Time Travel the Next Step:

More evidence that the universes tiniest particles can travel faster than the speed of light has come out of the CERN physics lab. Proof awaits further testing, but I'm betting on this tiny horse reshaping the world of physics and ultimately our vision of reality.

This little story is big stuff, folks. (See The Washington Post story, while I go read a real book!)

6 Ton Satellite Disappears:

I woke up this morning and rushed to the back porch to see if NASA's bus-sized satellite had parked itself in my backyard only to learn later that the thing is now a needle in a haystack. Nobody knows what happened to the space junk.

Speculation places parts of it in Canada, the Pacific Ocean, and maybe Africa. Most space junk, NASA says, ends up in the ocean. That's because more of the earth's surface is covered with water than dirt and rock.

So "the bus" sleeps with the fishes. (See Huffington Post article.)

What Travels Faster Than the Speed of Light?

Neutrinos, baby! Take that, Einstein! S0 much for your theory of relativity!

CERN clocked the little dudes doing 60 nanoseconds faster than light could keep up with, but the experiment has to be reproducible because science ain't like religion. You gotta verify your claims.

So before we sell our Corvettes and check out the neutrino dealership, we'll just have to wait and see if the folks in Switzerland can catch another one in the act of passing up the flash bulb.

What does this mean? Well, for one thing we now have an idea how Scotty managed to beam up Kirk. And you probably thought it was the magic of TV.

(See The Washington Post article.)

Legal and Deadly: The Water You Drink

In a lengthy article in today's New York Times, Charles Duhigg reports on the state of America's drinking water. The laws regulating our water have remained unchanged since 1974 and are far behind the development of deadly chemicals being dumped into reservoirs and waterways.

Complicating the matter, many citizens object to measures taken by officials to reduce the risk, claiming that if the water is "legal" nothing should be done. In other words, you should have the right to poison yourself—unwittingly—as long as 1) it keeps taxes down (especially for big business) and 2) it allows you to pretend that you are in control of your life.

Currently, we are in a battle to determine whether we trust big government or big and small business. (See the healthcare issue.)


What Should You Be Reading?

As the end of the year rolls around, we start to see reading lists pop up just in time for the holiday buying season. National Public Radio has provided their list, with more than one book that ought to keep you busy for a good portion of the winter, including The Paris Review Interviews, which is 1982 pages long. Who says they don't publish big books any more. And then there's American Fantastic Tales which is 1500 pages.

Don't worry, there are plenty of other books on the list in the 300-page range, including In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which was reviewed here not long ago.


Other Worlds:

Today's New York Times reports on the discovery of a planet outside our solar system that appears to be composed entirely of water, with a surface temperature of 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Don't get your fishing equipment out yet. It's 40 light-years away, and a year there lasts 38 hours.

December's National Geographic reported on the number of new planets found in the past few years, now that technology allows us to "see" beyond our own solar system with enough precision to discover them.

The Fourth Paradigm:

When will the world's greatest super computer be created? Well, it already exists. John Markoff reports on the status of parallel computing in today's New York Times. In January 2007, Jim Gray, a Microsoft employee, argued that focus should shift from creating ever faster, single super computers to shared computer power utilizing cheap equipment spread across the planet. Some of that is currently taking place.

A few years ago, I suggested the same possibility to the IT department where I'm employed, when one of our physicists received a large grant so that he could travel to a super computer location for just two hours of computing time in order to conduct research. Why not, I suggested, just set up the machines in our labs here to perform parallel computing functions? Our physicist would actually have more computational power, and he'd be able to use it for eight hours every night to his heart's content. I was told to shut up and never mention that idea to our physicist.

So much for getting out in front of the curve.

Pluto's Not a Planet so How Many Planets Are There?

Back in 1995, as Bill Clinton was gearing up to run for his second campaign and Bill Gates was about to release his new operating system, the first "exoplanet" was discovered. An exoplanet is a planet that exists outside our solar system. Since then, more than 400 such planets have been discovered in our galaxy, Bill Clinton has gone on to become the Secretary of State's husband, and Bill Gates and company are about to release a new operating system. (See The Washington Post story about "exoplanets." You can Google the two Bills, if you really want to.)

Ouch!

What was that bang? Something smelly just ripped through the fan. The Bush administration—seven and a half years delinquent—was just forced to tell the truth about what's happening to our environment. SETH BORENSTEIN writing for the Associated Press reports on the dramatic report issued by the government describing what's in store for the United States over the course of the next seventy plus years, and it ain't pretty folks. Looks like Mr. Bush's pompous assurances that history would vindicate his administration's reckless, feckless behavior are on their way to being flushed quite properly.

What's that you see stuck up in the air? Why it's your president, with his head buried in the sand. You can figure out what's waving in the air.

American Death Toll in Iraq Reaches 4,000:

According to the Associated Press, the death count for American's in Iraq has reached 4,000 now that we are in the sixth year of the war. No one knows precisely how many Iraqis have died, but best estimates range between 82,000 and 90,000.

The Bush administration usually dismisses the figures, stating that Saddam Hussein killed more of his own people in the 1980s. It should be noted that the Reagan administration continually increased its support for Saddam during this time, dramatically increasing aid following the chemical attacks.

As everyone should know by now, the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam possessed during this time were purchased from American suppliers with American government aid.

The War's a Bore:

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, as reported by today's New York Times, the media's coverage of the war in Iraq by 80 percent over the past year. Public interest in the war, according to the Pew Research Center, parallels Bush's popularity, "running below 30 percent since last fall."

G. W.'s joke — "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere." — George W. Bush at the Radio & Television Correspondent's dinner, showing a photo of himself looking under his desk, March 24, 2004 — was on us and the Iraqi people.

This day in history: On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez struck a reef in Alaska, spilling eleven million gallons of crude oil. Battles over the clean up are still going on. Exxon Mobil is now the wealthiest company in the world, even as American's are going bankrupt while paying record high prices for gasoline, diesel fuel, and heating oil.

Pure Commentary:

Have you noticed that while the Republicans hate government regulation when it comes to the banks they own they nevertheless promote it thoroughly when it comes to the way you lead your personal lives?

They also hate government financial aid to working class people (unemployment benefits, government funded retraining programs) and assistance to the poor (welfare), but they demand that their financial empires be bailed out by the taxpayers after they do stupid and harmful things with their banks and other speculating entities.

To Boldly Go … and Find Stuff:

Science has now determined that there are 277 planets in the known universe, with the number growing at a regular pace. (No, that doesn't mean new ones are being created, just discovered.) If we don't destroy ourselves first through global warming and war, this period of history is likely to change our perspective of who we are in a way comparable to the realization that the earth actually orbits the sun, rather than vise versa. (See The Washington Post story.)

When Does Life Begin?

The more appropriate question is "when did it begin?" Anti-abortion forces and women's rights groups debate the question, but science indicates it began a long time ago, about 3.5 billion years on this planet, and it simply continues.

Anyone serious about the argument needs to consider the information set forth in Neil Shubin's article in today's New York Times, "Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Dragons Don't Need To." As it happens, virgin birth is not a religious myth, but a biological function of some creatures, who create clones of themselves.

That's not, of course, what Mary is supposed to have done.

By the way, for those fundamentalists who object to the notion that we evolved from monkeys, Shubin points out that we share a common ancestor with sharks some 400 million years ago. I'm sure they'll find the "shark image" much more palatable.

A. O. Scott on the Oscars:

Today is Academy Award Sunday, that Sunday in February when there are no big sporting events on TV to distract people, which allows Hollywood to congratulate itself in front of the largest audience possible while at the same time trying to drum up interest (dollars) in its product.

The New York Times' A. O. Scott is probably the most widely respected of current movie reviewers, and he's chimed in with what seems to me to be the most quotable quote of the day on the subject: "The wonderful thing about the Academy Awards is that they are fundamentally trivial. To pretend otherwise is to trivialize movies."

Frank Rich Explains the Hillary Fall:

Writing in today's Times, Frank Rich explains the collapse of inevitability. Now that's a concept hard to get your head around. The press has been postulating thesis after thesis about what has gone wrong with the Clinton campaign for weeks now. Rich's view requires a knowledge of addition. It's the total package.

To the shock of the press, the Obama campaign, especially its campaigners, have beaten the Clinton machine like a drum, as Rich points out:

The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.

Perhaps the biggest surprise has been in spousal power. While Mrs. Obama has committed a couple of gaffs during the campaign, Mr. Clinton, the consummate campaigner, the secret weapon that was supposed to usher in his wife as the first woman president, has done far more harm to her campaign than any spouse in recent history. Brother Bill's strategy in supporting his wife seems to have been to insult as many voters as possible.

And then there is her campaign manager, who is also the head of the company that handles public relations for Microsoft. That's a nice résumé. But it hardly speaks well for his full devotion to either enterprise.

Perhaps some sage advice from that great statesman, George W. Bush, is in order: "If you don't stand for anything, you don't stand for anything!" — Austin-American Statesman, 2000.

Now how can you argue with that?

How to Get Rich on the Campaign Trail:

Senate ethics rules prohibit candidates from directly profiting from campaign donations. You can't take the money people donate to your campaign and put it into your pocket.

But you can put it into the pockets of your relatives.

Today's Washington Post reports that Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer paid her son Douglas $320,409.17 directly from her campaign coffers, between 2001 and 2006. Republican Senator Mike Enzi paid his daughter-in-law $306,718.18 during the same time period. Former baseball pitcher and Republican Senator Jim Bunning from Kentucky paid his daughter $138,933.37 over a six-year period.

It appears, however, that the House is much worse than the Senate: "72 House members paid [$5.1 million] from campaign funds to relatives or to relatives' companies or employers during the same period."

Back in January of last year, a law to tighten requirements to limit such activity was defeated (surprise, surprise) in the Senate by a vote of 54 to 41. Senator Boxer voted "present."

Many people assume that Americans' Puritan heritage has to do with attitudes about sex. They're wrong. The Puritans believed that the condition of one's soul could be determined by measuring how well one did economically on this earth. We are a country in mad pursuit of the next quarterly earnings statement.