Wednesday, September 25, 2002

Mr Armey's Foot-in-Mouth Disease. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/25/politics/25ARME.html For balance one is reminded of John Stuart Mill's famous letter to Sir John Pakington. "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it." 10:52:54 AM     WiFi is very hot these days, but there are places where it doesn't make sense. It doesn't scale very well and is far too unregulated to be a stable service in contested areas. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/59/26747.html I suspect someone will really push the issue by putting together small LAN bands (small groups of people running stations on their laptops) that would degrade or even saturate the local airwaves. These, in the eyes of the FCC, are as legitimate as providers like Starbucks. If a customer pays for service they will expect a certain level of quality. You can't do that with WiFi and some people are going to get burned. Of course other technologies (like 3G) don't make sense for other reasons. 5:48:22 AM     If you have a terrible urge to know the various decay modes of D+ mesons, you've come to the right place. Every particle physicist in the world carries a handbook from the Particle Data Group with them in the sense that many Chinese used to carry the quotations of Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution. The difference is that the PDG publications are incredibly useful summaries of work at the frontier. If you want your own copy all you have to do is ask.. http://pdg.lbl.gov/pdg.html 5:47:39 AM     While on the subject of Physics it is interesting to note that the gravitational constant the most poorly measured of all the fundamental constants. Recently people are getting past four significant places, but there are serious discrepancies in the measurements. There may be something very deep here and more experimental guidance is needed. Some of the explanations are exotic. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992814 http://www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash/gconst.html 5:47:25 AM     And now for something I can't imagine liking - deep fried twinkies http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/PEstory/TGAM/20020923/UFATTN/Headlines/headdex/headdexInternational_temp/13/13/22/ The thought that it originated in a fish and chips place causes pause as does the fact that the inventor does deep fried chocolate bars. 5:46:25 AM

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