Wednesday, November 19, 2003

I have a few days off from clinic. I am working daily on my human intelligence book. I made some good progress this last week. ... I am hopeful that our new Governor here in California will make a difference. I thought he gave a good speech on Monday. Together We Can! Arnold Schwarzenegger said: Today is a new day in California. I did not seek this office to do things the way they've always been done. What I care about is restoring your confidence in your government. When I became a citizen 20 years ago, I had to take a citizenship test. I had to learn about the history and the principles of our republic. What I learned -- and I've never forgotten -- is sovereignty rests with the people, not the government. In recent years, Californians have lost confidence. They've felt that the actions of their government did not represent the will of the people. This election was not about replacing one man; it was not replacing one party. It was about changing the entire political climate of our state. Everywhere I went during my campaign, I could feel the public hunger for our elected officials to work together, to work openly and to work for the greater good. The election was the people's veto -- for politics as usual. With the eyes of the world upon us, we did the dramatic. Now we must put the rancor of the past behind us and do the extraordinary. ... for guidance, let's look back in history to a period I studied when I became a citizen. The summer of 1787. Delegates of the original 13 states were meeting in Philadelphia. The dream of a new nation was falling apart. Events were spiraling downward. Divisions were deep. Merchant against farmer. Big states against small. North against South. Our founding fathers knew that the fate of the union was in their hands, just as the fate of California is in our hands. What happened in that summer of 1787 is that they put their differences aside -- and produced the blueprint for our government; our Constitution. Their coming together has been called "the Miracle of Philadelphia." Now, the members of the Legislature and I must bring about the "Miracle of Sacramento" -- a miracle based on cooperation, good will, new ideas -- and devotion to the long-term good of California. What we face may look insurmountable. But I learned something from all those years of training and competing. What I learned is that we are always stronger than we know. And California is like that, too. We are stronger than we know. There's a massive weight we must lift off our state. Alone, I cannot lift it. But together, we can. (11/19/03) Are We Alone in the Universe? Tom Foreman interviews: Seth Shostak is seriously listening to the stars. As a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, Shostak spends endless hours analyzing bursts of electronic noise drifting through the cosmos, captured by radio telescopes. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. ... Tom Foreman: You believe something is out there? Seth Shostak: Oh, absolutely! The usual assumption is they're some sort of soft, squishy aliens like you see in the movies—just a little more advanced than we are so that we can find them. But the galaxy is two or three times that age, so there are going to be some societies out there that are millions of years, maybe more, beyond ours. So they may have proceeded beyond biology—maybe they've invented thinking machines and it could be that what we first find is something that's artificially constructed. Tom Foreman: What if it is life form, though, let's talk about that. Will it look anything like us? Will we even recognize it? Seth Shostak: You're not going to see them in person, I don't think. To go from here to the nearest star is a project requiring a 100,000-year trip. And that's longer than you're going to want to sit there eating airline food. Tom Foreman: So even if we're reduced to sending inter-stellar post cards, and we get a picture of these critters, these people, these folks—whatever we want to call them—what do you think: Are they going to be the same size as us? Seth Shostak: It's unlikely that they're gonna be, you know, the size of a thimble, or something like that, because by definition they're going to be intelligent, otherwise we're not going to find them. And in order to be brainy, at least on this planet, you need a certain minimum brain size. It's also unlikely they'll be very large, because you get into other problems—you can't stand up so easily, it's hard to wield tools, you use too many resources. So they'll be bigger than a breadbox and probably smaller than an elephant, would be my guess. (11/19/03) No Warp Speed Possible Discover Magazine -- Three years ago, researchers created a light pulse that appeared to defy nature’s fundamental speed limit—it traveled faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. If it were possible to transmit information at such speeds, Einstein’s theory of relativity would be in tatters, and the principle of causality—the idea that cause must always come before effect—would go out the window. With a faster-than-light telephone, you could place a call back in time and tell your parents not to conceive you, for example. Now physicists (and everyone vexed by time-travel paradoxes) can breathe a sigh of relief. A recent series of experiments by experimental physicist Dan Gauthier of Duke University confirm that the earlier result was a kind of illusion; information cannot outrun light’s fastest pace. The ruckus began in 2000, when physicist Lijun Wang of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, and his colleagues beamed a pulse of light through a chamber filled with a cloud of cesium atoms and recorded how long it took for the light to emerge from the other side. In apparent disregard for Einstein’s physics, the light pulse exited the chamber before the researchers saw it enter. ... Gauthier and his student Michael Stenner, along with Mark Neifeld of the University of Arizona, devised an experiment much like Wang’s, using light pulses moving through a gas of potassium atoms. As expected, the light pulses appeared to move at faster-than-light velocities. Gauthier’s real goal was clocking how fast information could travel to a given location, so he and his colleagues imprinted a simple signal on the pulse—two discontinuities that could represent the one and zero of a binary code—and watched to see when the signals came out of the chamber. Whereas Wang observed the wave peak, Gauthier focused on the wave front, the first photon of the imprinted signal on the pulse, reasoning that if the wave front did not travel faster than the speed of light, then no information within the pulse could, either. “You can have the peak of the pulse traveling faster, so it catches up,” Gauthier explains. “But you can’t make the pulse go faster than that very first moment.” The experiments, published in the October 16 issue of Nature, revealed that the first photon of the changed pulse inched up to the maximum speed of light but did not surpass it, even though subsequent peaks within the pulse gained on the wave front at faster-than-light speeds. The elaborate series of tests all boiled down to a simple conclusion: As usual, Einstein had been right all along. (11/17/03) 12,000 Plant and Animal Species Face Extinction BBC Nature -- Another 2,000 species have been added to the annual Red List of the world's most endangered animals and plants. The "official" catalogue produced by IUCN-The World Conservation Union now includes more than 12,000 entries. This year, IUCN has highlighted the problems faced by many island habitats which it claims face a bleak future. It says many native animals and plants on the Seychelles and the Galapagos, for example, are being driven to extinction by invasive species. Since AD 1500, IUCN says 762 plants and animals have vanished, with another 58 known only in cultivation or captivity. Achim Steiner, the organisation's director-general, said: "While we are still only scratching the surface in assessing all known species, we are confident [the list of 12,259 species] is an indicator of what is happening to global biological diversity. ... The oldest seed plants on Earth, cycads, which resemble palms, are among the most threatened plants. Of 303 evaluated this year, 155 were listed as threatened. Seaweeds and lichens feature on the list for the first time, with Bennett's seaweed declared extinct: it was found only at two Australian sites, and has not been seen for a century. IUCN is worried about two cetaceans, the Mediterranean sub-population of the short-beaked common dolphin, and the Rio Grande do Sul/Uruguay sub-population of the franciscana, a river dolphin. Among the countries with the highest numbers of threatened birds and animals are Indonesia, India, Brazil, China and Peru. Plants are declining fast in Ecuador, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil and Sri Lanka. (11/19/03) Extreme Bacteria BBC Science -- The world's most alkaline lifeforms are living in contaminated water in the US. Scientists found microbial communities thriving in the slag dumps of the Lake Calumet region of southeast Chicago where the water can reach a pH of 12.8. Living in this extreme environment is comparable to swimming in caustic soda or floor stripper, the researchers say. They found the microbes while studying contaminated groundwater created by more than a century of industrial iron slag tipping in Illinois and Indiana. It was an unexpected discovery, said George Roadcap, hydrogeologist at the Illinois State Water Survey. ... Alkaline groundwater in the Lake Calumet region was created when steel slag was dumped and used to fill in wetlands and lakes. Water and air reacts with the slag to create lime (calcium hydroxide), driving up the pH. An estimated 600 trillion litres (21 trillion cubic feet) of contaminated industrial fill was dumped in southeast Chicago and north-eastern Indiana, about half of which is thought to be slag, Roadcap said. The slag dumps where the microbial communities were found resembled filled wetlands and were often devoid of surface vegetation, he explained. ... Roadcap presented details of his team's find to the recent annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Seattle. Scientists are discovering more and more so-called extremophiles - microbes that can thrive in super-hostile environments. These include locations with very high temperatures, acidity, radiation, and heavy metal contamination. They have shown scientists just how robust life actually is and raise the possibility that life could exist on other planets and moons that look, on the surface, to be uninhabitable. (11/19/03) 7:02:21 AM

© TrustMark 2003 Timothy Wilken. Last update: 12/3/2003; 10:22:01 AM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.