuals.

Palin’s politics of grievance and group identity, according to these critics, is a betrayal of conservative principles. For decades, it was a standard line of the right that liberals cynically promoted victimhood to achieve their goals and that they practiced the politics of identity — race, sex and class—over ideas.

Among those taking aim at Palin in recent interviews with POLITICO are George F. Will, the elder statesman of conservative columnists; Peter Wehner, a top strategist in George W. Bush’s White House, and Heather Mac Donald, a leading voice with the right-leaning Manhattan Institute.

Matt Labash, a longtime writer for the Weekly Standard, said that because of Palin’s frequent appeals to victimhood and group grievance, “She’s becoming Al Sharpton, Alaska edition.”

more here:

The Compulsion to Control

"Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for insects as well as for the stars. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." -- Albert Einstein, interview, The Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929

Setting Limits is One Thing, But. . .

Life without control in some form would create havoc. Rigid control procedures are essential in such areas as science, medicine, and manufacturing, which require high degrees of efficiency and safety. Most societal and institutional forms of control -- laws, regulations, procedures, and the like -- are also important for our overall well-being and safety. Similarly, in interpersonal settings such as the workplace, the home, and the classroom, appropriate levels of control are necessary to assure productivity, education, and safety.

Most of us, however, feel the pressure to control all aspects of our lives. We take for granted that that's what we should be doing -- what we must be doing to survive. This goes beyond setting limits and standards, and often we don't even realize how far beyond we take it. How often do we stop to question how our compulsion to control may be harming us, whether at home with our children and family, at work, in our friendships, or in our leisure activities?

Young or old, male or female, rich or poor, teacher or preacher -- we all have the compulsion to control. Control is a deeply ingrained part of our human condition. Indeed, it underlies the entire fabric of society. Our workplaces are hotbeds for control as the "survival of the fittest" is played out through intimidation, deception, and the drive to get ahead at all costs. On the world stage, powerful nations control by imposing their values and forms of government on weaker nations. And, of course, war is all about control.

Social institutions of all kinds try to control. Religion is controlling when it tells us what and how we should believe, lest dire consequences come our way. The political arena is rife with control strategies. Misinformation about candidates is broadly disseminated to discredit them and change voters' minds. High-stakes bartering is employed to force through partisan legislation. On the home front, we control our partners and family by telling them what they should do and criticizing their choices. We control our friends by trying to change them. We even control in love by lavishing gifts and doling out kind words to court favor, crying to churn a lover's heart, pushing "hot buttons" to punish, and calculating when and how to bring sexual pleasure to our mate.

The means of control are diverse. When we press our views or wheedle or pout to get favored treatment, we are controlling. When we judge, intimidate, and raise our voices, we are controlling. When we lay a guilt trip on others, we are controlling. We control physically as well: we shove to get a better place in line, spank to discipline, flash our eyes and clench our fists to unnerve.

But controlling conduct is not always assertive or overt. It is often subtle or seemingly passive. We do it when we repeat a suggestion or express our views more than once, when we prod, cajole, or advise, and when we withdraw from loved ones or play the victim or martyr. In fact, most actions we take -- or don't take -- are controlling in some way. It's just a matter of how, when, and how much.

When we are driven primarily by strong emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger, and insecurity, we try to control excessively. This is when we pressure and manipulate people and events to get what we want or need (or what we think we want or need) or to try to change people in ways that we believe will be better for them -- or for us.

At bottom, excessive control represents our attempt to change another's very nature and spirit. But because another's true spirit cannot be changed -- except by that person alone -- our efforts to do so are not only fruitless, they are also harmful. It is not about the other person as much as it is about us and our unwillingness to accept life as it is.

more here:

Owsley Stanley 1935 -2011

LOS ANGELES – Owsley “Bear” Stanley, a 1960s counterculture figure who flooded the flower power scene with LSD and was an early benefactor of the Grateful Dead, died in a car crash in his adopted home country of Australia on Sunday, his family said. He was believed to be 76.

The renegade grandson of a former governor of Kentucky, Stanley helped lay the foundation for the psychedelic era by producing more than a million doses of LSD at his labs in San Francisco’s Bay Area.

full story here: 

NY Times Obituary:

Rare interview, July 12, 2007:

Nuclear Energy 101

Source:  BBC

For the vast majority of people, nuclear power is a black box technology. Radioactive stuff goes in. Electricity (and nuclear waste) comes out. Somewhere in there, we're aware that explosions and meltdowns can happen. Ninety-nine percent of the time, that set of information is enough to get by on. But, then, an emergency like this happens and, suddenly, keeping up-to-date on the news feels like you've walked in on the middle of a movie. Nobody pauses to catch you up on all the stuff you missed.

As I write this, it's still not clear how bad, or how big, the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant will be. I don't know enough to speculate on that. I'm not sure anyone does. But I can give you a clearer picture of what's inside the black box. That way, whatever happens at Fukushima, you'll understand why it's happening, and what it means.

At a basic level, nuclear energy isn't all that different from fossil fuel energy. The process of generating electricity at a nuclear power plant is really all about making heat, just as it is at a coal-fired plant. Heat turns water to steam, steam moves turbines in the electric generator. The only difference is where the heat comes from--to get it, you can light coal on fire, or you can create a controlled nuclear fission reaction.

A fission reaction is a lot like a table filled with Jenga games, each stack of blocks standing close to another stack. Pull out the right block, and one Jenga stack will fall. As it does, it collapses into the surrounding stacks. As those stacks tumble, they crash into others. Nuclear fission works the same way--one unstable atom breaks apart, throwing off pieces of itself, which crash into nearby atoms and cause those to break apart, too.

Every time one of those atoms breaks apart, it releases a little heat. Multiply by millions of atoms, and you have enough heat to turn water into steam*.

In a Boiling Water Reactor, like the ones at Fukushima, water is pumped through the core—the central point where the actual fission reactions happen. Along the way, fission-produced heat boils the water, and the steam rises up and is captured to do the work of turning turbines.

In the Core

The core is the part that really matters today.

In the core of a nuclear reactor, you'll find fuel rods—tubes filled with elements whose atoms are unstable and prone to breaking apart and starting the Jenga-style chain reaction.

Usually, the elements used are Uranium-238 or Uranium-235. They're refined and processed into little black pellets, about the size of your thumbnail, which are poured by the thousands, into long metal tubes. Bunches of tubes--each taller than a basketball player--are grouped together into square frames. These tall, skinny columns are the fuel assemblies.

The fission reactions that happen are all about proximity. In a fuel rod, lots of uranium atoms can crash into each other as they break apart. Pack the fuel rod into an assembly, and lots more atoms can affect one another—which means the reactions can release more energy. Put several fuel assemblies into the core of a nuclear reactor, and the amount of energy released gets even higher.

Proximity is also what makes the difference between a nuclear bomb, and the controlled fission reaction in a power plant. In the bomb, the reactions happen—and the energy is released—very quickly. In the power plant, that process is slowed down by control rods. These work like putting a piece of cardboard between two Jenga towers. The first tower falls, but it hits a barrier instead of the next tower. Of all the atoms that could be split, only a few are allowed to actually do it. And, instead of an explosion, you end up with a manageable amount of heat energy, which can be used to boil water.

full article: 

[ed. note.  Wikipedia seems to have an amazingly detailed up-to-the-minute description of what's happening at Fukushima.  Reactor 3 seems to be the most dangerous, with a MOX mixture of uranium and plutonium from recycled nuclear weapons: http://goo.gl/DKZ9e ]

Moby

\

Fascinating art project by Matt Kish. From the site: One Drawing For Every Page of Moby-Dick.
Complete series here:

To Boldly Go...

Raising the Bar

Tough times undermine generosity at NY biker bar 

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. – After spending the past 1,500 or so Sundays making sure he had enough food to give a lot of people a free, hot meal, Don Birch took a Sunday off — a casualty of the same hard times he tried to make easier for others.

Last weekend, the longtime owner of the Sawmill Tavern served up what he said was the last of the free buffets he has offered every Sunday afternoon since 1980, two years after opening his biker bar in the Little Italy neighborhood in this economically depressed city on New York's Mohawk River.

Anyone who needed a meal — the homeless, the unemployed, the elderly, whole families struggling to make ends meet — could show up at the Sawmill, no questions asked.

"There are so many people out of work. They really have a tough way to go," said Birch, 73, perched atop a bar stool during a recent weekday afternoon.

Birch says he can no longer afford to pay for the free meals out of his own pocket, even with food donations from local businesses and a farmer who provided potatoes. He lost his job as an assistant plant manager at a locomotive factory when it shuttered two years ago amid a cratering economy and rising unemployment.

When the bills piled up to the point where Birch had to start dipping into his Social Security checks to cover the costs of each Sunday buffet, he knew it was time to pack it in.

"It cost me $350 a week, easy," said Birch, a strapping 6-footer with huge hands who's dressed this day in a black cable-knit shirt, blue jeans and boots.

As Schenectady's economy worsened, the number of people who showed up each Sunday rose to about 200. For the final meal, Birch served prime rib to about 170 people. A typical spread featured chicken, ribs, meatloaf or spaghetti and meatballs, vegetables and mashed potatoes. Birch's regulars pointed out that those showing up for the free eats didn't have money to spend on drinks, so Kool-Aid was given away.

more here:

Rock Men

 

photo: markk

Pop Art

Ted Wesselmann:

Mondo Window

Have you often looked out the window of a plane and wished you could find out about what you're seeing down below? Thanks to a new service that went into alpha testing today, you could soon do just that.



Known as MondoWindow, the service aims to let anyone onboard a Wi-Fi-enabled plane get real-time information about the places they're flying over. And as the service gets more sophisticated, it will likely add all kinds of additional features like audio programming, videos, and games, all related specifically to the places you can see five miles below you.

MondoWindow comes from Greg Dicum, the author of a hit series of books called "Window Seat," which has static information on a lot of the locations on popular plane routes. But with the new service, Dicum and his co-founder, Tyler Sterkle, are hoping to mash this general concept up with the power of the Internet and geo-tagged content.

And with a third of U.S. flights now offering passengers Wi-Fi--and growing quickly--MondoWindow would seem to have a very large potential audience.




For now, all the content that's available through the site is tied to specific geo-tagged locations. But in an interview with CNET, Dicum explained that soon, the service will also offer "regional" content, more in-depth information about, say, the high plains, or the state of Texas, or anything along those lines.

In some ways, the general regional content promises to be more interesting than the geo-tagged information because it will have more context and more depth, while the location-based content will likely tend to have a heavier emphasis on people's personal photos and the like. The two combined, however, would seem to offer a wealth of information about what's on the ground below.
...
In its early stages, MondoWindow will be available to anyone in the continental United States. Not long after, Dicum said, it should be rolled out on flights to and from European, and then the company will try to tackle the rest of the flying world.

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