Majikthise

Laser beam breakthrough

A team of Stanford researchers has discovered how to switch a laser beam on and off up to 100 billion times per second. This is exciting because light can transmit data much faster than electricity. This discovery may be a major step towards harnessing the speed of light inside electronic devices.

Ultimately, the Stanford team hopes to develop a tiny modulator or "shutter" that can transform a beam of light into digital data by selectively absorbing photons.

Since goal is to transmit information between computer chips, the challenge is to make a shutter out of relatively inexpensive materials that can be easily incorporated into chips on a commercial scale. The shutter developed at Stanford is remarkable because it uses silicon and germanium, both common materials in semiconductor manufacturing.

If this technology can be refined and mass-produced, it has many potential applications:

Such an advance could have broad applications both in accelerating the already declining cost of optical networking and in potentially transforming computers in the future by making it possible to interconnect computer chips at extremely high data rates.

Currently, the communications industry uses costly equipment to transmit data over optical fibers at up to 10 billion bits per second. However, researchers are already experimenting with optically linked computers in which components may be located on different sides of the globe. Cheap optical switches will also make it possible to create data superhighways inside computers, making it possible to reorganize them for better performance.

"The vision here is that, with the much stronger physics, we can imagine large numbers - hundreds or even thousands - of optical connections off of chips," said David A.B. Miller, director of the Solid State and Photonics Laboratory at Stanford University. "Those large numbers could get rid of the bottlenecks of wiring, bottlenecks that are quite evident today and are one of the reasons the clock speeds on your desktop computer have not really been going up much in recent years." NYT permalink]

PhysOrg has more details on the physics behind the discovery.

Snow monkey live-cam!

Snow monkey live-cam, people. What are you waiting for?

The sidebar links are all in Japanese, but don't worry. Just click. It's all cute.

Temple break-in follows beard-pulling brawl

Every so often the New York Post justifies its own existence with local news:

HASIDS IN TEMPLE BREAK-IN

By PHILIP MESSING and PATRICK GALLAHUE

More than two-dozen Hasidic men are in a holy mess after allegedly breaking into a Brooklyn synagogue, apparently as part of an ongoing power struggle among warring Satmar sects.

Cops arrested 26 men who allegedly celebrated a holy day Tuesday by burglarizing a reading room at Yetev Lev Bikur Cholim on Rodney Street in Williamsburg.

The men, ages 18 to 25, destroyed a podium, scattered papers and smashed three walls on the holiday of Shmini Atzeret, officials said.

When cops arrived, the men were sitting on the floor, laughing and smoking cigarettes, sources said. It was unclear if they were drunk.

Sources believed they belong to a faction that wants the Satmars to be headed by the eldest son of the Grand Rebbe Moshe Teitelbaum, Aaron — rather than the youngest son, Zalman, who was handpicked for succession by Teitelbaum.

Just hours earlier, a beard-pulling brawl over the sect's leadership at the same synagogue resulted in seven people getting summonses and one being taken to the hospital.

I love Brooklyn.

The Orange Man Project

One man's quest to turn himself orange by eating carrots.

It's doable. Though, frankly, his two-week timeframe seems a little ambitious. I know because I inadvertently achieved similar results in high school.

Tom "Coingate" Noe indicted in Oho

Tom Noe, the architect of the Coingate scandal was indicted today in Ohio:

TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) -- A coin dealer and major GOP donor at the center of a scandal in Ohio state government has been indicted in a federal investigation into contributions to President Bush's re-election campaign, his attorney said Thursday.

The grand jury was examining whether Tom Noe skirted campaign finance laws by having others donate money for him. Federal laws limit individual contributions to $2,000.

Noe's lawyer, Jon Richardson, said he did not have any immediate details on the indictment. The charges were to be announced later in the day by the FBI and the Justice Department, and federal prosecutors would not comment before then.

Noe is also under investigation over an ill-fated $50 million investment in rare coins he managed for the state workers' compensation fund. Noe has acknowledged that up to $13 million is missing, and Ohio's attorney general has accused him of stealing as much as $6 million.

The coin dealer contributed more than $105,000 to Republicans, including Bush and Gov. Bob Taft, during the last campaign.

The Republican National Committee announced in June that Bush was returning $4,000 in campaign contributions from Noe.

An investigation into Noe's coin investments led to the governor's conviction in August on charges he failed to report golf outings and other gifts. [AP]

In Ohio's culture of corruption, Noe is a pillar of the community.

OH-Sen: Sherrod Brown trivia

Election Law Blog reminisces about Sherrod Brown. Funny story...

In 2004 the Congressman was appointed as a Kerry elector for Ohio, trouble was elected officials can't be electors:

Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said today that he is giving up a job he shouldn't have accepted in the first place as one of the 20 presidential electors from Ohio if Democrat John Kerry carries that fiercely contested state. The U.S. Constitution specifies that states shall not appoint as electors any "senator or representative or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States." That very clearly includes a sitting member of the House of Representatives. "We fixed it," Brown said.

"We sent a letter to the state party and they're going to accept, obviously, the resignation and appoint someone else." He added, "I'd rather it hadn't happened." The Ohio Democratic Party did not immediately return messages seeking information about its Electoral College replacement for Brown, who once served as Ohio's top elections official. The six-term congressman is heavily favored to win re-election next week representing the 13th District, which encompasses Cleveland suburbs and parts of Akron. [CQ]

Disenfranchisement is the new black

1. The Federal Emergency Management Administration refused Louisiana's request for funding to notify displaced New Orleans residents that they can vote by absentee ballot in the upcoming municipal election.

The fear is that if displaced New Orleaneans vote on the future of their city, they might interfere with the economic opportunity experiment that FEMA and the private sector are trying to conduct in their absence.

2. Dr. B observes a an interesting rider in a new bill to promote affordable housing: "Well, there's a little provision that's been tacked on by the Republican Study Committee to disqualify non-profits from applying for that money if they've engaged in any voter participation activities in the previous year -- including non-partisan registering of voters. In other words, this provision ties funding low-income housing to suppressing low-income voting. According to today's House minutes, it looks like a final vote on the bill has been postponed; do contact your Representative to ask them to pass the bill without the RSC provision attached." [Hat tip to Evan at the Peek]

Gulf Coast wage cut to be reversed

After Hurricane Katrina, President Bush illegally suspended the Davis-Bacon Act on the Gulf Coast, the legislation requiring government contractors to pay union or near-union wages.

Happily, the Republicans are now backing off the Gulf Coast wage cut:

Feds to reinstate prevailing wages on Katrina contracts

WASHINGTON The Bush administration will reinstate rules requiring that companies awarded federal contracts for Hurricane Katrina pay prevailing wages, usually an amount close to the pay scales in local union contracts.

Representative Peter King of New York was among congressmen critical of the administration's decision to waive the requirement and who met today with White House chief of staff Andrew Card. He said Card told them the wage requirement would be reinstated November eighth.

In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, President Bush suspended provisions of the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, which sets wages for employees on federal contracts to ensure they are not underpaid.

The administration contended the move would reduce rebuilding costs and help open opportunities to minority-owned companies, but unions and other critics said it would result in lower pay for workers. [AP]

Certain "pro-labor" Republicans are facing midterm elections, and it shows.

Absentee voting for Katrina evacuees

Facing South reports on legislation that would allow Katrina evacuees who intend to return to their home states to vote by absentee ballot:

Congressman Artur Davis (D-AL7) has introduced the Displaced Citizens Voter Protection Act of 2005 (HR3734) that would allow displaced Katrina evacuees to vote in their home state elections by absentee ballots under the same protections afforded absent military and overseas voters. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) introduced a similar bill in the Senate (S1867).

The legislation would require evacuees to certify their status and former address and attest that they intend to return to the area. They would then be allowed to vote in their home state by absentee ballot according to the state's rules.

To date, 38 Democrats and no Republicans have cosponsored the House bill, and two Democrats (Kerry and Landrieu) cosponsored the Senate version. Republicans are reluctant to sign on.

The future of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast depend on iniatives like these. If we don't safeguard voting rights for evacuees, these citizens will have no say in how their communities will be rebuilt.

Antidote for H5N1 happytalk

Freelance Journalist Wendy Orent strikes a reassuring tone in her widely-circulated article on avian influenza. Sure it kills birds, she says, but bird flu won't kill you.

Orent cites geneticists who believe that the 1918 flu evolved in wild birds, not domestic fowl. In general, wild migratory birds tend to spread milder forms of influenza because the severe infections ground them before they can spread the virus too widely. According to Orent, it was just historical fluke that the the 1918 virus managed to spread from wild birds to humans. She speculates that if hundreds of thousands of people hadn't been crammed into the barracks, trenches, and transporter ships of WWI, the 1918 flu pandemic might never have gotten off the ground.

Revere the epidemiologist at Effect Measure critically examines Orent's hypotheses and finds them thoroughly unconvincing. Revere challenges Orent's assumption that a devastating pandemic flu would have to be both rapidly lethal and highly transmissible. Even in 1918, the fatality rate was "only" 2%--but 2% of a huge number of infected people. Furthermore, creatures infected with the flu are contagious before they're symptomatic. So, infected migratory birds may spread the disease across long distances before they are overcome.

Revere makes a number of other interesting points against Orent, but I'll leave off here and encourage you to read the whole thing.