1. 2012
    Jan
    05

    Internet access: an enabler of rights

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the internet (for real: he helped develop TCP/IP and early email tech) has written an enlightening editorial in the New York Times. His argument is that internet access should not be considered a human right in and of itself; it’s an enabler of the right to free speech. Sure it makes sense to protect people’s right to internet access, but only insofar as that is a component of the right to free speech.

    …technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things.

  2. 2012
    Jan
    02

    Inertia and the failure point

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on — Edited

    Here’s one for the fellow Star Trek fans out there. At the end of Star Trek: Nemesis (SPOILER ALERT), the Enterprise-E and Shinzon’s Romulan warbird, the Scimitar, get involved in a battle in which the Scimitar latches on to the Enterprise using grips. One of the community members at Science Fiction and Fantasy Stack Exchange thought to ask, when the Scimitar fired its engines in reverse, why did it detach from the Enterprise rather than dragging both ships along?

    At the question on SFFSE, there are two proposed explanations, the inertia of the Enterprise and the failure point of the grips. Both of them are relevant, but inertia doesn’t explain what happens all by itself. After all, if it were just inertia, what’s to say that the Scimitar detaches from the Enterprise instead of the engines detaching from both ships? As we’ll see, inertia does play a role in determining how much force is exerted on each part of each of the two ships’ structures. But once that force distribution is determined, it really comes down to whether the amount of force on the grips is enough to break them.

    In the grand tradition of …

  3. 2011
    Dec
    21

    SE Chat Santa Hats

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on — Edited

    Here’s a little treat for the holidays: add Santa hats to all the gravatars in Stack Exchange chat! You can copy and paste the CSS below into a user style, which you can enable in Firefox with the User Style Manager extension, or download a userscript that will insert the styles for you.

    This includes all the extra markup you need to copy and paste directly into Stylish:

    @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("chat.stackexchange.com"), domain("chat.stackoverflow.com") {
 div.avatar {
  position: relative;
  display: block;
 }
 div.avatar:before {
  content: url("http://static.ellipsix.net/ext-tmp/santahat32.png");
  position: absolute;
  top: -8px;
  right: 3px;
 }
 div.avatar-16:before {
  content: url("http://static.ellipsix.net/ext-tmp/santahat16.png");
  position: absolute;
  top: -4px;
  right: 0px;
 }
 div#active-user div.user-gravatar64:before {
  content: url("http://static.ellipsix.net/ext-tmp/santahat64.png");
  position: absolute;
  top: -18px;
  right: 0px;
 }
}
  4. 2011
    Dec
    17

    The Guardian's top 10 science stories of 2011

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    The Guardian has published a list of their top 10 science stories for the year. It’s a good summary of some of the major advances in science that took place this year, but only if you look past the sensationalism and focus on the facts.

    Item 2, for instance: “Flying faster than the speed of light just might be possible after all.” Probably not, though. Despite what the article says, the OPERA experiment has not been properly verified, and most physicists do not take the idea of FTL neutrinos seriously at this time.

    Or item 10: “And finally, we learned that the Higgs boson really does exist.” Again, we’re not sure. To be fair, this one is decently plausible, but ATLAS and CMS have only achieved a \(\sim 3\sigma\) observation so far, and it’s entirely possible that it turns out to be nothing.

  5. 2011
    Dec
    13

    The Higgs boson remains ephemeral (no surprise)

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    Since the big news in the physics world is this morning’s presentation of the Higgs search results from the LHC, it’s only appropriate that I comment on it here, even though every physics blog in the world will be doing the exact same thing so there will be no shortage of Higgs information out there ;-) In summary: no, they haven’t really found it, but there is a bump around \(\SI{126}{GeV}\) that could represent detection of a Higgs boson. It will take another year’s worth of data to be confident either way.

    Here are the plots that were released this morning by ATLAS and CMS, respectively:

    The quantity being plotted here is the cross section for candidate Higgs events, which is denoted \(\sigma\), relative to a theoretical prediction, \(\sigma_{SM}\). In other words, the thing on the vertical axis is related to the fraction of collisions in which something that looks like a sign of a Higgs boson comes out. (I’ll perhaps post on this in more detail later; for now see Matt Strassler’s post on Higgs production for a good explanation.) But not everything that looks like a sign of a Higgs …

  7. 2011
    Dec
    11

    Don't beware of experts (necessarily)

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    We should be wary of leaving political decisions to experts and technocrats. Lisa Jardine asks if someone is an expert in their field, does that make them the right person to run a country?

    If their field is running a country, then yes, it does.

    People like to complain that putting experts in charge of the government is dangerous because they are disconnected from average people. As this BBC article says, “The rule of a few wise men is oligarchy, not democracy.” But the problem is not experts themselves, it’s that it’s very difficult to become an expert in running a country. That doesn’t mean there is reason to mistrust experts in general.

  8. 2011
    Dec
    06

    Possibility of a Higgs observation

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    Just to keep everyone up to date on the latest rumors circulating in the physics world: there is speculation that ATLAS and CMS have a \(3\sigma\) candidate Higgs detection at around \(\SI{125}{\giga\electronvolt}\). I’m not going to speculate on the veracity of the rumors, but there will be a press conference next week on the 13th at which they officially announce their latest results, and it’s bound to be something interesting. Stay tuned!

  9. 2011
    Dec
    02

    Apparently a good reason NOT to use GoDaddy

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    Courtesy of Slashdot:

    “Chris Coyer at css-tricks.com has had his domain transferred from GoDaddy.com to a registrar in Australia where it’s being held for ransom. Several other domains have experienced the same theft by what seems to be the same person, and the registrars seem helpless to do anything about it.”

    (in case their almost-pornographic ad campaign wasn’t enough reason for you not to do business with them).

  10. 2011
    Nov
    30

    Mendeley: Reference Manager of the Cloud

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    I want to make a long overdue recommendation for all my scientific colleagues to check out Mendeley, a fantastic online reference manager. It’s also been billed as an academic social network, but for me, the real value in Mendeley lies in its ability to collect and categorize references.

    Basically, a Mendeley account is a database of bibliographic data and associated PDF files. You can add references while browsing the web using an importer bookmarklet, which works with many different websites including the arXiv and APS journals. Unlike other automatic bibliographic sources (ahem Google Scholar), importing directly from the official site gives you fairly complete and consistent data. You can also supplement it using the arXiv or DOI lookup in Mendeley’s desktop client, or by filling in fields manually. The desktop client also allows you to read papers using a builtin PDF viewer (or an external program of your choice), as well as add annotations and notes. It’s cross-platform, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it’s overall pretty well designed, especially for a free program. Of course, Mendeley also provides a web interface by which you can access your reference database from any browser. All these …