Physics Wobbled by Faster-Than-Light-Speed Experiments

by Uri Friedman

Scientists at CERN, the famous Geneva-based physics lab, have just called into question one of the most hallowed equations in physics: E = MC2. Scientists, the AP explains, have clocked subatomic particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. The BBC summarizes the magnitude of the finding, if true: "The speed of light is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and the entirety of modern physics--as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity--depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it."

Understandably, reports are using adjectives like "baffled" and "astounded" to describe the scientists. "This would be such a sensational discovery if it were true that one has to treat it extremely carefully," a  theoretical physicist at CERN named John Ellis tells the AP. CERN found that a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light, a difference that is statistically significant even with the margin of error. The lab's researchers have checked and rechecked their work and are still asking scientists in the U.S. and Japan to confirm the results.

What hangs in the balance? Oh, just the laws of nature and our understanding of the universe.

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Bastille Day, a photo from Bretagne, West | TrekEarth
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Dr. Don

The life of a small town druggist.

by Peter Hessler

In the southwestern corner of Colorado, where the Uncompahgre Plateau descends through spruce forest and scrubland toward the Utah border, there is a region of more than four thousand square miles which has no hospitals, no department stores, and only one pharmacy. The pharmacist is Don Colcord, who lives in the town of Nucla. More than a century ago, Nucla was founded by idealists who hoped their community would become the “center of Socialistic government for the world.” But these days it feels like the edge of the earth. Highway 97 dead-ends at the top of Main Street; the population is around seven hundred and falling. The nearest traffic light is an hour and a half away. When old ranching couples drive their pickups into Nucla, the wives leave the passenger’s side empty and sit in the middle of the front seat, close enough to touch their husbands. It’s as if something about the landscape—those endless hills, that vacant sky—makes a person appreciate the intimacy of a Ford F-150 cab.

Don Colcord has owned Nucla’s Apothecary Shoppe for more than thirty years. In the past, such stores played a key role in American rural health care, and this region had three more pharmacies, but all of them have closed. Some people drive eighty miles just to visit the Apothecary Shoppe. It consists of a few rows of grocery shelves, a gift-card rack, a Pepsi fountain, and a diabetes section, which is decorated with the mounted heads of two mule deer and an antelope. Next to the game heads is the pharmacist’s counter. Customers don’t line up at a discreet distance, the way city folk do; in Nucla they crowd the counter and talk loudly about health problems.

“What have you heard about sticking your head in a beehive?” This on a Tuesday afternoon, from a heavyset man suffering from arthritis and an acute desire to find low-cost treatment.

“It’s been used, progressive bee-sting therapy,” Don says. “When you get stung, your body produces cortisol. It reduces swelling, but it goes away. And you don’t know when you’re going to have that one reaction and go into anaphylactic shock and maybe drop dead. It’s highly risky. You don’t know where that bee has been. You don’t know what proteins it’s been getting.”

“You’re a helpful guy. Thank you.”

“I would recommend hyaluronic acid. It’s kind of expensive, about twenty-five dollars a month. But it works for some people. They make it out of rooster combs.”

Somebody else asks about decongestants; a young woman inquires about the risk of birth defects while using a collagen stimulator. A preacher from the Abundant Life Church asks about drugs for a paralyzed vocal cord. (“When I do a sermon, it needs to last for thirty minutes.”) Others stop by just to chat. Don, in addition to being the only pharmacist, is probably the most talkative and friendly person within four thousand square miles. The first time I visited his counter, he asked about my family, and I mentioned my newborn twin daughters. He filled a jar with thick brown ointment that he had recently compounded. “It’s tincture of benzoin,” he said. “Rodeo cowboys use it while riding a bull or a bronc. They put it on their hands; it makes the hands tacky. It’s a respiratory stimulant, mostly used in wound care. You won’t find anything better for diaper rash.”

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Myriam Holme at Iris Kadel
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Microsoft Introduces "Rightwingnuts" Font

by Jeanette DeMain

In a bold move, Microsoft today unveiled a font that will now be available on all of its new computers, as well as being made available free of charge for uploading to existing PCs.

A Microsoft spokesman explained that, "In an effort help our more conservative Windows users save time when writing to activist judges, overpaid government workers, leftist media outlets, misguided liberal relatives, and secretly Muslim and/or Communist elected officials,  the new Rightwingnuts font will provide an unmistakable way to get their point across, as well as offering extra assistance with spelling, grammar, and punctuation."

"Now, in addition to the old tried-and-true Times New Roman, Tahoma, and Arial, and the wild-and-wacky Chiller, Stencil, and Magneto fonts, Rightwingnuts gives true patriots a way to quickly and forcefully make an impact on the, and I'm using their words now, latte-drinking, Prius-driving, baby-killing, gay-sexing, Face-Spacing, class-warfare-waging denizens of nanny-state America."

"Rightwingnuts font is, basically, just really big and really dark. All the time. No more having to use the Caps Lock key, a separate command for bolding, or changing the font size. This is the font equivalent of shouting, 'Get off my lawn!' to that kid with the tattoos and pierced ears.  We think it will be a real hit with those on Medicare who want to keep the government out of our health care system, those who think that people like Lloyd Blankfein already pay too much in taxes, and those who think George Soros sacrifices goats to Beelzebub."

Other features of Rightwingnuts include:

• Three exclamation points for every one the user types.
• Typing the letters "D-e-m" automatically results in "Democrap." Likewise, typing the letters "l-i-b" automatically results in "libtard," thus saving thousands of keystrokes per week.
• The names of any Democratic elected officials will be underlined in red.  When you run a spell check, the only offered alternative will be "Fascist."
• If you type in a temperature, it is automatically lowered to prove that global warming doesn't exist. (Warning: Using Rightwingnuts for recipes may result in undercooked food and subsequent death.)
• Whenever the letter "O" appears in "Obama," it will have awesome little devil horns and a tail on it.
• In Rightwingnuts, the words "Socialist," "Communist," and "Nazi" all mean exactly the same thing.
• Names like "Reagan," "Bush," "Limbaugh," and "Hannity" automatically turn Republican red and, when you hold your cursor over them, angels sing.
• Frownie face always appears after the words "tax," "spend," "regulation," "union," and "Michael Moore."
• If you ever deviate from the talking points, a  cheery little paper clip will appear in the corner and ask if you really mean that. If you persist, the paper clip will actually hop out of the computer and stab you in the eye. (Clippy very angry!)

When asked if Apple had plans in the works for a similar font for Mac users, a spokesman replied that Apple wasn't aware of any rightwingnuts using its products.  "With our more intuitive user platform, creative music and video applications, resistance to viruses, and top-notch customer support, rightwingers typically regard our product as vaguely sinister, foreign or gay. And we're OK with that."

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Jose Padilla

by Glenn Greenwald

The story of Jose Padilla, continuing through the events of yesterday, expresses so much of the true nature of the War on Terror and especially America's justice system. In 2002, the American citizen was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, publicly labeled by John Ashcroft as The Dirty Bomber, and then imprisoned for the next three years on U.S. soil as an "enemy combatant" without charges of any kind, and denied all contact with the outside world, including even a lawyer. During his lawless incarceration, he was kept not just in extreme solitary confinement but extreme sensory deprivation as well, and was abused and tortured to the point of severe and probably permanent mental incapacity (Bush lawyers told a court that they were unable to produce videos of Padilla's interrogations because those videos were mysteriously and tragically "lost").

Needless to say, none of the government officials responsible for this abuse of a U.S. citizen on American soil has been held accountable in any way. That's because President Obama decreed that Bush officials shall not be criminally investigated for War on Terror crimes, while his Justice Department vigorously defended John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld and other responsible functionaries in civil suits brought by Padilla seeking damages for what was done to him.

As usual, the Obama DOJ cited national security imperatives and sweeping theories of presidential power to demand that Executive Branch officials be fully shielded from judicial scrutiny (i.e., shielded from the rule of law) for their illegal acts (the Obama DOJ: "Here, where Padilla's damage claims directly relate, inter alia, to the President’s war powers, including whether and when a person captured in this country during an armed conflict can be held in military detention under the laws of war, it would be particularly inappropriate for this Court to unnecessarily reach the merits of the constitutional claims" (emphasis added)). With one rare exception, federal courts, as usual, meekly complied. Thus, a full-scale shield of immunity has been constructed around the high-level government officials who put Padilla in a hermetically sealed cage with no charges and then abused and tortured him for years.

The treatment Padilla has received in the justice system is, needless to say, the polar opposite of that enjoyed by these political elites. Literally days before it was required to justify to the U.S. Supreme Court how it could imprison an American citizen for years without charges or access to a lawyer, the Bush administration suddenly indicted Padilla -- on charges unrelated to, and far less serious than, the accusation that he was A Dirty Bomber -- and then successfully convinced the Supreme Court to refuse to decide the legality of Padilla's imprisonment on the grounds of "mootness" (he's no longer being held without charges so there's nothing to decide).

At Padilla's trial, the judge excluded all evidence of the abuse to which he was subjected and even admitted statements he made while in custody before he was Mirandized. Unsurprisingly, Padilla was convicted on charges of "supporting Islamic terrorism overseas" -- but not any actual Terrorist plots ("The government’s chief evidence was an application form that government prosecutors said Mr. Padilla, 36, filled out to attend an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 2000") -- and then sentenced to 17 years in prison, all above and beyond the five years he was imprisoned with no due process.

Not content with what was done to Padilla, the Bush DOJ -- and then the Obama DOJ -- contested the sentence on appeal, insisting that it was too lenient; Padilla also appealed, arguing that the trial court made numerous errors in excluding his evidence while allowing the Government's. Yesterday, a federal appeals panel of the 11th Circuit issued a ruling, by a 2-1 vote, rejecting each and every one of Padilla's arguments. It then took the very unusual step of vacating the 17-year-sentence imposed by the trial court as too lenient and, in effect, ordered the trial judge to impose a substantially harsher prison term:

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AP Photo/J. Pat Carter

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Presstitute

via: Anthony Freda Studio

Beyond Oktoberfest

by Mark Garrison

Oktoberfest began on Saturday, Sept. 17, which means tourist hordes have begun staggering through Munich hoisting 9-euro beers to wash down pretzels the size of infants, weisswurst, and a menagerie of roasted meats. They'll be served by locals diligently playing along in dirndls and lederhosen. Elsewhere in the world, bartenders will try to cash in by offering up Oktoberfest-themed food and beer, or poor facsimiles of the like. Corporate brewers will lend a hand, supplying crates of decorations, gamely attempting to link their flavorless macrobrews with hundreds of years of German beer craftsmanship.

Oktoberfest is a bad thing for good beer.

Don't get me wrong, there will be some world-class beer served in the overstuffed Oktoberfest tents (though most of the tipsy tourists will be too wasted to notice). But every drop of it will be Munich-style beer. The enduring prominence of Oktoberfest in the global imagination means many outside Germany tend to think what happens for a few weeks on a field in southern Bavaria represents the nation's finest brewing accomplishments. It's as if everyone in Germany thought American culture and cuisine begins and ends with the Iowa State Fair.

You can see this pernicious misimpression at work in German-themed bars around the world. My colleagues in Slate's New York offices need only walk a few blocks to a West Village bar called Lederhosen, which is stuffed from floor to ceiling with Bavarian kitsch. Many "German" bars abroad are really Bavarian, with taps that rarely venture beyond the six major Munich brewers. This tendency to equate Germany with Bavaria is a shame, because Germany is a diverse country with 81 million people spread across distinct regions with distinct cuisines, cultures, and brewing traditions.

Many Germans proudly declare that they have never been and will never go to Oktoberfest. (Though it should be noted that for all the grief some Germans give Oktoberfest, they don't discourage foreigners from checking it out. Fierce regional rivalries can be set aside in the common interest of a tourism-revenue bonanza.) Being equated with Oktoberfest drives the rest of Germany nuts. It doesn't help that Oktoberfest is just one of a long list of grievances Germans have with Munich, from the region's strict social conservatism to Bayern Muenchen, the local soccer powerhouse with a reputation for using its deep pockets to steal the best players from other teams.

So unless you're actually celebrating Oktoberfest in Bavaria this year, why not make a point of enjoying everything else Germany has to offer by drinking the products of breweries far from the festival's beer tents? There will be plenty of time later to sample the great wheat beers and lagers coming from Munich.

Below are five great German beers to get you started. The list is absolutely not intended to crown these individual beers as champions of their particular style. Some may very well be best in class, but I chose these beers because they are high quality and accessible outside Germany.

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How To Prevent a Second Great Depression

by Nouriel Roubini, via Project Syndicate

The latest economic data suggest that recession is returning to most advanced economies, with financial markets now reaching levels of stress unseen since the collapse of Lehman Bros. in 2008. The risks of an economic and financial crisis even worse than the previous one—now involving not just the private sector, but also near-insolvent governments—are significant. So, what can be done to minimize the fallout of another economic contraction and prevent a deeper depression and financial meltdown?

First, we must accept that austerity measures, necessary to avoid a fiscal train wreck, have recessionary effects on output. So, if countries in the Eurozone's periphery such as Greece or Portugal are forced to undertake fiscal austerity, countries able to provide short-term stimulus should do so and postpone their own austerity efforts. These countries include the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the core of the Eurozone, and Japan. Infrastructure banks that finance needed public infrastructure should be created as well.

Second, while monetary policy has limited impact when the problems are excessive debt and insolvency rather than illiquidity, credit easing, rather than just quantitative easing, can be helpful. The European Central Bank should reverse its mistaken decision to hike interest rates. More monetary and credit easing is also required for the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, and the Swiss National Bank. Inflation will soon be the last problem that central banks will fear, as renewed slack in goods, labor, real estate, and commodity markets feeds disinflationary pressures.

Third, to restore credit growth, Eurozone banks and banking systems that are undercapitalized should be strengthened with public financing in a European Union-wide program. To avoid an additional credit crunch as banks deleverage, banks should be given some short-term forbearance on capital and liquidity requirements. Also, since the U.S. and EU financial systems remain unlikely to provide credit to small and medium-size enterprises, direct government provision of credit to solvent but illiquid SMEs is essential.

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"Americans [ed. and politicians everywhere] can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities." -
  --  Winston Churchill

Tales of Mere Existence

[ed.  And vice versa...] 
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a dog, watercolor 40x30cm, @_blacha_ on Flickr.
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Private Jets, at Public Prices

by Michelle Higgins

Flying in a private jet may not be as far out of reach as you think. Though it’s still not cheap, prices are rivaling first- and business-class tickets — and even, occasionally, coach — thanks in part to new Web sites, social media and a greater willingness by charter companies and private jet brokers to negotiate in an era of high fuel prices.

Here’s how you can land a seat on a private plane for less.

Search for last-minute, one-way discounts: Air Partner, a charter broker based in London, introduced emptysectors.com last year, to help fill so-called empty legs (when the aircraft flies without passengers back to base or between jobs) at discounted rates. Travelers can view which flights are available online but must call for pricing. Other brokers and private jet operators like JetSuite also make empty legs available to individual travelers, so it can pay to shop around.

“The dirty little secret of the industry is, about a third of our flights are empty,” said Alex Wilcox, chief executive of JetSuite, based in Southern California, which recently began posting last-minute $499 deals on Facebook for empty legs on the company’s four-passenger Embraer Phenom aircraft. “Say a Gulfstream pulls into San Francisco and is going back to Vegas empty,” he said. “A few years ago, if you were to say, ‘if I give you $500 will you take me and my family?’ you would get laughed at.” But the recession changed such attitudes, Mr. Wilcox said. Now, he said, more companies are saying, “Sure, it’ll help pay for the gas.”

But empty-leg flights involve a bit of a gamble. If the private jet owner’s arrangements change (say, the client they were planning to meet in Miami cancels at the last minute), you’re out of luck.

You also need to be flexible to get the best deals. Last month, Mike Lewis, chief executive of a property management company in Los Angeles, was able to score one of JetSuite’s $499 Facebook deals for himself and his girfriend for a last-minute empty leg on a four-passenger plane to Tucson. It was just six hours between the time he booked the flight and takeoff. Still, he said, the deal was so good — at roughly the same cost as he paid to fly back in coach on US Airways — without connections, security hassles and time lost waiting around at the airport, that he hopes to snap up similar bargains in the future.

“For $500 it’s a no-brainer to me,” he said.

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Home Brew President

by Lori Zimmer

Barack Obama has something in common with George Washington, besides his occupation. Our president has been brewing his own in-house organic beer, which he has dubbed White House Honey Ale. The ale is even flavored with White House-raised honey from Michelle Obama’s beehive. We have to applaud the Pres for embracing sustainably made, home-brewed beer! If you’re reading Obama, we’d love some samples.

The Obamas purchased a home brew kit (not on the White House’s dime) and have been brewing their own ale for the last few months. Using local ingredients from his own garden, Obama imbibes his own honey brew, and also serves it up to his guests. When recent Medal of Honor winner Sergeant Dakota Meyer was honored just a little while ago and treated to a visit to the White House, his one request was to have a beer with Obama, who has been known to partake in a brew during business meetings. The two men shared a laugh over two cold pints of Obama’s home brewed White House Honey Ale.

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[ed. shared a laugh?]

Seven Green Apples, 1990 by Douglas Portway
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Freezing Athletes to Speed Recovery

by Gretchen Reynolds

Last week, the American sprinter Justin Gatlin showed up at the World Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Daegu, South Korea, with frostbite on his feet. This condition was painful — he told reporters that he had blisters on both heels — but it was also improbable, given that he’d developed the frostbite in Florida in August. But Mr. Gatlin had been sampling one of the newest, trendiest innovations in elite athlete training. He’d gone into a whole-body cryotherapy chamber, and his feet had frozen there.

Whole-body cryotherapy is, essentially, ice baths taken to a new and otherworldly level, and it is drawing considerable attention among athletes, both elite and recreational. In the cryotherapy chambers, the ambient temperature is lowered to a numbing  minus 110 Celsius or minus 166 Fahrenheit. The chambers were originally intended to treat certain medical conditions, but athletes soon adopted the technology in hopes that supra-subzero temperatures would help them to recover from strenuous workouts more rapidly.

That they would place faith in cold therapy is surprising, given that studies examining the effects of simple ice baths have been, at best, “inconclusive,” said Joseph Costello, a doctoral student in the physical education and sports sciences department at the University of Limerick in Ireland, who is studying the effects of whole-body cryotherapy.

A 2007 study of ice baths found that young men who completed a punishing 90-minute shuttle run and then eased themselves into a frigid bathtub (with the water cooled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit) for 10 minutes reported feeling markedly less sore a few days later than a control group who did not soak. But ice baths did not lower the runners’ levels of creatine kinase, often considered a hallmark of muscle damage. They felt better, but their muscles were almost as damaged as if they hadn’t soaked.

Despite such findings, a growing number of elite soccer players, rugby teams, professional cyclists and track and field athletes in the United States and Europe have eagerly turned to whole-body cryotherapy. Because no agency in the United States or Europe regulates it, it’s impossible to say with any precision how many athletes are currently using the treatment, but researchers like Mr. Costello say the numbers are growing rapidly.

Before entering a cryochamber, users must strip to shorts or a bathing suit, remove all jewelry and don several pairs of gloves, a face mask, a woolly headband and dry socks. Mr. Gatlin neglected that last precaution; his socks were sweaty from a previous workout and froze instantly to his feet. The athletes then move through an acclimatization chamber set to about  minus 76 Fahrenheit and from there into the surface-of-the-moon-chilly cryotherapy chamber.

At minus 110 degrees Celsius, whole-body cryotherapy is “colder than any temperature ever experienced or recorded on earth,” Mr. Costello said.

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Photo by: William Warby from Flickr Creative Commons

Apple’s New Headquarters

[ed.  Looks like some kind of super-collider to me.]

by Paul Goldberger

I don’t usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren’t yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn’t look great as a model? Still, it’s hard not to comment on the new headquarters that Apple plans to build in Cupertino, California.

With Apple’s characteristic secrecy, the company hasn’t officially released the design, or announced that the architect is Foster + Partners, the London-based firm known for its super-sleek, elegant, exquisitely detailed buildings. But images of Apple’s future home, to be built on a campus that it has taken over from Hewlett-Packard, are all over the place, because plans must be presented to the local authorities in Cupertino, who understandably are falling all over themselves with delight. Foster may be the best large architectural practice around today, a firm that has done remarkably well at maintaining quality even as it produces more enormous corporate, institutional, and civic buildings all over the world. The finesse of Foster’s modernism would seem a natural fit with Apple, which produces the best-designed consumer products of our time, and which has done more than any other company to inject sophisticated modern design into the mass market.

Foster has proposed a gargantuan glass-and-metal ring, four stories high, with a hole in the middle a third of a mile wide. The building, which will house upwards of twelve thousand employees, will have a circumference of a mile, and will be so huge that you won’t really be able to perceive its shape, except from the air. Like everything Foster does, it will be sleek and impeccably detailed, but who wants to work in a gigantic donut? Steve Jobs, speaking to the Cupertino City Council, likened the building to a spaceship. But buildings aren’t spaceships, any more than they are iPhones.

So why is Foster’s design troubling, maybe even a bit scary? The genius of the iPhone, MacBook, iPad, and other Apple products is that they are tools that function well and happen to be breathtakingly beautiful. (Last year, I wrote about the design for the new Apple store on the Upper West Side.) A building is also a tool, but of a very different sort. In architecture, scale—the size of various parts of a building in proportion to one another and to the size of human beings—counts for a lot. With this building, there seems to be very little sense of any connection to human size. Flexibility is a hallmark of the iPad, and it counts in architecture, too, but how much flexibility is there in a vast office governed entirely by geometry? For all of Foster’s sleekness, this Apple building seems more like a twenty-first-century version of the Pentagon.

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