The Rogue Scholar

Three Americans Share 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics

3 Americans share 2009 Nobel physics prize

By MATT MOORE and KARL RITTER, Associated Press Writers Matt Moore And Karl Ritter, Associated Press Writers 16 mins ago

STOCKHOLM – Three Americans whose 1960s research laid the foundation for today's world of computerized images and lightning-fast communication shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for their work developing fiber-optic cable and the sensor at the heart of digital cameras.

Charles K. Kao, 75, was cited for discovering how to transmit light signals over long distances through glass fibers as thin as a human hair. His 1966 breakthrough led to the creation of modern fiber-optic communication networks that carry voice, video and high-speed Internet data around the world.

"What the wheel did for transport, the optical fiber did for telecommunications," said Richard Epworth, who worked with Kao at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in Harlow, England in the 1960s. "Optical fiber enables you to transmit information with little energy over long distances and to transmit information at very high rates."

Kao solved the problem of transmitting through miles of glass without having the glass itself absorb the signal. Corning Glass Works built on his ideas to create the first fibers that could be used for large-scale long-distance communications, making today's Internet possible.

Kao said he never expected the award despite the vast changes that resulted from his research.

"Fiber-optics has changed the world of information so much in these last 40 years," he said in a statement released by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he was formerly vice chancellor.

Willard S. Boyle, 85, and George E. Smith, 79, were honored for inventing the eye of the digital camera, a sensor able to transform light into a large number of pixels, the tiny points of color that are the building blocks of every digital image.

Their charge-coupled device, or CCD, is found today in devices ranging from the cheapest point-and-shoot digital camera to robotic medical instruments equipped with video cameras that let surgeons perform delicate operations deep inside the human body. It also revolutionized astronomy by letting spacecraft equipped with digital cameras take images from previously unseen regions of outer space and transmit them back to earth.

The work of the three men is "something that has really changed our lives," said Joseph Nordgren, chair of the academy's physics committee. "The impact on science is enormous."

Read the rest of the article here.  Enjoy!

Words Worth Expunging

It's been extremely hectic here, with Blackboard going under, the new semester beginning, and the library's wiping out our Fiction section. (In the long term, a good idea that I pushed for but in the short term, I have three carts full of books pulled from the shelves for lacking call number labels, and more than a few of them were mis-cataloged when they came in.)  Not to mention my other writing projects which are consuming pretty much all my time not spent eating, sleeping or commuting to and from work. So I haven't been around as often as I would like.

Things will calm down eventually which will give me more time to think and write, but in the meantime I found this wonderful article on Truthout.org from Johann Hari of The Independent UK:

Lies, Damned Lies ... and the Doublespeak I Would Expunge

Wednesday 02 September 2009

by: Johann Hari  


    The English language needs periodically to be given a spring-clean, where we scrape off the phrases that have become stuck to the floor and toss out the rotting metaphors that have fallen down the back of the settee. George Orwell warned that language will inevitably become cluttered with phrases that have lost their meaning - or, worse, are actually "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". He advised: "If one gets rid of these bad habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration."

    I'm not talking about the clichés that crowd us every day. "Your call is very important to us..." we are told, by automated voices that don't give a toss about our call, because if they did, they'd employ somebody to actually answer the damn phone. "With all due respect..." you'll be told, before being thoroughly disrespected. They are disingenuous, but they don't have political consequences.

    No - I am talking about phrases that, while posing as neutral descriptions of the world, contain a hidden political agenda that then moulds the assumptions of the listener. An obvious recent example is the phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques", a euphemism deliberately created by the American right to disinfect torture and make it sound reasonable. Language is often deliberately bent and misshapen for political reasons in this way. For example, in the 1980s, the proponents of the failed "War on Drugs" fought hard to turn the phrase "drug use" - plain, straightfoward, and unloaded - into "drug abuse." It evokes sinister images - it sounds like "child abuse" - but what does it mean? How is somebody who smokes cannabis to relax once a week "abusing" the drug? Do they beat up their spliffs?

    These phrases can be successfully driven from the language: during the Vietnam War, news reports blandly referred to slaughtered civilians as "collateral damage" - a bloodless phrase that evokes nothing. Today, even the Pentagon press officers avoid those words when describing the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan, because it has been so thoroughly satirised.

If you have a few minutes you really should read the whole thing. Enjoy!

The Life of Nonconformity

A couple of years ago, Jonathan Coulton wrote A Talk with George, a song about an imaginary talk with George Plimpton in a bar.  You could listen to it or read the lytics, and leave it at that. Alternately (or perhaps additionally), you could read Chris Guillebeau's blog, titled The Art of Nonconformity, often. (It's linked to the "Just Plain Cool" typelist to the left.) Chris is planning to visit every country in the world within 5 years and I hope he makes it. I for one plan to check back with Chris often.

A Lunar Addendum

In my haste to get yesterday's post up and done with, I completely overlooked this postscript from James Howard Kunstler's website on the subject:

    Tom Wolfe wrote a fabulous op-ed in the Sunday New York Times commemorating the Apollo 11 moon landing of 1969.  In it, he speculated that the achievment itself spelled the end of the NASA program because it lacked a philosopher corps that might have furnished it with more meaning beyond its element of "single combat" between the US and the Soviets in the "space race."   This meaning, he said, might have been supplied by someone like NASA's chief engineer Wernher Von Braun, who once stated (in effect) before a congressional committee that  "...we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.... Unfortunately, NASA couldn't present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent."
    The further trouble, of course, is now that we sentient creatures seem to be in the process of destroying our home planet, how might we justify our spread to other worlds? We've fallen short both in resources and philosophy.  In our current state of evolution we seem unlikely to ever again go further afield than the moon and not exactly worthy of making trips elsewhere anyway.  Stay tuned a few hundred thousand years....

As I wrote yesterday, a return to the Moon and a trip to Mars would be great if they happen . . . if not, well, we had our chance.

RS Edit: An additional article on the wackiness of the "Space Race" by William Normam Grigg is here.

Scenes from a "Tea Party"

According to some, Barack Obama is black. According to others, he is multi-racial. According to still others, he is African-American.

But according to the folks at Dick Armey's Freedom Works Foundation propaganda outfit, our president is apparently a Nazi, a Soviet Communist, a Subgenius, or Hitler.  I'm unclear as to whether that's in any particular order, or if the categories overlap in some strange way.

Fred Clark explains how. Enjoy! (Buy the book.)

Pity the Rich Folk . . . For the Moment

This has nothing to do with libraries (unless you happen to be a legal librarian or working in a B-school library at the moment.) But it's too good to pass up, so here is Bill Bonner's opening bit from today's Daily Reckoning:

Where the Bailout Money is Really Going
By Bill Bonner 

Pity the rich. Pity the CEOs. Pity the capitalists.

Poor Warren. He's down to his last $25 billion. And Bill Gates can barely hold his head up; his pile has shrunk to barely $18 billion.

And do a Google search of "AIG outrage" and you will get 621,000 hits.

Alas, being rich isn't as easy or as much fun as it used to be.

The rally paused yesterday. The Dow lost 7 points. It could be over. More likely, it will run for a few months. Gradually, people will come to think that this is the real thing. They'll begin to imagine that it is 2003 all over again. Of course, it's not...this market has nothing in common with the Great Rebound of 2003-2007. (More below...)

Oil traded at $47 yesterday; it is slipping toward the $50 level. And the dollar is slipping around too - it is losing ground against the euro, now trading at $1.29/$. But it is mostly steady against gold, which seems to like the $900-$950 range...for now. We have a feeling it's going to go much, much higher before all this is over. See here.

AIG is today's main story. Everyone is appalled, outraged...or apoplectic about it. First, we under-reported the amount in bonuses paid out. The real amount is $450 million, says the Wall Street Journal...and one member of Congress charges that many bonuses were disguised as other things...and that the real total is more like $1 billion. 

The average lumpenvoter has no idea how bailouts work. He was willing to believe that giving Wall Street hundreds of billions in taxpayer money would somehow make his house go up in price, but now that he sees how it really operates, he is ticked off about it. He may not understand macroeconomics, but he knows chicanery when he sees it. 

Under pressure, AIG revealed what it did with the bailout money. It came as no shock to us to discover Goldman Sachs at the top of the list of recipients. Goldman's main man was in the room with the feds - the only representative of Wall Street - when the decision was made to rescue AIG. What's more, the feds' main man at the time - Hank Paulson - also used to be the top honcho at Goldman. So the fix was in. The government gave money to AIG and AIG gave it to a long list of speculators - including Goldman.

This seems perfectly natural to us. If we'd been in on the fix we would have steered some of the loot our way. But the politicians are feigning shock and horror. Senator Grassley even said AIG management should "resign or commit suicide." He later calmed down and said he didn't mean it. 

But we would have simply edited his remarks, giving the schmucks at AIG a last chance to exit with honor: "Resign AND commit suicide, in that order."

Barney Frank added that "maybe it's time to fire some people." Why not? The feds own 80% of the insurance giant now. Go ahead; fire all the people you want. That's about the only pleasure a real capitalist has left to him. Reach out...and fire someone today!

Elsewhere in the news, the economy continues to deteriorate. Industrial production fell 1.4% in February. And credit card defaults are at a 20- year high. 

Misters Smoot and Hawley seem to still be on the federal payroll. The news this morning is that they began a trade war with Mexico and the Mexicans have already retaliated. That's all we know about it...

But back to the tribulations of the rich...

First, Mr. Market is downsizing fortunes - fast. In the last 12 months, the average rich person has probably lost half his wealth. Not only did he own millions worth of stocks and real estate...he was also among the privileged few to get into good deals on derivatives, SIVs, hedge funds and private equity. Many of those complicated and conflicted assets have been wiped out completely. Or, maybe he was unlucky enough to count Bernie Madoff as a friend.

Second, what Mr. Market doesn't take, Mr. Politician is looking at. All over the world, plans are afoot to increase his taxes...and close down his tax havens. President Obama has already revealed his plans to soak the rich. Every other group will come out even...or better...from Obama's tax proposals. But the rich are going to be saturated...marinated...soaked to the bone.

And third, the poor rich guy has become a pariah. He doesn't get invited to charity events anymore - or even to join the guys after work for a beer. Europeans have always distrusted rich people. But in America, a rich man used to be respected - just because he was rich. People asked his opinion on politics...on fashion...on art. He was presumed to be an authority on all things and was generally treated with respect...even deference. 

But now rich are seen as chumps, losers, incompetents and malefactors. Even Americans look at rich people and think they must be either stupid or corrupt.

"Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oubli , parce qu' il a t proprement fait." said Balzac. Which has been paraphrased to "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Of course, he was referring to France, where it is has probably always been true. Money is dirty in France. But in America, money was supposed to be clean...innocent...honest and forthright. The richest man in town always sat in the front pew in church and stood for election to local office. 

But come the depression and even the rich suffer. And unlike the starving urchins, unlucky widows and innocent orphans, no one cries a tear for the rich. Here at The Daily Reckoning we always take the side of the underdog...and always support the lost cause. So when we think of the rich...those darling people with their Italian suits...German cars...and Swiss bank accounts...our cheek gets a little moist. For we - and we alone - still admire and respect the rich. Of course, the rich are human beings too - just like the rest of us. And yes, dear reader...we still despise them as much as anyone else. When it comes to intelligence or moral rectitude, they are probably no better than the lower classes, though probably no worse. But we still admire and respect their money. Their money is no better either - but they have more of it.

The rest is here. Enjoy!

7 Things Making You Miserable

I expect to find many things in my travels along the Intarwebs--usually the stuff I happen to need for work, like subscription lists, ISBN and ISSN numbers, LOC catalog data, etc.  Occasionally I'l find something I didn't expect but like, and very rarely I'll come across something that not only did I not expect but cannot stop reading.

I certainly did not expect to find any example of the last category in the online pages of Cracked Magazine.  But here it is, an extraordinarily well written article titled "7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable." It's the best thing you'll read today. Trust me.

Enjoy!

Digging the Truth Out of the White House

I found this artcle at Truthout.org this morning. Archivists and historians should read this. And so should everyone else. 

Here is the excerpt:

Last Secrets of the Bush Administration

by: Charles Homans, The Washington Monthly

How to find out what we still don't know.

  In March 2001, U.S. Archivist John W. Carlin received a letter from Alberto Gonzales, then counsel to the newly inaugurated president George W. Bush. It concerned an important deadline that was looming-one that Bush owed to Richard Nixon.

  In 1974, Congress ordered a lockdown on all records kept by the Nixon White House, afraid that the outgoing president would try to wipe out the paper trail of his disastrous second term and chastened by the recent destruction of decades' worth of FBI files by the late director J. Edgar Hoover's loyal secretary. That order was expanded four years later into a law requiring that all presidents' papers-everything from briefings to personal notes and everyday communications between the president, vice president, and their staffers-be handed over to the National Archives twelve years after their terms ended for eventual public release. Ronald Reagan was the first chief executive to whom the Presidential Records Act applied, and his papers were due to be turned over to Carlin at the beginning of Bush's term.

  Gonzales wanted Carlin to delay the release until June. His letter didn't say why, but Carlin agreed. Then in June, Carlin got another memo from Gonzales-Bush's attorney now wanted until the end of August. Carlin agreed again. The extensions continued until November, when Bush issued an executive order: effective immediately, the release of presidential records would require the approval of both the sitting president and the president whose records were in question, rather than just the former. It was what open-government advocates would later describe as a two-key system: under Bush's rule, Nixon could have buried the Watergate tapes without explaining himself to anyone.

  Bush's executive order had little to do with any concerns of Reagan himself, whose estate has since shared his papers enthusiastically. Some administration critics theorized at the time that Bush was trying to shield from scrutiny his father's vice presidential records, which were among the Reagan White House documents-but ultimately it wasn't really about George H. W. Bush, either. It was about the new president and vice president, and the kind of government they intended to run. Bill Clinton's White House had been relatively obliging in matters of secrecy, handing over millions of pages of documents-down to the White House Christmas card list-when Congress demanded them. Things would be different under Bush. "I think they thought Clinton was too open, had caved in to Congress too much," Carlin says. "It was a different philosophy."

And here is the rest of the article. 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!

Was Karl Marx Right? Well, Sort of . . .

I'm posting this article from the UK Times entirely because A) I can almost guarantee nothing like this will ever be presented by any American mainstream media publication (if I turn out to be wrong on that, please send me the links or citations) and B) the article closes with an extended quote from Alexei Sayle.

My own idea is that, yes Marx was right, sort of, up to a point,  but it's more complicated than that. And that seems to be similar to the consensus presented both by the author and the additional comments by various students of Marx. But I've written on that already and I won't go into it again today (I can't compete with Alexei Sayle and know better than to try.)
Enjoy!