The Bastardization of Copyright

The bastardization of copyright is contrary to the public interest for three reasons. First, modern copyright violates the principles and ideals of a democratic society. Second, copyright permits monopolistic control over original works of expression. Third, commodization does not serve as an inducement to creativity.
http://cryptome.org/bauchner.htm

Quantum Cryptography Nearing Reality

The theoretical accuracy limit of copying quantum information - such as the direction of polarisation of a single photon - is of five-sixths, or 83 per cent. Bouwmeester is part of a group led by Antia Lamas-Linares at Oxford which reports in Science that they have successfully copied a photons quantum state with 81 per cent accuracy.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992111

Global Warming... Geothermal Style

A team of American and Canadian researchers has found evidence of real global warming: the temperature of the Earths crust is increasing at a remarkable rate."We can now say we truly have global warming," says Dr. Hugo Beltrami, a geophysicist at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.Until now most data on global warming has been gleaned from the atmosphere, polar icecaps and oceans, but Dr. Beltramis team looked at continental rocks, which cover about 30% of the planets surface.The scientists studied 616 deep bore holes that had been drilled into rock formations from Africa to the Arctic and found evidence of a marked rise in temperature over the past 500 years.The surface of continental rocks are, on average, one degree Celsius warmer now than they were five centuries ago, and most of the warming has occurred since 1900, the scientists report in a paper being published in the upcoming issue of the Geophysical Research Letters, a leading geology journal.
http://www.nationalpost.com/search/story.html?f=/stories/20020327/463946.html

Stopping Light

Last year, physicists at Harvard University shined a laser beam into a glass cell filled with atomic vapors. The light went in, but it didnt come out again. It was not destroyed or absorbed, but rather stored -- ready to emerge intact at the scientists bidding.The laser pulse was kilometers-long before it entered the cell, yet the pulse fit intact within the centimeters-wide chamber. Sound like magic? Perhaps ... but it was only quantum mechanics.Quantum mechanics describes the bizarre rules of light and matter on atomic scales. In that realm, matter can be in two places at once. Objects can be particles and waves at the same time. And nothing is certain -- only probable or improbable.This improbable feat -- stopping light -- was accomplished by two teams. One was led by Ron Walsworth, a physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the other by Lene Hau of Harvard Universitys Department of Physics. Walsworths group used warm rubidium vapors to pause their laser beam; Haus group used a super-cold sodium gas to do the same thing.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002/27mar_stoplight.htm

NASA Testing Anti-Gravity Device

The details might be sketchy, but the basic idea behind the device is fairly simple. It begins with a disc, about six inches in diameter and a quarter of an inch thick, made out of a superconducting material whose recipe Podkletnov has carefully kept secret. The disc is cooled to below -233 degrees centigrade and levitated using a magnetic field. Then an electric field is applied to make the disc spin. So far, all we have is a variation on an electric motor, but Podkletnov claims that when the disc rotates at more than 5,000 revolutions per minute, an object placed above it begins to lose weight. Somehow, he says, the force of gravity is being counteracted--the trick is, you have to get the setup exactly right.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-000021224mar24.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Aikido as Spiritual Practice

Of all the Japanese martial arts, Aikido is far and away the art most clearly and overtly focused upon the higher levels of development. Again and again in the literature you read that the spirit of Aikido is taught through the techniques of Aikido, that within the techniques of Aikido is a philosophy of true love and protection for the whole world. This is often difficult to connect with the practice and techniques of Aikido because Aikidos techniques are effective fighting techniques which involve the extremely painful manipulation of joints, and throwing your partner around quite forcefully, as well as occasionally just hitting people outright. Underlying the techniques of Aikido, however, is a basic philosophical value of harmonizing, which is present in all of its techniques. Aikido teaches that all things are connected, and that by working in harmony with the energy of the universe and all things within it, one can accomplish whatever needs to be done without conflict. On the other hand, working in opposition to the harmonious movement of the universe is seen as both much more difficult, and something which will eventually bring disaster. While Aikidos lessons are couched in the language and techniques of physical confrontation, they are intended to be applied to all aspects of a students life. The lessons of Aikido are seen as teaching students to recognize the harmonious nature of the Universe, and how to blend with and live in harmony with the universe.

http://www.aikiweb.com/spiritual/boylan2.html

Superluminal Photons Possible?

Can superluminal photon propagation really be compatible with the principle of causality, or does it necessarily imply the existence of time machines? After all, such motion is genuinely backwards in time as viewed locally by a class of inertial observers. The question remains controversial, but the key is the SEP. In special relativity, a causal paradox requires both outward and return signals to be backwards in time in a global inertial frame. In general relativity, however, global Lorentz invariance is lost and the existence of a sufficiently superluminal return signal is not guaranteed. The quantum violation of the SEP certainly permits superluminal motion, but with photon velocities predetermined by the local curvature. Consistency with causality is therefore a global question. If the original space-time admits a global causal structure with respect to the geometrical light-cones, then causality will be respected even in the presence of superluminal photons if this structure is preserved with respect to the new light-cones. This rapidly leads to sophisticated issues of global topology in general relativity, but at this stage superluminal photons appear to be both consistent with causality and predicted by QED.
http://cerncourier.com/main/article/42/3/13

The Epidemic of Fear

Many claim that 11 September changed the world forever, particularly impacting on public perceptions of risk and creating a sense that we live in an ever-more risky world. But it is wrong to blame todays culture of fear on the collapse of the World Trade Centre. Long before 11 September, public panics were widespread - on everything from GM crops to mobile phones, from global warming to foot-and-mouth.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000002D46C.htm

Study of Occupant Behaviour during 1993 WTC Evacuation

Most of the respondents in both towers never left the building or the floor when alarms went off or drills were held. Over 90% of the respondents in Tower 2 never evacuated the building and never moved to another floor. In Tower 1, 79% of the respondents never moved to another floor and 88% never evacuated. These results further explain the unfamiliarity with the stairs that many respondents reported, in spite of the fact that most of the occupants who responded to the survey were fire wardens.
http://cryptome.org/wtc-1993.htm

Readable Description of Bose-Einstien Condensates

BEC is a group of a few million atoms that merge to make a single matter-wave about a millimeter or so across. In 1995, Ketterle created BECs in his lab by cooling a gas made of sodium atoms to a few hundred billionths of a degree above absolute zero, more than a million times cooler than interstellar space.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space03250201.html

Expansion of the Universe is Accellerating

A team of 27 astronomers led by Professor George Efstathiou of the University of Cambridge has published strong evidence for the existence of dark energy using an entirely different technique. They used the clustering pattern of 250,000 galaxies in a large volume of the universe surveyed with the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring in New South Wales, Australia. By comparing the structure in the universe now, some 15 billion years after the Big Bang, with structure observed in the cosmic microwave background radiation, which preserved information about what the universe was like when it was only 300,000 years old, the Anglo-Australian team could apply a simple geometrical test to elucidate the composition of the universe.Their results show that the universe is full of dark energy, completely consistent with the earlier supernovae results. "It seems that Einstein did not make a blunder after all -- dark energy appears to exist and to dominate over more conventional types of matter," Efstathiou said. "An explanation of the dark energy may involve String Theory, extra dimensions or even what happened before the Big Bang. At present nobody knows. The ball is now firmly in the theorists court."
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/universe_expansion_020320.html

Martian Dark Spots Worth a Closer Look

The spots appear on dunes found on the floors of craters in the south and north polar regions. The Hungarian team has examined the southern spots in detail. "They appear in late winter and by summer they have disappeared. They appear first at the margins of the dune fields and rarely appear on the ridges of dunes," Szathmary told the meeting. Their location (which is independent of the elevation of the land) and shape (which is circular on flat surfaces but elongated on slopes) seem to be at odds with a physical explanation alone, say the Hungarian scientists who have proposed a biological explanation instead. The spots are colonies of photosynthetic Martian microorganisms, they hypothesise, which over-winter beneath the ice cap. As the Sun returns to the pole during early spring, light penetrates the ice, the microorganisms photosynthesise and heat their immediate surroundings. A pocket of water, which would normally evaporate instantly in the thin Martian atmosphere, is trapped around them by the overlying ice. As this ice layer thins, the microorganisms show through grey. When it has completely melted, they rapidly desiccate and turn black. This explains why many dark dune spots have a black centre surrounded by a grey aureole, say the Hungarian scientists.
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0203/14marsspots/

Sonic Fusion

Standard sonoluminescence experiments use water. Taleyarkhan?s group used an organic chemical called acetone, an ingredient in common nail-polish remover, because it is rich in neutron-absorbing carbon and hydrogen atoms. The researchers then loaded up the acetone with extra neutrons in two ways. First, they used acetone made from deuterium, which is hydrogen with an extra neutron. Second, they put the flask of acetone next to a source of neutron radiation, in one case a chunk of plutonium-beryllium and in other cases a neutron pulse gun. Their hope was that the neutrons shooting into the acetone would collide with the carbon and hydrogen nuclei, and this would create disturbances that would "seed" the bubbles produced by the sound waves. Many more bubbles than normal would be formed at once, and on average the bubbles would grow much larger than usual before they collapsed. Perhaps, the scientists thought, the bubbles would get so big that their collapse would produce temperatures near 10 million degrees?hot enough to cause a few deuterium atoms in the acetone to fuse into helium or tritium (hydrogen with two extra neutrons).
http://www.scientificamerican.com/explorations/2002/031802fusion/

Video Games Enhance Strategic Thinking

A recent study found that computer games have a significant impact on the strategic thinking and planning skills of children, which could lead to the games being added to the school curriculum. The study in the UK examined simulation and adventure games, such as Sim City and RollerCoaster Tycoon. Parents and teachers also noticed an improvement in their childrens mathematics, reading, and spelling. The researchers examined the habits of 700 children from 7 to 16 years of age and discovered that children actually prefer to play games in pairs or small groups. The Teachers Evaluating Educational Multimedia (Teem) performed the research. Professor Angela McFarlane, the Teem director, said we have a great deal to learn from the games industry in terms of developing scenarios that really challenged and engaged children, rather than reproducing text books on the screen.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/science03190203.html

Ancient Incan Civilization Found in Peru

Peter Frost, a British author who led an expedition to the area last year, described it as the largest Inca site found since 1964 when American explorer Gene Savoy discovered Vilcabamba, thought to be the capital of the empires jungle refuge. "Few, if any, Spanish conquistadors ever reached the southern part of Vilcabamba," said Frost, referring to the region around Vilcabamba. "This site may ultimately yield a record of Inca civilization from the very beginning to the very end, undisturbed by European contact -- an unparalleled opportunity."
http://www.cosmiverse.com/science03190201.html

Asteroid Nearly Hits Earth, Nobody Notices

One of the largest asteroids known to have approached the Earth zipped past about 450,000 kilometres away on March 8 - but nobody recorded it until four days later.The object, now called 2002 EM7, was hard to spot because it was moving outward from the innermost point of its orbit, 87 million km from the Sun. When it passed closest to the Earth - just 1.5 times the distance to the Moon - it was too close to the Sun to be visible.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992052

No More Personal E-mail & Surfing @ Work

Major corporations are increasingly classifying employee email and Internet privileges as potential security hazards, distractions or worse, costly legal dangers in the making. As a result, companies are considering dramatically curtailing, or even abolishing completely the freedoms, on which employees have grown increasingly reliant over the past few years.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020318/wr_nm/tech_internet_security_dc_1&cid=582

Optical Cryptography

His system, he said, starts with a laser that sends part of its beam into photo detectors which produce electrical signal that feed back to help power the laser. The resulting circuit behaves erratically -- something like the feedback you hear at a concert when the performer wanders too close to his stack of amps. Liu has found that if he picks his lasers carefully, he can set up two such nonlinear (chaotic) circuits whose feedback behavior is the same. Thus, if you have a message that needs to get from Albuquerque to Boston without being snooped on, you place a laser in each city. After the two lasers have been synchronized over an open channel, you add your message signal on top of the sending chaotic laser. And once the signal reaches Boston, you use the Boston laser to subtract off the chaos -- and to get the original message.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,50779,00.html

Interview With Gary Gygax

The original D&D evolved from Gygaxs interest in miniature war-gaming - every weekend, his basement would be full of game geeks conducting medieval-era warfare with hundreds of metal miniatures on a huge sand table. When things eventually got a little boring for the participants, Gygax threw in some new twists - a dragon?a wizard?a giant. The additions proved so popular that he soon ran out of room in his basement. Gygax published the innovations as the game Chainmail, the war-gaming forerunner of D&D. Eventually his experiments with war gaming lead to a focus on individual characters, as opposed to armies, and the exploration of ruins and wilderness areas as opposed to mass combat. With Dave Arneson, Gygax developed the basis for what would become Dungeons & Dragons. (he experimented with several names - it was his daughters enthusiasm for the "D&D" moniker that made it stick). Gygax shopped the game to various game companies, who were not interested, citing the games complexity and open-ended quality. Undaunted, he raised $1000 with his long-time friend and fellow gamer, the late Don Kaye, and formed TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) in 1973. Together, they hand-assembled 1000 copies of the rules, which quickly sold out - the rest is very well documented history.
http://kcgeek.com/content/features/1016009127.Johnny%20Pharaoh.Interviews/feature.html

CIAs Network Mapped

"The points of presence all seem to be overt CIA links, and the names are of overt employees who seem to be either system managers or points of reference for billing purposes," said Vince Cannistraro, former chief of counterintelligence at the CIA, who reviewed the report. "It doesnt tell you anything about the clandestine side of CIA networks over which classified information flows and which has no public points of presence. But perhaps these are good starting points for less-scrupulous elements to begin cyberattacks."
http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO68961,00.html

Canada to Raise Tariffs on Recordable Media

A new Canadian levy will be introduced in 2003 on all recordable media (pdf). The magnitude of these tariffs is staggering: $1.23 for all CD-RWs, $2.27 on all DVD-Rs, and get this: $21 for each gigabyte of storage on portable MP3 players. Thats an extra 160 dollars for a Nomad. The cash will go to the Recording Industry whether you use it for recording pirated music or not.
http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/tariffs/proposed/c09032002-b.pdf

Gushing Technical Review of Google

Ysee, the Web is full of people like you and me, making links between documents; human beings, making decisions about documents, voting with their links. When I link to some arbitrary document, its an indication that I think that its in some way authoritative. When you link to a document I wrote, youre indicating that Im in some way authoritative. The Internet is already structured in a meaningful way, but that structure is obscured. Google teases out the relationship between the URLs, examining the webs of authority: this person is linked to by 50,000 others, and he links to this other person over here, which indicates that person one is a pretty sharp individual, one whos inspired 50,000 human beings to take time out of their busy schedules to link to him; and person one thinks that person two is on the ball, which suggests that person two knows what shes on about.
http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a//network/2002/03/08/cory_google.html

X-Ray Pulses from Jupiter

"The 45-minute pulsations are very mysterious," adds Elsner. Theyre not perfectly regular like a signal from E.T. might be; the period drifts back and forth by a few percent. "This is a natural process," he adds, "we just dont know what it is...."While the researchers were using Chandra to observe Jupiter, two NASA spacecraft -- Cassini and Galileo -- were near the giant planet. Galileo was deep inside Jupiters magnetic field, while Cassini was outside sampling the solar wind. Neither craft detected 45-minute variations in their surroundings, such as plasma waves or surges of energetic particles, "although such variations have been detected by Galileo at other times," notes Gladstone. Galileo has also picked up 1 to 200 kHz-frequency radio bursts that come and go with a 45-minute period, as did the Ulysses spacecraft when it flew by Jupiter in 1992.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002/07mar_jupiterpuzzle.htm?list454505

Milky Way Currently Swallowing Neighbor Galaxy

Sagittarius dwarf galaxy is now in the process of being swallowed by the Milky Way Galaxy after a complete disruption caused by Galactic tides. Part of our stellar Halo has been formed from additions of such smaller constituents.The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy is our nearest neighbor. Despite its proximity, it lay undiscovered until 1994, being hidden by foreground Galactic stars and dust of the Milky Way. The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy is located at 75,000 light-years from the Sun and 50,000 light-years from our Galactic Center. This makes Sagittarius dwarf galaxy the nearest known satellite of the Milky Way.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space03070202.html

Dozens of Human Embryos Cloned in China

Chinese scientists are claiming a great leap forward in human cloning - the creation of dozens of cloned embryos advanced enough to harvest embryonic stem cells.Their intention is not to copy human beings, but create genetically matched cells to make tissues for transplant patients and for research. The work has not yet been reported in any peer-reviewed journal but Lu Guangxiu of the Xiangya Medical College revealed details of her work in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. Experts familiar with her work say that three or four other Chinese labs have made similar or greater strides forward.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992012

Town Hosts Frozen Dead Guy Festival

Its just the thing to brighten up a cold winter day, a sort of "Frosty the Snowman" festival. But this one honors a "Frozen Dead Guy," the most famous "resident" in the town of Nederland, Colorado.Thats right. The people of Nederland, about 40 miles northwest of Denver, are holding a festival this weekend to honor the towns most famous dead resident -- Bredo Morstoel, who died in his native Norway in 1989.
http://dailynews.netscape.com/mynsnews/story.tmpl?table=n&cat=50900&id=200203061042000245729

A Bow Shock from a Young Star

NASAs Hubble Space Telescope continues to reveal various stunning and intricate treasures that reside within the nearby, intense star-forming region known as the Great Nebula in Orion. One such jewel is the bow shock around the very young star, LL Ori, featured in this Hubble Heritage image.Named for the crescent-shaped wave made by a ship as it moves through water, a bow shock can be created in space when two streams of gas collide. LL Ori emits a vigorous solar wind, a stream of charged particles moving rapidly outward from the star. Our own Sun has a less energetic version of this wind that is responsible for auroral displays on the Earth.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space03060207.html

Optical Tempest Hack

Security researchers have discovered that data transmitted through modems and routers can be remotely reconstructed from the equipments LED status indicators. According to experiments, their light-to-information retrieval method is successful even when the light is captured at a considerable distance from the source. If you want to prevent people from spying on your data, you may want to tape up those blinking LEDs!
http://applied-math.org/optical_tempest.pdf

Chemtrails Still Happening

For years now, people have noticed planes flying in a certain and deliberate pattern in the skies above their cities. The planes leave what appears to be at first just the traditional contrail plume behind them as they go, but if you watch, it quickly becomes clear this is no ordinary contrail. The width is several times wider than the traditional trails planes leave in their wake, and it seems to hang in the sky almost as if it is suspended there. Some would argue that it is designed to do exactly that. These strange contrails also have the ability to obscure the radar screen of air traffic controllers, something ordinary contrails would never be able to do. So serious is this problem that when flying occurs over a city, the airport is notified that "military exercises" are in progress that day and all commercial aircraft is instructed to fly underneath its pattern so that they may be seen on radar. Rumors on what exactly is contained in these strange trails have been brewing and multiplying for as many years as they have been spotted.
Also see: this link.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/paranormal03050203.html

Fusion In A Flash?

The dramatic flashing implosion of tiny bubbles--in acetone containing deuterium atoms--produces tritium and nuclear emissions similar to emissions characteristic of nuclear fusion involving deuterium-deuterium reactions. This finding was reported in the 8 March issue of the peer-reviewed journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.Shock wave simulations also indicate that temperatures inside the collapsing bubbles may reach up to 10 million degrees Kelvin, as hot as the center of the sun. Although the high temperatures and pressures within the bubbles would be sufficient to generate fusion, the overall results of the study only suggest, but do not confirm, nuclear fusion in the bubbles? collapse. Nuclear fusion joins together light atoms, such as hydrogen, in a reaction that creates a third heavier atom and converts some of the original atoms? mass into energy. Nuclear fission, the type of reaction currently used in commercial power plants, splits heavy atoms like uranium and releases some of the excess energy stored as mass in the uranium atoms. Scientists have been eager to harness fusion as an energy source, because unlike fission, fusion uses readily available raw material as fuel and produces fewer radioactive waste products.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-03/aaft-fia030102.php

Meditating Brains Mapped in Monks

Scientists investigating the effect of the meditative state on Buddhist monks brains have found that portions of the organ previously active become quiet, whilst pacified areas become stimulated. "Perhaps that [spiritual] sense of reality is more accurate than our scientific everyday sense of reality" Andrew Newberg, a radiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, US, told BBC World Services Discovery programme: "I think we are poised at a wonderful time in our history to be able to explore religion and spirituality in a way which was never thought possible."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1847000/1847442.stm

Mars Odyssey images: A lot of ice

Gamma ray spectrometry investigator William Boynton said, "The signal weve been getting loud and clear is that theres a lot of ice on Mars. ... All the way from the south pole up to about -60 degrees latitude."
http://europe.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/03/01/mars.odyssey.briefing/index.html