Computer technology is SO 20th century! It’s time for a career change – to antimatter weapons!! Consider the example of:
…Gerald Smith, former chairman of physics and Antimatter Project leader at Pennsylvania State University. Smith now operates a small firm, Positronics Research LLC, in Santa Fe, N.M. So far, the Air Force has given Smith and his colleagues $3.7 million for positron research, Smith told The Chronicle in August.
Smith is looking to store positrons in a quasi-stable form called positronium. A positronium “atom” (as physicists dub it) consists of an electron and antielectron, orbiting each other. Normally these two particles would quickly collide and self-annihilate within a fraction of a second — but by manipulating electrical and magnetic fields in their vicinity, Smith hopes to make positronium atoms last much longer.
Smith’s storage effort is the “world’s first attempt to store large quantities of positronium atoms in a laboratory experiment,” Edwards noted in his March speech. “If successful, this approach will open the door to storing militarily significant quantities of positronium atoms.”
It seems that Positronics Research is hiring. Woo-hoo! Move over, Edward Teller. You think your H-bomb was a big bang? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet….
Note for the humour-impaired: this is sarcasm. Frame your comments accordingly.
The other George had a way with words, too…
During the tenure of the current President, many people have compared him with his father. Herewith a few bon mots from George Senior. Make of them what you will.
27 Oct 1984 “Let me assure you of one thing: the United States under this administration will never — never — let terrorism or fear of terrorism determine its foreign policy.”
28 Jan 1987 [On selling weapons to Iran] “On the surface, selling arms to a country that sponsors terrorism, of course, clearly, you’d have to argue it’s wrong, but it’s the exception sometimes that proves the rule.”
Maybe this explains why his son prefers other counsel. But sometimes they seem too much alike. More from Bush pere:
2 Aug 1988 [When the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner] “I will never apologize for the United States, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.”
4 Dec 1990 “I know what I’ve told you I’m going to say, I’m going to say. And what else I say, well, I’ll take some time to figure that all out.”
12 May 1991 “I’ve got to run now and relax. The doctor told me to relax. The doctor told me to relax. The doctor told me. He was the one. He said, ‘Relax.'”
4 Mar 1992 “Somebody asked me, what’s it take to win? I said to them, I can’t remember, what does it take to win the Superbowl? Or maybe Steinbrenner, my friend George, will tell us what it takes for the Yanks to win… one run. But I went over to the Strawberry Festival this morning, and ate a piece of shortcake over there — able to enjoy it right away, and once I completed it, it didn’t have to be approved by Congress — I just went ahead and ate it.”
More here.
"If Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote"
I keep running across links to quotations from recent emails by the WSJ reporter Farnaz Fassihi in Baghdad. Here are two sobering excerpts:
Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity. Guess what? They say they’d take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler. I heard an educated Iraqi say today that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote. This is truly sad.
I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in the Iraqi elections since it was the first time Iraqis could to some degree elect a leadership. His response summed it all: “Go and vote and risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents and murdered for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? Are you joking?”
After reading this, and watching Bush and Kerry debate Iraq, all I can say is, “Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.”
A channel 9 moment
I was flying home this evening on UAL994, IAD-BOS, B752. It was misty in Boston, with RVR fluctuating betwen 1500 and 5000; traffic was landing on 4L and departing on 9. We’d left PVD on the 070 radial to pick up the BOS 4L localizer, and at MILT we’d gone to BOS TWR and been cleared to land. Less than 2 miles out, at about 500 feet, I heard the following exchange on channel 9:
BOS TWR: Eagle Flight 538, cancel takeoff.
Perplexed voice: Er… Eagle Flight 538 is in the air!
BOS TWR: OK, I must have confused you with… Eagle Flight 538, contact departure.
[With apologies to those who don’t grok aviation jargon.]
Frustration and optimism
Collective frustration and optimism for a bunch of Sun engineers, marketeers, and managers is….
We’re at a week-long workshop held in a secure facility, which means no network connections, WiFi, etc. So we all book into the same hotel (so we can share cars), and we obviously pick a hotel that proudly advertises free Internet access. And then the hotel WiFi goes out… for several days. The poor desk clerk, who has no control of things, gets harrassed by all and sundry. Just now, in sheer desperation, a colleague and I walked to another hotel just down the road and paid $10 each to get a few hours of our “drug of choice” – pure WiFi Internet, served straight up, no chaser.
Although it has been an occasionally frustrating week (bad weather, no opportunity to visit the city, not even a quick look around the Air and Space Museum, though we drive past it twice a day), overall I have to say that it’s been a very productive one. It’s always good to get a chance to work closely with colleagues from California, Colorado, New Hampshire, and England, whom I usually encounter as disembodied voices on a phone conference. As usual, the challenge is going to be sustaining the team commitment and energy after we all head home and have to work with out different organizations, with colleagues who haven’t been a part of this workshop. Nonetheless I’m very optimistic about this particular initiative. We’ll see. Kudos to my colleagues Brian Wong and Mary Vanleer….
The completion of "The Project"
I finished “The Project” last night: the reading of all seven volumes of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. I don’t have time to write a full review right now, but I found the final volume very satisfying indeed. King feels the need to defend his use of metafictional elements, but from my perspective no defense is necessary: they are wholly natural in this many-worlds context. The penultimate truth – that art is our defence against chaos – was nicely capped in the Coda.
This was a most enjoyable project. The last time I did this (read all of a long series of novels in order) was when I was a student in 1970; I decided to read every novel by Thomas Hardy during one summer. Exhausting and exhilarating.
Getting to Washington (or rather to Chantilly)
Yes, I’m here – so yes, the hotel WiFi works. But the journey was interesting. The flight was United 861, a routine 415 mile hop in a Boeing 757 from BOS to IAD. 
I checked in online from home, and managed to swap my middle seat for a window – 30A. Boarding was uneventful, though the flight was absolutely full.. The pushback was delayed slightly, and the captain came on the PA to explain that there were aircraft in the “alley” blocking us in; he also mentioned that “radio communications are available on Channel 9”. (This is my favourite thing about United – if corporate policy permitted, I’d only fly on United, just to listen to ATC on channel 9. But anyway….)
A minute or two later the aircraft was pushed back, and as it was, there was an audible bump. We stopped, and suddenly channel 9 switched from radio to muzak. Hmmm…. We sat there for about 15 minutes. Eventually the captain announced that during the push-back “the push bar had been bent”, and he was “having a maintenance engineer check it out.” After a further delay, we taxied out, and normal channel 9 was resumed. Obviously we’d missed our “slot” into IAD, so we were held at the “Bravo hold point” until the top of the hour (0000Z) before we were allowed to take off. (We also switched our call-sign – from “United 861” to “United 8143” – to reflect the fact that we’d had to file a new flight plan.) The flight was uneventful, and so was the landing, though I must admit I held my breath as the nose gear hit the tarmac and reverse thrust came on. We were about 30 minutes late.
In the “mobile lounge” that transports passengers between terminal C and the main building I caught up with the captain of our flight and chatted to him about the incident at Boston. What had actually happened was that during pushback the tug driver turned a bit too sharply, and rather than the tow bar steering the nose gear, it popped off the lugs on either side on the gear. “The tug driver isn’t an engineer,” said the captain, “and I wanted someone to take a look at it to make sure that it hadn’t damaged anything.” We talked about what it might have hit, and agreed that “it’s better to fix these things on the ground – they’re a bitch to repair in-flight!” Various aviation geek stories ensued. “I notice you turned off channel 9 when it happened,” I said, and we discussed the fine balance between keeping people informed and alarming them unnecessarily.
So overall it was an very enjoyable flight, more interesting than most.
P.S. Chantilly is the Virginia community occupied by Dulles airport; it’s also where my hotel is. Of course I take this on trust; the hotel is indistinguishable from thousands of others across North America (and now, sadly across Europe too).
From Hub to Capitol
Time for another trip: I’m heading out of here to fly down to Washington DC for a week’s seminar/workshop/training. (Categories blur.) I’m going to be in a hotel close to Dulles airport, working in an office close to Dulles airport, and I’m not renting a car, so who knows if I’ll have any time to get into the city? Last time I was there I went to a really cool Ethiopian restaurant not far from Dupont Circle….
And yes, the hotel has WiFi. So I’ll be blogging.
The personal side of Bush's war
Three pieces caught my eye today with a common theme: the personal consequences of Bush’s elective war in Iraq.
First, there was a piece in today’s NYT about an ex-reservist who’s been activated for duty in Iraq.
[M]y cousin Alan – the youngest – joined the Ohio National Guard after graduating from high school in 1997. […] My primary concern was whether Alan was in good enough shape to get through the arduous training. Once that was over, he had to train with his unit for only one weekend a month and two weeks a year for the next six years. His name would then be placed on an inactive list for another two years, unless – as the recruiter who visited his high school had explained – our country needed his skills during a natural disaster or a college riot. […] But two-day weekends became four-day weekends, two weeks stretched to three weeks, and full college tuition shrank to half the tuition for vocational school. Alan grew disenchanted with the National Guard, and […] he was given a general discharge. His name was still placed on an inactive duty list – a roster he was told was only for an unprecedented national disaster that active-duty soldiers couldn’t handle alone. […] He packed away his uniform, and none of us ever thought about it again. Until last month. Alan received orders to report for “involuntary” duty on Sept. 12. In Iraq. For a year and a half: 545 days to be exact, with two possible extensions.
Next, I was reading PlanetSun, the aggregation of blogs for folks at Sun Microsystems, and I came across a piece by David Kordsmeier about his thoughts on coming across his (fairly unusual) name in the list of US casualties in Iraq. It’s a moving piece, worth reading slowly and thoughtfully.
And then, as so often, I turned to Terry, and read his short piece on the moral issue at the core of sending someone to war. This is from an interview with Stephen Fry, quoting Bertrand Russell, as cited in Neil Gaiman’s blog (and that pretty much captures the magic of the web right there):
“Don’t you understand? The sacrifice we’re asking of our young is not that they die for their country, but that they kill for their country.” That’s the sacrifice. To ask a child to kill someone else, whom you’ve never met. That’s a moral choice, pulling a trigger. Having a bullet hit you is not a moral choice. You don’t decide to be killed. It’s a terrible thing that happens to you. But killing something is something you do and that’s a desperate sacrifice.
Exactly. (See also my earlier piece on War and Morality.)
Equal rights for the secular
A thought for the day: from Fran Lebowitz‘s book Progress, excerpted in the October 2004 Vanity Fair:
Reversion of rights:
[…]
(3) All religious texts will be vetted and, if necessary, revised, by ad hoc committees composed of public librarians, English teachers, literary critics, and writers, in order to ensure that no representative of the secular community is in any way offended.
This seems only fair….
Update: Apparently I should have decorated this with :-) or otherwise indicated that this was intended in fun, as a reductio ad absurdum. Of course I don’t want to vet religious texts, any more than I want religious types vetting, or censoring, secular texts. (And nor does Fran Lebowitz, I imagine.) I guess irony is out of fashion….