02.07.08
Posted in 2¢ at 13:36 by RjZ
CNN.com reports that “Romney suspends presidential campaign,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. Really, how is “suspending” not the same as “backing out” of the U. S. presidential race? Is he assuming that 71 year old McCain really is on deaths door and he can step back in before the republican convention?
Funnier, though is his comment: “In this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.” Because, obviously, if a republican doesn’t win, the terrorists will have won.
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12.26.07
Posted in 2¢ at 15:15 by RjZ
I just wanted to note that early in the year I complained about how nuts Pat Robertson is.
Indeed, according to CNN, Pat’s got some news for us. He tells us “a terrorist attack on the United States would cause a ‘mass killing’ late in 2007. ‘I’m not necessarily saying it’s going to be nuclear,’ he said. CNN continues “Robertson said God told him about the impending tragedy during a recent prayer retreat.”
Well, he’s got a few days, but it doesn’t look good for another Robertson prediction. Surprise, surprise. Can we all agree to stop listening to him now?
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12.24.07
Posted in 2¢ at 10:21 by RjZ
Shopdropping sounds pretty hilarious, even when I don’t agree with the message. Regardless, I wish I could have seen this battle:
“At Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., religious groups have been hitting the magazines in the science section with fliers featuring Christian cartoons, while their adversaries have been moving Bibles from the religion section to the fantasy/science-fiction section.”
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12.20.07
Posted in 2¢ at 9:31 by RjZ
I really need to get back to blogging. Sorry to my avid fans (all three of you.) Just a quick update…I haven’t been writing much because I’ve been traveling quite a bit (for work, alas—few stories) and just haven’t had time. Not enough time to, well, to gather my thoughts on things.
So, the simple plan: write more scattered things! Therefore, dear readers, expect the quality to plummet, but the quantity to increase! That’s something, isn’t it?
Remember, though, I do have the flickr-y photo-blog stuff going….! Register at flckr and comment! I’m not going to make you, but I really think you should be embarrassed by your feeble excuses why you don’t.
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11.23.07
Posted in 2¢ at 8:48 by RjZ
A 19 year old woman in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to receive 200 lashes (and now another six months in jail!) for being the victim of rape. Senator Hillary Clinton is so angry about this that she’s blasted President Bush for not condemning Saudi Ariabia and not calling on King Abdullah to repeal this sentence.
It may be obvious to the kind of people reading this blog that the woman’s punishment is absurd. I too, am opposed to many of the laws around the world and quite a few in my own country. Some laws are downright appalling (such as the Sharia laws of Saudi Arabia) and many of them violate basic human rights that I should be applicable across borders.
Individually, we each have a right to express our opinion of these laws and even act against them through boycots and even sanctions, but no country has the right to directly interfere with the sovereignty of another without expecting war.
Where does Ms. Clinton (and now Joe Biden has joined her) get off demanding that Mr. Bush go tell the leader of a sovereign nation what laws to enforce? How would a President Clinton respond to requests to punish the free speech of anti-muslim activists? How will Hillary react to cries that homosexuality be banned (as it is in many of our allies’ countries)? Will President Clinton wonder what the first man has to say when she receives a phone call from King Abdullah asking her to leave office as women in his country aren’t even afforded the right to drive a car, let alone become president. Does she really think King Abdullah ought to have this right to tell her how to run the United States of America? How then, does she expect anyone to take this grandstanding seriously?
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11.15.07
Posted in 2¢ at 20:49 by RjZ
You know, dear readers, when I haven’t posted anything for a while, it might be a good idea to check out my flickr site. It’s like a photo-blog and a picture is worth a thousand words I hear. That totally counts! Right? Um, of course it does. When nothing is happening here, you should look there, because, um, it’s boring here then. And that’s also where I “travel places, look at things, [take pictures of them], write your thoughts down..” If you log in, you can comment and they don’t spam you! Really.
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Posted in 2¢ at 20:40 by RjZ
I do enjoy watching and reading reading sci-fi now and again, but, as impressed as I am by the futuristic and clever ideas that writers create, I am also frequently disappointed by the lack of touch with reality they often are. Don’t they realize that technically educated geeks dominate their audiences?
During the recent Colorado Photonics Industry Association’s (CPIA) annual meeting students from local universities participated in a poster session and department chairs discussed photonics related progress in their universities. A sci-fi writer running low on ideas need go no further.
One poster was on cloaking. Cloaking’s already a popular sci-fi element and it was hard not to wonder, looking at the student’s paper, if he wasn’t talking pseudo science. The fact is that there are already small objects, meta-materials, that have a negative index of refraction making light bend around them in such a way that the light never even registers they were there. A meta-material is a material whose characteristics are not based upon its chemical properties, but rather on its structure. It’s like textured vegetable protein. You can make the stuff into almost anything, even though chemically, it’s still just soy.
Another poster discussed cancer cell detection between a Fabry-Perot interferometer. A Fabry-Perot interferometer is simply two semi-reflective plates parallel to each other. As the light bounces between them on its way in and then out of them, it makes special patterns. Through incredibly tedious and impressive mathematics, these students were able to describe how the patterns look when you pass certain kinds of healthy cells between the plates compared to decidedly similar cancer cells. I can see futuristic doctors testing your health by making you walk between two plates of glass.
There were solar cells made of organic plastics and bio-sensors made of chemically, microscopically, tethered RNA. The students were very impressive, indeed, but the really mind-bending stuff came later. In 2001 the Nobel prize for Physics was awarded to Colorado University faculty for their work on Bose-Einstein Condensates, BEC. BECs are a state of matter that is so cold, that even their tiniest internal vibrations begin to cease. In doing so, unfortunately for them, the attempt to break a law of quantum mechanics which says we can only know so well just exactly, I mean really exactly, where something is. To make up for their offense, the otherwise unnoticeable wave-function of these atoms spreads out and becomes measurable. If all the atoms cool off together, their wave-functions match up, or become coherent.
Coherence is exactly what is special about lasers and so these new BECs are really atom-lasers. Coherent streams of particles all acting like laser beams. They’re actually the exact opposite of laser-beams though, because where beams interact with matter to bounce around, for example off of mirrors, or be focused by lenses, these atom beams interact with light. They bounce off of walls of light and are focused by fields of light, all the while, completely unaffected by matter.
I am not even sure where sci-fi authors are going to go with this stuff, but these fascinating features of nature aren’t the stuff of science fiction, they’re happening, in the real world, at local Colorado universities. Looks like that latest sci-fi novel we’re reading is already behind the times!
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10.16.07
Posted in 2¢ at 7:39 by RjZ
Why does this happen? 9NEWS - Article - Several arrested for jumping on cop car I mean, your ‘team’ wins some apparently significant game and people decide to block intersections and jump up and down on police cars. Please, dear readers, tell me what the hell the point is.
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10.12.07
Posted in 2¢ at 12:14 by RjZ
So, Gore won the Nobel peace prize. Interesting. It doesn’t say much for Gore, after all, Yassir Arafat won it also, and I don’t know that he did much for world peace. The Nobel committee said Gore was “probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.” That’s hard to argue.
The loud, vocal, minority who believes, contrary to the views of most scientists, that climate change has not been contributed by humankind seems to think Gore’s pretty damn responsible too. They jumped right on CNN.com to complain about how he’s promoted pseudo science and the like, or that they selected Gore for political reasons. Those damn Norwegians, always mixing in American politics!
Another U.S. American has won the Nobel Peace prize. Regardless of what you may think of the award, it’s good press for this nation, and with Bush still not making friends outside of our borders, much less inside, these days, we could use all the help we can get.
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10.03.07
Posted in 2¢ at 9:33 by RjZ
Computer market analysts, journalists and bloggers are up in arms because Apple lowered the price for an iPhone. Sure they lowered it a lot and only a few months after people just bought the $600 (!) phone, but really, are we serious here? People are upset that they lowered the price?
Folks like Rob Enderle are calling it a backlash:
“Even if the price reduction didn’t happen to you, it happened to someone you know,” Enderle said, adding that “a lot of good alternatives are starting to emerge.”The Apple backlash stems from September’s unexpected $200 price cut for the iPhone two months after its release.
“Even if the price reduction didn’t happen to you, it happened to someone you know,” Enderle said, adding that “a lot of good alternatives are starting to emerge.”
There is gnashing of teeth that this was a horrible market debacle, but I’ve got news for you. People who line up, overnight, to buy a $600 phone-cum-modern art piece aren’t really customers you have to worry much about losing. They’re like delegates at the U.S. Republican or Democratic national party conventions. They’re sold! They drank the kool-aide. They’re about as likely to give up on Apple because they lowered the price as delegates are to switch political parties because analysts think they chose the wrong candidate.
Give me a break. At least now the phone is almost affordable for a few more of us.
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