Of Course Obama Owns a Computer

The NY Times Paywall

I am disappointed with the subscription plan recently announced by the New York Times.

Don't get me wrong -- I love the NYT. If I had to subscribe to only one newspaper, it would be the NYT.

But in this day and age I don't have to subscribe to any single news source. That's what's great about this age, and that's the problem.

When I was in graduate school at Stony Brook I used to love, during warm weather, walking across the railroad tracks to the local deli, buying a chicken salad sandwich and a knish and a copy of the New York Times, and walking over to the track of the local private school and sitting up in the bleachers reading the paper and eating dinner by myself. I guess I was a bit of a loner then. I guess I still am.

But these days I don't get my news from any single source -- I get it from all over, via the Web. This is a great thing.

But the Times disgital subscription doesn't recognize that. At several hundred dollars a year, it acts like my newspaper is still tossed onto my driveway every morning.

Those days are past.

Yes, I want to read Krugman and Douthat and Alessandra Stanley. I want to read their sports columinsts.

But I want to read lots of other people, too. And the NYT people aren't that great (except for maybe Krugman) that I want to read them at the exclusion of all other people on the Web, especially when all these other people put up paywalls as well.

I want good journalists to get paid. I want good newspapers to survive. But I also want to read all over the place. I'd pay about $30-40/month to read newspapers across the Web, but not to read just one of them. Those days are over in the era of the hyperlink.

I will miss clicking thoughtlessly on the NYT button in my bookmarks. I hope that in some fashion they succeed. But not, perhaps, in this fashion.

Japan = 10% of Chernobyl?

According to der Spiegel, a French model calculates that the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan has already released one-tenth of the amount of radiation that was released at Chernobyl in 1986 -- and that was as of last Tuesday.

This site says that the total radiation release from Chernobyl was 100 megaCuries, and that the total release from Three Mile Island was 15 Curies. Thus Chernobyl = 7M x TMI, and if the French model is correct Fukushima = 700,000 x TMI.

We have been very lucky that no one lives immediately east of Japan. (But I wouldn't want to be immediately west of Fukushima either.)

Stuff

Some interesting things I’ve come across recently:

• over 28,000 species of nematodes are known, and there may be as many as a million.
• The freshwater content of the upper Arctic Ocean has increased by about 20 percent since the 1990s.
  
• The scariest path in the world.
• This week's Science magazine says Peak Oil is most probably here: "Despite a near tripling of world oil prices, non-OPEC production, which accounts for 60% of world output, hasn't increased significantly since 2004. And many of those same experts, as well as some major oil companies, don't see it increasing again— ever. In their view, it's stuck on a flat-topped peak or plateau at present levels of production for another decade or so before starting to decline. “Stable [non-OPEC] production is the best we can hope for,” says energy economist Robert Kaufmann of Boston University. “I have trouble seeing it increase more. It’s a wake-up call.”
  

Will this mean less oil consumption, or more war for OPEC's oil?

Intriguing formulas from Randell Mills

I know that Randell Mills' ideas about "hydrinos" (a purported energy state of the hydrogen atom below the canonical ground state predicted by standard quantum mechanics) are not accepted and considered to be cranky, but you have to admit these formulas for the mass ratios of the basic (non-neutrino) leptons (the electron, muon, and tau particles) and the neutron-electron mass ratio are pretty intriguing:

Here alpha is, of course, the dimensionless fine-structure constant, the most famous number in all of physics (approximately equal to 1/137):

Mills' book, The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics, is available for free here.

Arizona Caves

Arizona -- who has acted Oh-so-tough against "illegal" immigrants (as if a mere line on a map should tell people where they can and can't go) -- caves because it is costing them too much money!

Here's the letter.

Congrats to all of you who have declined to travel to Arizona or do business with them. Perhaps now the other states who want to be hard-asses will get the message.

And the message is: America is changing.

Decline in Arctic Sea Ice Extent

Arctic sea ice extent has peaked, and it's not especially good news.

According to the JAXA satellite, Arctic sea ice extent peaked on March 8, 2011 at 13.89 M km².

First, let's note that sea ice extent (akin to area) is not the absolute best measure of Arctic melting. That would be, of course, sea ice volume, which is modeled by PIOMASS.

But PIOMASS relies on modeling and is not a direct measurement, so some purists talk about ice extent.

This year, Arctic sea ice extent was lower than last year, and in fact, lower than any year since 2006:

Here the y-axis is in units of millions of square kilometers.

This is one way to look at the data. Here's another:

Which is best? Don't ask me -- deciding that is your job.

Incident on 57th Street

"He tried sellin' his heart to the hard girls over on Easy Street
But they sighed 'Johnny it
falls apart so easy, and you know hearts these days
are cheap'"

Battle of LA Aliens

From Roger Ebert's review of Battle: Los Angeles:

The aliens are hilarious.... They seem to be animal/machine hybrids with automatic weapons growing from their arms, which must make it hard to change the baby.

Actually this isn't so bad of a movie if you aren't expecting an original plot, great character development or sparkling dialog. But it does have great action, gung-ho Marines and some nice helicopter scenes. Any movie with gangs of helicopters is alright in my book.

(PS: Did you know there actually was a "Battle of Los Angeles," during World War II?)

Japanese Radiation Hits the US (at minuscule values)

The EPA announced today that radiation from the stricken Japanese nuclear reactor complex has hit the west coast of the U.S., though at extremely small values, far below natural background levels.

Today in Sacramento, radioactive xenon-133 was detected at approximately 0.1 disintegrations per second per cubic meter of air (0.1 Bq/m³; Bq is a becquerel), the EPA says, "which results in a dose rate approximately one-millionth of the dose rate that a person normally receives from rocks, bricks, the sun and other natural background sources. This validates a similar reading of 0.1 Bq/m3, taken from March 16 through 17 in Washington State."

They continue:

These types of readings remain consistent with our expectations since the onset of this tragedy, and are to be expected in the coming days.... Following the explosion of the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine in 1986 – the worst nuclear accident in world history – air monitoring in the United States also picked up trace amounts of radioactive particles, less than one thousandth of the estimated annual dose from natural sources for a typical person.

I don't know about you, but I feel better about all this when they give the actual numbers instead of vague qualifiers like "low."

So how small is a becquerel? According to Wikipedia: "...natural potassium (K40) in a typical human body produces 4,000 disintegrations per second, 4 kBq of activity. The nuclear explosion in Hiroshima (14 kt or 59 TJ) is estimated to have produced 8×10²⁴ Bq (8 YBq, 8 yottabecquerel).

New Data on Arctic Sea Ice Volume

PIOMASS has new data on Arctic sea ice volume:



(The gray bands are one- and two-standard deviations.) They don't give actual numbers, so it's difficult to tell how this point in time compares to last year. But overall the data is clearly nothing to cheer about, especially the change in the trend that occurred around 2001. (That is to say, the melting is accelerating.)

Of course, Congress has already decided there is no warming taking place, so just move along, OK?

Republicans and the Value of Pi

Some day this vote ("Committee Republicans Unanimously Reject Measures Reaffirming Science Behind Global Warming") is going to look just as asinine as this one.

For the sake of future historians, here are those who voted against moving an Amendment to H.R. 910 out of House Energy and Commerce Committee, which said

SEC. 4. CONGRESSIONAL ACCEPTANCE OF THE SCIENTIFIC FINDINGS OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY. Congress accepts the scientific finding of the Environmental Protection Agency that ‘‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.’’.

Note that the bill didn't even say why these changes are taking place -- only that they are.

An A.T Journey

6 months on the Appalachian Trail -- I miss it:


Green Tunnel from Kevin Gallagher on Vimeo.

About Paper

Via: someecards

Quote on Cosmology

A radio interviewer once asked me why anyone should care about cosmology. I was about to launch into the usual "origins of everything we know" answer, but then stopped and said "You know, if you don't think it's just totally cool, I can't really help you out." 

-- Michael Lemonick, Time science correspondent

Picture from Japan

The most impressive picture I've seen so far, from Japan (via Al Jazerra):

More on the West Coast Tsunami

This SF Chronicle article says the tsunami hit Crescent City, CA about 7:30 am yesterday morning, with waves at least 8.1 ft high, destroying 6 docks and 35 boats.

Here's an impressive video from Santa Cruz, via CNN:

Aftershocks

There are an amazingly large number of very strong aftershocks from the Honshu earthquake -- here's a list.

Speed of the Tsunami

The Honshu earthquake traveled about 350 mi/hr across the Pacific ocean to reach Brookings, OR.

--

Earthquake time/lat/long: 

3/10/11 9:46 pm PST

38.322°N   142.369°E

Brookings, OR tsunami arrival (appx):
3/11/11 11:00 am PST
42°3′27″N   124°17′11″W

Then it's some spherical trigonometry (or you can use this handy site) to find the surface distance traveled was about 4,633 miles in 13 hrs 14 minutes.

Videos of Oregon Tsunami