The Ash Twins Blog

Cracked.com has a hilarious article up today called “The 5 Scientific Experiments Most Likely to End the World.” It discusses five real-world scientific inquiries that have a real-world chance of annihilating mankind. The whole thing is very much worth reading, but I’ll post some choice excerpts from the first 3 technological menaces:

Scientists are kind of pissed that they weren’t around when the Big Bang happened. Here we had an event that holds all of the secrets to reality, and we missed it because we were lazy enough not to evolve for another 13 billion years.The solution, science says, is to make it happen again… Meet the Large Hadron Collider. This is not only the largest particle accelerator ever built, it’s the largest anything ever built. Originally set to come online in 2005, then delayed until September 2008, the LHC will fire very small objects around its 17-mile circumference at close to the speed of light, before smashing the shit out of them and watching what comes out… Experts assure us that based on everything we know about science, the chances of doom are fairly slim.

For years, scientists have been scouring the cosmos for some kind of bizarre hypothetical anti-gravity bullshit they’re calling “dark energy”. And they’ve had some success with it … perhaps at the expense of our mortal souls. To grossly simplify it, on a scale smaller than atoms, the quantum level, everything suddenly turns into a goddamn circus. Quantum physics is to regular everyday physics as a David Lynch film is to a mainstream blockbuster. We’re talking particles popping in and out of existence, being in two places at the same time, and generally acting like assholes. No doubt the strangest part is the Quantum Zeno effect, which points out that simply observing and measuring particles changes them (specifically, changing the rate at which they decay). How? No one knows. It appears to be the closest science has ever come to proving black magic exists. One prominent scientist theorized that the changes caused by simply observing dark energy could cause it to collapse, taking the universe with it… It’s like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, apparently.

As you’ve probably worked out by now, there’s some weird shit out there in the world of science. That’s because a whole lot of the fundamental theories about reality are based on mathematical equations rather than actual observation. So there are all sorts of things out there that seem to exist in theory, but we’ve never seen them… Anyway, Strange matter is one of these things. It’s a hypothetical material made up of quarks, which are one of the building blocks of reality, things so small that you can’t even possibly imagine. Seriously, don’t even try to think about it… There are two hypotheses about strange matter. One is that the stuff will simply disappear a fraction of a second after it appears. The other is that it will stabilize and convert every atom it comes in contact with into more strange matter… Now imagine, just theoretically, if some of this strange matter should appear on Earth. And, just theoretically, it should be stable enough to start a reaction with regular matter. Theoretically, we’d all be fucking dead… Imagine you’re like the fabled King Midas, and you have the power to convert matter with a single touch. Except that instead of gold, everything you touch turns into shit. And everything it touches turns to shit. Before you know it, the whole world is shit, and it’s all your fault…Luckily for us, strange matter can only be created in high-energy particle collisions, and nothing like that ever happens here, right? Oh, wait. Meet the Large Hadron Collider. Again. That’s right, our friends at the LHC project expect a lot of weird things to pop up when they start smashing atoms together, and strange matter is one such possibility. That’s why scientists have written papers with boring titles such as Will Relativistic Heavy-ion Colliders Destroy Our Planet?, the rebuttals to which were basically, “Let’s turn them on and find out!”

It gets even better! Check it out.

From ScienceDaily:

By tracking the amount of light emitted by Baghdad neighborhoods at night, a team of UCLA geographers has uncovered fresh evidence that last year’s U.S. troop surge in Iraq may not have been as effective at improving security as some U.S. officials have maintained.

Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery. . .

“If the surge had truly ‘worked,’ we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time, as electrical infrastructure continued to be repaired and restored, with little discrimination across neighborhoods,” said co-author Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor of geography at UCLA. “Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only in certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing.” . . .

Previous research has used satellite imagery of night-light saturation to measure changes in the distribution of populations in a given area, but the UCLA project is believed to be the first to study population losses and migration due to sectarian violence.

Federal Judge Richard Posner reserves harsh words for Scalia’s majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, which held unconstitutional Washington D.C.’s handgun ban:

The majority (and the dissent as well) was engaged in what is derisively referred to–the derision is richly deserved–as “law office history.” Lawyers are advocates for their clients, and judges are advocates for whichever side of the case they have decided to vote for. The judge sends his law clerks scurrying to the library and to the Web for bits and pieces of historical documentation. When the clerks are the numerous and able clerks of Supreme Court justices, enjoying the assistance of the capable staffs of the Supreme Court library and the Library of Congress, and when dozens and sometimes hundreds of amicus curiae briefs have been filed, many bulked out with the fruits of their authors’ own law-office historiography, it is a simple matter, especially for a skillful rhetorician such as Scalia, to write a plausible historical defense of his position.

But it was not so simple in Heller, and Scalia and his staff labored mightily to produce a long opinion (the majority opinion is almost 25,000 words long) that would convince, or perhaps just overwhelm, the doubters. The range of historical references in the majority opinion is breathtaking, but it is not evidence of disinterested historical inquiry. It is evidence of the ability of well-staffed courts to produce snow jobs.

A guy on Rotten Tomatoes reports:

I was very curious to hear Murray’s answer. He’s not as available to the press or public as Dan Aykroyd or Harold Ramis and he also seemed to be the least enthusiastic about a Ghostbusters sequel…

But tonight he said that he knew “some writers from THE OFFICE” were taking a stab at the script right now (which we already knew) and that he thinks that’s a good start. He paused for a few seconds then said that he thinks enough time has passed and that “the wounds from GHOSTBUSTERS 2 are healed” and that he would definitely be into doing another GHOSTBUSTERS movie, stating that the first 40 minutes of the original film is some of the best stuff he’s been associated with and the whole shoot was an amazing amount of fun.

He also went on to say that his enthusiasm for Ghostbusters was heightened after recording the voice of Peter Venkman for the video game over the summer. In fact, he said he found himself walking down the street singing the Ghostbusters theme song and then thought people walking around him were going to start yelling at him to “get over yourself, Bill,” so he stopped… But the enthusiasm was there.

The New York Times’ Charles M. Blow notes the striking difference in religiosity between Americans and the citizens of other developed nations. He asks for comments, and I replied:

America’s free religious market forces individual religious organizations to compete with each other for adherents. Modern civilization and technology has provided superior substitutes for religious goods, so now religions have to compete with secular substitutes in addition to the substitutes provided by other religions. Religious substitutes for goods like music, art, psychotherapy, community, medicine, and sex are oftentimes inferior to their secular counterparts, so a popular strategy for making up the difference is for religious leaders to demonize secular substitutes. This demonization contaminates secular goods and lowers their value (and thus demand) for religious believers.  That’s why religious groups that demonize modern medicine can be so effective; if the adherents believe that medicine doesn’t work, then the only way to ward off illness is to “buy” the substitute provided by the religion.

Dark flow.

Along with dark matter and dark energy, astronomers can now add dark flow to the lexicon of cosmic mysteries. Researchers have discovered that 700 distant clusters of galaxies, gas, and dust are all being pulled in the same direction, apparently toward something invisible and possibly very large, confounding current cosmological models. So far, what that “something” is remains speculative, but it could turn out to be a vestige of the universe’s earliest days…

The researchers had been surveying the motion of 700 clusters of galaxies to test an unrelated astronomical phenomenon when they made a startling discovery: All 700 clusters are flowing basically in the same direction and at speeds of as much as 1000 kilometers per second–or more than 30 times faster than Earth revolves around the sun. As the team reports in this week’s online edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters, the clusters, which appear headed toward a region of the sky where the constellation Centaurus resides, are moving faster than they should be if their acceleration were due only to dark energy, the mysterious force discovered a decade ago that is slowly ripping the cosmos apart.

To quote Sir Arthur Eddington, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

For a primer on dark matter, check this out.

For those who miss the glory days of Napster, a glorious day has arrived: the release of Vuze.  Vuze is an open-source BitTorrent application with a fast and friendly file search built into the client interface. Search results are sorted by user ratings, so the highest-quality versions come up first.

Download Vuze here.

Naturally, peer-to-peer file-sharing software presents the opportunity for activities of ambiguous legality; if you intend to engage in such activities, you may want to install PeerGuardian. PeerGuardian is an open-source IP blocker that specifically conceals your computer from the entertainment industry panopticon.

Download PeerGuardian here. (Vista users should choose the “Windows 2003″ installation option.)

I just learned that, by US statute, music publishers cannot prevent artists from recording and selling cover songs. According to CDBaby,

The Copyright Act provides for what is called a “Compulsory License” for downloads and CD sales, which means that if you follow the steps set forth by statute, you can distribute your recording of that song on a CD or over the internet.

Federal Judge Richard Posner writes that in the case of the compulsive license,

the licensee does not have to negotiate with the licensor, and so licensing costs are zero. The fee that the licensee under a compulsory license must pay is not meant to defray the licensing costs, in whole or in part, but to compensate the copyright owner for the value of his property (more precisely, the value represented by the copyright) . . . [L]ike fair use, compulsory licensing is a further testament to the perceived significance of intellectual property licensing costs as a barrier to the efficient allocation of such property.

The statutorily mandated royalty for selling an individual cover song is 9.1¢ if the song is under 5 minutes, plus 1.75¢ for each additional minute of duration.

After learning how small cover-song royalties were, I was a little puzzled that a market for cover songs has not developed. What would seem to me to be a cunning business model would involve producing near-identical recordings to popular hits and selling them at a discount. With iTunes downloads at 99¢, one could sell the covers for half price (49¢) and still make 40¢ of revenue from each download after paying the royalty. Alternatively, one might create a near-identical cover of a popular song and release it on the internet for 10¢, democratizing the market for popular music while recouping royalty costs.

One might be concerned with meeting the costs of producing a near-identical duplicate, but those would be negligible in comparison to the sales of most popular recordings.

Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman confronts the problematic relationship between the US Supreme Court and international law in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Feldman offers an honest account of the limitations of constitutional interpretation:

Looking at today’s problem through the lens of our great constitutional experiment, it emerges that there is no single, enduring answer to which way the Constitution should be oriented, inward or outward. The truth is that we have had an inward- and outward-looking Constitution by turns, depending on the needs of the country and of the world. Neither the text of the Constitution, nor the history of its interpretation, nor the deep values embedded in it justify one answer rather than the other. . .

[T]his requires the Supreme Court to think in terms not only of principle but also of policy: to weigh national and international interests; and to exercise fine judgment about how our Constitution functions and is perceived at home and abroad. The conservative and liberal approaches to legitimacy and the rule of law need to be supplemented with a healthy dose of real-world pragmatism. . .

Feldman’s pragmatism leads him to insightful reframings of traditionally ideological issues:

The reason those with power prefer law to brute force is that it regularizes and legitimates the exercise of authority. It is easier and cheaper to get the compliance of weaker people or states by promising them rules and a fair hearing than by threatening them constantly with force. . . On those occasions when the weak, using the machinery of courts, are able to vindicate their legal rights, the reason their demands are honored is generally that those who have the most influence in the system recognize it is in their own long-term interest to make the concession. . .

The Supreme Court therefore was right to reinsert Guantánamo in the legal grid — but not because this was definitively the best reading of the constitutional materials, which were contradictory and indeterminate. What justifies the decision is the practical necessity and importance of reassuring the citizens of the United States and the world at large that the United States had not given up the role it assumed after World War II as the chief proponent of the rule of law worldwide.

Salon’s Andrew Leonard sums it up.