When cellphones kill December 4, 2006
Posted by dorigo in computers, news, science.3 comments
Milano, Italy. A bus whose driver is distracted by a phone call. A woman who carelessly crosses the road on the pedestrian strips while talking on her own phone. A collision. A death. Shock, sorrow, rage.
Cellphones do kill… And not through electromagnetic radiation: they do it by entertaining us too much. Our brain is not as multi-tasking as we would desire, in this age shaped by the boom of information technology.
Maybe one day we will all carry a co-processor installed in our brain which handles visual stimuli more quickly and effectively, leaving our main neuron-based CPU free to deal with other occupations…. Or maybe it will not be our main CPU by then.
Maybe we’ll all have a cellphone installed in our parietal lobes, and software dedicated to filter out calls from furniture sales…. Or maybe we won’t have our parietal lobes any longer.
The singularity is near. Will we live to see it ? Do we want to ?
I personally do - you cannot stop technological advancement, no more than you can stop preemptive wars or global warming. It’s all a sickening but unavoidable by-product of the built-in will to prevail and survive of our genes. Technological advancement is one of the most benign of these by-products…
Search engine terms today - the explosion of Polonium demand December 4, 2006
Posted by dorigo in internet, news, physics, science.1 comment so far
I made the mistake of writing a few posts about Polonium 210 and its availability on the global market last week… My blog is now visited by a sizable amount of people looking for the substance, its effects, and how to purchase it. How do I know ? Because see the hits the polonium posts get, and because I also monitor the words people typed in search engines when they were pointed to my site.
To explain better what I mean, look at the following list:
- “polonium 210 for sale” - 10 views
- “buy polonium 210″ - 9 views
- “polonium 210 buy” - 5 views
- “polonium sale” - 4 views
- “polonium-210″ - 3 views
- “polonium-210 obtain” - 3 views
- “buying polonium” - 2 views
That was just today… And the day is not over yet. Here’s yesterday:
- “polonium 210 for sale - 9 views
- “polonium-210 for sale - 5 views
- “polonium 210, for sale - 2 views
- “polonium-210 sale?” - 2 views
As I said before… Get a life, people.
Physics in trouble December 4, 2006
Posted by dorigo in Blogroll, books, food, news, personal, physics, science, social life, travel.12 comments
Last Saturday, upon arriving in Chicago, I went downtown and spent a couple of hours at the Borders of Michigan Avenue. Time really flies there… In the end, I bought two books, one by Raymond Kurzweil (”The singularity is near”) and another by Lee Smolin (”The trouble with Physics”).
I will post about my impressions on Kurzweil’s book later. I rather started reading Smolin’s book, which has been at the center of a heated debate lately, together with Peter Woit’s “Not even wrong”. For details, a good site to visit is Peter’s blog, http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/blog/.
I only read a chapter and browsed carelessly through the rest, but I can already say I find Smolin’s “Trouble with Physics” a very pleasant reading and a well-written account of the situation fundamental physics has been facing in the last thirty years. The book has no formulas whatsoever, and I am sure outsiders will find it just as good a reading as insiders.
Which brings me to my thought of the day. The fact that people like me ends up reading about the status of theoretical particle physics in a divulgative book rather than in scientific journals is kind of depressing. I am no theorist, but I did study physics for ten years. A laurea, a PhD, several schools, plus 15 years of experience as an experimentalist. Notwithstanding all of the above, the level of theoretical discussions in most of today’s scientific papers is way above my head, and I have to settle on material such as Smolin’s or Woit’s book to know what is going on in theoretical physics.
Sure, I do follow theory seminars in my Physics department now and then (more then than now). But most of the times things get too complicated after the first 20 minutes. This is frustrating and is a side-effect of the complexities into which theoretical particle physics has spiraled in the last years of unbound speculation.
By the way, in the evening I visited the “Cafe’ Iberico” on La Salle Avenue with Giorgio and Simone (the new Ph.D. student for CDF in Padova, who took the picture below). The tapas were as good as ever… I only advise to get there early (as we did - we were all jetlagged and hungry) or an hour wait is quite normal on Saturdays…
More polonium for sale December 4, 2006
Posted by dorigo in internet, italian blogs, news, physics, science.3 comments
Marcoscan (http://www.marcoscan.com/2006/11/polonio_in_vendita.html) has spotted a sale of a much larger amount of polonium than the one distributed for a $69 price tag by United Nuclear in the US… Check his post at the link above (in italian, but I guess the information is understandable by anybody).
I insist: the substance is extremely poisonous, ok. There are zillions of cleaner ways to kill human beings, and most of them are also less expensive and dangerous, ok. But if you are going to make the headlines for weeks at a time and terrify whole metropolitan areas, polonium 210 might be the way to go…
I only allow myself to write this here because I know my site is not a high-traffic one. There’s lots of deranged minds out there who might actually think this is a suggestion… It is not a suggestion, you moron. Get a life. It is rather a warning (to whom?) that our society is as vulnerable as ever, and bound to fall as we know it, maybe quite soon…
