Scooter rides shotgun on the blog.

11:28:11 PM     leave/read comments []

Lock up your wives! Here I come! (pun totally, totally, totally, oh, oh, oh, oh INTENDED!)

11:25:15 PM     leave/read comments []

Striking Notes of Progress on the World's Tiniest Guitar. Cornell University physicists reported they had used a laser beam to pluck the strings of a tiny silicon guitar just 10 millionths of a meter long. By George Johnson. [New York Times: Science]

Dude!!! The pick is a laser! And that axe- looks like a Randy Rhodes model fer sure.

Cornell University physicists reported last week that they had used a laser beam to pluck the strings of an invisibly tiny silicon guitar just 10 millionths of a meter long. Each string of the instrument is about 50 nanometers (or billionths of a meter) wide [~] 100 atoms thick. Human hearing tops out at tones that vibrate at about 20,000 cycles per second. The high-pitched sound of the nanoguitar twanged forth at 40 million cycles per second, putting it 17 octaves above what human ears take for music.

Yeah, but my dog totally grooves to it. It's like Radiohead for Schnauzers.

Something this small brings up a fascinating conundrum- just how many atoms of something do you need for it to be, well, stuff.

....the nanoguitar, each string of which is thousands of times thinner than a single human hair, so small that it begs the question of what one means by a "thing." Scientists can say with some confidence that a single atom does not qualify, consisting, as it does, mostly of empty space, a vast nothing separating a dense nuclear core and a shimmering periphery of electrons. Even an atom's substance [~] if it can be called that [~] is elusive, the particles hovering in a quantum state where position and momentum can be described only in terms of probability.

Put trillions of atoms together and you get something solid like a real guitar, a chunk of matter you can hold in your hands. The nanoguitar, impossibly tiny as it seems, also exhibits some of the dependable properties associated with thinginess: you can pluck it and it plays. But it hovers near the brink, at a poorly understood threshold where quantum effects begin to dominate.

I'm always amazed at the perfect Zen koan that is matter. Everything is mostly made of nothing. Dude.

11:06:29 PM     leave/read comments []

Another history of women and the U.S. Space program. Looks well worth reading.

Also check out Promised The Moon:The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race

10:28:45 PM     leave/read comments []

Auditioning the Next James Bond. It's time to start looking for the first new James Bond of the 21st century. Will a boy from Oz be given a license to kill? By Elvis Mitchell. [New York Times: Business]

Not considering Clive Owen is just crazy talk, pure and simple. He is James Bond. Just look at him!

10:06:15 PM     leave/read comments []

Users face malicious web attacks. Virus attacks on computers which do damage through HTML in e-mails and websites are set to increase, says a security expert. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

Everything you need to know about this story is in this paragraph:

These security threats exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser.

Gee, what a surprise.

Not.

6:36:44 PM     leave/read comments []

It's in Dutch, which is a lot like English, only funnier. If you're an Anglophone, that is.

Feyenoord - Teplice 0-2

Dat smaakt Piet!. Alex is nog even de herhaling aan het bekijken terwijl wij de sate analyseren. Erg gezellig en de volgende keer tussen het Legioen? Er zit een Ajax man met ons mee te kijken...

[From What happened today Radio Weblog ]

Mummmm......footbjall kjorndoogs, or something.

5:34:58 PM     leave/read comments []

Red Cross cuts Iraq operations. The ICRC says its offices in Baghdad and Basra are being temporarily shut amid continuing dangers in Iraq. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]

For the first time in its history the International Committee of the Red Cross has been the target of suicide attacks, and as such, it is pulling out of Iraq for the first time since it arrived in Iraq 23 years ago. Yet another "Mission Accomplished" for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The ICRC spokesman refused to say how much the closures would affect the work of some 30 foreign staff and 600 Iraqis.

"The situation is so tense on the ground that we don't want to get into details," Mr Westphal was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.

He said the ICRC had received no direct threat but had taken its decision on the basis of an overall assessment of the situation.

"We are still discussing what to do with our foreign staff. The situation is extremely dangerous and volatile," he said.

" We must painfully acknowledge that the ICRC...has become a target of attacks for a group of people "-Jakob Kellenberger ICRC President

"Thanks for nuttin' ya Yankee maroons," he didn't add, probably because he's Swiss and far more polite than his American "hosts" in Iraq.

5:21:13 PM     leave/read comments []

U.S. Warns of Al Qaeda Cargo Plane Plot. The Homeland Security Department advised law-enforcement officials Friday night of threats that terrorists may fly cargo planes from another country into crucial U.S. targets. By The Associated Press. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

Wait a minute!

I think someone has been reading too much TV Guide or maybe they copied the listing from last week's Threat Matrix. Or, maybe one late night when the gang down at DoHS was busy brainstorming on how to raise more money for their shiny new department, some wag (prolly an intern) put on "The Gift" from The Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat album? I guess we'll never know.

Now go do your civic duty and get busy being scared out of your wits. And don't skimp on the unquestioning subservience either, bub!

12:26:20 PM     leave/read comments []