The Rogue Scholar

Einstein was Right! (Who Knew?)

From the Agence France Presse:

e=mc²: 103 Years Later, Einstein's Proven Right

Thu Nov 20, 6:56 pm ET

PARIS (AFP) – It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.

The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent?

The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.

In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.

The e=mc2 formula shows that mass can be converted into energy, and energy can be converted into mass.

By showing how much energy would be released if a certain amount of mass were to be converted into energy, the equation has been used many times, most famously as the inspirational basis for building atomic weapons.

But resolving e=mc2 at the scale of sub-atomic particles -- in equations called quantum chromodynamics -- has been fiendishly difficult.

"Until now, this has been a hypothesis," France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said proudly in a press release.

"It has now been corroborated for the first time."

For those keen to know more: the computations involve "envisioning space and time as part of a four-dimensional crystal lattice, with discrete points spaced along columns and rows."

Voila!

Last Call for 2008 NYTSL Dinner/Meeting

From Angela Sidman of the New York Technical Service Librarians group:

Reminder:  Online Registration closes Tuesday, November 18th!

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New York Technical Services Librarians

Fall Dinner Meeting

Friday, November 21, 2008

 

TOPIC: The Reference Librarian's Toolkit

SPEAKER: Thomas Mann, Library of Congress, Reference Specialist

Join us for an evening with Thomas Mann as he discusses how he views the relationship between reference and cataloging.

For more information on this program and for online registration, please go to http://www.nytsl.org/fall2008.htm

WHERE and WHEN:

Princeton Club of New York, 15 West 43rd St. (Bet. 5th & 6th Ave.), New York, N.Y. 10036

Cash Bar   6:00-6:45 PM

Dinner  6:45-7:45 PM

Program  7:45-9:00 PM

ONLINE REGISTRATION DEADLINE: Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Please visit http://www.nytsl.org/fall2008.htm.

NYTSL programs are supported through the generous sponsorship of EBSCO.

If you're a cataloger, Tech Service Librarian, or a library student interested in the subject matter, this meeting is a great place to network. I'll be there (as will Mrs Rogue Scholar) and I hope you will as well. And no, you don't have to register for the whole thing--you're allowed to just come for the lecture and discussion. If you're a member, you can renew your dues, and if you're not a member you can become one there.

Deadline is tonight!

Some Items to Not Miss

It's been busy. Over the past two days I went through a number of false starts, questionable instructions, failed FTP attempts, etc., but I finally got the most recent Java client for Symphony Workflows installed on my PC. It's a very nice package  but needs a huge amount of energy to analyze and then I'll need to figure out how to configure it properly for our library then train staff to work with it. In the meantime, the C client remains in use, which means that I can take this at my own pace.

That said, in my travels across the intarwebs, I came across a few things you should probably read.

First take a look at Portfolio.com's Michael Lewis (of Liar's Poker fame) and his massive 9-page article about the death of Wall Street.

That done, scoot over to Tomdispatch.com and read what Tom has to say on the subject of just what President-elect Obama has in store for him beginning January 20, 2009.  (For an extra treat you can listen to this podcast he recorded with Lew Rockwell.) In that same vein, I'd suggest reading what Glen Greenwald has to say about the fact that Obama's not going to make things better just because we happen to like him more than we did his predecessor--that means he's no more likely to make things worse because we'd rather have a Republican in office as well, by the way. The point is that if all he does is move into the emperor's throne, we're actually moving backwards, not forwards.

Finally, Justin Raimondo over at Antiwar.com suggests that being anti-war means, well, being against war, not for it. Certainly it means reassessing why we started a given war and what it's costing us to maintain (or expand).

For what it's worth, I voted for Obama and I don't regret it (I may do so in four years' time, but for now, he's got the benefit of the doubt.) I'm glad he won. But I would ask everyone else who voted for him to keep in mind that fixing the country doesn't just mean changing the guy in the driver's seat. If old Number 43 screwed the country up (and I think d he did) it wasn't merely because he had the common sense of an overripe cantaloupe and Dick Cheney controlling what he heard and from whom. It was because the Congress and the Supreme Court let him get away with it. From what I see and hear the legislative and economic system that we all depend on for our daily bread in one way or another is broken, and mere hope and platitudes are not going to fix it. Holding our elected officials' feet to the fire will be worth a great deal more over the next four years.

Anyway, read. (And enjoy!)

NYPL Puts Its 'Treasures' Online

I'm not sure how I missed this article in USA Today the other day but since I obviously did, let me correct matters:

The New York Public Library quietly rolled out a new video series last month. Titled "Treasures," it showcases 11 gems of the library's vast collection of more than 50 million items.

And since then it has joined Facebook, broadening an online reach that already included YouTube and iTunes pages to gain more of an audience — which, for one of the world's largest public libraries, includes "everybody from preschool toddlers to the greatest writers in the world," says president Paul LeClerc.

Curators and administrators whittled a list of hundreds of ideas to record videos of the most "visually grabbing," says director David Ferriero.

The library has made the videos available on its site, nypl.org, as well as on YouTube— where its photography piece is by far its most popular with more than 13,000 views. The video, "Knowing What to See" is the only one featuring current events: the drug trade in Afghanistan as photographed by Stephen Dupont.

His works "you can appreciate both aesthetically and for its relevance in what's happening in the world today," curator Stephen Pinson says in the video, comparing it to photos from the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Depression.

The rest of the article is here and you should take a look at the website at NY Public.  Enjoy!

"The Good Life" by Chris Sullins

In light of my comment on the previous post--that soldiers routinely see things the rest of us literally can not imagine, much less comprehend--I'd like to direct you to an essay by Chris Sullins that is beautifully written and disturbingly instructive.  An except is as follows:

Every year at springtime when factory hybrid seeds were still being put into the ground my friends and I would shoot rifles across an open field into a massive stump at the base of a hill. The original tree had been cut before our own fathers had been born but it was still hard enough to easily catch bullets from everything fired at it up through 300 Winchester Magnum. The old stump had literally absorbed thousands of rounds of military ammunition brought in from around the globe and shot at it.

It was during one of these afternoons of shooting after emptying a magazine and beginning the walk across the recently disked field that I stumbled on the edge of a stone. Although it had broken the surface of the dirt it had remained hidden from my view by some short weeds. It wasn’t unusual for stones to rise in the field and we would carry these off to the side of the planting area. When I pulled this one completely from the dirt I noticed immediately it was far different than any other we had ever pulled before.

The shape was somewhere between round and oval and somewhat smooth for the type of material. It was a little large for one hand to comfortably cup around. The first comment out of someone’s mouth was that it looked like a small “dinosaur egg” but even that still didn’t seem right to our novice eyes. Our gut feeling was that it was fashioned by man and not by nature. It didn’t have the groove around it that was characteristic of the stone axes found elsewhere in the county. I wondered out loud if it was a pestle for grinding grain.

I gave the stone to my father who knew someone who collected Native American artifacts. I returned to work and some weeks later my father came back with information on the stone. He was told it was a very old first tool used to make other tools. It was before the time of the more recent native inhabitants of our land. When my father had described the place where I found the stone in a field below a small hill leading to a short plateau, the expert had commented it sounded like a good spot for “continuous human habitation”. Many parts of our county and the surrounding counties in other states had a great reputation for hunting and fishing so this didn’t surprise us.

The hunting hadn’t always been that good. This was not for a lack of ability and effort, but rather the local wildlife had in fact been nearly depleted. Years after finding the stone I spoke with an elder from one of the last remaining native tribes in the neighboring state only a few miles away over the boundary line. During one of our conversations (and when an elder is speaking, one listens more than talks), he told me how life for the tribal members had been very difficult during the Great Depression.

After an appropriate pause of silence, I asked about hunting to supplement food for survival during this time because I had come to know his local area as a hunter’s paradise. In very few words he described this had still been a hardship for his people. He didn’t use the word “depleted”, a direct action phrase such as “hunted out”, or go into yearly hunting harvest data with a chart illustrating a decline. He told me “We would call the people out to look at the track when someone found one. This didn’t happen often back then.” It didn’t a long pause of silence as the simplicity and concise accuracy of this description hit me over the head like a rock.

The entire article is here, and you should definitely find time to read it. Enjoy!

This Veterans Day, U.S. Soldiers Say "Stop the War"

This Veterans Day, U.S. Soldiers Say 'Stop the War'

By Benjamin Lewis and Brandon Neely, AlterNet
Posted on November 11, 2008, Printed on November 11, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106404/

On this day, Veteran's Day, we would like to express to the American public why we, veterans of the Global War on Terror, have chosen to refuse orders to reactivate into military service. We are direct witnesses to the horrors of this war, having experienced its atrocities at their source, and we have decided that we can no longer carry out these illegal and immoral policies.

We believe that veterans and active-duty GIs are in a key position to stop illegal and unjust war, and we are inspired by the resistance of troops who stood against the war in Vietnam. One of the preeminent reasons for the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was increasing dissent among the active-duty troops stationed abroad and at home. By the end of the war, there were entire units refusing to participate in combat, many going as far as outright mutiny.

The United States learned a lesson from the Vietnam War: that it is unlikely, except in the event of self-defense, that regular civilians will execute the life-threatening orders that are given to them by military authority. The solution of policy makers was to create an all-volunteer force that negated the need for a draft. This translates into a mercenary force composed of America's disadvantaged: a sector of the U.S. demographic that is particularly susceptible to military recruitment for lack of other options and finding themselves with deployment orders again and again.

To compensate for huge pitfalls in recruitment since the invasion of Iraq, the military has resorted to recalling former service members. This policy is known as "involuntary activation" and utilizes deactivated service members who still have time on their contracts in the Individual Ready Reserves (IRR) to fill shortcomings in specific job specialties. The abuse and misuse of this policy has escalated under the current administration to such a degree that it can now only be viewed as a "backdoor draft" that targets the same disadvantaged individuals the military sought out for enlistment, namely because they are better at not questioning orders.

However, we have now begun to question these orders. We are veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and members of the IRR who have refused or will refuse any activation orders that would lead to us serving an unjust and imperial U.S. foreign policy. It is a prevailing notion that this refusal is unpatriotic, but we consider our actions the only choice. Not only did the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan do great harm to the people of those countries, but it undermined the ostensible goal with which the wars were begun: Instead of stopping terrorism, it has proliferated terrorism, an expectation that was predicted well before the war started.

By refusing activation, we are refusing to participate in wars that serve the purposes of furthering the careers of politicians and high-ranking officers. We openly support other IRR members who follow in these footsteps. The military is a force that rules through fear of retribution for disobeying its will. In reality, more than a third of IRRs simply refuse to report to duty. Most of the rest report out of fear that the military will change their discharge status or prosecute them for desertion, but up to this point, prosecution has been rare. Members of the IRR are not under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), and thus far, the military has had a practice of not prosecuting them with criminal charges unless they report in some form or function to activate. Very few willingly volunteer for activation.

There can be no promise that President-Elect Barack Obama will stop the stressful and unfair techniques of back-to-back deployments, "stop-loss" or the "backdoor draft" that are damaging the psychology of veterans in irreparable ways. Nor that he will stop encouraging global violence by unlawful uses of force. It is in this vein that we turn to organizations like Courage to Resist, Iraq Veterans Against the War and many other large-scale and grassroots organizations to solicit change in a largely unrepresentative democracy, and to allow the voices of the people to ring through the halls of the Capital.

Benjamin Lewis, former Marine Corps mortarman, Iraq veteran, IRR recall resister, peace activist

Brandon Neely, former U.S. Army Military police officer, Iraq veteran, IRR recall refuser

We owe our veterans a great debt. They have seen what the rest of us can merely imagine. Three or four million more soldiers like these two and we may see an outbreak of peace. We can hope, anyway.

Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Librarian

I am hoping now that the election is over (more or less) and Barack Obama is safely considered the U.S. President elect that I can back to dealing primarily with library-related issues, ideas and articles. That's not to say that politics is boring or unimportant. Neither is it to say that I'll now refrain from posting things of a non-library nature I find genuinely interesting, but enough is enough.

On that note, I'd like to point out Denise O'Shea's FDU Library Technology News weblog. I just found it after losing contact with Denise some time ago (we worked together at NYAM for a while and she is now the Systems Librarian/Tech Support Specialist at Fairleigh Dickinson University.) It (and she) promises to be an amazing resource for those interested in systems librarianship. You can find this link in the Library Blogs typelist in the left margin.

Enjoy!

Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States

Congratulations, Mr. President-Elect. And congratulations, America, for finally outgrowing your teen years. Let's hope the next four years give us a government where dignity, common sense, and good policy prevail.

Vote, Damn You! VOTE!

I'm tempted to say that I care that you vote rather than who you vote for. On some level I believe that. The big money donations which generally come from corporate accounts rather than individuals has been contributing well to both candidates, but they've been donating a bit more to Obama because they believe he'll win. In terms of policy--at least to judge from what passed for policy discussion during the debates--there's not that much difference between them. Neither candidate mentioned implementing a comprehensive national health care system, overhauling and re-regulating out financial system, or reducing Pentagon-based spending, for example. That said, I'm voting for Obama. Take that as an example to follow, or not.

There are many moments when race really does matter to people. I think tomorrow will be one of those times. I think a great many otherwise well-informed, highly educated, confident (dare I say, liberal-minded, or perhaps conservative) folks are going to go into that booth, pull the curtain and just not be comfortable pulling the lever for The First Black President of the United States. Some people may hesitate then pull the lever anyway, and to them I say, good for you. But some others just won't be able to do it. To them, I say this: if you must vote for a white man, vote for Bob Barr. If you must vote for a woman, vote for Cynthia McKinney. There may be good reasons to vote for John McCain, but I confess I can't think of any at the moment. I haven't been able to think of any over the past six months. In 2000, when McCain sounded like a sane human being, I could understand voting for him for President. Not any more.

And this year promises to be even more (cough) interesting in terms of problems at the booth than 2000 or 2004. The Republican Party (and McCain's campaign in particular) has shown itself to be the greatest den of scum and villainy we've had to look at in a long time. They will try to get their man in any way they can and if that means lying to people about what's going on before, during, and after the election, they'll do it. With that in mind, here are a few things to be aware of as you head for that curtained booth:

First, if you are registered to vote, you have the right to cast a ballot. Period.

You can not be prevented from voting if you arrive at your polling place with unpaid parking tickets or mortgage payments.

You must go to vote on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, just like everyone else in the U.S.

You do not need to go through some wacky arbitrary test to prove your identity before you vote, although a photo ID is a good thing to take with you, just in case.

Know your polling place ahead of time and arrive early.

Nobody in this country can vote by phone. You must go to your polling place or mail in an absentee ballot.

Verify your registration beforehand if you need to.

Finally, if poll workers insist you can't vote for whatever reason, let someone know about it.

Now, vote, damn you! Vote! (Tomorrow . . .)