The talks were very interesting…and covered topics ranging from “hardware hacking” situations and workshop skills, as well as various social and economic consequences of the rapidly evolving state of the digital world in its various forms.  Well worth the investment of time…especially since the price was right…no charge!

While not on the scale of major hacking/security conferences like DEFCON, Black Hat, and Schmoocon to name a few, it brought some serious stuff that bears close attention as we apparently move ever more fully into involvement with and membership in a rapidly evolving digital world.

Moxie’s presentation specifically covered aspects of the privacy (or lack thereof) issues associated with the oncoming (and future) generations of cell phones, so when I saw the following it definitely rang a bell:

Snooping: It’s not a crime, it’s a feature
New apps hijack the microphone in your cell phone to listen in on your life

Cellphone users say they want more privacy, and app makers are listening. No, they’re not listening to user requests. They’re literally listening to the sounds in your office, kitchen, living room and bedroom.

A new class of smartphone app has emerged that uses the microphone built into your phone as a covert listening device — a “bug,” in common parlance. But according to app makers, it’s not a bug. It’s a feature!

The apps use ambient sounds to figure out what you’re paying attention to. It’s the next best thing to reading your mind.
Your phone is listening

The issue was brought to the world’s attention recently on a podcast called This Week in Tech. Host Leo Laporte and his panel shocked listeners by unmasking three popular apps that activate your phone’s microphone to collect sound patterns from inside your home, meeting, office or wherever you are.

The apps are Color, Shopkick and IntoNow, all of which activate the microphones in users’ iPhone or Android devices in order to gather contextual information that provides some benefit to the user.

YIKES! The Chief thought it would be sort of neat to have a Droid phone. (Except for the slight detail that there is nearly no reliability of signal at his rural outpost, and the other detail of the cost of the airtime that he would like to use. Oh well. maybe it’s just as well.)

So what can they REALLY find out? 

You should know that any data that can be gathered, will be gathered. Since the new microphone-hijacking apps are still around, we now know that listening in on users is OK. So, what’s possible with current technology?
By listening in on your phone, capturing “patterns,” then sending that data back to servers, marketers can determine the following:

• Your gender, and the gender of people you talk to.
• Your approximate age, and the ages of the people you talk to.
• What time you go to bed, and what time you wake up.
• What you watch on TV and listen to on the radio.
• How much of your time you spend alone, and how much with others.
• Whether you live in a big city or a small town.
• What form of transportation you use to get to work.

In the early 70’s the Chief had the acquaintance of a highly unconventional electronics and media mavin who at the time was running an alternative FM station (KDNA) in St. Louis.  His often repeated admonition was “assume that anything you say can have someone else listenting” as the only sure-fire way to maintain privacy.  I’m not sure his warning was ENTIRELY true at the time…but if not, the way things have developed now have made him into a prophet…now that I think of it, he literally had the name of a prophet too!  Believe it or not, your choice.

US physics professor: ‘Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life’

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.

Anthony Watts describes it thus:
This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.

H/W is the start of the letter. Dr. Lewis becomes painfully explicit in explaining his point:

Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

Lewis very specifically lists his problems with the current iteration of the APS, and why it is no longer a worthy representative of science, before going into his concluding statement (go to the linked article for all the Gore-y details).

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal

Just in case some envirowackos want to claim that Dr. Lewis is somehow not qualified to offer this slap-down to the APS establishment, his C.V. gives the lie to that concept:

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety
Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

With over a quarter-century of teaching HS sciences, including physics, the APS’ actions smack of the attitude that gave an Italian scientist a very difficult political problem when he went against the orthodoxy of his day. THAT scientist was Galileo Galilei.

Any scientist that is unwilling to allow actively encourage scientific debate is unworthy of the name, and unworthy of the responsibility that he has presumed to take on to expand human knowledge about the universe in which we live.

Cockroaches and locusts contain powerful antibiotic molecules in their brains that could be used to develop new treatments against MRSA and E-coli, scientists have discovered.

Scientists at Nottingham University found that the insects, which are widely reviled for their dirty image, could actually be more of a health benefit than a health risk.

They have identified up to nine different molecules in the tissues of cockroaches and locusts that are toxic to bacteria and they hope will pave the way for new treatments for multi-drug resistant bacterial infections.

Who would have guessed?

Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium

If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.

What’s not to like about this one? Well, it IS kind of disconcerting to be in a position to [potentially] supporting an Obama initiative…but then again, it hasn’t happened yet, and since it depends on the other (technological) n-word (nuclear), the Chief is willing to be that B.O. will be no more likely to adopt this than he would be to embrace the original n-word.

There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday – produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. “It’s the Big One,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

“Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels,” he said.

Ooops. What would happen to the “uranium cartels”, to say nothing of the vast, wealthy, and dare one say influential oil iindustry? Anyone else think there may just be a BIT of opposition to this from those locations? (I’m just saying…you know?) As an object lesson in support of this observation:

You might have thought that thorium reactors were the answer to every dream but when CERN went to the European Commission for development funds in 1999-2000, they were rebuffed.

Brussels turned to its technical experts, who happened to be French because the French dominate the EU’s nuclear industry. “They didn’t want competition because they had made a huge investment in the old technology,” he said.

C’est la vie.

After explaining some of the technical aspects of thorium energy, and the prospects of at least one privately financed effort underway (in Norway), the piece from the Telegraph concludes:

Nuclear power could become routine and unthreatening. But first there is the barrier of establishment prejudice.

When Hungarian scientists led by Leo Szilard tried to alert Washington in late 1939 that the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb, they were brushed off with disbelief. Albert Einstein interceded through the Belgian queen mother, eventually getting a personal envoy into the Oval Office.

Roosevelt initially fobbed him off. He listened more closely at a second meeting over breakfast the next day, then made up his mind within minutes. “This needs action,” he told his military aide. It was the birth of the Manhattan Project. As a result, the US had an atomic weapon early enough to deter Stalin from going too far in Europe.

The global energy crunch needs equal “action”. If it works, Manhattan II could restore American optimism and strategic leadership at a stroke: if not, it is a boost for US science and surely a more fruitful way to pull the US out of perma-slump than scattershot stimulus.[Emphasis added]

Even better, team up with China and do it together, for all our sakes.

The Chief concurs.

Ms. Neergaard is lucky that bad science writing isn’t a crime; otherwise she would be in shackles by now. The word “enduring” in the first sentence is puerile puffery. The much worse sin against scientific literacy is that DNA doesn’t “power” living cells, nor does it “take over and drive” them. DNA is the fundamental repository of information for most of its operations and for the essential business of reproduction. DNA is a very powerful map, but the cell itself does the driving.

These distortions have clearly been encouraged by Venter, who is both a scientist and an entrepreneur. This is how he sells his science:

“This is the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer,” Venter told reporters.

Well, not yet. Venter’s team built the genome of one kind of bacteria from scratch, using fragments of DNA. In doing so, I gather they were plagiarizing the Lord’s work by precisely copying the DNA of the cattle germ. Then they transplanted the artificial genome into a different kind of cell (a goat germ). The new cell was able to function and I gather it has reproduced. But the parent of the new cell is clearly the recipient cell, not the computer.

Go read the rest of KB’s post…it’s well worth it.

By the way, the Chief heartily concurs with KB on this…and you can put 4 quarters with that and get a can of pop!

A new ‘phase’ of water that is electrically charged has been discovered in space for the first time.

The weird space water vapor was discovered in an interstellar dust cloud by the European Space Agency’s Herschel space observatory.

Unlike the three more familiar phases of water – namely solid ice, liquid water and gaseous steam – this newfound ‘phase’ doesn’t occur naturally on Earth.

In the birth clouds surrounding young stars, ultraviolet light is pumping through the gas, and this irradiation can knock an electron out of the water molecule, leaving it with [positive] electrical charge.

After teaching H.S. sciences for 27 years, finding something new that is so fundamentally basic is just too cool!

Freaky Physics Proves Parallel Universes Exist

Look past the details of a wonky discovery by a group of California scientists — that a quantum state is now observable with the human eye — and consider its implications: Time travel may be feasible….

The strange discovery by quantum physicists at the University of California Santa Barbara means that an object you can see in front of you may exist simultaneously in a parallel universe — a multi-state condition that has scientists theorizing that traveling through time may be much more than just the plaything of science fiction writers.

And it’s all because of a tiny bit of metal — a “paddle” about the width of a human hair, an item that is incredibly small but still something you can see with the naked eye. UC Santa Barbara’s Andrew Cleland cooled that paddle in a refrigerator, dimmed the lights and, under a special bell jar, sucked out all the air to eliminate vibrations. He then plucked it like a tuning fork and noted that it moved and stood still at the same time.

How could this be? The Chief isn’t sure about the actual mechanics of the experiment, but it’s easy to imagine two viewing devices recording simultaneously that show the states of motion/non-motion.

Check out the piece for some more details of this stuff.

Forward, into the past!

U.S. successfully tests airborne laser on missile

A U.S. high-powered airborne laser weapon shot down a ballistic missile in the first successful test of a futuristic directed energy weapon, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency said on Friday.

The agency said in a statement the test took place at 8:44 p.m. PST (11:44 p.m. EST) on Thursday /0444 GMT on Friday) at Point Mugu’s Naval Air Warfare Center-Weapons Division Sea Range off Ventura in central California.

“The Missile Defense Agency demonstrated the potential use of directed energy to defend against ballistic missiles when the Airborne Laser Testbed (ALTB) successfully destroyed a boosting ballistic missile” the agency said.

What does this system actually do?

The airborne laser weapon is aimed at deterring enemy missile attacks and providing the U.S. military with the ability to engage all classes of ballistic missiles at the speed of light while they are in the boost phase of flight.

“The revolutionary use of directed energy is very attractive for missile defense, with the potential to attack multiple targets at the speed of light, at a range of hundreds of kilometers (miles), and at a low cost per intercept attempt compared to current technologies,” the U.S. Missile Defense Agency said.

Nothing succeeds like success!

Scientific evidence now points to global cooling, contrary to U.N. alarmism

U.S. policymakers who cite “consensus” on man-made global warming as justification for anti-emission regulations are relying upon outdated and misleading material from the United Nations that deliberately omits the influence of natural forces, according to climate skeptics. In fact, a growing body of evidence now points to the emergence of another cooling cycle that could persist for decades.
Dr. Don Easterbrook, a geologist and professor emeritus at Western Washington University, has presented data that shows a cooler and wetter climate is in order for the next 25 to 30 years. The Pacific Ocean has a warm temperature mode and a cool temperature mode known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO, he said in a recent study.

The shift away from a cooling cycle in 1945 triggered several decades of warming that ended in 1998, according to the study. However, the PDO has now reverted back over to a cool mode, Easterbrook has concluded. This data raises questions about the reliability of models used by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Easterbrook has said. This U.N. prediction of global temperatures 1° F warmer by 2011 and 2° F by 2038 appear to be very much off track.

Meanwhile, some scientists are convinced earth could experience more than just cooling over the next few decades. Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics with the National Autonomous University of Mexico sees evidence that points to the onset of a “little ice age” in about 10 years that could last for much of the 21st Century. The IPPC models are not correct because they do not take into account natural factors like solar activity, he said in a ecture.

This view is also advanced in a paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia. The authors anticipate that sun’s activity will diminish significantly over the next few decades.

Unfortunately, we have a much more immediate threat than the U.N. from B.O., AlGor, et al.

Up until now, critics of the Waxman-Markey bill inside and outside of Congress have focused mostly on the severe economic costs of emission caps. During the August recess, it might be helpful to ask members why they continue to pursue regulatory schemes unattached to what new scientific data now shows.

Tune up your snowblowers & snowmobiles, and throw another AlGore log on the fire.

As I was walking down the street one day
A man came up to me and asked me what the time was that was on my watch, yeah
And I said

Does anybody really know what time it is
Does anybody really care
If so I cant imagine why
We’ve all got time enough to cry

Are we missing a dimension of time?

A scientist has put forward the bizarre suggestion that there are two dimensions of time, not the one that we are all familiar with, and even proposed a way to test his heretical idea next year.

Time is no longer a simple line from the past to the future, in a four dimensional world consisting of three dimensions of space and one of time. Instead, the physicist envisages the passage of history as curves embedded in a six dimensions, with four of space and two of time.

“There isn’t just one dimension of time,” Itzhak Bars of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles tells New Scientist. “There are two. One whole dimension of time and another of space have until now gone entirely unnoticed by us.”

DOH! How could we have missed this?

Until now, they have been reluctant to meddle with time because it can lead to unexpected consequences, such as time travel.

That’s why!  Avoiding that pesky ole’ time travel paradox:

Changing our picture of time from a line to a plane (one to two dimensions) means that the path between the past and future could loop back on itself, allowing you to travel back and forwards in time and allowing the famous grandfather paradox, where you could go back and kill your grandfather before your mother was born, thereby preventing your own birth.

Bars first found hints of an extra time dimension in M-theory in 1995 and, when he looked into it, discovered the grandfather paradox and other fears could be overcome by using a new kind of symmetry – a mathematical property to work out the relationship between the quantities of position and momentum. It is this symmetry that might help reconcile the two mighty pillars of 20th-century physics, quantum mechanics and relativity.

And then there’s this aspect of it…anyone else remember your Platonic “ideals” (reality) and their shadows (what we experience)?

According to Bars, the familiar four dimensional world we see around us is merely a “shadow” of the six-dimensional reality, just as a hand makes many different shadows on a wall when lit from different angles.

Although we cannot experience the extra time dimension directly, we can effectively notice it through the different perspectives of the different “shadows”.

Actually – this is really cool stuff…it would be really neat to figure all this stuff out.

My background from teaching years of H.S. physics isn’t up to all the math details of this, but conceptually I really get into this sort of stuff…I guess it appeals to my SciFi instincts.

If you REALLY want to see what Bars says about this himself, go here, but be warned…this is real physics stuff, even though he’s discussing it conceptually, more or less.