There's really no point to this except that they got a bunch of really fast cars on a runway and put them through a quarter-mile. A Bugatti Veyron, a Lamborghini Aventador, a Lexus LFA, and a McLaren MP4-12C. If that doesn't sound kind of awesome to watch, then this is probably not the video for you.

h/t +Abe Rahey for the link...

This is an amazing photo. One of those that looks like it couldn't possibly be real.

(Has it ever occurred to you how spectacularly fortunate we are to live on a planet which can have total eclipses? It requires that the apparent size of the Moon and the apparent size of the Sun match to within a few percent, so that the Moon can hide the body of the Sun and reveal its corona alone. The coincidence required is so extraordinary that I doubt that one planet out of a thousand has it. Even if planets are commonplace, this is rare and beautiful. If there are aliens travelling our cosmos, then a solar eclipse may be the best place to find them: it's something you might come a long way to see. « Ça vaut le voyage, » as the Michelin guide says.)

h/t +Ahmed Amer.

Yesterday +Michelle May shared this quote, and I think it's worth talking about. Something I like about this is that it's a meaningful argument from both a theistic and an atheistic perspective. It directly wrestles with the question Euthypro asked: is something good because God loves it (well, the Gods, this is from Plato's dialogues) or does God love it because it is good? If the former, then "good" is completely arbitrary and defined as "whatever the gods happen to like;" if the latter, then divine goodness is arbitrary, rather than a fundamental property of the gods. 

Marcus Aurelius takes the second approach without hesitating. If the gods exist and are good, then they will like you because you have been a good person. If the gods' opinion of you depends on something other than whether you're a good person, then the gods aren't that great and you shouldn't give a damn what they think. And if the gods don't exist at all, then none of that matters, but being good is its own reward.

Plato and Marcus Aurelius were both discussing this in a much older religious context. In more modern contexts, the Christian approach -- that God is intrinsically good, and ought to be worshiped -- dominates the conversation so much that we often forget that there are other ways to talk about this.

Judaism deals with this in a very different way. For one thing, there are many different views of the afterlife in Judaism, no particular consensus on it, and it's not considered particularly central to the religion. Rather, moral behavior and having a close relationship to God are seen as two independent ends in their own right. You want to be a good person for basically the reason Marcus Aurelius says; and you want to be close to God because being close to God is awesome in its own right. It still runs up against Euthypro's dilemma, but at least in this case, the dilemma doesn't affect your individual behavior as much: you want to be good because that's the right thing to do. If God doesn't want you to be good, for some reason, then there are going to be some serious problems here, but the choice is clear: be good yourself.

Part of the way that this manifests is that in Judaism, the divine hand in human morality primarily takes the form of perpetually encouraging humans to make laws, establish codes of behavior, and debate and improve them at length. The suggestion that God, or God's chosen, is automatically good doesn't actually get a very strong basis; to take an obvious example, David, the Messianic king, is an utter dick and behaves in obviously shady ways (e.g. involving Batsheba and her husband). He even gets some divine ass-kicking for it. And sometimes God is a dick, too; how many times does Abraham, or Moses, or someone else, have to talk God out of killing a bunch of people? And they don't even always succeed at it. 

I think that there's a powerful lesson in this: that even God is not always right. The powerful are not good by virtue of their power, and it is expected and anticipated that we maintain our own moral compasses, and speak truth to power when it is needed. 

(I can also give a much more technical theological answer and explanation for this, but I'll save all of your sanity unless someone really wants to argue deep questions of Judaism)

This problem is simply harder in Christianity. Here you have God who is manifest in the world, and who judges people based on their conduct in life, with extremely serious consequences. Christianity doesn't distinguish between the ends of moral behavior and of closeness to what God wants; in general, it tends to prefer the latter. That brings Euthypro's question right to the forefront, and it now dictates how you should act. Most people largely fudge this question by assuming that the two do, in fact, line up pretty closely; but this tends to fail when, e.g., preachers start preaching hate from the pulpits. At this point, there are two basic things you can do: tacitly assume an independent moral standard, and that these preachers are wrong, or align with the preachers and justify hate as good. I would say that the split between people who do the first and the second is basically the split between people I do and don't want to spend any time around.

I'm not as familiar with approaches to this in Islam. I get the sense that the approach is largely more similar to the Jewish one -- not surprising, as they developed side-by-side for millennia -- but does someone with more experience in this have something to add?

Bill Clinton gave one of the best speeches I've heard in a decade tonight. I know that a lot of you are expecting me to give a deep analysis, but I'm kind of wiped right now, so just some quick thoughts:

He clearly outlined the difference between the two parties, especially on economic matters. Gave a picture of two competing visions, and argued for why he thinks one is better than the other. He called out specifics about what each party has done, both in and out of power, and about what Obama did in particular. And he managed to do this in a speech that was rousing and passionate without being condescending, electrifying without pandering to the audience's basest instincts – something I've seen way too often in speeches lately.

But what was really important to me about this speech was its deeply positive message. This wasn't, all told, an attack speech of the sort we're used to hearing at conventions: it was a speech about a vision for where we have been and where we can be in the future. It convinced me that there was a real plan here, and that if we get together and pull on this plan, we can make our country a better place than it is today.

And that's not something I get from a politician every day.

Go watch this speech. Not as a campaign speech, go watch it to hear where our country could be if we pull together. It's that good a speech.

(And BTW, don't bother looking for transcripts as-prepared; he went very far off-script and seems to have ad-libbed half of it)

How the price of paint is set in the hearts of dying stars

Today I’m going to try to explain the real reason that barns are painted red: nuclear fusion. And yes, this is an excuse to take a mad ride around some of the stranger corners of physics and chemistry in order to give you the real, this-is-not-BS, answer to a simple question.

This question got stuck in my head as a result of an episode of a long-forgotten sitcom called Head of the Class, about a high school class full of smart kids. (Sort of like Welcome Back, Kotter in reverse) This being an American show, it’s obligatory to occasionally emphasize the superiority of the ordinary virtue of “plain folk,” so in one episode the protagonists face off in some kind of academic contest with kids from a rural school, and end up losing because their city-slicker knowledge can’t answer the question “why are barns red?” (And this episode appears to have annoyed me enough that, several decades later when I have only the haziest memory of the show’s existence, I still remember it) The answer the show gives is “because red paint is cheaper,” which is absolutely true, but it doesn’t really tell you why red paint is cheaper. It clearly isn’t because the Central Committee for the Pricing of Paints has decreed that red shall be in vogue this century, or because of the secret Communist sympathies of early American farmers. In fact, to answer this we have to go all the way to the formation of matter itself.

Paints & Pigments & The Sun

First of all, let’s think about what paint is. At a minimum, paint is a combination of a binder (some material that dries to form a film, like acrylic or oil) and a pigment, some material which gives it a color. A pigment is a material which absorbs some colors of light and reflects others; most pigments are minerals. (There are also organic pigments, such as the Imperial Tyrian purple made from the snot of the Murex snail, but not as many, and they tend to be much more expensive for the simple reason that there are a lot more rocks than there are animals and plants.) So for something to be a cheap pigment, it has to be a good pigment, and it has to be cheap. So let’s figure out what makes each of these happen.

To be a good pigment, first and foremost, something has to have a nice, bright color. The way pigments produce color is that light shines on them, and they absorb some, but not all, of the colors of light. (Remember that white light is a mixture of many colors of light) For example, red ochre, a.k.a. hematite, a.k.a. anhydrous iron oxide (Fe2O3), absorbs yellow, green and blue light, so the light that reflects off of it is reddish-orange. (This happens to be the pigment that’s used in barn paint, so we’re going to come back to it.) Light is absorbed when a photon (a particle of light) strikes an electron in the pigment and is absorbed, transferring its energy to the electron. But quantum mechanics tells us that an electron can’t absorb just any amount of energy: the particular energies (and therefore colors) that it can absorb depend on the layout of the electrons in the material, which in turn depends on its chemistry.

The detailed calculations, or even the not-so-detailed calculations, are way beyond the scope of this post. (There are even whole books about it, like Nassau’s The Physics and Chemistry of Color) But there’s one important pattern which I can at least tell you about, which is that if you look at the various atoms which form a pigment, and you look at their outermost electrons (not the inner electrons, which are so tightly bound to their atom that they don’t participate in chemistry; all of chemistry is determined by the behavior of the outermost electrons around an atom) then it turns out that certain kinds of outermost electrons form pigments, and certain ones don’t.

The magic property is what’s called “angular momentum,” which basically measures how fast these outermost electrons are rotating around the nucleus. Electrons in atoms get angular momentum only in fixed increments (there’s that quantum mechanics again, only fixed increments allowed) and for historical reasons, the first few increments are named “s,” “p,” “d,” and “f.” On the periodic table, (http://www.webelements.com/) the elements whose outer electrons are “s” form the two tall leftmost columns; the “p” elements are the big square on the right; the “d” elements are the big block in the middle; and the “f” elements are the two rows off at the bottom. (If we ever make element 121, it would be the first “g” element) 

Electrons with less angular momentum spin in more spherical (rather than deformed) orbits, and when multiple electrons are trying to fly in the same spherical orbit, they repel each other pretty strongly. The result of this is that two “s” electrons meeting will have very different energies -- and it turns out that, in quantum mechanics, the amount of energy an electron can absorb is exactly the difference between these energy levels. So “s” means a big gap, “p” a slightly smaller one, and so on. And it turns out that “d” electrons are right at the sweet spot where that gap corresponds to visible light. 

Well, why are those particular colors of light visible? It’s because of the temperature of the Sun: our eyes didn’t evolve to see X-rays because there aren’t many X-rays to see around here. Instead, they’re very sensitive in the range of colors that the Sun produces, from red (around 780nm wavelength) to a peak brightness of yellow (around 600nm) all the way up to violet (around 400nm). Those colors correspond to energy gaps of about 0.3 electron volts (eV, a good unit of energy for studying atoms) which are right around the energies of chemical bonds involving d electrons. S- and p- bonds involve energies of 1-3 eV, corresponding to wavelengths around 100nm, in the far ultraviolet range.

Did we just get lucky that the Sun is yellow, and if we lived orbiting another star might the useful pigments come from p bonds? Surprisingly, the answer is no. The Sun’s color comes pretty directly from its temperature: it’s literally glowing yellow-hot, with a surface temperature of about 5,800K. The coolest stars, red dwarfs, are about 2,800K and glow red. The hottest stars, the type O stars, go up to about 40,000K, only 72nm; but it turns out that when a star gets any hotter than class F (about 7,000K, about 400nm -- blue) its lifespan starts to decrease precipitously. This is because the temperature of stars is actually fixed by the kinds of fusion reaction going on in their core, which I’ll get back to in a moment, and those hotter reactions burn through their fuel a lot faster. The net result is that any star that’s going to last long enough to have planets with life on them might be a bit redder or a bit bluer than our sun, but not radically so: and it’s those d-orbitals that are going to make the best pigments for anyone whose eyeballs evolved there.

How the price of iron is determined in the centers of stars

So now we know what makes a good pigment. What makes a cheap pigment? Obviously, that it’s plentiful. The red pigment that makes cheap paint is red ochre, which is just iron and oxygen. These are incredibly plentiful: the Earth’s crust is 6% iron and 30% oxygen. Oxygen is plentiful and affects the color of compounds it’s in by shaping them, but the real color is determined by the d-electrons of whatever attaches to it: red from iron, blues and greens from copper, a beautiful deep blue from cobalt, and so on.

So if we know that good pigments will all come from elements in that big d-block in the middle, the real question is, why is one of these elements, iron, so much more common than all of the others? Why isn’t our world made mostly of, say, copper, or vanadium?

The answer, again, is nuclear fusion. 

To explain this, we need to think about how fusion actually works. The basic principle is that two small atomic nuclei combine to form a bigger nucleus. Now, there are two forces at work here: there’s an electromagnetic force, which makes the positively-charged nuclei repel each other, and repel each other more and more as they get closer. And there’s the strong nuclear force, which is what holds nuclei together: it’s powerfully attractive, much stronger than the electromagnetic force, but it has the interesting property that it simply shuts off at distances of much more than about 1fm. (10^-15m, the size of a medium nucleus) So to make fusion happen, you need to somehow push two nuclei together with enough force (generally in the form of heat and pressure) to overcome their repulsion until they get within range of the strong force, at which point it will yoink them together with spectacular force and release a good deal of energy in the process.

This gives us two rules of thumb. As the nuclei involved get bigger, the amount of energy (heat and pressure, in particular) required to set fusion off gets higher, because you have more repulsion that you have to overcome before fusion can start. And second, as the nuclei get bigger, the amount of energy you get back from the fusion gets smaller: in the bigger nucleus that you would form, you still have all of this repulsion, but the strong force can only bind together the nucleons that are close to each other, so as the nucleus gets bigger you keep adding repulsion but you don’t keep adding attraction. 

This means that fusion of really small elements is very efficient; combining two hydrogen atoms is just great. (For various technical reasons, the slightly heavier isotopes of Hydrogen -- deuterium (a proton with a neutron) and tritium (a proton with two neutrons) do better than bare protons. That’s where the “D-T” of D-T fusion comes from, and it’s the kind that powers both the Sun and H-bombs.)

In fact, once the atoms get too big, you no longer get back any net energy from fusion: the last reactions which turn out to be net-positive are the ones that form atoms with 56 total neutrons and protons in them. Beyond that, fusion starts consuming more energy than it produces, and won’t light up anything. (If you go far enough beyond that, to 232 nucleons or more, you start to see nuclei that are so unstable that a swift kick will make them separate enough that repulsion takes over, and they explode with a bang: that’s nuclear fission, a subject for another time)

Now imagine a star. It starts out its life as a giant ball of primordial hydrogen from the formation of the universe, and under the tremendous pressure of gravity, it starts to fuse. As it fuses, it starts to form heavier elements like helium: but (rule 1) it takes higher temperatures than these mere hydrogen fusion temperatures to make helium do any fusing, so the Helium basically acts as a pollutant and just gums up the works. Ultimately, it reduces the efficiency of fusion so much that power levels start to go down.

But the only thing holding the star up was the energy of the fusion reactions, so as power levels go down, the star starts to shrink. And as it shrinks, the pressure goes up, and the temperature goes up, until suddenly it hits a temperature where a new reaction can get started. These new reactions give it a big burst of energy, but start to form heavier elements still, and so the cycle gradually repeats, with the star reacting further and further up the periodic table, producing more and more heavy elements as it goes.

Until it hits 56. At that point, the reactions simply stop producing energy at all; the star shuts down and collapses without stopping. This collapse raises the pressure even more, and sets off various nuclear reactions which will produce even heavier elements, but they don’t produce any energy: just stuff. These reactions only happen briefly, for a few centuries (or for some reactions, just a few hours!) while the star is collapsing, so they don’t produce very much stuff that’s heavier than 56. 

If the star is small, it will end up as a slowly-cooling cinder, or as a white dwarf. But if it’s big enough, then this collapse will send shock waves through the body of the star which bounce off the star’s core, pushing the collapsing wall of matter outward with more than enough energy to escape its gravity: the star explodes in a supernova, carrying off a good ⅓ of its total mass, and seeding the rest of the universe with elements heavier than the simple hydrogen we started with. Those elements, in turn, will join the mix for the next generation of stars, as well as the accretion clouds of stuff around them which turns into clumps rather than falling into those stars: that is, the planets. And this is how all of the chemical elements in the universe were formed.

How do we know that this is really where the elements came from? There’s a whole field of science around this, but the classic paper is commonly known as “B2FH” for its authors -- Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle. Using only the physics and the computational resources available to them in 1957, they calculated all of the various processes by which elements would be formed in stars, in enough detail to predict the ratios of elements which would be formed, and to predict the abundance ratios of chemical elements in our solar system. Amazingly enough, they made a pretty damned good and thorough prediction, enough that even then it was clear that this was a smoking gun -- and it’s been refined considerably since. 

So how does this tie in to red paint? Well, I told you before that the magic cutoff for ordinary fusion is at 56 nucleons. Because it’s the last point in the normal reaction chain, a lot of the fusion products tend to “build up” there before the star explodes, and so you get a lot more of isotope 56 than you do of anything except for the really light elements that didn’t fuse at all, or didn’t fuse much. (Check out the first figure in the B2FH paper, linked below) And what has 56 nucleons in it and is stable? A mixture of 26 protons and 30 neutrons -- that is, iron.

So it’s because of the details of nuclear fusion -- the particular size at which nuclei stop producing energy -- that iron is the most common element heavier than neon. And as we saw before, you have to be a d-block element to make a decent pigment, which means that iron is going to be, by far, the most plentiful pigment for any species which lives on a star that isn’t about to blow up. And it’s going to bond to oxygen, the most plentiful thing around in planetary crusts for it to bond to (only hydrogen and helium are more common, and they tend to evaporate), to form iron oxides: those rich, red ochres that we mix with oils to form a cheap, stable, red paint.

And that’s why barns are painted red.


To learn more:
Something a lot more interesting than you would guess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigment
The color of the Sun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight
Colors of stars, and a place to start about how they get them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_sequence
The abundance of elements in the universe, the Earth, the human body, and other places:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements
A nice diagram of how much energy you get from fusion and fission for various elements, thanks to +Jas Strong: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/imgnuk/bcurv.gif
The 1980’s sitcom that inspired this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090444/

To learn a lot more about color:
http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Chemistry-Color-2nd/dp/0471391069
To learn a lot more about how the elements are formed, the original B2FH paper: http://rmp.aps.org/pdf/RMP/v29/i4/p547_1

Photo by John Christopher: http://www.flickr.com/photos/67382043@N06/6153955066/

I have no idea why I find this clip so amusing, but I do. Some students figured out how to have a staged rendition of silent monks singing the Halleluia chorus from Handel's Messiah. I particularly like the short one on the far right.

h/t +Christine Bogart for the awesomeness.

Since I’ve heard that there’s some kind of religious festival going on this weekend, I thought it might be an interesting time to write something about the history of how Christianity came to have such a blend of non-Christian origins in it. There’s actually a very interesting history to this: in essence, it isn’t so much that Christianity absorbed external elements, as that through the tumult of the first six centuries CE, a bunch of European religions mixed and combined, and the Christianity we know today was the result of that -- it got its name on the label, so to speak.

To realize how big the difference between what came out and what came in is, just pick up the Christian Bible and read through the discussions between Jesus and the Apostles. This was, originally, a Jewish reform movement, responding to the particular skews and corruptions that had shown up in the (Pharisaic) leadership, concerned with economic reform, (e.g. Luke 12) a hard shift away from ritual towards personal piety, (e.g. Matthew 15) and a serious mystical trend. (Largely cut out of the “canonical” texts, but very present in the Egyptian texts) The first radical change came with Paul, who was interested in converting outsiders -- something that the earlier “followers of the Way,” as they called themselves, had very little interest in. But if you compare even Paul’s early churches with (say) medieval Christianity, or even most modern branches, you’ll see very little in common. How did this happen?

Let me start by setting up a few bits of history. We’re in the Classical Roman Empire, say around the year 100 CE. Rome is expanding everywhere; there’s a well-practiced routine when a new barbarian tribe is encountered. The Romans make offerings to the gods of that tribe, saying that they will build them a temple in Rome if they let this tribe be joined to the empire; then they go to war, win, and start to fold yet another tribe into the center. The erection of that temple isn’t something accidental: it’s part of what’s called the “Pax Deorum,” the peace of the gods, and what it really is is a public statement that these new people are being folded in to the society. These conquered barbarians aren’t at quite the same level as true Roman citizens, but they’re part of the Empire now, and light-years above those barbarians outside the gates. The physical mechanisms of the Empire are backed by a deep civic notion of “Romanitas;” to be a Roman is to be part of this great thing, to have a particular relationship to the outside world: we will conquer you and you will join us. And to be part of Romanitas is to have the weight of the Empire behind you.

And then it stopped working. Hadrian makes it halfway up Britain and builds a wall; and the Romans start to realize that they’re at the logistical endpoint of where they can conquer. A climate cycle drops food production down and leads to widespread famine and disease across Europe. Worse climate cycles to the east start to push nomadic tribes further out in search of resources, and they start to hit an already-weakening Empire. Without the constant influx of resources from conquered tribes, the underlying lack of planning in the Roman economy (and system of succession) starts to show; and from about 180 to 280, the Empire essentially collapses into an infinite sequence of famines, plagues, civil wars, and barbarian incursions. The last of these wars, the War of the Seven Emperors, is ended in 287 when Diocletian personally executes his last rival, and sets up a new regime. 

Diocletian’s empire was very different from Caesar’s in a lot of interesting ways, but the one I want to talk about today is that notion of “Romanitas.” Once, to be a Roman meant that you were ready to conquer everyone that you met; but the later Roman Empire was in no state to do such a thing. The central question of civic identity -- of what it even meant to be a part of this empire -- didn’t have a good answer, and with it, the whole question of what held the Empire together at all was up in the air as well.

Now switch over and look at the religion of the time. If we rewind back to the year 100, the Latin word religio had a very different meaning from what we think of today: it was the set of public rituals that the society participated in. These were tremendously important in a lot of ways. First of all, they were a key economic glue. Roman society didn’t have a notion of “taxation” in the modern sense; but instead, leading citizens were expected to regularly have sacrifices to the Gods to honor their good fortune in various things. At a sacrifice, animals would be killed, their first fruits given to the Gods with various prayers, and what followed is what we would today call a “big damned barbecue.” A Roman could expect to go to a sacrifice every week or so on the average, and this was the primary access that most Romans had to meat. (So when I say “key economic glue” I mean “a major part of how the society got access to food.”) Second, they were the way in which people defined their civic nature. Today, we define our nationality in terms of things we learn in school, what we read in the papers and discuss in the media -- all things which didn’t exist in Rome. The expression of nationality was the common rituals that people went to. (And this, incidentally, is why the cult of the Emperor was so important: by sacrificing to the Emperor, you were indicating your loyalty to the Emperor and the Empire) Public actions were the main way that people communicated their thoughts.

One thing you may notice is missing from that list is anything which resembles our modern notion of “faith.” This wasn’t an unfamiliar concept, but it wasn’t considered to be part of “religio.” People had household gods with which they had a personal relationship, and actual priests had relationships with their gods, but nobody was generally expected to have a deep and abiding religious faith in each god that showed up through the gate. But the urge for deeper religious experiences was certainly there, and ever since the time of Alexander the Great (around 300BCE) one of the main ways this manifested was in “mystery cults.”

Mystery cults were the religious secret societies of the ancient world. You could join some of them by simply walking in the door, and for others you had to know someone, but what they all had in common was that you would be initiated, participate in secret rituals, gradually learn more and more of the secrets of this god. These cults often taught a combination of mysticism, philosophy, and theology; they offered a chance to see into the world beyond; and they offered a close confraternity among the members. And they were quite separate from “religio” proper, bearing it about the same relationship that gentlemen’s clubs in Victorian England bore to Parliament. 

There were a few categories of mystery cult which were becoming particularly popular in the first few centuries CE. The first was the cult of Magna Mater, which was basically the worship of Isis gradually transmuted into a pan-European religion. Consider that ancient Egyptian religion was already extremely, incomprehensibly ancient: the pyramids are a great work of the late Stone Age, as much older than the Romans as the Trojan War is older than us. The knowledge of hieroglyphs had already passed out of the world, but the infinite number of mummies and inscriptions and magical practices were still very much there. Add on to this that, even thousands of years earlier, Egyptian religion had highly favored spectacular, awe-inspiring temples where people went for rituals, healing, miracles, surrounded by fire, strange smokes, talking statues -- and that this tradition was still very much alive -- and you have a great factory of religious beliefs which were immensely popular in the Roman world.

Second was Mithraism, a religion that we still understand relatively little. Mithras was a warrior-god, of Persian origin; he has many similarities to similar warrior-gods spread across the Near East, not least the version of Yahweh worshipped in the western Levant which later became a core part of Judaism. In Rome, his worship became very popular among the army, starting with soldiers who had served in the east. The rituals were very secret, part of the brotherhood of joining the Roman Legions; underground caverns, secret dances, sacrifices, rituals that we know very little about today because they were actually fairly good at keeping their secrets, and quite deliberately didn’t write many things down. 

The third was ascetic monasticism, something which never really caught on in Europe but which was a huge deal in Egypt for hundreds of years. There was a tradition of hermits retreating off into the desert to pray, fast, and generally mortify themselves, and these hermits were considered to be avatars of purity itself, holy, powerful, capable of great magics, and mad as a bag of clams. (As a side note, The Book of the Fathers, a book on how to be a good monk written in fragments from the 4th through 10th centuries, has lots of examples of the stories of early monks, who were basically Christian Egyptian ascetics. Something like two thirds of these stories end with either “and then he/she starved to death” or “and then he/she died in a sandstorm.” These guys were hard-core.) 

And Christianity -- Paul’s Christianity, the kind that wanted to spread -- joined in to this mix. This early Pauline Christianity worshipped in secret, because it was defiantly anti-religio; this was honestly a holdover from its Jewish roots, with the Jews being rather famous for their (often violent) unwillingness to sacrifice to other gods. But it had many other familiar features: secret meetings in (literally) underground churches, intense personal faith, mystical healing, close confraternity between the followers. Unlike many of the other mystery cults, it was built fairly strongly around concepts of morality -- another holdover both from its Jewish antecedents and from Jesus’ own focus on reforming Judaism towards personal religiosity. 

These religious traditions competed with each other pretty openly. If you read Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (arguably the first novel), you’ll see all these conflicts show up in people’s daily lives. Laws were passed banning Christians from serving in the army -- it would destroy unit cohesion, you see, and the men might feel uncomfortable. (Le plus que ça change...) And they also combined: Christianity became popular in Egypt, and people combined it with both Egyptian asceticism (to form the seeds of monasticism) and Manichaeanism, another Persian import from which Christianity got its notions of the duality of God and the Devil. The healing magics of Magna Mater stayed popular across the board, and Christians found themselves doing basically the same things. 

(There’s a whole history here, too, of how these religions related to the earlier Roman political order.)

And around the year 300, these religious and political trends started to come together. The political order of the old religio made less and less sense: giant, formal, public rituals to the gods of old Rome didn’t pull people together the way they once did. But the underlying needs behind them, both civic and economic, were still there. By the time of the civil war that followed Diocletian’s retirement (a very interesting story in its own right), Mithraism was in a bit of a downturn, apparently not providing quite enough mysticism relative to simple brotherhood; Christianity had folded most of the magical elements of Magna Mater into itself, and had done a better job of conversion through its strategy of focusing on women, and soldiers, many of whose mothers had been converts, started to use it as their secret brotherhood ritual. Against this background, Constantine (one of the warring emperors) made it the quasi-official religion of his army, and soon after won control of the Empire. 

What happened here was that a religious trend of secret societies, previously illegal in many situations, which thus tended to forge close relationships among the practitioners, suddenly became an official Thing which people realized they could further their careers by converting to. Many is the Roman nobleman of this period who went to bed one night, a contented pagan, and woke up the next morning a bishop, and a few hundred thousand solidi poorer. (That was the going rate for a bishopric) But this new religious system had communal identity baked so deeply into it, and held people together well enough (after all, that’s one of the big things Constantine used it for!) that it started to become a substitute for this now-missing identity.

Several things happened over the next hundred years which reinforced this, but perhaps the most dramatic was the sack of Rome in 410. It’s hard to express how world-shaking this was: imagine if, on 9/11, rather than destroying the Twin Towers in New York, the Taliban had simply marched in to New York City and sacked it, and the government was powerless to do anything about it. That’s roughly what happened then. And yet: the Goths who sacked Rome left the churches untouched -- they, too, were Christians. Augustine used this as the jumping-off point for his book, The City of God, which crystallized the ideas that had been building up over the years: Christianity united its believers in a sort of world-spanning empire. This notion of Christianity as a social identity, rather than as a religious faith, became the cornerstone of European society for the next thousand years.

This answered the question of “how do we deal with those barbarians?:” If they were Christians, then you could use this common language of Christianity to establish relations with them. If they weren’t, you could convert them or kill them -- or point your own friendly barbarians their way. It also provided a new social glue for the society, so long as everyone came over and converted.

And what you might notice is missing, again, from this picture is the modern notion of “faith.” It was important that everyone be a Christian because that was part of being part of the Empire, but the details weren’t quite as important. So the common variety of “conversion” in the Late Antique Empire went something like this:

A priest shows up in a village. The village is generally having some kind of major problem or another, whether it be a failed local irrigation system, or a famine, or a plague. The priest calls people together in the name of his god, and fixes the problem: either by prayer, or by getting people together to fix the well, or by pulling in external resources. (Most of the time, incidentally, the priest didn’t successfully fix the problem, in which case he simply would move on to the next village and try again) On success, the village praises God and converts. They have to give up “pagan rituals” -- i.e., they have to adopt the forms of Christian religio rather than whatever they did locally. But the underlying importance of the sacrifices (economic, civic, etc) was still there, so what was important was to do them in a Christian way. Do them in a church, not a cemetery. Praise a saint rather than a god, and so forth.

And then the priest would move on to the next town, racking this up as yet another successful conversion. But nobody was left behind in this town who actually had a particularly deep understanding of Christian doctrine; and in fact, owing to how bad travel was in the Empire at this point, it was often 100 years until the next priest would reach a particular village! So Europe “Christianized” by adopting a shared set of practices and religious language, but not a shared religious faith in the modern sense of the word. 

The results of this weren’t fully appreciated until nearly a thousand years later, during the Counter-Reformation: in response to the rise of Protestantism, the Catholic Church started to try to root out “heresy” in its own world, and discovered (much to its shock) that the average Christian had absolutely no idea what the religion was supposed to mean. (A truly fascinating account of this can be found in The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, which studies the record of the heresy trial of some random schmuck who was grabbed by the Inquisition. The title comes from his attempt to explain just how the world was created.) 

So when we talk about a “Christian syncretism,” what was happening wasn’t that Christianity deliberately or accidentally took on bits of other religions. Rather, most of the conversion of Europe -- and very similarly, most of the conversion of other parts of the world later on -- happened very quickly, with groups of people agreeing to take on the structural forms of Christianity, praying to saints in churches and so on, but with very little emphasis on constructing a shared “faith” in the modern sense.

In fact, this modern notion of faith came largely out of the Protestant reformation. The Protestants started out with a notion that people should have a direct, personal familiarity with scriptures and a much more personal relationship with God: ideas which hadn’t really entered much into the Christianity of the preceding millenium. The Catholics, in response, tried to “purify” their own faith and make sure that everyone was on the same page, using much the same techniques which they had developed for ensuring that there were no secretly practising Muslims or Jews in Spain after the Reconquista. (Yes, I know. You were expecting that the Spanish Inquisition would show up in here at some point.) Several centuries of spectacular bloodshed later, it was a commonly accepted idea in all branches of Christianity that Christianity was, first and foremost, about individual faith, and a common understanding of doctrine was what bound Christians together. But this hadn’t actually been a feature of Christianity ever since the days of Paul, and the Christianity of the 19th century is a very different beast from that in too many ways to count. It was a new thing.

So today, when people tell you about how Christianity has “borrowed” ideas from non-Christian religions, or that this or that holiday is actually a pagan festival in disguise, your surprise isn’t coming from the fact that Christianity ever was really a common religious language rather than a unified faith: it’s coming from the fact that, over the past few hundred years, Christianity has deeply rewritten its creed, and largely forgotten its own history. These things aren’t alien to Christianity at all: they’re the deepest part of its origins.


For more information, some places to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybele
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraic_mysteries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_I_and_Christianity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_God_(book)

The best sources of all on this subject are books. Peter Brown’s The Cult of the Saints or The Rise of Western Christendom give an excellent snapshot of the Late Antique transition and can get you started looking for other things. Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms is a great way to see what ground-level faith in the sixteenth century looked like.

Photo by Robobobobo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/45493477@N05/4178051127/

Jupiter and the Sun are the two largest objects in our Solar System, and as they orbit around one another, they create regions where their gravity roughly cancels out. These are the Lagrangian points, created whenever two objects orbit one another: places where gravity is such that another small object can follow along in the orbit without being pulled in or out. And since things aren't getting pulled out of there, they get stuck in there as well: and so we have two large clumps of asteroids (and miscellaneous smaller space debris) in Jupiter's orbit. These are called the Trojan Asteroids; the group ahead of Jupiter is known as the Greek Camp, and the group behind it the Trojan Camp, with the asteroids in each camp being named after famous people in that war. Together, these two camps have as many asteroids as the Asteroid Belt.

Other stable patterns are possible, too: another one is what's called a 3:2 resonance pattern, asteroids whose motion gets confined to a basically triangular shape by the combined pull of Jupiter and the Sun. This group (for Jupiter) is called the Hilda Family, and their route forms a triangle with its three points at the two Lagrange points and at the point on Jupiter's orbit directly opposite it from the Sun. 

None of these orbits are perfectly stable, because each of these asteroids is subject to pulling from everything in the Solar System; as a result, an asteroid can shift from the Lagrange points to the Hilda family, and from the Hilda family to the Asteroid Belt (not shown), especially if it runs into something and changes its course. 

The reason that Pluto was demoted from planet to dwarf planet is that we realized that these things are not only numerous, but some of them are quite big. Some things we formerly called asteroids are actually bigger than Pluto, so the naming started to seem a little silly. So our Solar System has, in decreasing order of size, four gas giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus); four rocky planets (Earth, Venus, Mars, and Mercury); five officially recognized dwarf planets (Eris, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Ceres); and a tremendous number of asteroids. (We suspect that there are actually about 100 dwarf planets, but the job of classifying what's an asteroid and what's actually a planet is still in progress -- see the "dwarf planet" link below if you want to know the details)

Ceres orbits in the Asteroid Belt, about halfway between Mars and Jupiter, just inside the triangle of the Hilda Family; Pluto and Haumea are both in the distant Kuiper Belt, outside the orbit of Neptune but shepherded by its orbit in much the same way that the Hildas are shepherded by Jupiter; Makemake is what's called a "cubewano," living in the Kuiper Belt but unshepherded, orbiting independently; and Eris is part of the Scattered Disc, the even more distant objects whose orbits don't sit nicely in the plane of the Solar System at all, having been kicked out of that plane by (we believe) scattering off large bodies like Jupiter.

But mostly, I wanted to share this to show you how things orbit. This picture comes from the amazing archive at http://sajri.astronomy.cz/asteroidgroups/groups.htm, which has many other such pictures, and comes to me via +Max Rubenacker. 

More information about all of these things:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_(astronomy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_family
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_planet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scattered_disc

#ScienceEveryDay

+Dirk Talamasca shared a video by this guy of Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata, and I started digging through more of them and found this awesome visualization of Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee. I really love creative ways to visualize music, especially when it shows the relationship between different parts of the piece in ways which aren't at first obvious.

[Resharing as public]

Something awesome. I understand our financial markets so much better, now that I realize that the trading desks are actually manned by infants with access to e-trade.

I want to tell you a very unpleasant truth about climate change. It's a lot more serious than we've been discussing in public.

(Warning the first: This is not going to be a cheerful sort of post. It will, very likely, leave you feeling deeply unsettled. If you do not want this, you should stop reading now.)

(Warning the second: This is not a post on which to say "I don't believe climate change is happening!" or "this is a left-wing plot!" or "I don't believe there's adequate proof that humans are causing it!" There are times that I have the patience and interest to discuss what are essentially political arguments about science, and this is not one of them. If you believe this stuff, it's because you have a deep personal need to do so, and best of luck to you with that. But I'll just delete such comments on this post.)

The paper referenced here is one that +Larry Smarr shared. We have a new paper running several parallel models of Arctic ice collapse, and the one thing that even the most conservative models agree on is that the Arctic will be ice-free in summer within the next 20 years. This is pretty much right; anyone who's been watching the development of climate indicia and thinking about the positive feedback loops in ice melting has known it for a while.

But we don't really talk about positive feedback loops, much, and when we do, we stop soon afterwards because it's a bit too horrifying to think about. But climate systems are full of them; ice melting is a simple example. If you have a big sheet of ice, it reflects sunlight and stays cool. But if it melts, the top of it melts first, and then you have a puddle of water, which is great at storing heat and doesn't reflect as much sunlight, sitting on top of your ice. That puddle gets warmer, and melts the ice under it much faster than pure light would; lather, rinse, repeat, and ice melts fast. (You can test this out in your own backyard; take two pieces of ice and put them in the sun. If you keep draining the water from the top of one as it melts, it will melt much more slowly than the other one)

The best way to know that climate systems are a big hornking bag of positive feedback loops is to look at the Earth's climate record. (We can get this quite nicely from things like deep ice cores, tree cores, etc.) You can see a good summary graph here: http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm. What's distinctive are those sudden vertical spikes; these represent times when the climate suddenly and rapidly became a lot hotter, on time scales much shorter than any other variation. That sort of thing can only happen when you get a massive external driving force (think "giant comet") or a positive feedback loop.

What's important to understand about this is that, when you hit a loop like this, the consequences aren't measured in the ways that IPCC climate models talk, about so many degrees rise in mean temperatures, changes in the biomes of infectious diseases, crop failures, sea level rises making cities into ruins, giant storms wiping cities off the map. They change the entire ecosystem of the Earth -- the basic kinds of plants and animals which can live on it.

The last big spike like this was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 55 million years ago. Average temperatures rose by 6C over a period of 20,000 years -- which is enough to look like a giant, sharp spike on the history-of-the-entire-planet graph. During the PETM, the Earth looked like the inside of a giant greenhouse; hot, wet, tropical. Swamp cypress grew as far north as Ellesmere Island, the northernmost part of Canada. The large mammals of the Paleocene vanished, to be replaced by a huge variety of new species, mostly dwarf-sized. Many of our modern kinds of creature -- birds, ungulates, etc -- emerged in this period. Life before the PETM favored much bigger critters, like a snake the size of a school bus. (See below for a link)

As far as climate swings on the Earth, this one wasn't close to the biggest, although it was one of the fastest: the temperature rose by 0.0003C per year, enough to completely reset the biota of the planet. 

By comparison, since 1920, the mean temperature has been rising an average of 0.01C per year. Yes, that's about 30 times faster than the run-up to the PETM.

Some things you need to understand about these shifts.

* They've happened quite a few times. Look at that first graph I linked, and read about any of the times the climate changed sharply. Each of these was associated with a complete rewriting of the planet's biota -- which is a nice way of saying "almost all the life died out and was replaced by something completely different."

* Because of positive feedback loops, when a climate shift starts, it can speed itself up. There are a lot of different loops, ranging from ice melting to methane clathrates to ocean circulation pattern changes. Unfortunately, we don't understand these loops very well -- because if any of them had gone off full-force while we were around to study them, we wouldn't be around to study them. Because of loops like that, once something gets started it's not always possible to shut it off by reversing what you're doing, no matter how much you do so.

* When the biota of a planet get rewritten, the creatures that require the most delicate maintenance die first. This tends to mean really big creatures, that rely on large supplies of their foods; apex predators, which rely on the entire food chain beneath them; and "canary" species like many frogs, which are very sensitive and tend to be the first to die when something is going wrong. Historically, the cutoff for "large creatures" (that tend to not survive extinction events) seems to be in the ballpark of 20 pounds; things bigger than that just require the ecosystem to be too healthy.

So, yes, that includes you, it includes your dog, it includes most of the animals you eat. It probably also includes lots of the grains you eat, since large-scale agriculture is quite fragile as well. (As evidenced by the tremendous amount of work put in every year to keep crop yields high enough to feed humanity) 

* Technological methods of helping are actually more limited than you think, because so much of our technology stack is built on top of society being basically functional. Manufacturing microchips requires pretty much the full scope of human industry, from mining to power generation to transport logistics to chemical engineering. Growing the quantities of plants required to support humanity is, if anything, even more delicate. We're fairly robust against small perturbations because we can put in technological solutions -- but when problems start to knock out the basic infrastructure on which we can depend, the descent and collapse is fairly rapid.


Now, you may think that I'm writing this to make a political point, or to urge you to do something or other. Sometimes I would be, but this time I'm not: I'm just writing to show you a bit about the science, and give you an idea of just what the situation we're talking about could potentially entail. It's not clear where we are on the positive-feedback loop right now; it's very likely, for example, that the Arctic ice will collapse at this point, no matter what we do in the next 20 years. Whether we've gone far enough to trigger other catastrophes is still up in the air. 

But if it is, what we're looking at isn't a world where we all live like Bangladeshis, or a world where we're living in technological bubbles. It's a world where there are tropical rainforests going up to the poles, where there are millions of new and unfamiliar species... and we're simply dead.


If you want to know more about the history, here are some places to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene-Eocene_Thermal_Maximum
Life in the Eocene: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene
Temperature change in the 20th century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record
Titanoboa, and other giant creatures of the Paleocene: http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/site/sn/show.do?show=140671
One of the kinds of positive feedback loop that could be a problem for us: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

Isn't this what a capella is really for? Playing the Mario Bros. theme?

h/t +David Nachum for the link.

Some useful-but-maybe-not-obvious features of Google+:

* In your stream, "Incoming" means "other people who are sharing with me" -- people who aren't yet in your circles. You can browse through it to see people who have added you.

* "Notifications" gives you the same sort of stuff that you can see in the notifications menu in the top right. (The one that turns bright red when you have an update -- not yet available in all countries) Who's added you, when you've been mentioned in a post or tagged in a photo, etc. Also, that menu at the top? Very useful.

* "Sparks" lets you get cool content relevant to your interests. Random side note: While debugging the system, we often used "Chocolate Cake" as a test interest. It turned out to be a really distracting interest.

* Hangouts are more awesome than you may suspect, because they require so little work.

* You have to click on the "Chat with people on Google+" link to enable chat within Google+ (long story as to why), but then you get IM functionality.

* The mobile app has two features of surpassing awesomeness: Huddles and Instant Upload. Huddles are everything that messaging was supposed to be but never was -- group of people, persistent conversations so you can keep chatting with people, a hell of a lot faster delivery than SMS, etc. Instant upload means that you will never have photos stranded on your phone again.

* The delete circle animation is enough fun that one is tempted to create circles and delete them just for the heck of it. Andy Hertzfeld FTW.

I'll probably think of more of these later... there are a lot of features in here, and there are even more on the way. This is called "The Google+ Project" for a reason; the future is bright and exciting.

I suppose that, in a way, this is refreshingly honest: Romney's senior campaign staff seems to be publicly and openly saying that they will, in fact, be lying about Obama and his policies in their campaign ads, and they don't see anything wrong with that.

I don't really know what to say about that.

via +Tammy McLeod.

Edited to add: Do not read the comment thread below unless you want to lose faith in the American political process. ::facepalm::

I have a question for avid Google Reader users: what are the aspects of the way Reader works that made it so useful for you? I've heard a number of things floated in the past day -- e.g., the particular sources available, the way of managing read/unread state, various aspects of the UI -- but I'd like to understand better what the concrete things about Reader were which people found the most useful, because I'd like to integrate those ideas into future versions of many Google products, and try to capture that value.

(NB: If you're seeing this via a reshare, please remember to comment on the original post if you want me to see what you're saying!)

Warning: This is not a thread to simply complain about the shutdown, or to ask Google to keep Reader. That's not something that I can help you with, nor is it a decision that I had anything to do with, and this is not a good place to get anyone's attention about that. This thread is a place to talk about specific things which are useful about it so that we can think about good ways to capture that usefulness in the modern world.

Comments which disregard the previous paragraph will simply be deleted. Comments complaining about my deleting those comments will result in me blocking and/or mercilessly mocking you for failing to read instructions. Comments complaining about that will lead to some interesting replies in a combination of languages, probably starting with Yiddish and moving on from there. Comments interested in the Yiddish language should instead go on my post from last night. (http://goo.gl/xxn7h, but I should say that I'm not an expert or a fluent speaker of the language)

NB: The comments have filled up! Please check out my comment at the end of the post.

A few things I have learned while posting on Google+:

If you post about science, cars going fast, interesting animals, or the like, lots of people will enjoy it, especially if it comes with a video. If you post a cool photograph of a person or place, people will enjoy it but will +1 more than they comment. If you post inspirational quotes, people seem to like that a lot, but the comments get a lot more incoherent.

If you post about religion, people will be surprisingly civil even if you say something controversial, and they'll want to talk about it a lot, especially if they disagree. However, at least one commenter out of 20 will feel strongly that if you mention religion and don't say anything contemptuous about it, you are wrong and must be corrected. Most people will ignore this commenter.

If you post about politics, especially if there is an election coming, everyone will get extremely excited and will soon be not at all civil. 

The most effective way to troll a conversation appears to be to utter the words "Romney" or "Obama." Doesn't really matter which.

If you post about law, economics, or any bit of politics which isn't related to a current election, at least one commenter will feel strongly that all these problems are just symptoms of the evils of the existence of government, and that we must replace all laws with voluntary contracts.

If you post about art, music, or something else you personally think is cool, you will likely discover that someone else you know also thinks it's cool, even though you wouldn't have guessed that about them.

If your post has a photo on it, people will look at it more. It doesn't matter if the photo is relevant. This photo is of some stuff on my desk.

What have you learned?

This is not what you think it is.
This is kind of disturbing.
This is sort of like Microsoft meets Charles Stross meets Aleister Crowley.

I blame +Rob Bush.

Do you have an election plan?

If you are a U.S. Citizen, then there's an election coming up in just under two weeks – on Tuesday, November 6. Now, I bet that some of you are saying that you aren't sure if you're going to vote – aren't the candidates all the same? Is any of this stuff really going to make a difference?

If you're wondering about this, I found that there's a simple thing you can do to check if you really should vote or not. I'll bet that no matter how little you watch the news, there's some issue that's guaranteed to bring out the people who tick you off. The sort of issue that's the exact reason why you don't listen to the news. I want you to do something unusual for me.

Go open another tab in your browser, and go to your favorite social network or search engine. Now go do a search for something about that topic, the sort of search that will bring up people's opinions. Maybe that's as simple as searching for "Obama" or "Romney" or "socialism" or "abortion." But go over there, and check to see if you can find one spectacular jerk out there, saying the sort of thing that makes you lose all faith in humanity.

That jerk? He or she cares a lot about the issue. In fact, that person almost certainly cares enough to vote, and come November 6th, that jackass is going to be out there at a ballot box. I'll bet you can guess how they're going to vote on at least one issue.

So here's the special prize I'm offering you: Pick that one jackass, and save a link to their post. Now on November 6th, if you go out and vote, you can cancel out that jackass' vote. You don't have to vote for anything; you can just go to the polls, and make sure that this particular jackass' vote ends up not counting. And if you feel like it, on the afternoon of November 6th, you can even go back to that post and let them know what you did. Or you can just hold that fact in your heart, that you managed to undo all of this person's efforts to vote some utter lunatic into office.

Doesn't that feel good?

But OK, maybe you've decided to vote. Have you got a plan? Do you know what you're going to do that day, or maybe a few days in advance if you can do early voting, or vote absentee?

Here's my plan: My polling place is at St. Timothy's Church in Mountain View, at the corner of Grant and Sleeper. (It's on the sample ballot my state sent me) I'm planning on getting up 15 minutes early that day, driving down to the polling place before work to vote, and then stopping off for a cup of coffee on the way in to work.

What's your plan? Are you going to vote absentee, vote early, vote on the day itself? Do you know how you're going to get to the polls? Do you need help getting there? (If you call up the campaign office of one of the candidates, they'll often help you get a ride if you need one!)

Remember: You're not just voting. You're making sure that at least one jackass out there fails at being a jackass, for one important day. Isn't that worth it?

Also: If you want to check your local election information, or get summaries of the things that are going to be on your ballot, try smartvoter.org. It's a nonpartisan site that gives you pointers to local election info.

Because recursive dogs are cool.

h/t +Noritoshi Takeuchi for the pic.

This is pretty fascinating, even though it's not something I'd normally watch -- this guy bought an engine for his Triumph Spitfire on eBay, stripped it down to its parts and rebuilt it. In this movie, you get to watch an engine disassemble and reassemble itself as if by magic. It's sort of hypnotic...

via +Jennifer Ouellette.

Something awesome, via +Adam Lasnik – a Hong Kong architect's 344 sq ft apartment, made amazingly pleasant and livable by turning into a massive sort of transformer.

More useful-but-maybe-not-obvious features of Google+

* If you want to send a private message to someone, just create a normal post and share it only with them. Bam! Instant one-on-one conversation! If you want to make a post publicly visible but aim it specifically at someone, share it with them and also with Public (or also with your circles, etc).

* Speaking of sharing only with someone: If you type +<name> or @<name>, it shares the post directly with them, just like if you added their name in the sharing targets. You can also do this in a comment, to pull someone else into the conversation.

* Want to see who can see a post? Next to the dateline at the top of a post, you’ll see something like “Public” or “Limited.” “Limited” is a link -- click on it to see who has access.

* At the top right of each post, there’s a little circle-and-triangle menu. For your own posts, this menu lets you edit or delete the post, or disable commenting or resharing. For other people’s posts, it lets you link to the post, mute it, block the person completely, or report abuse.

I'm excited to announce something else we've been working on: Google+ Comments, launching today on Blogger. This provides you with some features that you won't have seen in other commenting systems; my own favorite is that it brings the conversation from G+ into your blog, so that the social media conversation doesn't get segregated from the comment thread.

This is a purely opt-in launch for blog owners: if you have a blog and want to try it out, follow the instructions in this post. We'll be rolling it out over the course of today!

There's been so much news lately from Mars, Europa, and Antarctica about the search for life in space that I thought it might be good to explain what's been quietly happening in science on this front. For centuries, people believed that the universe was full of life: there were people on the Moon, wise aliens on Mars and Venus, and so forth. This took a huge hit after the Viking landing on Mars in 1976 showed a dry and cold world, something that looked like it could never have supported life; and for some time, there was an increasing hunch that life was actually very rare, that the search for it outside of Earth was actually a vain hope, that we were alone.

The past few years have made us rethink this. The gut feeling now -- though many have been reluctant to say this out loud, to risk making the prediction that proves wrong, or simply to jinx it -- is that life might be extremely common in our universe. Here are the things that have really changed that.

Exoplanets: The first thing is that we discovered that planets aren't rare at all. For some time, we suspected that very few stars even had planets; but over the past few decades, we've found better and better ways to spot them, and now we're realizing that planets seem to be the common thing for stars to have. So far, we can only directly detect fairly large planets, mostly gas giants; they're bigger and exert more gravity so they're easier to spot. But large planets often have moons (and as I'll get to below, those can be great places for life!) and where there are large planets, there are likely also smaller ones. So the number of possible places where life could simply sit down and exist has gone up by a lot.

Organic matter: Turns out there are more carbon compounds tooling about the universe than we suspected at first. Interstellar gas clouds, etc., tend to have good amounts of carbon (coming from old supernovae), and from spectroscopy it appears that they'll form the simple precursors of amino acids even floating on their own, in space. The building blocks of life are pretty common.

Moving matter: Also, it looks like matter moves from planet to planet a bit more easily than we'd initially feared. There are plenty of meteorites on Earth which started their lives on Mars, and presumably vice-versa; comets ship materials all the way from the outer Solar System. Shipping things across star systems is obviously harder, but it's no longer something that's completely out of the question to imagine. Life in one place could easily spread to nearby places.

More habitats: We used to think that, for example, Jupiter and the whole Jovian system had to be dead. But now we've discovered that its moon Europa (pictured below) is basically a giant saltwater ocean the size of Australia under a protective layer of ice. Jupiter not only acts as a giant solar mirror, bringing Europa much more light than it would otherwise get, it also emits a nearly equal amount of heat just from its own contraction. Its magnetic field shields its moons from the Solar Wind, and its moon Io's perpetual volcanoes fill the entire Jovian magnetosphere with a steady bath of some very interesting ions. 

Similarly, the more we probe Mars, the more we discover that it had some useful conditions for life in its past: free-flowing surface water, chemical gradients in the ground of the sorts that many Earth microorganisms use for fuel, etc. Even though Mars may have never been good for large-scale amounts of life (it never had that great an atmosphere), it could have held something, at least for a while.

Life is tenacious: We've been studying "extremophiles" on Earth -- life forms which can live in insane environments. Volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean support worms that live at temperatures as high as 400C. Tardigrades are small water-dwelling creatures which can survive in the vacuum and radiation of outer space. The Vostok Sea, locked two and a half miles beneath the Antarctic ice for tens of millions of years, and far from any source of light or outside food, nonetheless turns out to sustain life forms all of its own. And now we're finding microbes living in the rock hundreds of meters under the sea floor of the Juan de Fuca Ridge. It increasingly appears that life will survive, and thrive, anywhere that it gets a chance. And there are more places that give it a chance than we ever thought before.

None of these things add up to a discovery of life not on Earth, but all of them mean that, rather than requiring an incredible set of coincidences never to be repeated, life may actually be a common phenomenon, requiring only a star, a planet or appropriate moon at the right temperature and gravity,  some chemicals occurring fairly frequently in space, and either a bit of luck or a boost from a nearby planet. 

It's possible that, during our lifetimes, we'll see the first discovery of life that's not on Earth. And even if that life is no more than a bacterium, that means that there could be more life out there; that we could understand the ranges and possibilities of life, and perhaps even discover that there are other things out there that we could talk to.

Some interesting places to start for more information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_Station
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/03/microbes-likely-abundant-hundred.html

Circle Strategies

Lots of people have been posting strategies for organizing your circles on Google+, and I thought it would be nice to pull together some of the most interesting ones I've seen. (These come from a lot of people!)

* Have circles corresponding to groups of people which match groups that you would chat with in your life; e.g., particular groups of friends, family, and so on. Don't obsess over how to partition people; if someone fits naturally into both circles, put them in both. These are your "sharing circles," and are great both to read (you're now hanging out with just this group!) and to share with.

* Have other circles corresponding to groups of people you like to read, but don't necessarily want to follow or specifically share with. e.g., "Random interesting people," "Musicians," "Friends." (See how that's different? All your friends in one pile, rather than chopped up.) These are your "viewing circles."

* A "local people to hang out with" circle can be very useful when you want to see who's up for dinner.

* Create a couple of empty circles for your own purposes -- e.g., "drafts" or "bookmarks." That way, when you come across something that you want to save for your own reference, you can share it with that circle, and only you can see it.

* If you have a lot of circles, give them slightly layered names. "Sharing: College Friends", "Sharing: Extended Family", "Viewing: Tech Press" will group circles together for easy access. (This is a temporary hack, of course, until there's a better way to do this -- but it's easy to rename your circles later to get rid of this)

* Important point: When people you don't know start following you, don't sweat it, and don't add them to any circles. Circles are useful when you want to follow someone, or when you actually have a relationship with them and want to share things with them. If people are just following you asymmetrically, that means that they want to see your public posts. Basically, they're your fans. :) You can see what they're posting in your Incoming stream and then add them to circles if you decide to later on.

Are there any good techniques I've missed? What methods have other people found useful?

OK, so I can now give a clarification to the whole circles issue, after some very useful internal conversations, and especially some great clarifications from +Jean-Christophe Lilot. Short version: The initial advice was right, but missing a few useful warnings.

So here is your new and improved, little-known useful feature of Google+:


* If you edit your profile and click on the set of people in your circles, you can control whether or not people can discover who is in your circles. Note that even if it's public, this just lets people know "Bob is in your circles" – it never reveals which circle people are in. (So it's completely OK to have a "Jerks, but I want to know what they're saying" circle.) I'd actually recommend leaving this fairly open; that way, people can go through you and find more people they know. I've got mine set so that my circles are visible to other people in my circles.

But one particularly useful thing you can do with this is to change the visibility on a per-circle basis. In particular, you can have some circles that anyone can find out about, some circles which are connections that only other people in your circles can know about, and some circles whose membership is completely private. If you have relationships you're not comfortable broadcasting, use this feature, it gives you flexibility.

What does it mean for a circle membership to be private? It means that, if you're only following a person via a private circle, the fact that you're following this person will not be visible on either your publicly visible profile or theirs; it will be known only to you and to them.

Now, some caveats:

* No, we don't have a "follow someone and don't tell them you're following them" mode. That would be creepy. You can always see who you're following and who's following you from your circles page, and when someone starts to follow you you get a notification.

* If that person follows you back, they would need to hide that separately. (If they wanted to) You could still show up on their profile as someone they're following, and they could show up on your profile as someone following you, but you have control over whether or not you announce that you're following them.

* If you add a person to both a private circle and a public circle, then the fact that you're following them is still publicly visible.

* Also, if you change an existing circle from public to private, it may take some time until you disappear from their profile page. Don't panic if you don't disappear instantly... and if it's really important to you to keep a relationship secret, keep it secret from the beginning. (Which is good advice for life in general)

* If you share with this private circle, and someone clicks on the "Limited" link, they'll still see who can see that post. So if you don't want members of this circle to know about each other, either, don't put them all in the same circle and then share with that circle. :)

My apologies for the confusion, and thanks to +Stephen Pearson for the original hard question which started this. :)

Today, +David Archer and +STEM Women on G+ shared some things about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, the first person to earn a Ph.D. from Radcliffe College, and later the chair of Harvard's department of Astronomy. However, her work is largely unknown today – and having just spent an hour reading through some of it, this is something which needs to be fixed.

Her most critical work was actually her Ph.D. thesis in 1925, in which she calculated the chemical composition of the stars. (http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1925PhDT.........1P/0000001.000.html – thanks to +Rajini Rao for finding the link. Be warned, it's long!) The use of spectroscopy to determine which elements are present in the stars had started in the 1860's (and had led to the discovery of Helium), but figuring out how much of those elements is present was much more complicated. The idea is simple: each element (and each molecule, and each ionized atom, etc) absorbs light at a particular pattern of frequencies, which can be measured in the lab; hot objects emit light in a particular pattern; put them together, compare with the light you see coming from a star, and you should be able to figure out what's there. The hard part is that the precise patterns of absorption (etc) depend on things like the structures of temperature and pressure inside the star, which are rather hard to measure directly. Payne did the theoretical work of figuring out how to estimate all the critical quantities (using only the scientific knowledge of the 1920's! Remember, this is when quantum mechanics itself was in its infancy, and the idea of being able to calculate these things from first principles seemed impossible) and build a model of how the patterns of light should correspond to the abundances of the elements, and used that to compute just what the stars are made of. 

Some of her big results:

- All stars are made of roughly the same material, no matter what color they are.
- The composition of the Sun is apparently very similar to the composition of the Earth, lending support to the idea that they were made out of the same material; but
- The Sun also contains an enormous amount of Hydrogen and Helium, and is in fact almost entirely made out of those two elements.

Under pressure from Russell (a noted astrophysicist of the day) she stepped back from that last conclusion, saying that the high abundances of those materials suggests that there must be an error in her method. There wasn't; that's what stars are made of.

(NB: Several years later, Russell got the same answer using other methods, and concluded that she was in fact right. He was quite up-front about giving her credit, but others tended to ignore this, and give Russell most of the credit for the discovery)

It's hard to overstate the importance of this work. Pretty much all of modern astrophysics (and no small part of nuclear physics) derives from our ability to measure these quantities. The famous B2FH paper, for example, which explained how the chemical elements were formed in the first place (inside stellar furnaces and supernovae) is built pretty much entirely on these sorts of calculations, and the techniques which Payne pioneered.

Despite this, Payne's work has remained mostly unknown. I myself worked in a fairly related field – high-energy physics – and had never heard of her until today. (And so my estimate of the work's significance comes from digging it up and actually reading it, and knowing the big picture of where those results are used – results which I had known for years without ever thinking about who originally found them) 

In fact, this paper has a few weaknesses – the weaknesses that you see when the author can't get the full support of the community. She backs away from the most significant result; all of the most important results are fairly buried in chapter 13, rather than placed front and center. I've seen many papers do this, and it's quite clear that if her advisors (Shapely and Eddington, two of the preëminent astronomers of the day) had backed her more firmly, or if the community had followed Russell's lead and properly credited the work when it was confirmed by Russell's results years later, this paper would have been more forcefully stated, and its significance would be better-known today. Given the impact of these methods on astrophysics, it is highly likely that she would have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

(As it is, credit for this discovery seems to have diffused out across many researchers in the astronomical community, and no one person is considered "the" discoverer. But having read the paper and knowing its date, I think that it's more than fair to mark Payne as such; she worked out all of the details years before anyone else)

So today, let's take some time to remember this extraordinary discovery. We know what's on the insides of stars because of her.

#STEMWomen #ScienceEveryDay 

A minor update for you all: Lots of people have gotten frustrated by the fact that, when you have more than 100 comments on a thread, you stop getting notified when people comment on it. We originally put that rule in to keep people from getting bombed with notifications if they comment on (say) one of +Robert Scoble's posts, but it makes it hard to have conversations. So we fixed it by making the algorithm smarter instead. New algorithm should now be live everywhere. Converse and enjoy.

Since several people have asked about this: If you want to see posts in a single column in the new Google+ UI, instead of in multiple columns, scroll to the top of your stream. To the right of your circles is a "More" menu. At the very bottom of that menu there's an option to switch between single- and multi-column mode.

#googleplustips

Here's an amazing photo of a region of the Sun taken by Alan Friedman. The photo is taken through a filter which allows only a very narrow band of wavelengths through, in the Hydrogen-alpha band; this penetrates beneath the corona and shows the deeper chromosphere of the Sun, covered in fine "hairs" of plasma. Up in the sky above it is a detached prominence which erupted from the pit beneath it. 

We're so used to thinking of the Sun as a bright, featureless orb that it can be shocking to look at it through filters which reveal its fine structures: layers of fine plasma hairs, million-mile-long rivers of fire, swirling currents, great arcs pulled by magnetic field and bending far above the surface. 

http://lightsinthedark.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/detachable-prominence/

We have several things to announce today at Google+ that I'm incredibly excited about. The first one is Google+ Communities. A lot of people have been saying that sharing circles wasn't really what they wanted: they wanted a way to have a group of people that people could join, talk with, form a community with. Today we're starting to roll out that feature to all of our users. You can form communities ranging from completely public (anyone can join, anyone can see what's happening) to completely private (need approval to join, membership lists are kept secret, nothing leaks out of the community), so they're meant to serve a wide variety of needs. This product is still very much in Beta, so please try it out, see how it works, and give us feedback: we want to know what should improve!

The second is something for the photo world. Google recently acquired Nik Software, maker of both some very serious high-end photography software and some very neat cell phone software. Today we have an announcement on the cell phone front: Snapseed for Android is now available in the Play Store. Snapseed brings you some amazingly sophisticated filters and tools which are shockingly easy to use. It's a great deal of fun and I recommend you try it out. (There's already an iOS version for those of you with such devices)

And finally, we have some numbers to announce about the size of the Google+ community. As of today, Google+ has over half a billion users; 235 million active users, visiting some social aspect of Google; and 135 million people who are actively using the stream alone, visiting plus.google.com to read and share things with the people they know. It's been an amazing first year and a half, where we've gone from "I really hope this works..." to having the equivalent of the population of a major country showing up on a regular basis to talk with one another. We've started to really see Google+ shine as both a place to talk very privately – all of those conversations that you don't see, because they're between small groups of friends or family – and very publicly, sharing photos, long-form text, and so on. It's become a place where a lot of people can meet, and I've been lucky enough to make a great many friends through the service. And in the next year, I hope that we can make it even more so, with more features, more people, and more community among our many users.

Oh hey, we launched a minor feature yesterday that makes me happy: if you fill in the "Tagline" field on your profile, it now shows up on your hovercard. So that's a great place to put a few short words about yourself; it's the first thing most people will see about you, after your name and pic. The hovercard, if you haven't heard the word before, is the card that pops up when someone hovers over your name.

(And thanks to the hovercards team!)

This is something I'm very happy to hear. My own feeling is that patents (and similar intellectual property rights) serve the purpose of encouraging innovation when they're in a field that's already mature, development is expensive, and people need time to recoup these costs. They hinder innovation when the field is in rapid flux, and any invention is likely to be independently produced by many people: at that point, it becomes a way for companies (and other IP holders) to draw arbitrary fences about what other people can and can't do, and demand fees for work that other people did on their own. Software is one such field. (Whereas refrigerators probably aren't)

My own preferred reform would be to establish a 20-year moratorium on the granting of new patents for software, as well as a moratorium on causes of action emerging from such patents. We can look again in a few decades to see if the situation has changed enough to merit switching this.

(I would also reform quite a few other things: e.g., I would explicitly mark business methods as non-patentable, and make quite a few reforms to copyright law as well. But those are separate matters)

h/t to +Gary Walker and +Dirk Talamasca for the link.

RESHARE:
Hi everyone,

Today we made a small but important step in allowing people to be known on Google+ in the way that they’re known in the rest of the world. I’m very happy to announce some updates to our names policy, and some associated new features of the service.

We really appreciate all of the feedback that we’ve gotten around this issue: it’s from active, engaged and passionate users who care about getting these things right that we can build the strongest communities.

As +Bradley Horowitz says below, this is not the end, only a milestone: We’re going to be watching and listening to feedback, and will continue to evolve this going forward.

And now, finally, I can answer your questions. :)

Reshared text:
Toward a more inclusive naming policy for Google+

With Google+, we aspire to make online sharing more like sharing in the real world. And during the Google+ signup process, we've asked users to select the name they commonly use in real life.

Since launch we've listened closely to community feedback on our names policy, as well as reviewed our own data regarding signup completion. The vast majority of users sail through our signup process -- in fact, only about 0.1% submit name appeals.

When we analyze the set of all name appeals on Google+, we find that they generally fall into three major categories:
- The majority (60%) of these users want to simply add nicknames.
- About 20% of appeals are actually businesses (who are inadvertently trying to set up their business as a Profile, rather than using Google+ Pages which were intended for this purpose.)
- And the remaining 20% would either prefer to use a pseudonym or another unconventional name.

Today we’re pleased to be launching features that will address and remedy the majority of these issues. To be clear - our work here isn’t done, but I’m really pleased to be shipping a milestone on our journey.

Nicknames and Names in Another Script

Over the next week, we’ll be adding support for alternate names – be they nicknames, maiden names, or names in another script – alongside your common name. This name will show up on your Google+ profile and in the hovercards which appear over your name. In the next few weeks, we’ll be displaying it more broadly as part of your name in other areas of Google+ as well. So if you’re Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Jane Doe (Smith), or Saurabh Sharma (सौरभ शर्मा), you can now communicate your identity the way you want to.

To add an alternate name, go to your Google+ profile, click Edit Profile, select your name and click on “More options.” (See attached photos)

It’s important to remember that when you change your name in Google+, you’re changing it across all services that require a Google Profile.

Other Established Identities

On Google+, we try to flag names which don’t represent individuals, such as businesses or abstract ideas which should be +Pages. Sometimes we get this wrong, so starting today we’re updating our policies and processes to broaden support for established pseudonyms, from +trench coat to +Madonna.

If we flag the name you intend to use, you can provide us with information to help confirm your established identity. This might include:

- References to an established identity offline in print media, news articles, etc- Scanned official documentation, such as a driver’s license
- Proof of an established identity online with a meaningful following

We’ll review the information and typically get back to you within a few days. We may also ask for further information, such as proof that you control a website you reference. While a name change is under review, your old name will continue to be displayed. For new accounts without an old name, your profile will be in a non-public, read-only state during the review. Either way, you'll be able to see the status of your review by going to your profile.

For more details, check out the Google+ Names Policy: http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1228271

To reiterate, the features described herein will be rolling out over the next couple days.

Today is a small step towards improving the ways in which you can communicate your identity on Google+. We will be listening to feedback from the community and will continue to refine all aspects of how we handle names and identity over the coming weeks, months and beyond.

Thanks for your continuing feedback and support.

Bradley and Team G+

#googleplusupdate

So earlier today, Neil Tyson posted an estimate of the mass of Mjölnir, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mj%C3%B6lnir)  assuming that it's made out of neutron star matter. And +Cyrus Khan followed up with a calculation of how big a crater it would leave if Thor dropped it. (http://goo.gl/ZYlqS) But I'm afraid this calculation left something out, because while the hammer (if dropped from a height of 10 meters) would only be travelling at 14 meters per second or so when it hit the ground, it turns out that a mass of 300 billion elephants (about 2.1*10^14 kilograms, or roughly the mass of enough dirt to cover Texas a foot deep) hitting the ground at that speed will make a bit of a bang.

Specifically, it will have a kinetic energy of about 2.1*10^16 Joules, or just over 5 megatons. 

(For comparison, that's about the bang you would get from a 42,500 ton meteorite hitting the Earth – one about six times the size of the one that detonated over Chelyabinsk a few days ago – or from a single W-71 thermonuclear bomb)

But OK, just how much is five megatons? What would that do?

We can't compare this to the burst of a nuclear bomb, because bombs (by their nature) create large shells of supersonically expanding gas which fly into the air – that's how they blow things up – whereas this dumps all its energy into the ground. (If you do want to know how large explosions work, then you should look at the Nuclear Weapons FAQ, nuclearweaponarchive.org, perhaps the greatest nonclassified source in the world for understanding things that go "boom") Instead, it's probably best to compare this to an earthquake. Fortunately, the Richter scale is effectively a log scale of energy deposition, so we can make at least a rough guess of the intensity by using that.

The moment magnitude scale for earthquakes (one of the more modern improvements to the Richter scale – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale) is actually even better, because it directly measures energy dumped into the ground. Using the definition of that, we find that the resulting earthquake would have a moment magnitude of 4.8. Since the Moment and Richter scales were calibrated to match at 5.0, that's about a 4.8 on the Richter scale, too.

But before you go saying "oh, that's not too bad," remember that most earthquakes are a bit more spread out than the size of the average hammer. Rupture areas are normally hundreds of square miles, not less than a square meter. And earthquakes generally go off at least somewhat underground, not right at the surface. So to get a more realistic estimate, we should instead compare this to meteor impacts.

There are a couple of ways to estimate crater sizes, and here's a handy website which runs through them: http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~jmelosh/crater_c.cgi . You can just feed in the info; assuming that Mjolnir has a radius of about half a meter, and that it's striking a target of rock (as opposed to loose dirt), you find out that over the next 200 milliseconds, it's going to form a crater with a rim-to-rim diameter of about 21.7 miles.

Boy. It's a good thing he didn't drop it from any higher than that.

A couple of people have started to come across the problem of being followed by way more people than they can possibly cope with following back, and their stream becomes insanely noisy. I've found a pretty simple strategy seems to fix the problem:

- Create circles for groups of people that match groups in your real life; e.g., old friends, co-workers, etc. Put people you actually know into these, and feel free to put people in multiple circles. That way, you can share with just these groups, and you can also view the streams for just these groups when you want to hang out (or Hangout) with just them.

- Create circles for groups of people that you want to follow, even if you don't know them. e.g., tech bloggers, public figures. Good sources of reading material, even though you'll probably never share anything with these circles.

- And if you get a bunch of followers who you don't know, that's OK; you don't have to add them to your own circles. That way, they can see things which you post publicly, but your own stream doesn't get flooded. If you want to see what they're saying, you can browse your Incoming stream, and occasionally spot interesting people to follow or respond to. (This continues to scale well even when you have a Really Huge number of followers, and lets you occasionally keep in touch with people even if you don't want to be doing that every single time you log on to Google+)

To all you YouTube creators out there: We now have a method (in beta!) to connect your YouTube channel to a Google+ Page. If you do this, several things happen:

* Your YouTube channel can act on G+.
* You can have multiple managers (up to 50) for your channel, without needing to share spreadsheets full of passwords.
* You can have any name you want for your YouTube channel and page.
* You can host Hangouts On Air via your Google+ Page.
* Various other features unlock, like the ability to have a YouTube tab on your G+ page, and improved video sharing in YouTube.

We're working hard on ways to activate YouTube channels so that they can take full advantage of everything Google has to offer. This is a step in that which should open up some especially useful features for you.

Check out this blog post for more details and how you can use this. The feature is still rolling out, so if you don't see it yet, check back again in a bit!

Yesterday, I shared an article from the BBC about a documentary about the descendants of prominent Nazis. +Buddhini Samarasinghe found a link to the documentary itself on YouTube, and if you have the time, this is absolutely spellbinding. Some documentaries rely on lots of effects and drama to make their subjects interesting; this one needs nothing more than the people themselves, their expressions, their words. Watching this gave me tremendous hope for humanity; these people have each come up with their own ways of dealing with their families' pasts, but what struck me over and over was how truly decent and good they were.

Some things that struck me: Rainer Hoess, grandson of the camp Kommandant,'s visit to Auschwitz; Niklas Frank, son of the governor-general of Poland, and the way he dedicated his life to educating people -- and telling his feelings and stories so openly; Katharine Himmler, also writing, and how incredibly pleasant she seems; Brigitte Goering, and the great lengths she went to to separate herself from her past; and Monika Goeth, and how much harder her family's past hit her because of the way it was hidden from her as a child.

Seriously, watch this if you have the time. You won't regret it.

There's been some great work lately on redefining exactly what it means to be a solid or a liquid. You would think this would be something obvious, but it's not: solids do flow, just very slowly, and if you hit them hard enough, liquids resist impact just like solids. (Which is why belly-flopping onto water from a height is a really bad idea) And there are many other materials, like glasses and quasicrystals, which don't fit neatly into either category.

It's important to understand the differences, though, because the transitions which separate solids and liquids are very real (e.g., the melting of ice), and understanding these well is extremely important for both physics and engineering. (A huge fraction of the devices in our world are based on smoothly managing these transitions) 

The new research is finally narrowing down on a criterion which seems to separate the solids from the liquids: the response to shear forces. (Forces which try to deform the object) Two different teams studied two aspects of how materials respond to shear forces: how much they resist deformation, and how viscous they are when a shear is applied. In both cases, they looked at how the material responds to a small shear, since for large shears (like what happens when someone falls onto the water from a height) everything starts to resist. But it appears that liquids may systematically differ from solids in that they don't resist small shears, while solids do. And this is something which changes discontinuously as something freezes or melts, as well as matching our own physical intuition about what "feels" liquid or solid.

So: A little more knowledge about how the universe works. And now when someone asks you what makes a solid solid, you can tell them: it's that, if you apply a gentle shearing force to it, it resists flowing or changing its shape.

#ScienceSunday

+Randall Munroe makes an important observation: birds aren't descended from dinosaurs -- by any reasonable definition, birds are dinosaurs. T. Rex is more closely related to a sparrow than it is to a Stegosaurus. Our world has flying dinosaurs in it that eat other dinosaurs. And that's pretty cool.

+Anita Sarkeesian  is an excellent speaker. If you're at all familiar with modern feminism, most of what she says in this video won't come as a huge surprise. (And if you're not, this video isn't a bad place to start; nor is her video series on YouTube, which is damned interesting) But she has one part in the middle that really caught my attention and made me think.

If you weren't aware of this particular bit of Internet history, several months ago Sarkeesian had a kickstarter campaign to fund her video series, which became the target of one of the most spectacular paroxysms of moral turpitude to hit the Internet in decades. (Which is no small achievement) She became the target of a systematic campaign by a mob of... well, I'll save you my list of descriptives, but a vivid illustration of the sort of scum and villainy that one knows, intellectually, is out there on the Internet but one rarely sees in its full effulgence. You can go search for her kickstarter campaign, and the various things linked off it, if you really want to see. (Warning: You will lose some fraction of your faith in humanity)

This talk is mostly discussing that particular chain of events and what she learned from it. The part I found so interesting is her analysis of the entire event like an elaborate social game: it had a battlefield (the Internet), a specified villain (her), a set of players, a set of quasi-rules, and most importantly, a scoring system, based on social credit among one's peers. I think that this is a rather brilliant notion worth following up on in much more depth: troll mobs like these have many of the same dynamics as social games.

In network theory, we often study the ways in which networks fail. Sometimes this is in order to keep networks alive more effectively – such as telecommunications networks – and sometimes it is in order to destroy them more efficiently – such as disease transmission networks. But the study of games has been mostly limited to how to make games better, for fairly obvious reasons. But if Sarkeesian's analysis is correct, and I strongly suspect it is, then perhaps we need to think about various aspects of society which can meaningfully be modelled as games – and then apply what we know about game design to deliberately sabotage them, make them not fun to play, and lead people to abandon them. Think of it as community curation by anti-engineering.

Thanks to +Lionel Lauer for the link.

Before continuing with the day's science news, I just wanted to share this. An eighth grader in New York, annoyed with the perpetual flux of exceptionally stupid but legally-mandated standardized tests, composed a test of her own. I rather like this one.

Standardized testing, as it stands, is a perfect example of looking for your keys under a lamppost. You want to measure whether teachers and schools are being effective, so that you can reward and repeat successes, so you need to evaluate; but evaluating something useful is hard, so you evaluate something easy instead. The result is more than just a waste of everyone's time: it's a readjustment of the entire school system to be good at these tests, even when being good at them is directly at odds with teaching.

If you want to make testing useful, there are two simple (but not easy) things you need to do.

(1) Decide what you want to teach, then make sure the test tests that. In my own experience of teaching, the purpose of every class can be summarized in learning how to do something -- whether that be fix a car, explain how the history of something shaped its present, write a persuasive essay, or build experiments to measure physical properties. The first step in teaching a class is generally to figure out what that thing is. Once you know what it is, it's straightforward to write a good test: you simply ask the students to do whatever it is. (Not, you may note, asking them questions about how it's done, or about the theory of doing it, or asking them to do rote operations which are part of it. You ask them to do it and grade them based on how they did it.) This leads to a wonderful result: teaching to the test and teaching to the material are now the same thing, and the test is actually a useful judge of what you're doing.

(2) If you're going to use tests to evaluate something other than a particular student's ability to do something, make sure that the measurement you're taking measures what you want it to. For example, if you want to measure the quality of a teacher, the performance of her students is meaningless; that might measure how experienced they were before they got in to the class. What you want to measure is how much the teacher improved the performance of the students, compared to how much other teachers working with similar groups of students did the same. Otherwise, you end up concluding that every school in a poor area is "failing" and every school in a rich area is "succeeding" (and taking away money from the poor areas, which is pretty much exactly the opposite of what you want to do), and penalizing teachers who take on hard assignments. If you do it right, then the best way for a teacher to shine is to deliberately take on a hard assignment, where it's possible to have a huge impact because the students are doing poorly to begin with, and to pull them up to doing well. Same goes for schools, districts, curricula, etc.

If you apply both of these principles, then using testing as a basis for things like merit pay, promotions, and so forth is an excellent idea -- and I would suggest eliminating seniority, tenure, and pretty much all other metrics for job level at the primary and secondary levels in favor of this. (Yes, I'm sure this will make the teachers' unions thrilled with me. But I generally think that seniority and so on are terrible measures for any sort of labor where skill is at all important) But if instead, you're going to set up tests which measure completely arbitrary criteria, then to use those test results for anything at all -- especially for critical things like funding schools or paying teachers -- is foolish.

A fascinating chart, via +M Monica: How many hours per week would you have to work at minimum wage, just in order to afford fair market rent there. Khimm rather mildly says, "in no state was a 40-hour work week enough;" to be a bit more precise, Puerto Rico, at 55 hours, was the only location under 60 hours per week. In my own home of California, you would have to work for 130 hours per week just to pay the rent -- if you actually want to eat, you'll need to work more.

I suppose there's good news in that: if you only need to work another 38 hours per week to pay for everything other than rent, then you'll be working a full 168 hours per week and won't actually need to sleep anyway, which will save you a great deal of money on housing. Or you could just live in Hawaii, where rent alone would take up 175 hours per week, more time than actually exists.

Some more tips and tricks for using Google+ search:

* Saved searches are like streams When you hit the "Save this Search" button, you're creating a new stream that shows up below your ordinary streams. Circle streams are built around groups of people; search streams are built around common interests. So if you save (e.g.) "BBC Sherlock", what you're saving is a stream of people who are interested in that show. It can be a great place to meet people, and to talk about the things you care about.

* You can use hashtags like #plustips Hashtags are just strings that begin with a # symbol, but people use them to identify subjects or topics of interest. Stick those in your posts, and you can search for them, too. (For example, check out the searches for #plustips or #storycircle) And hashtagging is a collaborative effort: if you add a hashtag in a comment, that tags the post as well.

* You can share searches The URL you get when you do a search is just https://plus.google.com/s/<whatever>. You can share this link around and other people get that same search stream; they don't have to be logged in, or even Google+ users, in order to see that link. (Of course, if you aren't logged in, you'll only see public content)

And of course, we're working intensely on making Google+ search a more and more powerful experience. We want to turn these searches into a place where you can find your (and your friends') content, where you can find people, and where people with common interests can meet and talk -- and there's a lot more in the works to make that happen!

On September 11th, protesters marched in the streets of Egypt, demanding that the makers of a YouTube video insulting Islam be put to death. These protests have since spread across the Middle East and even as far as Australia, and in many places turned bloody, leaving dozens dead and hundreds wounded. The people of the Arab world have been quick to condemn the violence; but even as they did so, they quite matter-of-factly repeated the calls for the authors of the film to be brought to swift justice and death, much as Americans would call for a killer’s conviction abroad. And these demands didn’t just come from the man in the street; they came from intelligent, educated people, even heads of state. 

To Western ears, such a statement seems unfathomable. And to understand where it comes from, we have to understand the two basic cultural values which are at play: respect for religion, and freedom of expression. (And also to understand that these sentiments are by no means universal in the Islamic world; these riots were tied to a whole host of political and economic issues. But I want to talk about where these sentiments come from where they do exist.)

Respect for religion – for Islam in particular, but for religious beliefs in general – is one of the most important cultural values in Islamic society, and especially in the Arab world. This norm is so deeply rooted that even during wars, armies take great pains to avoid firing on houses of worship; terrorists can hide from governments by taking sanctuary in churches; and groups who violate this rule, as al-Qaeda in Iraq did when it started bombing Shi’ite mosques, quickly find themselves without any friends. (Al-Qaeda found itself having to recruit abroad; Iraqis stopped joining) To involve a house of worship in a battle is an escalation in the same way that blowing up a school would be in the West.

Historically, a major reason that Islamic governments have taken such a hard line against insults to religion is because of the difficulties in getting tribes to stop killing each other. In fractured and militant societies like the ones where Islam was first a religion and government – think of the Middle East, think of present-day Afghanistan – honor is tremendously important, because if people know the consequences for trampling on your honor, they won’t dream of going further and actually trying to (say) murder and pillage your town. Honor was, and still is, often enforced with blood feuds which could last decades. For a government to convince tribes to lay down their arms and resolve disputes through laws instead of bloodshed, it has to convince them that if they do that, their honor will still be protected. By clearly and forcefully punishing “general insults,” things which impugn a lot of people’s honor, the government can signal that it takes protecting individual groups’ honor seriously. That, in turn, lets people have faith that neither they nor their neighbors need to stockpile arms and form militias, and so it’s become a basic civic duty of the government, like prosecuting murders.

Meanwhile, the notion of freedom of expression, especially around religious matters, is a very powerful European one. The religious wars of the 16th through 18th centuries ravaged the continent. The decision to let everyone hate everyone else’s religion, and simply not make a big deal out of it, was a response to a pressing need to end centuries of sectarian conflict. This became especially significant in the US, of course, since a lot of its first immigrants came specifically to escape this bloodshed. From there, freedom of expression took on great political and cultural significance, and today is one of our most sacred communal values.

Nothing like this happened in the Islamic world; sectarian violence never reached the scales it did in post-Reformation Europe. As a result, “freedom of expression” isn’t part of the cultural lexicon in the same way that it is in the West. That’s not to say that the idea doesn’t have resonance there – in fact, I believe that the more people are exposed to it, the more they are likely to want it for themselves. But for now, to the majority of the populations in the places where these riots have taken place it’s a largely foreign value, something with little influence over their lives.

Neither of these ideas is usually discussed so historically – Muslims don’t talk about how respect for religion ended tribal conflict any more often than Americans talk about the influence of the Thirty Years’ War on the First Amendment. Instead, both cultural values are deeply rooted within the cultures’ respective identities, basic things that you do in order to be a decent human being. So when these protests seem incomprehensible and barbaric, what’s really going on is two very different sets of values talking past one another. Westerners are confused as to why people in the Islamic world are upset at all, and shocked at the suggestion that the film authors should be put to death, while in the Islamic world, people are equally shocked at the suggestion that the authors get away with a major crime against the commonweal, and are confused as to why Western governments are refusing to perform this basic function. It is, quite simply, as bizarre to these eyes as it would be to Americans if a foreign government were to refuse to prosecute terrorists. 

So when you see these protests go by, or whatever similar protests happen in the future, the thing to help you understand what’s happening is that, to these protesters, someone just committed a serious and shocking crime; they’re calling on the government for justice in the same way that they would over a murder. The great clash of norms here is that what one side sees – for very solid historical reasons – as a vicious crime is the same thing that the other side sees – for very solid historical reasons – as a core civil right.

Here's something neat for you: A digital orrery that shows you the motion of all the planets and moons of our Solar System. You can see it either in Copernican mode, centered on the Sun, or be all old-school and Tychonian about it and see everything centered on the Earth, watching the planets trace out their cycles and epicycles.

http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/orrery_2011_bce.swf

This is a very interesting article, because it finally answered for me where the deep opposition to same-sex marriage is coming from for many people. Some of it is the simple "gay people are ICKY," but there seems to be a separate thread within it, that's specifically opposed to marriage. And this article talks about why, and where the notion that it might threaten "traditional" marriage can come from: because it normalizes the idea that traditional gender roles aren't automatically a part of marriage.

h/t +F.S.J. Ledgister for the link.

What is the Higgs Boson, and why do we care?

The Higgs is one of those fascinating things from high-energy physics that everyone has been almost certain exists for nearly five decades, but that we've been unable to catch. If the theory is right, it's where mass comes from.

To understand this, let me separate all of the particles in the universe into two categories: force particles and matter particles. Matter particles, such as electrons, quarks, and protons, are the stuff that stuff is made of. Force particles, such as photons and gravitons, are what (if you look at things through an incredibly powerful magnifying glass) the forces between particles are made from. For example, when two electrons repel each other electromagnetically, at the quantum level what's happening is that one electron emits a (virtual) photon, the other electron absorbs it, and the energy and momentum transferred between the two cause the particles to push away from each other. The detailed rules for the probability of an electron to emit or absorb a photon are what encode the details of the electromagnetic force, e.g. that like charges repel and opposites attract, or that the strength of the force is proportional to the charge of the objects.

Some lesser-known force particles are the W and Z bosons, which mediate the weak nuclear force. This is one of the four fundamental forces of nature (the others being electromagnetic, gravity, and the strong nuclear force, which holds nuclei together against their own tremendous EM repulsion) and is responsible for many kinds of radioactive decay. (Among other things, it's key to keeping the Sun shining) Unlike the force particles of the other three forces, the W and Z are massive -- weighing in at about 86 and 97 times the mass of a proton, respectively. Photons, by contrast, have no mass.

(In relativity, particles don't have to have mass, but massless particles are doomed to forever be travelling at exactly the speed of light; they still have energy and momentum, from their motion. The real energy equation is E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2c^2, where p is the particle's momentum. If a particle is at rest, this reduces to E = mc^2, that a particle has built-in energy proportional to its mass; if a particle has no mass, it instead reduces to E = p c, the relationship for massless particles like photons)

As the weak force was being understood, though, it became clear that a theory involving massive force particles was fundamentally inconsistent. (The reason why is extremely technical, but essentially the mathematical expressions for the motion of such particles turn out not to be well-formed)

Peter Higgs came up with a fascinating solution to this problem, which incidentally also explained the origin of the mass of matter particles, too. He hypothesized that all particles are actually massless, but there is another field in the universe -- called the Higgs Field, in his honor -- which pervades all of space. A particle's "mass" is really just a measure of how strongly it interacts with this field.

What happens, according to this theory, is that as a massless particle flies through the Higgs field, it picks up a cloud of Higgs which gets stuck to it, much like trying to run through a river of snot, and the combination of the energy and momentum of the original particle and of the attached Higgs looks like a massive particle. There's a good deal more math to it, but the important thing is that this gives an explanation for where all of that mass comes from, this explanation is logically consistent, and in theory it tells us more about how to mess around with that.

Also interestingly, not only does the Higgs field interact with every particle that has "mass," but it interacts with itself as well -- which is what makes it so goopy that it can stick to other things in the first place. As a result, you can end up with a "Higgsball," basically a lump of Higgs field stuck to itself with nothing in the center. And that lump would act like a particle in its own right, with a mass currently predicted to be somewhere around 135GeV.  That lump is what's known as the Higgs boson (a boson is a general term for a particle with certain angular momentum properties), and finding it would be direct experimental proof of Higgs' theory.

For the past several decades, we've been trying to spot it, but it's really hard to form. Basically, the way you would generate it is to trigger a collision between two particles that themselves have a lot of Higgs interaction -- say, a pair of Z bosons -- and get some of their cumulative "goop" to shoot off as a ball of its own. There are a few big catches in this: first, you can't just manufacture a bunch of Z bosons. Instead you ram other particles together (protons in the case of the LHC), and some small fraction of those collisions involve cases where one proton emits a Z, another proton emits a Z, those crash into each other and form a Higgs, etc. (Sort of like the photon case above, but this happens a lot less, which is why you need to collide a lot of protons for this to happen -- and with a lot of energy incidentally, since you need to incidentally create particles weighing as much as 180 protons just out of your spare kinetic energy, which is why earlier accelerators couldn't do it)

The second catch is that the Higgs boson itself is very unstable; it is expected to decay within only 10^-21 of a second, enough time for it to travel only about 1/1000 the width of an atom. So rather than detecting the Higgs itself, we have to detect the patterns of things which the Higgs decays in to -- which we can do, but it's a lot harder, and means that you need to see a lot of Higgses before you can detect with confidence. That's what a lot of accelerator teams have been doing for the past several decades.

At this point, I think that most people in the scientific community would be very surprised if the Higgs didn't exist. The theory has done a great job of explaining pretty much everything else in its path, and nobody in the years since has come up with an alternative theory which is quite as good. So in a way, finding the Higgs could be a little disappointing; "yeah, we were right, go us. What next?," whereas not finding it would mean "hey, WTF? We don't understand anything that's going on suddenly." 

But if we do find it, then we'll have a fairly deep answer to the question of where mass comes from.

Cosmic snot.

Edited to add: And we found it! CERN confirmed the discovery on the Fourth of July, 2012. It has a mass of just over 125GeV, and has been independently spotted by two different experiments, CMS and ATLAS, running at the Large Hadron Collider. Woohoo!

Oh, BTW, I can finally share some numbers, since +Vic Gundotra just said them at I/O: G+ has 250 million users, 75 million daily actives, and those active users spend over 60 minutes per day on Google – 12 in the stream view alone. 

"Ghost Town," my ass. We are a ghost city. :)

And we'll be one year old tomorrow! #io12

Google launched a site today called "Good to Know" about privacy on the internet -- and perhaps most importantly, about what data Google keeps, why it keeps it, and how you can control it.

This is just a lovely analysis by +Randall Munroe  about playing relativistic baseball. The physics seem mostly right, except for the spherical shape of the resulting nuclear explosion; the baseball's motion should instead reshape it into roughly a hyperboloid (same shape as  a sonic boom) with additional widening due to secondary fusion of the debris. 

The fusion will slow down the baseball more than Munroe claims, too. Although it's going very fast, that also means it's hitting a lot of nuclei per second, and that's a lot of explosions. (Even after the original baseball is wholly consumed, there's still a flying blob of very hot nuclei to fuse) Using figures for a standard MLB baseball and air that's basically pure Nitrogen at STP, and approximating 10MeV energy released per fusion event (assuming that it's dominated by fusion of Hydrogen in the baseball with Nitrogen in the air, or Hydrogen in the air with Carbon in the baseball) you end up with a simple differential equation for the speed of the baseball which you can solve numerically. The baseball is brought to a stop within about 300 microseconds, during which it will have traveled about 84km. Since the cone of fire will be dominated by X-rays during this short time interval, it will also spread at the speed of light, with the result that the fireball will look at first somewhat like a cone lying on its side.

So what you'll really see is a very bright flash streaking across the countryside, leaving in its wake an expanding cone of light brighter than the Sun (but tinged noticeably blue) expanding outwards. It will then go through the whole process of getting briefly dimmer before flashing bright again, and then rising upwards as a ball of flame before curving into a mushroom cloud. This cloud would be more than big enough to bounce up against the upper end of the atmosphere before it properly mushroomed out, so it would more flatten and spread horizontally, probably engulfing a sizeable geography (like, a good-sized Western state) in flame and light. The total energy yield would only be about 20kT, not much bigger than the Hiroshima bomb, but the motion of the ball would spread the explosion out over a much wider area -- less devastation per location, but spread out much more dramatically.

It would be a pretty awesome game to watch.

This story hasn't been picked up by the large English-language press yet, but it's worth a gander. (This article is based on a translation of stuff from the Finnish and German press...) According to the report, the two women were camping and having dinner when they heard gunfire from across the water – this being the beginning of Anders Breivik's massacre which killed 69 people. They immediately took their boat across the water and filled it with people, while taking direct fire, and escorted them to safety – and then returned three (possibly four, reports conflict) more times, rescuing a total of 40 people.

This reads like the sort of thing you would see in a citation for the Medal of Honor. Charging into fire four times in a row to rescue civilians is no small matter.

May we all live up to their example.

EDITED: I just put up a new post with a new & improved version of the "private circles" advice below, with some more details.

https://plus.google.com/103389452828130864950/posts/7fqxffxg4NA

OK, time for another "little-known but useful features of Google+" post.

- If someone particularly makes a particularly obnoxious comment on your post (since alas, this is the Internet) you can delete it. Go to the little circle-and-triangle menu, and there's an option to "remove or report comments," and then you can nuke them one at a time.

- If you edit your profile and click on the set of people in your circles, you can control whether or not people can discover who is in your circles. Note that even if it's public, this just lets people know "Bob is in your circles" – it never reveals which circle people are in. (So it's completely OK to have a "Jerks, but I want to know what they're saying" circle.) I'd actually recommend leaving this fairly open; that way, people can go through you and find more people they know. I've got mine set so that my circles are visible to other people in my circles.

But one particularly useful thing you can do with this is to change the visibility on a per-circle basis. In particular, you can have some circles that anyone can find out about, some circles which are connections that only other people in your circles can know about, and some circles whose membership is completely private: nobody but you will know that you're following those people. If you have relationships you're not comfortable broadcasting, use this feature, it gives you flexibility.

- If you want to know how many people are following you, go to your circles page instead of your profiles page. It's a minor bug which should be fixed soon, but the number on the profiles page tends to be somewhat out-of-date and skew low, especially if you're gaining followers rapidly.

Orbital Sciences Corporation has joined the ranks of companies which have launched payloads into orbit! The Antares took off yesterday from Virginia on its test flight, successfully delivering a test mass payload into orbit, as well as a few small satellites. This June, they will start the test flights for delivering unmanned payloads to the ISS. Here's a complete video of the launch, which was really picture-perfect from ignition to payload separation. 

More info about the Antares: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antares_(rocket)

h/t +Frank Elliott for the video!

This game is remarkably fun: You get five random images from Street View, and you have to try to figure out where in the world you are. It encourages you to travel on the one hand, and is excellent preparation for when you're recruited by a secret agency to perform a completely anonymous assassination mission in exchange for $20M, and airdropped blindly somewhere into the world.

... what? I call that "Thursday."

The way your brain combines visual and auditory input is fascinating. I know the (actual) lyrics to O Fortuna pretty well, but when watching this video damned if I wasn't hearing "Gopher Tuna! Bring more tuna!"

The LA Times is reporting – together with large stacks of detailed, substantiating evidence – that the Boy Scouts systematically aided and abetted child molesters within their organization for several decades. The files in this article cover the period from 1970 through 1991, and appear to show a pervasive pattern in which all levels of the organization took active efforts to protect people known to them to be sexually assaulting children and teenagers from prosecution or exposure, as well as continuing to promote them within the organization, encourage their further access to children, and help them move across the country.

Even by the standards of the child abuse scandals of the past few years, this one has the potential to be one of the worst. Unlike the Catholic Church cases, where information generally flowed up to the episcopal level at most and then got stopped, it appears that the BSA went as far as to keep detailed files on these people at the national organization level – ostensibly so that they would not be recommended for further roles, but in practice it seems to have been more of a fetish for record-keeping. My hope is that the level of detail in these documents will make it easier to convict those people involved.

Perhaps more significantly, this case could well run afoul of federal as well as state laws: obvious targets include helping known molesters move across state lines, and (given the formal organizational involvement) even RICO prosecutions against the organization itself. While the BSA has considerable political support which would notionally bulwark it against such things, there's something about large data files full of child molesters that has the tendency to burn through people's goodwill.

Schneier has an excellent editorial today about airline security. As +Sean Bonner (h/t for the link) said, if you read one thing today, make this it: he cuts directly to the meat of the matter, of what's wrong with security as we practice it, and makes clear and specific recommendations about how to fix it. These recommendations may be politically highly unpopular, but I firmly agree that they are the right thing to do.

What’s Hot / Beliebte Beiträge / Lo más popular / Popular / À découvrir / Популярное / خبرهای داغ / 人気の投稿 / 热门信息 / 熱門訊息

Time for another #googleplusupdate!

For Google+ users around the world, we just launched What’s Hot in nine new languages, in addition to English.

If your primary language is set to German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, Farsi, Japanese, simplified or traditional Chinese, you’ll now see a “What’s hot” link in your left-hand navigation (or right-hand navigation, for Farsi speakers) which takes you to some of the most exciting stuff going on in your language on Google+.

Pro tip: If you want to see what’s hot in any available language, navigate to https://plus.google.com/hot?hl=<language>. The currently available languages are en, de, es, pt, fr, ru, fa, ja, zh-CN and zh-TW.

#whatshot

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I can't make this stuff up

I'm sitting in a Starbucks doing random whatever over an iced americano. While I waiting for my drink, I watched a guy with his friend, pick up a newspaper; and start to remark on the Samsung Apple verdict.

Guy: "Wait, so what they're saying is, Samsung is the same as Apple?"
Friend: "I know, right? Makes me think twice about how much I paid for my Mac Book"
Guy: "Seriously"

Not 10 minutes later, a husband and wife, same newspaper:

Husband: "... Samsung's iPad is the same as Apple's iPad, and I paid how much for the Apple one? Honey, I told you they were a ripoff", after looking up the Samsung tablet on his iPhone.
Wife: "Oh wow," looking at the screen, "... that's a lot cheaper. Think we can return it?"

I put my Samsung QX410 on my table, and started to plug in, when he leans over to me, "Sorry, you don't mind if I ask, how much did you pay for your Samsung laptop?"

"Oh, no worries, it was $700." I replied. 

I watched shock overcome his face, like actual shock. He looked at me, blankly, for an awkward amount of time, "Mind if I have a look?" he asked. 

So, I obliged, and showed him a few things. He commented on Windows 7, so I opened up my virtual machine of OS/X... By the time the conversation was over, he was ready to kick Cupertino in the nuts, I think.

... Now, the punchline: 

I'm writing this post after the FOURTH group of Starbucks patrons have made the connection that Samsung is now the same as Apple. They don't know the details, they don't really care, what they know is Apple is saying that Samsung is the same as Apple ... and with one simple Google Search, you get prices that are basically half for what seems to be the same products -- for nearly everything. 

Two of these groups (including the husband/wife) asked me about my Samsung laptop, the second group noticed my Galaxy phone (also by Samsung)... Best billion dollar ad-campaign Samsung ever had.

Some of these seem remarkably useful. I'm not sure why I didn't know more of these.

So a while ago, I posted to remind people of a basic bit of etiquette on social networks: Don't leave off-topic comments on other people's posts. It's obnoxious at best and spam at worst. This is something good to remember when you're moving about the Internet.

I'm bringing this up again because in the past month I've seen a lot of people leave comments about their favorite Google+ features on my posts, even posts which have nothing to do with the feature in question -- or more commonly, nothing to do with Google+ whatsoever. Doing this does not get your comment attention; it gets your comment deleted, and your feedback promptly ignored. It also eats in to your social capital significantly* and does not improve your odds of being listened to elsewhere or at other times.

If you want to leave comments about something, leave them as comments on posts where they're actually relevant. If you want to send feedback about the product, use the "Send feedback" link at the lower right -- it's a much better way to do it, and that way your feedback will actually get read.

(And of course, if you're commenting or otherwise replying to someone, think for a sec about how you're phrasing it. There's a tendency of the Internet to make people forget that they're talking to actual people. Before you hit "share" or "send" or whatever, imagine saying whatever you're saying to that person, face-to-face. Coming up to a complete stranger and acting like a total dick** is not going to get you good results in most cases.)

* That's the most polite way of phrasing it I've come up with. It is not the phrasing I normally use in conversation.

** That's the most polite way of phrasing it I've come up with. It is also not the phrasing I normally use in conversation.

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This is somewhere between awesome and terrifying. Computer archaeology is one thing, but this company is still running their business off an IBM 402, believed to be the last of its kind in the world. They have a software library for it: a bookcase full of plugboards, each of them a bundle of wires. To change the program, you swap the batch of wires. You see, back in 1948 the notion of a stored-program computer -- one where the software is stored as data in the system, rather than as the physical wiring of the machine -- wasn't really developed. (The very first such machine, a small-scale experiment, started running in June of that year) But with plugboards for its software and punched cards for its data input, this thing could do basic business accounting, and so it did -- and so it still does, apparently, to this day.

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Fascinating article about ancient computers still in active use today. This one below was built by IBM in 1948(!) It's "software" is actually a patchboard of wire connections. To change from one job to another, slide out the program and replace it with another patchboard from the rack.

Data is input via punched cards.

(check out the attached gallery)

via kottke

Punch-Card Accounting

Sparkler Filters of Conroe, Texas, prides itself on being a leader in the world of chemical process filtration. If you buy an automatic nutsche filter from them, though, they’ll enter your transaction on a “computer” that dates from 1948.

Sparkler Filters' IBM 402, with self-employed field engineer Duwayne Leafley in the foreground. (Photo Courtesy Ed Thelen / IBM 1401 Group)
Sparkler’s IBM 402 is not a traditional computer, but an automated electromechanical tabulator that can be programmed (or more accurately, wired) to print out certain results based on values encoded into stacks of 80-column Hollerith-type punched cards.

Companies traditionally used the 402 for accounting, since the machine could take a long list of numbers, add them up, and print a detailed written report. In a sense, you could consider it a 3000-pound spreadsheet machine. That's exactly how Sparkler Filters uses its IBM 402, which could very well be the last fully operational 402 on the planet. As it has for over half a century, the firm still runs all of its accounting work (payroll, sales, and inventory) through the IBM 402. The machine prints out reports on wide, tractor-fed paper.

The punched cards used in the 402, with some mangled cards from a recently cleared jam in the card reader. The cards sit on the IBM 029 key-punch machine. (Photo Courtesy Ed Thelen / IBM 1401 Group)
Of course, before the data goes into the 402, it must first be encoded into stacks of cards. A large IBM 029 key-punch machine--which resembles a monstrous typewriter built into a desk--handles that task.

Carl Kracklauer, whose father founded Sparkler Filters in 1927, usually types the data onto the punch cards. The company sticks with the 402 because it's a known entity: Staffers know how to use it, and they have over 60 years of company accounting records formatted for the device.

The key punch isn't the only massive accessory in Sparkler's arsenal. The 402 also links to an IBM 514 Reproducing Punch, which has been broken for three years. When it works properly, the 514 spits out punched "summary cards," which typically contain the output of the 402's operation (such as sum totals) for later reuse. Sparkler stores all of its punched data cards--thousands and thousands of them--in stacks of boxes.

Sparkler Filters' collection of IBM 402 programs on IBM plugboards. (Photo Courtesy Ed Thelen / IBM 1401 Group)
The company also possesses dozens of 402 programs in the form of IBM plugboards. Computer programming in the 1940s commonly involved arranging hundreds of individual wires in a way that would likely drive a modern software engineer insane. In the 402's case, a spaghetti-like pattern of wires attached to hundreds of connectors on each plugboard determines the operation of the machine, and different plugboards can be pulled out and replaced as if they were interchangeable software disks. So you might insert one plugboard for handling, say, accounts receivable, and a different one for inventory management.

Sparkler’s 402 is a such a significant computing relic that the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, sent a delegation to the company last year to try and convince its executives to move to a more modern accounting system and donate the 402 to the museum. That will someday be an appropriate resting place for the 402, but as long as it still does its duty, the Texas company has no problem keeping its digital dinosaur living a little while longer.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_fix_it_ancient_computers_in_use_today.html

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One of the rare animated GIFs I've seen worth sharing. Kind of magical, isn't it?

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Two stage domino collapse

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Here, have a cyclonic storm. Because that's kind of awesome.

via +Mike Salway.

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The DHS has claimed the right to stop people, and search and seize any electronic devices which they have, anywhere within 100 miles of any U.S. border. To give you an idea of just what "within 100 miles of the border" means, here's a handy map – it includes, for example, the entire states of Hawaii, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Michigan, together with the District of Columbia and most of the other major cities of the United States.

And lest you assume that this is "only to catch the bad guys," the various lawsuits and Congressional investigations of post-9/11 behavior by agencies using powers under the PATRIOT act (which is what the DHS is claiming as their authority for this) seem to indicate that police departments have been using these powers quite freely to go after whoever they see fit; and without any checks and balances preventing them from doing so, this means anyone whom they suspect they don't like.

Write to your Representative. Write your Senators. Each and every time one of these issues comes up, let them know that it's important to you that the United States remain a country of laws, not of arbitrary powers. If we sacrifice the Constitution out of fear that groups unknown will harm us, we are giving up what it means to be American in the first place.

As Benjamin Franklin said, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Or as a T-shirt I once owned (with the Information Awareness Office logo on it) once said, "I gave up my essential liberties in order to obtain a little temporary security, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."

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If you live in the orange areas, you are in what the DHS now considers a "Fourth Amendment Exclusion Zone"...meaning that it's fine for the DHS to stop anyone within 100 miles (the Orange area) of ANY US border, without any suspicion or warrant, and search all the data on all their devices.

“We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” says the executive summary.

Absolute insanity. More info here: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/02/electronics-border-seizures/

EDIT: Ok, so here's the thing. I'm tired of hearing the back and forth of "It's this candidate's fault" or "It's that party's fault." No. It's your fault. It's my fault.

They're using laws that were passed with MASSIVE approval by the American people. When we invaded Afghanistan, it was supported by over 90% of the population. When we passed the Patriot Act and similar legislation after 9/11 (which led to DHS and other agencies being able to enact changes like the above), the support was well over 80%.

We, as Americans, are really good at feeling fear first, and then reasoning about it much, much later. We allowed our leaders to gain this power out of fear, very similar to the "Red Scare", and the eventual conclusion of such a precious gift is an abuse of that power.

If anybody would just pick up and read a damned history book every once and a while, we wouldn't be so awful at letting these things happen.

Your reading list for this evening. Let's try to stop this sort of madness before it gets any worse:

Propoganda (1928) by Edward Bernays
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) by Wilhelm Reich
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) by Norbert Wiener
Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) &  A Thousand Plateaus (1980) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
A People's History of the United States: 1492 – Present (1980_ by Howard Zinn

And watch the following documentaries:

The Century Of The Self

The Trap - 1 - F*k You Buddy

Edited: There's a revised version of this bill, and with more information in play, I was wrong in this previous post: it's just vile. See more here: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/Fv6dbUet6Tz

Everyone is in a great furor over this bill, and the HuffPo has published a rather breathless article on it, but I suspect that the people in question have not actually read the text. (http://www.nmlegis.gov/Sessions/13%20Regular/bills/house/HB0206.pdf) 

This bill does not make getting an abortion in case of rape or incest a felony. This makes getting an abortion, or causing someone else to get an abortion, for the purpose of destroying evidence of the crime a felony. That is, if you rape someone or commit incest and then force them to get an abortion in order to hide the fact, then you've committed an additional crime of tampering with evidence.

I'm not sure how it is that the HuffPo managed to fail at such basic fact-checking here, especially given that their article actually links to the bill text directly, and said text is less than two double-spaced pages. Not rocket science, guys.

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Your next bit of random insanity for the day. God Hates Ferns.

(Side thought: Does anyone else get an urge to replace the picture under this caption? With, say, "Me," "My Brother," "Mommy," and "Daddy?" I mean, if you're going to teach something as deeply screwed up as "God will love you more if you have this ritual... and God doesn't love those other people," you may as well go all the way.)

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I don't even..

This device is sure to provoke controversy, but it doesn't seem fundamentally novel to me: rather, it's the compact, portable version of something we've seen for years in naval point gunnery systems such as AEGIS and PHALANX. Basically, this is an almost entirely automated gunnery platform: you look through the scope and select a target, and pull the trigger to tell it to fire on its own mark; then it waits for a clean shot and takes it. A first-time shooter can reliably hit targets at a range of 500 yards, which is no big surprise, since the shooter isn't actually doing much of the work at all: this is an automated gun system.

Thinking of this in the range of applications: for hunting as a sport, it kind of defeats the purpose of the "sport" aspect. (Especially if you added just a bit more logic to help it identify deer or whatever on its own, and just ping the operator for confirmation before taking a shot) It's basically an automated killing device. For hunting for survival, it would certainly be effective, although if you're using a device this fancy then perhaps you have more efficient means at your disposal of getting food. 

Its main application, AFAICT, is as a sniper's weapon, where this could be tremendously powerful. A system like this could likely improve the single-shot accuracy of even an experienced scout/sniper, and combined with an even longer-ranged weapon like a BMG, it could become robotic death at a distance.

What's perhaps more alarming is that it would turn absolutely any random person into the equivalent of a moderately skilled sniper, and I cannot think of any chain of events that begins with this that doesn't end really, really, badly.

The other important thing about this is that there are obvious extensions possible with this technology: with just a bit more AI logic to identify candidate targets (and, presumably, check with a human before taking shots), you could turn this into a fully autonomous point defense platform that just sits there and kills any targets of a certain category that it sees. It would be awfully effective at it, too. The delayed-triggering technology could be combined with high-ROF-capable guns to produce a sort of deadlier version of a machine gun: rather than firing rounds off as fast as possible, and losing significant accuracy due to the motion of the gun, it has an eye strapped to the barrel which means that it only fires each round when it's pointed at a target. A weapon of this sort could be as much deadlier than a machinegun as a machinegun is deadlier than a repeating rifle. Combined with a base that can move itself to improve shooting vantage, you have a killer robot. (Imagine mounting this device on, say, a Boston Dynamics BigDog, or a small UAV) But even without that, it could make infantry motion through surveyable spaces as impractical as massed infantry charges against machine-gun posts, by simply picking off anyone who is visible for even a moment.

The key innovation is that the sort of advanced tracking technology we saw decades ago with the AEGIS is now mountable on a single rifle, rather than on a large weapons system. This allows unprecedented accuracy and versatility of mounting.

As a military weapon, this could reshape the battlefield, and possibly be the start of the end of the use of infantry. This is a weirdly mixed development; if sending individual people to kill people becomes impractical, it means that warfare will focus instead much more on mass weapons such as bombs and chemicals. But infantry is where most of the people involved in a war get killed, so this could have the perverse result (after, perhaps, one or two wars in which people learn just why infantry doesn't work as well) of greatly reducing the human cost of war.

As a civilian device, OTOH, this is completely insane. I'd rather have people walking around with hand grenades. This is alarming enough on the battlefield; having cities full of people with automated sniping platforms is a spectacular disaster waiting to happen.

(As a side note, this thing has WiFi on it. How thoroughly has its system security been vetted? On the list of things that I do not want unauthorized access to, "automated sniper rifle" is pretty close to the top.)

h/t +Jesse Powell for the link.

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I had absolutely no idea that the game actually recognized a win condition; I thought you just played until failure, and the "win" was just another failure mode. The more you know...

via +Lionel Lauer.

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I did not know you could actually win Snake.

Wowsers.

Oh, dear gods. Something for you hardcore CS geeks out there, via +Bradley Rhodes: Someone has proved that Magic: The Gathering is Turing-Complete. In particular, he details a complete layout of cards for four players, controlled by a "tape" consisting of a sequence of tokens of particular colors and toughnesses, which – entirely using forced play, so the game "runs" itself – executes the (2, 3) Universal Turing Machine.

If you have no idea what the previous paragraph meant, just shake your head and walk away. If you do understand what the previous paragraph meant, you may want to shake your head and walk away anyway.

Edited to add: I just realized what this means. It means that any sufficiently advanced technology is mathematically indistinguishable from Magic.

+Christina Talbott-Clark just made a post which I think is utterly worth re-sharing, but as it was a re-share, a flat re-share of my own would lose her commentary, which was my favorite part of it. So (as the original post that was shared, by +Jenny Winder, was a pure link) I'm going to flatten this and post it again, just so that you can all see what she said.

"I'm a religious person, and my desire for social justice and a better life for all people is informed and shaped by my faith. To me, the social changes this article describes are nothing less than the bringing about of God's kingdom on earth. It's what I believe our purpose as humans to be.

And if the result of succeeding is that religion fades into human history, well, I'm okay with that. What's important is that we live well and love well, not that we adhere to an exact metaphysical understanding of the world. Faith, as I see it, is about how to act, not what to think."

I couldn't agree with her more.

Alright, so for #ScienceSunday  I thought I'd share this great video (via +Brett Lider) about the process of falling in to a black hole. The science in here is all good, except that I should add that the more modern quantum theory of black holes (yes, there really is a quantum theory of black holes) seems to give a much better explanation for what happens at the singularity than the old classical theory – so the stuff about wormholes in this video is probably wrong.

Also, since it's #ScienceSunday  and I've got some free time, I'll be around to answer people's science questions. What do you want to know about?

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This is a great video -- not just because you get to see glass explode at 130,000fps, but because he gives a really clear explanation of just why a Prince Rupert's Drop can survive a hammer-blow on its big end, but the smallest clip at its narrow end will make the entire thing blow itself into dust.

(Technically speaking, it's a catastrophic mechanical failure wave, but not an explosion: the wave of destruction moves at about Mach 0.75 through the glass, whereas by definition true explosions are supersonic. That's not just a technicality: supersonic motion creates shock waves, which are what does most of the damage in an explosion. That said, I would still recommend being careful, and wearing eye protection, around Prince Rupert's Drops.)

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Just in case anyone hasn't seen this awesome little explosion at 130,000 frames per second. #ScienceSunday  / +ScienceSunday

Geometry: Enemy of the People!

Many of you who encounter American politics are routinely horrified by the things that some of our political parties want to do to schools: teach more religion, mix creationism in with science, make sure that kids aren't exposed to the evils of evolution or set theory. But as usual, Israel is here to help you remember that, no matter how crazy your local politics may seem, it can do crazier. In Israel, there are parties that are filling in that important empty slice of the political spectrum to the right of Bill O'Reilly and to the left of Mullah Muhammad Omar.

This is a recent poster from one of Israel's religious parties, UTJ. Let me translate this for you, with footnotes:

EUCLID
No, it’s not the name of a medicine.
It’s a Greek mathematician that your sons will learn about instead of learning Mishna.(1)

After all, what’s really important to us when we send them to school every day? Moral education, virtue, piety, to instill in them from childhood “to meditate on it day and night.”(2) A government without Judaism will require your sons to learn secular(3) things. You must protect the next generation. Everyone must. We are all Haredi.(4) Vote.


(1) i.e., rabbinic commentaries on the Torah from the 1st and 2nd centuries.
(2) Joshua 1:8
(3) I'm trying to be idiomatic here, but this is actually a dog-whistle word, especially paired with "Greek" earlier on. What it actually says is "to learn 'outsider' things" -- as in, "those things which foreign conquerors have imposed on us in the past to force us to destroy our Judaism and which we have fought, and will fight, civil wars to overthrow." cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanukkah.
(4) This is a bracket term for the far end of the Orthodox spectrum. "We are all Haredi" is the party's latest slogan.

That's right. If we allow our schools to teach math or any of these other secular subjects, we open the door to rampant secularism and Hellenization.

/facepalm

(Side note: The still-standard translation of Euclid's works into Hebrew was done by the Vilna Ga'on, considered one of the greatest Orthodox rabbis of the past several centuries. But as elsewhere, historical memory only shows up in politics when it's convenient.)

The good news, I suppose, is that this series of posters is the subject of a lawsuit arguing that it violates election laws: (http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2013/01/activists-seek-to-ban-haredi-rabbis-pronouncement-on-upcoming-elections-567.html) after a series of interesting events a couple of years ago, rabbis are now banned from doing things like offering amulets and rabbinical blessings in exchange for votes. Edited: Apparently this lawsuit is about other activities of the same group of rabbis; the poster campaign is just standard campaigning. What a country.

Do you ever have the feeling that we're all doomed?

h/t +Tal Cohen and +David Oren for the link.

In the past week, I've encountered more than my usual share of trolls. Not sure why this was... probably just the ordinary maliciousness of the universe. And I've walked away from a number of arguments on the Internet, with that happy feeling of "Wait a moment! There is absolutely no reason for me to be having this conversation!"

In honor of this happy thought, I thought I would create a little bit of graphic design, and share it with you all.

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OK, I know, an animated GIF... but I just can't stop looking at this one. It makes me miss snow. (A sentiment for which I'm sure those of you in the Northeastern US will want to throw something at me, at the moment – but what can I say, I'm a Coloradan)

via +Lisa Borel.

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Time lapse of snow fall. #nemo   #stormnemo  
30" in 38 hours

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Holy crap; this is amazing! Apparently you can ask to stay on the 6 past the last stop and go through the turnaround, and thus get a slow tour of this station... although you apparently have to engage in some creative B&E (or at least trespassing) to see the secret art gallery. Make sure to click through the link:

http://www.travelettes.net/new-york-city%E2%80%99s-hidden-subway-station/

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New York City's hIdden unused subway station.  Under City Hall is an abandoned gem "with tall tiled arches...and skylights that run across the entire curve of the station."  It became obsolescent in the 1940's when the tight curve of the station created unsafe platform gaps when longer subway cars were introduced. However, it is still used as a turnaround for the 6 and now they let you stay on the train and see the station.

But there's more! The Underbelly Project has made the station an off-the-limits gallery of street artist's murals. Excellent!

Read the Travelette piece. Lots o' pictures.  http://www.travelettes.net/new-york-city%E2%80%99s-hidden-subway-station/   #subwayart  

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This is bad news.

A few years ago, the IPCC snapshot of climate change predicted relatively low ice melt, and this raised a bunch of eyebrows because it was patent bollocks. What happened was that they didn't have a very good mathematical model for how ice would melt, so they chose an extremely conservative one to avoid any accusation that they were being alarmist – basically, one that assumed that prior icemelt doesn't affect future icemelt at all.

You can see the problem with this model by simply putting an ice cube out in the sun and staring at it for a few minutes. The top of the ice melts first, and that forms a little puddle of water that sits on top of the ice. But water absorbs sunlight quite happily and starts to warm up, whereas ice (especially very white ice) reflects a lot of sunlight, so the water starts to melt its way through the ice. You see the puddle get deeper, fast. If you have a big enough piece of ice, you'll see deep pools start to form, and the ice start to hollow itself out from the middle. To compare this to what the GISS-E model (used by the IPCC) did, you would have to keep draining off all the meltwater every few seconds – and if you do that, you'll see that the ice melts a lot more slowly.

Now, that work was 6 or 7 years ago; since then, the ice melt models have gotten a lot better, but AFAIK nobody's published a full-scale model that includes them yet. But it was already possible to eyeball the answer from the old paper; rather than a few inches over a century, we should expect a rapid and rapidly accelerating collapse of both polar ice sheets, especially at the North pole. By 2030, I would be quite surprised if the North Polar Sea weren't navigable for at least most of the year – something with substantial geopolitical implications.

But the loss of "sea ice" – ice that's floating on water – is less serious than the loss of land ice, because when sea ice melts, the overall water level doesn't change. (Try it with a glass of ice water) When land ice melts, the water pours into the oceans. The main reservoirs of that are Greenland, West Antarctica, and East Antarctica. East Antarctica is bigger and so more stable, but the other two appear to be losing ice at a rather terrifying rate.

Within our lifetimes, I expect to see a planetary climate that's significantly different from the climate I grew up in. Not that we'll suddenly be living in the Jurassic again; that sort of change takes a bit more time. But I expect to see the Western US desert be much drier, I expect to see the growing range of various plants – and animals, and parasites – substantially changed, and I expect to see existing watersheds shift, dry up, and form. And most of all, I expect to see deep geopolitical changes as the food and water supplies of the planet move around, and existing breadbaskets collapse.

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Global warming: New study shows massive ice loss at both poles

Bad global warming news: A new international study done by 47 researchers from more than two dozen facilities has the most accurate measurements of polar ice yet, and shows that we're losing ice from both the north and south poles at an ever-increasing rate. Overall loss is 3x faster than it was in the 1990s, and Greenland alone is losing ice at a rate 5x faster. The West Antarctic ice sheet, a vast reservoir of ice, is losing a staggering 65 billion tons of ice per year.

Climate change deniers can kiss their ice goodbye.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2012/11/30/global_warming_is_melting_greenland_and_antarctic_ice_and_contributing_to.html

A Robot With a Chainsaw: Because why not? "Exactly what the robot is doing isn't obvious to the viewer," says the site, "but once it is finished the whole thing is disassembled to reveal two wooden stools and some interesting shapes."

Also, because robots with chainsaws are cool! Until they rise up and kill us all, of course.

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/169-robotics/5392-a-robot-with-a-chainsaw.html

A great little article about a very short interview Arthur C. Clarke gave in 1974, where he predicted the world of 2001: "when he grows up... he will have in his own house, not a computer as big as this, but at least a console through which he can talk to his friendly local computer and get all the info he needs for his everyday life: his bank statements, his theater reservations, all the information you need over the course of living in a complex modern society." He goes on to talk about the possibilities of telecommuting, instant global communication, and so on. Clarke's ability to understand the consequences of computers was really extraordinary, in an era where even most science fiction writers didn't really get it. 

The full article is here; I've linked the video separately because the article's video link is some broken Vimeo thing that's only showing ads for Microsoft and not the video itself.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/tech-time-warp-arthur-c-clarke/

h/t +Kee Hinckley and +David Brin for the link.

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I don't always share statistics about Google+. But this one, I'm allowed to repeat.

As +Vic Gundotra said in his share, "That is a lot of ghosts. :-)" 

Stay ethereal, my friends.

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Google+ grows to become 2nd largest social platform globally

Wow, that was quick! Like I had said before it was only a matter of time! It's also interesting to note the decline in Chinese based social media sites...

Google+, who despite being branded a failure or ghost town by large portions of the media, grew in terms of active usage by 27% to 343m users to become the number 2 social platform. Interestingly for Google, YouTube (not previously tracked by us as a social platform) comes in at number 3, demonstrating the immense opportunity of linking Google’s services through the G+ social layer. This is also a key indication of why Google+ integrated with the Google product set is so key to the future of search and the internet. We’ve got more coming on Google+ later this week as well.

Source: +GlobalWebIndex 
Link: http://goo.gl/hgU4k

#Google+
cc: +Sergey Brin +Louis Gray +Natalie Villalobos +Brian Rose +Eric Schmidt +Vic Gundotra 

Side note: With results from every state but Florida called at this point, Nate Silver has correctly called 49 out of 49 states — and the prediction for Florida was, in fact, a nearly perfect tie, leaning very slightly towards Obama.

This was not magic, nor was it chance. Silver isn't an oracle nor does he have some amazing ability to understand the American political system. This is simply what happens when you have one hell of a lot of data, and put it in the hands of a serious professional statistician.

Math FTW.

Since so many people are coming in to Google+ for the first time this week, I thought it would be good to share some tips for how to get the most out of your experience here.

* Don’t be afraid to follow interesting people. I have a circle which I call “Random Interesting People;” whenever I encounter someone on G+ who seems to post interesting things, I add them to it, even if I’ve never met them. Often I’ll encounter them because they left an interesting comment somewhere, or because someone reshared one of their posts, and then I’ll peek at their profile to see what kind of stuff they post. You meet a lot of really cool people this way. Don’t worry, adding someone to a circle isn’t creepy -- you only get to see what they’ve shared publicly, unless they explicitly decide to share more stuff with you.

* Search lets you meet people with common interests. Do a search for your favorite hobbies, TV shows, or musicians; you’ll see what people are posting about it, and you can keep up on the latest, comment, and meet a lot of people who are interested in the same things you are. To top it off, when you do a search you’ll see a “Save this Search” button -- that creates a new stream for you, which gets listed in the left under your circles. These “interest streams” are a way to come back and talk to people over and over.

* Hang out with your friends. There’s a green “Start a Hangout” button on the right -- it’s amazing how much fun these can be. You can do anything from hanging out with one special person, to opening it up to your friends, to opening it up to everyone in the world and seeing who you meet. I’ve seen people use them to hang out with friends who live on the other side of the world, to have birthday parties, for musicians to get together and jam, and all sorts of other stuff. We’ve added a bunch of new features to them lately, too; you can share your screen, watch videos, and do all sorts of other things together. I’ve personally done everything from meeting my oldest friend’s new daughter to meeting people I’ve only read about in magazines.

* Post and talk. It turns out that G+ works really well for having conversations. Posts that tend to get a lot of reaction include pictures (there are a lot of amazing photographers on this site!) and longer thoughts, say a few paragraphs or so, that invite people to agree or disagree. If you post publicly, there are more ways for people to find and meet you; if you post privately, you can keep things just “in your circle” of friends. Either way, you can get a lot of reaction to what you say, and my experience is that it’s mostly good reaction.

* Tag people. When you hit + in a post or a comment, you can +-mention someone: add them to the post and send them a notification (like in that little red box at the top right of your screen) that they’ve been mentioned. It’s a great way to pull people in to the conversation. For example, I’m going to tag +Trey Ratcliff, who is an amazing photographer, and +Natalie Villalobos, who is the G+ community manager and a great person to read for G+ tips, because if you just joined these are some cool people to follow.

* Share your own thoughts! Find out something cool? Figure out something you can do? Tell people about it! I’m going to share a bunch more of these tips, for example, as well as things about all the subjects I care about -- politics, science, technology, language, history, and whatever comes to my mind. The more you share, the more people will share with you, and the more fun you’ll have on Google+.

Welcome aboard!

Here's a mystery: If I'm walking down the street in Tel Aviv and I see someone wearing a pistol, I feel safer. If I'm walking down the street in Mountain View and see the same someone wearing a pistol, I'm pretty damned alarmed.

It took me a while (and a conversation with +Constantine Perepelitsa back in the early days of G+) to figure out why, but I realized that there's a simple but important difference: it's all about the level of threat. If I see someone carrying a gun in Tel Aviv, I know they're almost certainly licensed (your military discharge is your gun license), but more to the point, I know why they're carrying a gun, and what they're worried about: they're thinking about terrorists coming at them with knives or bombs, and that's a not entirely unreasonable thing to be thinking about. Guy with a gun on my side is a good thing.

But say I'm walking around in Mountain View. I'm walking around in a place that I figure is pretty safe; but this person feels that it's necessary to openly carry a gun. Clearly, their estimate of the ambient threat level is grossly different from mine. And that's worrisome, because it means one of three things. Option 1, they could be right, and I could be walking around blissfully unaware of serious danger around me; I should stick as close to them as possible. Option 2, they could be right about the danger, but the danger only pertains to them. In that case, I should get as far away from them as possible, because if someone's about to start shooting at them I don't trust anybody's aim. Or option 3, their threat assessment is completely wrong – in which case I'm standing next to someone whose ability to estimate threats in the world around them is demonstrably broken, and who is carrying a loaded gun. Which is not exactly reassuring.

Or put another way, it's not that carrying a gun openly makes you a crazy person – it's that crazy people are more likely to want to carry a gun openly in a situation that other people regard as peaceful.

(There are people who argue that carrying a gun openly is what helps preserve the peace – but that's just another version of threat assessment. It's an argument that a visible threat of force is required to avoid violence in this situation. The argument that one should wear a gun openly at all times simply on principle seems to be another variation of that, simply applied to society as a whole rather than the particular situation)

Open-carry laws like the one Oklahoma just passed don't bother me per se, but I think that we've been far too lax as a society about the training required to safely carry guns in public places. I think that a public-carry license (wether concealed or open) should come with a certain level of responsibility: not just to train regularly in the basic operation and maintenance of the firearm, but in the critical skills of knowing when it's safe to fire the weapon (hint: your accuracy in combat is a lot lower than you think, and bullets keep going until they hit something), knowing how to meaningfully assess threats, and perhaps most importantly, knowing that owning a gun doesn't make you a cop. I'm concerned that a lot of states (Texas Ohio, I'm looking at you) have gone so far with their gun licensing, in the name of encouraging Second Amendment rights, that they've completely lost track of this sort of practical good sense. Is Oklahoma trying to encourage responsible citizens to carry weapons in the name of civic good? Or is it trying to encourage every J. Random Hominid to walk around armed? Those are two pretty different outcomes.

(Edit: Apparently it's Ohio, not Texas, which decided that allowing guns in bars was a good idea. My apologies to the state of Texas, and Ohio, I'm looking at you.)

So since I'm posting all about #gplusupdates today, I thought I'd say a bit more about the "What's Hot" feature that we're rolling out now. The goal is for this to be a home for what's interesting and exciting right now on G+. We're approaching this using the classic Google ranking-fu approach, with functions that try to identify a really dynamic notion of people's interest, the presence of good conversations, and so on.

One thing that we're working to avoid is having an echo chamber, where the top posts are perpetually the same group of really famous people. (Sorry, +Robert Scoble. We'll have to limit you. :) We designed our function to balance between showing the top of the top, and finding interesting posts further down the popularity chain which are nonetheless creating a lot of buzz wherever they're seen. We're going to keep working on this and coming up with more interesting ways to let you see what's going on in the G+ community.

You can see this right now if you go to https://plus.google.com/hot , although it's only available in some languages at the moment. (We'll have it out in all languages soon, we just wanted to get the result quality somewhat better) There's also a "What's Hot" box which will sometimes show up in your stream, between your read and unread posts, and show you what's up; that can happen in any language.

This whole area of dynamic community-building is one I'm very excited about. What's Hot is a very early first step towards this, focusing on the G+ community as a whole, but we have a lot more in mind for the future.

(Full disclosure: Part of the reason I'm so excited about this feature is that it's the first chance I've had in a while to sit down and code for a bit; I actually got to be an ordinary engineer on this project, in addition to the usual running-about-organizing-stuff behavior.)

Edited to add: If your primary language in G+ isn't set to English, you won't see the What's Hot link yet, and if you go to the link above, you'll get an error that it isn't yet available in your language. (But you still may get the promo in the stream) This is because we wanted to work some more on quality cross-language. But if you want to see the English results right now, you can go to https://plus.google.com/hot?hl=en and see that right away. We'll have other languages for you soon!

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This is completely magical. Go over and play with it; you can pull and cut the cloth and it responds to you.

Having grown up in an era where doing this sort of computation on a computer in realtime would have seemed completely unthinkable, to see it done as a JS demo is just stunning.

h/t +philippe roux 

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Tearable cloth in JavaScript

And the award for the coolest canvas physics experiment of the day goes to this little beauty (http://bit.ly/11LmmoG). Its a CodePen link so you also get the added benefit of being able to play with the source code :)

#html5   #javascript   #html5canvas   #physics   #webdevelopment  

I just returned from an 11-day voyage in northern Alaska. It's hard for me to describe how utterly beautiful the state is; every part I saw, from Anchorage all the way up to Barrow, is stunning, arresting. The people are warm and friendly, the food is delicious (mmm, reindeer sausage), and every day has a bit of a feeling of adventure.

I may have fallen in love with Fairbanks in particular.

Here are a few of my shots (straight out of the camera) from the trip. Possibly more later, as things get cleaned up. #sooc

OK, everyone, search should now be rolled out to 100% of users. If you don't see "Search Google+" in your search box at the top yet, hit refresh. :)

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A simple, but effective, mousetrap. +Michael Vaughan suggests that it's ideal "for the scientist who's breached ethics codes and can no longer buy lab mice," but its ease of construction out of spare parts and its depositing the mice straight into a pot suggest that its real application is during sieges.

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Guten Morgen :)
Intelligente Mausefalle

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Something for your evening, if you haven't seen it yet; some truly amazing volcano photography.

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Chile Volcano Plume Explodes With Lightning

Since you were very enthusiastic about the Chile Ash Cloud picture I posted last night http://goo.gl/TsJX7, I decided to do some research and share more amazing pictures with you.

The eruption of the Puyehue volcano in the Andes mountains of southern Chile in mid-2011 provided some spectacular images of the force of nature.

Ash covers the landscape and thousands of people were evacuated from the surrounding rural communities.

The volcano, which hasn't been active since 1960 when it erupted after an earthquake, sent its plume of ash 6 miles high across Argentina and toward the Atlantic Ocean.

source: on each picture, you will find a text with the photographer's name

#photo #photography #volcano #eruption #lightning #chile

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I like this; it's brief and to the point. But I'd add more:

If you address it to Public, or to any large enough group of people, and watch the comments show up in realtime, it's a conversation.

If you address it to your friends, it's something you want to tell just them. We don't have a good word for this yet.

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Here's what I love about Google+ in general and the Google+ Diet in particular:

Instead of saying, "I'm going to write a blog post now," or "I'm going to send an e-mail" or "I think I'll tweet something" you simply say what you have to say, then decide who you're going to say it to.

If you address it to "Public," it's a blog post.

If you address it to "Your Circles" it's a tweet.

If you address it to your "My Customers" Circle it's a business newsletter.

If you address it to a single person, it can be a letter to your mother.

I'd say this is pretty revolutionary.

Linguistic reconstruction is a branch of historical linguistics that looks for the common ancestry of languages. This is how we identify common groups of languages like the Romance languages (descendants of Latin) or the broader families like Indo-European, which includes everything from Sanskrit to English. These are generally identified by a process which involves looking for words with the same meaning and related sounds. It's not enough for sounds to be similar: you have to argue that there are rules by which sounds changed from one language to another, and that the same set of rules will transform a bunch of the words. For example, the English word "father," the French word "père," Italian "padre," Latin "pater," and Sanskrit "pitar" all have the same meaning, and we know that as Latin words moved to French, consonants like medial t's and s's vanished, while the Germanic languages turned p's into f's and t's into th's. (But this rule wouldn't work at all with, say, the Hebrew word "av" or "ába;" Hebrew isn't part of the Indo-European family, and so its word is completely different) 

And once you have a well-established set of transformation rules like these, you can work them backwards to get a hypothesized "proto-language" that they came from. For example, in proto-Indo-European, the conjectured word for father is *pH₂tér. (The * means "this is not a word in any known language, just a reconstruction." H₂ is a sound we don't have in modern English, something similar to the 'h' sound in "Muhammad," with a bit of an "a" to it.) We can even estimate where and when this language was spoken by looking at the relations to modern languages, how distant they are (so that we can estimate how much time passed in the drift), which words they have in common and different (because this might tell us which objects weren't common when the languages split), and so on. Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is probably the best-attested proto-language, because it's been researched so heavily; it was probably spoken around 4000BCE in the area between the Caspian and Black seas.  

This paper is about something even more intense, "deep linguistic reconstruction" -- the attempt to detect "superfamilies" that combine top-level families like Indo-European, Ural-Altaic, and so on into even bigger families. Many linguists regard this entire business of deep reconstruction with a lot of suspicion, because languages change simply too quickly for sounds to be maintained for more than a few thousand years, and because at some point random chance similarities and the lack of real data start to obscure real relationships. This paper does a better job than most of trying to counter that by doing a few things:

* They look for words which are commonly used in their respective languages;
* They build up models of the rate at which different words change in different languages;
* They show that words which are both commonly used in their languages, and which don't change much, are the ones which seem to have cognates across many families, rather than just one or two;

And using this, they build up words that they believe are cognates across a group of seven families spoken across Europe and Asia, as well as words that are cognate among only six, five, etc. Unsurprisingly, these are for very common words which are also core parts of speech: I, thou, not, that, we, give, who, and so on. (Some are a bit more surprising: e.g., ash, bark, and worm all make the list. But given that we're talking about language families that are 15,000 years old, going back to the end of the last Ice Age and predating agriculture, those are at least basically reasonable words to have been common)

Finally, using all this data, they try to reconstruct a tree linking these seven families into a "proto-Eurasiatic" superfamily, which based on their reconstruction would have been about 15,000 years old, and originally spoken somewhere in the vicinity of northwestern Kazakhstan. The first branching off would have taken the proto-Kartvellian speakers off towards modern Armenia, and the proto-Dravidian speakers to Pakistan; then about 12,000 years ago, another group would have branched off heading north-west, to later branch off into the proto-Uralic and proto-Indo-European languages. Later, another branch would have headed northeast, ultimately turning into the Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, and Inuit-Yupik families. 

Do I believe this reconstruction? Only with a fairly large grain of salt. While they've definitely added some interesting techniques, the level of statistical noise in doing this analysis is so absurdly high that it's hard to take any of the results all too seriously. On the other hand, the map and the tree they end up with isn't a completely crazy one; it's at least something that could have happened. 

You can read the full paper at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110.full.pdf?with-ds=yes . 

You can read more about proto-Indo-European (and the ways in which proto-languages are reconstructed) at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary

To learn more about sounds like H₂, a good place to start is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory#.2Ah2
and get ready to follow all sorts of links about phonology and so on so you can find out just what a pharyngeal, epiglottal, or voiced velar fricative is. 

h/t +Lauren Weinstein for the link.

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I do not know anything about this church, but I like them already.

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Earlier today, +Xeno Phrenia made a post about the relative pay of CEO's and health care workers, and something in what she said struck me as a little off. After reflecting on it for a while, I think I know what it is, and I think it leads to some useful thoughts on the nature of our frustrations with the state of the country and the economy.

Her words were: "because moving numbers around on a computer screen and playing golf with other CEO's is so much more important than the direct care we get when sick ... let's not forget chasing a ball around on a field with painted lines - now that warrants so much more money than being cared for when when sick."

Upon reflection, I think that the heart of what felt wrong to me about this was the conflation of several different notions of importance.

A medical caregiver and a CEO both produce things which are important to our society. These are two extremely different things: one provides care to individuals who are in need, and the other organizes a large group of people to produce some thing which benefits society. (There's a tendency of rhetoric to claim that CEO's do nothing useful, but this is very far from the truth. The job is intensely difficult, requires the ability to lead very large teams and to form a clear vision, and has a far bigger impact on the company than any other person in it. When a company goes particularly good or bad, you can often trace it to the culture of the company -- which is very much set by the CEO and the rest of the senior leadership.)

It's hard for us to immediately compare which of these two things is more important, because they're so different, and because their value is along different axes of value: how do you compare the good of, for example, helping one person with every aspect of their day-to-day life, with the good of putting a new operating system in the world which enables thousands of new kinds of device? The impact of the latter, in purely numeric terms, is much bigger, but the impact of the former is much more personal. 

This comparison is made harder by the fact that the personal service is one which fills a critical lack in American society. Since we live in a society of spread nuclear families, with an infamous health care system, the fear of being left alone to die when we are sick is a very palpable one. Therefore, the people who could potentially stand between us and that take on an outsized importance: not because of the fact that they are doing it as a job, but because of the fact that nobody else (including the people who would traditionally do it) is doing it at all. And on the other side, CEO's have gotten a fairly bad rap of late, as a number of fairly vicious and predatory ones have made headlines by generally maltreating everyone within their power, so it's easy to discount the value that they produce as a group. 

Really, I think that this sort of comparison of value is extremely hard to make. It's hard for me to ask which one is "better" because they do such different things. Would the world be better off if all the CEO's became health care practitioners, or vice-versa? Probably not. 

The introduction of money into the comparison makes things worse, rather than better. Money and markets are, in general, very good at measuring one particular kind of value: the trade value of a good or service as a function of supply and effective demand. Yet American society tends to impart an almost mystical significance to it, and tie monetary worth to a much broader (moral) sense of worth. (Something which is very deeply rooted in the varieties of Protestantism which seeded this country)

On top of this, because money is a resource which needs to be exchanged for hydraulic goods (goods which are necessary to survival, goods whose absence is a primary and major stressor) this means that lacking money is life-threatening; and because money is a resource which can be exchanged for various kinds of access, power, and control (which is really true for any resource which has value) this means that having large amounts of money creates positive-feedback loops in society which allow for deep stratification, converging ultimately on an effective caste system. These two facts mean that, whether money is accorded a mystical worth or not, having money is very important.

And the sentiment here conflates all of the above. Medical care is very important to people personally, CEO's and other businessmen are currently considered predatory and disreputable, and their two importances are of a sort which is very hard to compare, which means that depending on the phrasing of the question and its emotional weighting either one might appear to be far more important than the other. The fact that one receives much more money than the other, because of the mystical significance attached to money, seems to indicate that our society considers one much more important and worthwhile than the other, but really it indicates something about access to trade goods, and the attachment of importance to this is a  cultural phenomenon. But the real value of money means that the importance of wealth is a cultural universal, and that poverty is a serious hazard to life and limb: so there's a very real concern underlying this, that health care providers unquestionably are very important in at least some axis, but nevertheless because their job involves no access to trade goods, they receive so little money that their own very life is threatened. 

So if I really divide this up, I think that the sentiments which are at play here are:

- Health care providers do something very important to us personally, and yet they receive so little money that their basic needs are not taken care of. (Underlying problem: If you have too little money, your basic survival needs are threatened, not only your ability to acquire luxuries. This is not something which has historically been the case in most societies, and means that poverty represents a rather terrifying existential threat)

- Health care providers do something very important to us personally, and yet they receive very little societal respect, as represented by their low pay. (Underlying problem: Societal respect and pay are closely correlated; we tend to assume that anything which has value is paid for in money, which turns out to often be incorrect and then lead to dissonance)

- CEO's do something which is important in a very impersonal fashion, and if one does not routinely interact with them it is hard to see what the value is; yet they receive tremendous social respect, as represented by their very high pay and the power which comes with it. (Underlying problems: It's hard to understand central roles in a very complex economy intuitively; societal respect and pay are closely correlated, see above)

- CEO's and their ilk have so much wealth that the entire structure of our society is deformed thereby. Implicitly as well, the tremendous access to wealth of many CEO's strikes people as unfair, especially when other people who do other visibly important things, such as health care providers, do not have the same access.  (Underlying problem: The positive-feedback nature of resource access means both that a large concentration of it can deform society and the economy, and that the people whose job is to directly control the flow of trade goods have disproportionate access to those goods and therefore to all the exchangeable resources)

I think that all four of these are very real problems, but when we try to coalesce them into a single sentence they get muddied up, and the underlying issues become significantly less clear, and we implicitly reinforce things like the conflation of money with worth. 

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You know, this joke is just a bit too accurate.

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#philosoraptor

h/t +Reddit 

Since I've been having to delete a lot of comments lately, I wanted to remind everyone of some basic common sense when commenting on posts:

- Keep on-topic. On a post about politics, comment about politics. On a post about music, comment about music. If you comment about politics on a random thread then I do not care how good your comment is, I will delete it. (And the same goes for any subject)

- Act like a grown-up. I will occasionally let a thread go a bit wild (often if the thread hits What's Hot) but even then, if you are threatening violence, advocating genocide, (oh, you think I'm being hyperbolic, don't you? I wish.) or being generally abusive, I will nuke your comments, flag and block you, and possibly use your account for experiments in the future. 

- Most of the time I do not let my threads go wild, and keep a close eye on them. At which point I expect you to act like a normal human being and not be a jerk to other people on the thread. Yes, I will delete your comments. Yes, I will ban you. Yes, I will mercilessly mock you as well. Deal with it.

By the way: There are certain times and certain subjects where I will be even more of a hardass than usual. To take an example, I didn't comment on +A.V. Flox's recent post (https://plus.google.com/112254467169147545881/posts/6VGoSsRVFLq) but I noticed that a number of people -- particularly on its reshares -- decided to not only be assholes, but to be self-righteous about their right to be assholes. Just as a forewarning to y'all: you pull that around here, you will not be treated gently. 

News flash, everyone: You may have a God-given right to be a jerk, but you do not have the right to do it in my threads. 

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For those interested in the workings of Google, Wired's interview with +Larry Page is a really good one. The attitude they describe is by no means limited to the crazy projects done by Google X – I long ago learned to never bother coming to Larry with a proposal for building a system that was any less than 100x the current system. If it was only 10x, he would immediately ask why it wasn't bigger; if it was 100x, there was generally at least a very concrete answer to why it wasn't 1,000x.*

He's a fantastic guy to work for. I've really learned a lot about how to think big – and more to the point, execute on big – from being around him.

* Engineering wisdom: You can generally build a software system to scale over two orders of magnitude along its most demanding direction, but the third order of magnitude often requires a fundamental redesign, and often new enabling technologies. So build each system for 100x, and then build its successor for 100x over that. If you find yourself in a situation where you need more than 100x right away... well, your life is going to be very exciting.

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Best quote ever.

Steven Levy (Wired): "Steve Jobs felt competitive enough to claim that he was willing to go to 'thermonuclear war' on Android."

Larry Page: "How well is that working?"

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/01/ff-qa-larry-page/

More on Android: http://Android.alltop.com/ 

Illustration: Nicola Felasquez Felaco
Reference Photo: Corbis

#HolyKaw  

This is an absolutely fascinating article and I heartily recommend it. Greer talks about what category the word "religion" really connotes, and argues that the meaningful boundary isn't around having a god, but around the common behaviors which define it: formal rites, core beliefs about what is good and evil which are considered to be fundamental and "sacred," etc. And this, in its turn, has two major subcategories: theistic religions and civil religions, of which the two main examples he discusses are Americanism and Communism.

Beyond arguing (rather compellingly) that we should consider these as being part of a single spectrum with two main subcategories, rather than different things, he goes into some detail about their commonalities and differences. The commonalities are very pervasive, and shape a lot of the ways they interact: civil religions interact with other civil and theistic religions in much the same way that theistic religions do. They also tend to form "antireligions," groups who accept all the basic ontologies and precepts of the main religion but invert the ethical pyramid, saying "Evil, be thou my good:" Satanists as the anti-Catholics being the obvious example. The civic religion of Americanism, he argues, "has as its anti-religion the devout and richly detailed claim, common among American radicals of all stripes, that the United States is uniquely evil among the world’s nations.  This creed, or anti-creed, simply inverts the standard notions of American exceptionalism without changing them in any other way." And the anti-religion of Communism is Objectivism, in much the same way.

The biggest difference, he argues, isn't about theism so much as about brittleness: for a number of reasons, civil religions are more prone to catastrophic failure and mass disillusionment than theistic religions. (Both for good and for ill; less chance to ossify, more chance for spectacular chaos when they collapse)

I find this tremendously thought-provoking. I've always had a sense that the two systems are extremely similar, and that defining the boundaries of religion around having a god is the wrong boundary. This gives a natural place to a lot of deeply held belief systems which are very different in their details, but have common behaviors and intensities of feeling associated with them, from Americanism to Atheism to Catholicism to Satanism. When I'm wearing my hat of a student of religious and political history, I think that this is going to be extremely helpful in thinking about what was going on at any particular stage in history.

For example, when thinking about the transition to Christianity in the later Roman Empire, if we think about the classical Antique Roman civic religion of "Romanitas," which I wrote about last week, we now have a great language for what happened: in the late second century, Romanitas began to have a mass crisis of faith, in the fashion that Greer describes. This created a tremendous vacuum, since I would note that using this broader definition of religion, religion of some sort is nearly omnipresent among humans: it's a central organizing principle of the way people see themselves in groups. We can see the Christianity of the second century (which was focused on conversion, personal codes, healing, etc.) merging with the free-ranging energies released by the collapse of the civic religion as turning into a new Christianity of the fourth century, basically a hybrid civic/theistic religion. At its elite and political levels in particular, it was a civic religion, the replacement for Romanitas and the definition of what it means to be "part of society." The older, non-civic but highly theistic Christianity, still existed as a core in some places, but that Christianity (perhaps best regarded now as a separate phenomenon) wasn't the one which spread aggressively through Europe until much later, when its derivative in Protestantism started to spread. 

via +Jordan Peacock.

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+vint cerf is pretty damned awesome. And he makes for a good meme.

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#itu