Something's comin'

Teaser video for the 2010 Toyota Prius. I WANT this car, man!

Santa Claws

I love cats because they've always got an attitude and they're just so photogenic. This one's particularly awesome =)

Dumb and dumberer

So yesterday U.S. President George W. Bush announced his plan to offer a bridge loan to the Detroit auto manufacturers, which allocates roughly $9bn to GM and $5bn to Chrysler immediately. So far I had spoken against it but in fact, as it stands, the latest deal is actually quite reasonable the for time being. Indeed, handing out a crumbling auto industry to a new administration would not be a good thing at all and in any case the loan is conditional on the two automakers coming up with a restructuring plan by March. Otherwise the loans will be called and the U.S. Treasury will have first priority over other creditors to recuperate its assets. Unlike with the deal to buy bad mortgage securities, in this case the U.S. is making sure it cannot lose money in the end, which is a very good thing indeed.

On the whole, though, this changes nothing to the fact that one cannot turn GM into a Toyota overnight, especially at a time when even Toyota itself is experiencing its first losses in over seventy years. So the question is, what next? this is of course where things get very tricky, as there are no good options I see for the Big 3 right now. Indeed, one cannot imagine the U.S. Treasury having to dole out $2bn a month to each one of the Detroit 3 over the next five years. This would amount to burning as much cash as for another Iraq invasion. Sadly enough both George Bush and Barack Obama seem to be paying heed to this phoney argument that bankruptcy would mean the end of the car companies, because if they go bankrupt then oh-my-god nobody will want to take the risk to buy their trucks anymore because they might not be able to honor their warranties if they go bust for good. On the contrary, it seems to me this would be a perfectly good time to have GM file for Chapter 11, as nobody is buying their gas guzzlers right now anyway.

Yet in these tough economic times it is hard to see how one could possibly revive talks with Renault-Nissan for a buyout of either GM or Chrysler, which would have been the best solution for them. Undoubtedly it would really take a Carlos Ghosn at the helm to restructure the Detroit automakers and precisely what GM really needs is oversight from a parent company or a partner that really know how to build small, fuel-efficient vehicles that the public want to buy. Either Renault-Nissan or Toyota would be the very best suitors to this end-there are not many others to begin with. Or perhaps-Tata, anyone?

Which brings me to the totally depressing realization I am going through in this end of 2008: that the Bush administration has been an economic and diplomatic disaster for eight years but my early doubts about Barack Obama's economic (and even diplomatic) know-how are now becoming very real. Mr Obama seems intent on bailing out the U.S. economy by having the U.S. Treasury manage the restructuring of GM and generally bailing out everybody else by spending lots of money on infrastructure and public service.

The problem is, determining what the long-term infrastructure needs of America precisely are is not so easy as it seems and in spending too much money too quickly one is running the risk of building plenty of bridges to nowhere. Civil engineering is not a trivial task, although in some cases it can be a very good thing. But rather than spending money on infrastructure I would call for the U.S. government to save as much money as it can, as follows:

1. pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan immediately. Neither of these wars can be 'won' in the long run and in fact a prolonged American presence in two conservative muslim countries will only serve to keep the Jihadi movement going forever. Bin Laden managed to escape to Pakistan and you won't catch him there, so get over it and send the troops home.

2. cut military spending drastically. It's not like Canada and Mexico are about to invade the U.S. and this would also be a good opportunity to get back to nuclear disarmament negotiations with both the Russians and the Chinese. Then refocus the government labs like Los Alamos and Livermore to researching energy problems of the peaceful kind, e.g. solar energy and fuel cells.

3. tax the rich! even Warren Buffett is advocating this and it only makes sense. Instead of asking the rich to lend money to Uncle Sam, it is much cheaper for the Treasury to simply tax them more. This is done most effectively by taxing luxury goods and capital gains on Wall Street above a certain limit. In the end this is a good deal even for the rich themselves, as a crumbling financial system is doing them no good anyway.

4. cut down drastically on social security and medicare. This generation of seniors and the upcoming Baby Boomers have had it too easy their whole lives, they've stashed plenty of money on the side and it's totally unfair that my own generation should have to pay to keep their decadent lifestyle going. And if people insist on drinking beer and eating plenty of sugar and bread, it's their problem if they get diabetes when they hit 50. Just don't make younger, health-conscious people pay for your stupidity, fellas!

5. if you're going to invest public money into the American industry, at least invest it in the most reliable and productive way possible. That is, invest it into promising business sectors. Like, don't invest in GM, invest in Google and solar energy companies. Even oil companies are a better investment, as oil is not about to go away as an energy source and it's really burning coal that's causing global warming for the most part!

Explaining metallic glasses

This most fascinating article on physorg.com is reporting progress made in researching the properties of glassy metals, an exceptional state of matter not normally found in nature.

A team of materials scientists from MIT, led by Carl V. Thompson of the Materials Processing Center, have built a microscopic array of cantilevers on which they have deposited alloys of the same two metals in slightly varying proportions, in order to compare their properties side-by-side.

Glassy metals are produced by quickly cooling, or 'quenching' as this is called, a molten metal alloy, in order to prevent its atoms from aligning themselves into a crystal lattice. Glassy metals have unusual magnetic and mechanical properties. Their magnetism is 'soft', which means it is easy to reorient and so for instance they can be used as cores in high-voltage electrical transformers. Glassy metals are also exceptionally hard and have a high degree of springiness, which means that they can get back into shape quickly after suffering a mechanical shock. For this reason they make excellent golf clubs!

The Mactini

Hilarious spoof Apple ad =)

Kim's alive and kickin'!

Well it looks like North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is back and totally rockin' the Communist homeland with his parka and dark glasses as usual.

김 정일이 돌아왔어요!!

Last week, Francois-Xavier Roux, a French neurosurgeon at Saint-Anne Hospital in Paris, told a French newspaper that Kim had suffered a stroke, but is now better. The doctor said he last treated Kim in late October. Great so now we know for sure the guy's literally lost his mind!

Sock and awe

I just stumbled upon this hilarious web game that puts you the player in the shoes of the Iraqi journalist who threw his pair at the U.S. President. Have fun!

The KLF-Justified and Ancient

Another classic trance track featuring the beautiful voice of country singer Tammy Wynette, who passed away ten years ago.

Antikythera reconstructed

London Science Museum curator Michael Wright demonstrates his reconstruction of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek astronomical computer.

Interview with John Doerr

An interview with venture capitalist extraordinaire John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, in which he discusses the state of the high tech industry in the U.S. today, as well as immigration issues and the financial crisis.

Iraqi throws shoe at George Bush

Well, it doesn't get any better than this!

Barack 'Santa' Obama

Here's the new and positively hilarious cartoon from Kal, the cartoonist for The Economist magazine. I thought I really should share it, as it brilliantly summarizes why I'm still not completely a fan of Barack Obama, although the man certainly has a lot going for him. Trouble is, compared to the outgoing president, almost anyone would look good-even myself and whoever will one day be my mother-in-law.

Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate that Barack Obama has a good personality and is willing to listen to other people's points of view. Also Mr Obama does not despise Europe and the rest of the world and he has just picked a Nobel prize-winning physicist, Dr Steven Chu, to head his Department of Energy, which bodes very well for his environmental and scientific policies.

However, when it comes to his strategy to revive the U.S. economy-and the economy supposedly is the strength of the Democrats-I do remain more than a bit skeptical. First Mr Obama said nothing to criticize, even constructively, Henry Paulson's plan to bail out Wall Street bankers by directly  buying bad mortgage securities. Now he has approved another $800bn to inject into the consumer credit market and he is also readying what is reportedly another trillion dollar so-called 'stimulus' package to be spent on building projects, education and other popular-sounding job creation schemes.

All of a sudden a trillion dollars has become the new billion dollars.

I would definitely be more than a bit cautious about engaging America so emphatically into a direction of bottomless government spending, which basically has all the appearance of America attempting to lift itself up by pulling its own straps. This is the kind of gravity-defying stunt that could very well end up making the lives of my generation of workers extremely miserable in the long run, all the more since America is already heavily in debt. And that precisely is what worries me most: America has a mountain of debt, its economy is suffering its worst recession in perhaps thirty years and that could last the entire length of Mr Obama's tenure and yet the President-elect is enthused by the idea of spending trillions of dollars without an afterthought.

Supposedly Mr Obama's economic team of advisors, headed by Larry Summers, are great academics and financiers who are the best of the best. Fair enough, but at the end of the day economics has a lot more to do with common sense than academics and technical competence. Unfortunately, more often than not common sense and intuition is what great academics and former bankers tend to lack completely. And my own common sense tells me that George Bush and Barack Obama are both setting America on a course that may very well trade an economic and financial crisis for another crisis, of a fiscal nature this time, that might potentially bankrupt the U.S. Federal government altogether.

Then in the event of a real emergency, such as a catastrophic bird-flu pandemic, an 8.0 earthquake in Los Angeles or even a group of islamic fanatics from Pakistan or Iran stealing and then detonating a nuclear device in some Western capital, America would have no money left to respond in an effective way...

How to: watch Colbert online from London

Since the guys at Comedy Central apparently have a deal with FX UK that restricts Eurosurfers from watching Colbert on the internet, I would like to suggest fellow Colbert fans in London the following trick: access The Colbert Report site through an anonymous proxy site such as the-cloak.com. Just click here and there you go-nothing shall stop the march of Colbert's Truthiness!

Balloon diplomacy

I was just reading this great article in the LA Times, which recounts the exploits of Mr Lee Min-bok, a North Korean defector who is now sending propaganda flyers back to his homeland with helium balloons flown across the heavily-guarded DMZ.

"Dear North Koreans," one begins, taking aim at Kim. "So he's a General who eats rice gruel together with the people? But how could he get love handles and a double chin if he eats rice gruel? People are starving to death, but why does the country spend so much for Kim's [extravagances]?"

재미 있어요!

United States of France

A while back, rather as a joke, I sent a couple of my friends this article from Time Magazine, entitled 'How we became the United States of France,' in which author Bill Saporito pens a hilarious comparison of how U.S. capitalism is on the verge of becoming even more neo-socialist than the French economy. Two months ago the U.S. Treasury and the Fed bailed out Wall Street, and in the process they nationalized America's big banks and its largest insurer, AIG. At the time I decried that as making little economic sense, especially the way they were doing it, by having the Treasury directly buy bad mortgage securities from the banks.

Today the U.S. is nationalizing its Big 3 carmakers, GM, Chrysler and Ford, through ginormous loans with complete oversight from the government attached to them. This of course makes little economic sense either, as that money would be better spent on education and heck-the U.S. might just as well invest it in Google and other tech stocks at a bargain price today. The justification behind it is of course the threat of losing 5m jobs tied to the auto sector. But even this is nonsense, as according to that logic you might as well bail out the entire U.S. economy. What about small businesses having to lay off their hard-working, non-union employees? they too might like to get bailed out, somehow. Plus, I do think bankruptcy would be the best way to force the automakers to restructure at once anyway.

But big shareholders would lose out big time and the U.S. goverment once again can't get used to the idea of letting fat investors lose their poorly-invested money. On top of that, this bail out of American car companies is sending a terrible message to their foreign competitors such as Toyota and Honda, who now build their cars in assembly lines located on U.S. soil and have created just as many jobs as GM has-and their cars don't totally suck.

Just to entice the reader, here's quoting the first paragraph of Saporito's hilarious sendup of America's new-found love of socialism:

How we became the United States of France

by Bill Saporito

This is the state of our great republic: We've nationalized the financial system, taking control from Wall Street bankers we no longer trust. We're about to quasi-nationalize the Detroit auto companies via massive loans because they're a source of American pride, and too many jobs — and votes — are at stake. Our Social Security system is going broke as we head for a future in which too many retirees will be supported by too few workers. How long before we have national health care? Put it all together, and the America that emerges is a cartoonish version of the country most despised by red-meat red-state patriots: France. Only with worse food.

Have a good laugh, read the rest =)

O Jail

I won't comment at length on the news today that O.J. Simpson was sentenced to a maximum of 33 years in jail for the foolish armed robbery of two sports memorabilia dealers in Vegas-you can read it all in the press I suppose. But let me just tell ya this joke I once heard from a homeless man in L.A.: you wanna know what's the difference between the Lion King and O.J. Simpson? one's an African Lion and the other's a lyin' African!

Resuscitating squeletons

I always love to post Steve Bell's cartoons but Martin Rowson's also very funny =)

Pounded

£1 = €1.148! and a number of English politicians are now having regrets about not joining the euro, as the UK would probably be weathering the financial crisis better. As Tony Blair would say, it's all the fault of Gordon's "five shitty little tests." Well I suppose this is a classic example of the British wanting to have it both ways with the EU. Call it to have your ridiculously expensive scone and eat it too...

First superconducting transistor

The Dec. 3 issue of the excellent New Scientist features a number of extremely interesting articles, in particular this brief on research being done on the world's first superconducting transistor, a holy grail of microelectronics. For the first time in decades solid-state physicists have been able to build a working prototype superconducting transistor. This paves the way for much faster electronic chips, as resistivity of conventional semiconductors remains the principal obstacle to higher switching speeds for transistors.

This groundbreaking work was achieved by Andrea Caviglia and his colleagues at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. They did so by growing a single crystal containing two metal oxides, strontium titanate and lanthanum aluminate, forming two separate layers inside the crystal. At the interface of these two materials the team found a dense gas of free electrons and at 0.3 kelvin, just above the absolute zero, these electrons can flow completely without resistance, and so form a superconductor.

This device can act as a transistor by applying or switching off a voltage at the interface, which has the effect of turning on or off the superconducting behavior of the electron gas. The crystal can therefore mimic the properties of a Field Effect Transistor (FET), a common component in electronic circuits. In a conventional FET the switching speed is limited by the heat that results from the resistance to the flow of electrons through the semiconductor channel. But with a superconducting transistor one could conceivably achieve much higher frequencies than the gigahertz range currently reachable with existing transistor technologies.

Stimulus fabulous

As if splurging over a trillion dollars on bailing out f**ked banks and insurance companies weren't enough, the U.S. government is now approving a new plan to spend another $800bn on consumer credit banks. Just to allow people to spend even more of all this money they won't be earning next year since they've just lost their job-and probably wouldn't have earned either way.

One could certainly argue that something ought to be done to restart, or rather restructure the entire U.S. economy. The problem is, both the U.S. and the U.K. got into this incredible mess thanks to a propensity to spend money that they don't have, hoping that Chinese investors will bail them out in the end.

This totally spells disaster and it is rather incomprehensible that Americans are so worried about importing oil from the Middle East, which really accounts for about 20% of U.S. consumption of oil, whereas they're not worried at all about selling out the entire U.S. banking infrastructure to the Chinese.

If anything, this crisis ought to be an opportunity for the U.S. to reinvent itself into a lean, green society, where splashing money one doesn't have on buying a gas-guzzling SUV is, like, totally uncool. Not to mention anything about that 26-bedroom house with 100 plasma TV's-including one for the dog and the other one for the goldfish.

Over the years I have been used to thinking of my native country (France for those who haven't been following so far) as being backward and stingy when it comes to just about anything but as it turns out, frugality may very well be the only moral value that might save us in the 21st century.

More than anything, what totally baffles me is how the U.S. government is suddenly splurging money into the most inefficient sectors of its economy, thereby rewarding all the people who've been f**king up so seriously. Indeed, investing all of the U.S. government's liquidity into badly-managed banks and carmakers is simply ridiculous if you think of all the other things you could do with a couple trillion dollars.

So to be fair and constructive, allow me to make a few suggestions:

-free college education for mathematics and science majors. In fact free education for everybody!

-the world's most efficient public transport infrastructure, to save a lot of time and money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and Middle-Eastern oil imports.

-a Manhattan project for solar energy,

-replace every car in the U.S. with a hybrid vehicle,

-venture capital funding for tech businesses, which are the driving force of the U.S. economy. Instead of bailing out GM, which is a f**ked company anyway, how about funding the next Google?

-send Jerome to finish his PhD at Caltech... because I'm worth it!

I invite readers to make their own suggestions =)

Let's all go boing!

...and another hilarious cartoon by Steve Bell, in which he explains Brown Man's strategy to tackle the current financial and economic crisis with a daring flight maneuver!

Graphene memory

With all the progress being made understanding and applying the physics of graphene nowadays, it was only a matter of time until physicists would be able to come up with computational and memory devices made from graphene. I had already reported the first graphene transistor but now it seems a team of physicists from Rice University have come up with a design for a graphene memory cell, as reported in physorg.com.

It appears the new memory cell design works mechanically, although the article does not explain exactly how. Yet the properties of the graphene memory cells seem extremely promising: they function at temperatures ranging from minus 75 to plus 200 degrees centigrade with no discernible effect and most importantly, their on-off power ratio reaches a million-to-one, which makes them extremely reliable. Another interesting quality of the graphene memory cell is that they function with only two gates as opposed to three for existing memory gate technologies, which would allow chip designers to stack them in layers and manufacture three-dimensional memory devices. Finally, the switching speed of the graphene memory gates is so fast it has so far not been possible to measure.

I can't wait for these new iPods with graphene memory that can hold all the music ever recorded and all feature films ever shot. And you bet this gizmo will be implanted directly in our brains!

Bicycle Samba

Just saw this on YouTube. Definitely most creative and those guys really have some unusual talent to be sure.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Bail-out blues

I was just reading this excellent article in The Guardian by Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, in which he argues much as I did in my post, Shifting Craters, that U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's bail-out plan for Wall Street will only benefit the most poorly managed banks and cost a fortune to U.S. taxpayers.

Thank you Mr Stiglitz, I retract what I said earlier, that only late-night comedians seem to understand the stakes of this issue.

Most awkward loan interview. Ever.

All late-night American comedians agree: this Bush administration plan to bailout Wall Street is a scam. How come comedians have become the only credible thinkers-on any subject-in the U.S. today? My guess: it's a awesome job with great perks and they're attracting all the smarty pants. All that's left for politics and banking is backwash!

Beau travail

French dance company Beau Geste are setting up this amazing ballet between man and excavator. If all construction workers could do this, building sites would definitely look more interesting, innit? Or perhaps they're just practicing to pick up the pieces of the economy in an artful way!

Caution: lame ducks falling

Shifting craters

Well, there it is... I remember having this discussion six months ago with my grand-father who is an eminent economics professor at LSE and former big CEO, in which I argued that the U.S. was edging closer to a 1929-style credit meltdown. He, being an optimist, wouldn't believe me but it now looks like my worries about the insanity of the economic policies of the U.S. government are turning into a true disaster in reality.

As if the fallout from the Enron scandal had not gone far enough to convince the American people that regulating financial markets, as both Warren Buffett and George Soros have been emphatically advocating for years, might be a good idea, the Bush administration is now intent on doing exactly the opposite: making the U.S. government liable for the hubris of Wall Street.

Frankly, I think the Paulson plan to rescue the American banking system could have been a relatively sound idea had the U.S. government not been so heavily in debt to begin with and the dollar not been so weak already. There is, it seems to me, a non-negligible chance that piling so much deficit so suddenly onto the U.S. budget will cause a further slide of the dollar, since it amounts to printing money. This might scare off foreign investors, particularly the Chinese, and drive them to divest from the U.S. market, which could in turn significantly aggravate the liquidity problem that the U.S. financial system is currently experiencing. In that sense the remedy might just kill the patient in the end.

Then there is also the problem of spending priorities: were the U.S. federal government to face some other costly emergency in the coming year, such as another disastrous hurricane, Katrina-style, a bird flu pandemic, or even the inevitable war with Iran (why not!), it would find itself hard-pressed to come up with large amounts of cash in a short period of time to take care of such eventuality.

Crucially the profitability of this bailout plan to U.S. tax payers is relying on both the U.S. real estate market recovering in the near term but also on future willingness from banking institutions to buy back all those credit derivatives from the Treasury once they have supposedly regained their value. Unfortunately both are likely a long shot, to say the least. It is indeed hard to imagine all the large banks such at Merrill Lynch and Citi, who've been seriously burned by this crisis, coming back to their customers in six months' time and explaining to them they are back into the credit derivatives business. Mortgage securities now have such a serious image problem with the American public that will simply prevent banking institutions from ever doing this kind of trading again. So now the U.S. treasury will be stuck with $700bn worth of insurance contracts on mortage loans that will probably keep on defaulting for a long while until the U.S. economy recovers. This, I think, will be very costly any way you look at it.

The truth is, there are still banks out there that are actually very well-managed. I could definitely mention Wells-Fargo (where yours truly has his checking account), BofA, JP Morgan Chase, and countless others, that still have plenty of cash to lend their customers. Instead of bailing out banks that did not exemplify good financial practice, I think a better idea would be for the Federal Reserve to loan large amounts of money at a low rate to financially sound banking institutions. These would in turn be most qualified to inject the cash back into the American economy through properly vetted mortgage loans, business loans, etc...

In fact, if the rationale for the Paulson plan is to jump-start the sagging U.S. economy, another excellent idea would be for the Federal Reserve to loan lots of money to venture capitalists in the Silicon Valley. If you're going to give American tax payer's money away to restart the economy, at least give it to businesses that deserve it and will really help the U.S. economy. Don't give it to bankers who've been acting like total crooks and are by far the least productive sector of the economy.

As Jay Leno put it, this plan-here's how it works: you screw up, you pay; they screw up, you pay.

Slinky notes

EepyBird's Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

The latest from the EepyBird guys of Diet Coke and Mentos fame: the Sticky Notes Experiments.

Is Kim Jong-il ill??

Sorry I couldn't resist posting such a once-in-a-lifetime title. 김정일 이 아프다-나는 잘 슬프다!! For the latest on the adventures of Mr Kim, I refer the reader to the excellent Chosun Ilbo.

Pigs fly

What a week! well once again I've haven't been writing as often as I wish I did, because I've been worried about figuring out what it is I'm going to do for a living this coming year and beyond. In the meantime, since my last post, the insanity of the U.S. presidential campaign has been growing out of its federal proportion-to infinity and beyond. Lo and behold, our American friends keep finding new and awesome ways to turn their political scene into something so outrageous it's unbearable.

Thankfully, such brilliant cartoonists as The Guardian's Steve Bell are here to put things back into perspective for us-with the stroke of their finely sharpened pencils =)

Pahari Dhun

The electronic animation entitled 'Pahari Dhun' I produced as my thesis project while a student at USC in 2001. It was inspired by a long series of drawings I had been doing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For the animation I did a series of electronic paintings on a prototype tablet PC and rendered them as a metamorphosis sequence on the music of Ravi Shankar.

Paris for President

See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die

Well so far I had been loath to formally endorse a candidate for President of the United States. As it turns out, I shall endorse neither of the two big candidates. I mean, Barack Obama's strategy to pull out quickly from Iraq I find difficult to believe, while Mc Cain's so old I'm just afraid he'll be too focused on fighting the commie Soviets to do anything about the economy.

So I endorse Paris Hilton for President, like, totally. You go girl!

Large Hadron Rap

I'm speechless!

Colbert interviews Reisman-on Earth

This last week Stephen Colbert was completely over-excited, that is to say, insanely funny. Remember that interview of Garrett Reisman aboard the International Space Station? well, this time he's chatting with Garrett back on Earth on the Colbert Report Studio in NYC.

The Word-Join the E.U.

Stephen Colbert's argument for the U.S. to join the E.U.: the U.S. Dollar would be worth a Euro if it were the Euro. And if they don't accept us we'll sue them for geographic discrimination!

First STM spectroscopy of graphene

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and U.C. Berkeley have performed the first scanning tunneling spectroscopy of graphene flakes equipped with a "gate" electrode-see article on physorg.com here. Well I'm always a big fan of the scanning tunneling microscope and I'm a big fan of graphene too, so I was totally excited to read about this. And indeed this is another insanely great experiment involving two of my very favorite objects in physics. (this blog entry is still a work in progress but I wanted to post the link early for everyone to read for themselves =).

The pleasure of finding things out

The first of a series of interviews of Richard Feynman in which he recounts how he met his painter friend Jirayr Zorthian and became interested in drawing. Incidentally, I did get to know Zorthian while I was a graduate student a Caltech, and I even produced a couple of pictures together with him and a group of friends. Sadly enough, Mr Zorthian passed away two years ago at the age of 97. I remember telling him how boring and stiff I thought Caltech people often tended to be and the old man replied with a mischievous smile, "oh yeah, they're pretty dull!" Richard Feynman must have been a spectacular exception =)

Science, evolution, and creation: Ali G vs Kent Hovind

In which Ali G. discovers we're all homo's!

Graphene is strongest

This past week scientists at Columbia University in New York, Jeffrey Kysar and James Hone have tested the mechanical resilience of a flawless sheet of graphene-see article in MIT Technology Review here. They did so by digging a series of microscopic holes into a slab of silicon, placed sheets of graphene above the holes and then measured how much force it takes to puncture the sheet with a diamond nanopoint. As it turns out, graphene is so strong that you could balance a car on top of the probe without puncturing the sheet. Holy atomic pile, Batman!

Ali G interviews Buzz Aldrin

Da classic interview of my main man Buzz Aldrin by Ali G.
Yo listen up! da moon does exist yo!

JibJab

Send a JibJab Sendables® eCard Today!

Dear friends, I know I haven't been blogging much lately and my excuse is I've been busy with other things but here's an awesome way to get back into the fun: the latest JibJab video parodying the US presidential campaign, entitled "Time for Some Campaignin'." Enjoy.

Colbert interviews astronaut

Stephen Colbert interviews astronaut Garrett Reisman, currently onboard the ISS.

A match made in space heaven!

The more the merrier

This past week I was very fortunate to be rejoined in my blogging effort by two new contributors of note: my brother Florent, who will be writing about-well I don't actually know what he will be writing about and that's the point. Florent always has an amazing ability to surprise me, so I'm hoping readers will appreciate his undoubtedly wacky sense of humour.

Beside Florent and myself my old friend Masaki Hirama will be writing on all sorts of philosophical subjects, including quantum mechanics, which he is now interested in getting into. His perspective will be that of a talented dancing, ice-skating, competitive-swimming offbeat philosopher. To me Masaki has this essential quality that he's at least as much allergic to school and academics as myself, which always makes for people with a different perspective on life and just about everything. One cannot be a good philosopher-or scientist-I think by being merely good at doing what one is being told to do. Masaki-san in this respect is a true original, who should have much of interest to talk about on this blog.

Thanks to both of you for joining the team!

Feist 1 2 3 4

here's a nice video by Feist for you Jerome, hope you like it...

Circuit City

This week something rather exceptional has occurred in the realm of microelectronics: a group of physicists working at HP Labs have built a new and revolutionary kind of circuit etched onto a microchip. This is highly unusual as most advances in this field tend to be fast-paced but rather incremental in nature. Here, we are talking about a completely different animal in the zoo of all those microscopic circuits that populate the chips in our PC's and the beast is called a memristor, condensed word for 'memory' and 'resistor'.

So far to build their microprocessors electrical engineers have had the choice of three different kinds of elementary circuits: resistors, capacitors and inductors, together with the now-ubiquitous transistor (this does not count as an elementary circuit since its behavior is non-linear.) Each of these tiny elementary circuits controls two different properties of the electrical current flowing through it-according to a linear differential relation.

For instance, middle-school students (in France at least) learn in physics class what is known as Ohm's law: dv = R di, where v is the voltage of the current and i it's intensity. The factor of R is called the resistance of any conducting material, and resistors are commonly used to control the ratio of voltage to intensity within a circuit. Similarly, capacitors relate the amount of charge q that passes through it with voltage, through the relation dq = C dv (C is called the capacitance of the capacitor), and inductors relate the magnetic flux to current intensity through dφ = L di (where the constant L is called-you guessed it-inductance).

About fourty years ago, Leon Chua, then a graduate student in electrical engineering at Berkeley figured that, for the sake of symmetry (see picture above), there ought to exist a fourth type of passive component, which would relate the magnetic flux φ to charge through the relation dφ = M dq, where the constant M would be called the memristance of the circuit. Yet the physical existence of the memristor proved elusive and no one had ever managed to produce one using simple materials until this past week.

The research team at HP Labs built their prototype device by sandwiching two layers of titanium oxide between two perpendicular electrodes (see picture above). The upper layer of titanium oxide is missing a few oxygen atoms, on the order of one percent, while the lower layer is regular titanium oxide. When a current is forced through the two electrodes, it pushes the charged voids down to the lower layer, thereby lowering the average resistance of the circuit. This can then be reversed by flowing current in the opposite direction.

But you may ask, this is all well but what is this new gizmo good for? well, my friends, this is good for many things. In particular, a memristor must have the interesting property that, in fact, its electrical resistance changes over time proportionally to the amount of charge that passes through it. So as its name indicates, a memristor acts like a memory component and precisely, electrical engineers are now thinking about using it for that purpose: memristors would provide a new kind of a very dense and also persistent memory (i.e. it can retain information even when the current is turned off, unlike our current PC's RAM chips.)

Even more interestingly, memristors may very well bring back into fashion analog circuits for all kinds of signal processing applications. In fact, scientists have already pointed out the similarities in the way memristors 'remember' their level of electrical activity and the way the human brain's neurons and synapses function. So memristors would make it possible to implement very dense neural networks in silicon, as opposed to simulating them in software on existing digital computers.

For decades, electrical engineers have been able to continuously shrink the size of the elementary circuits and transistors that they etch onto the surface of microprocessors, an evolution of technology now called 'Moore's law', after Gordon Moore the founder of chipmaker Intel who first came up with the observation that the number of transistors on our PC's microprocessors roughly doubles every two years. But now that the feature size of a transistor on a microchip is closing in on the size of a few hundred atoms (currently they're at 0.18 μm so about 1500 atoms), the performance of current transistor technology is running into its physical limits. Thankfully, memristors might eventually replace transistors completely as they are getting smaller, especially since the memristance effect gets better as the circuit gets tinier because it involves moving around oxygen atoms inside its structure-the less far they have to move the faster they get there.

You go, Lenovo!

This funny video I got from FSJ's blog summarizes really well the point I made last month about Apple's new MacBook Air: it's kinda hem... crappy. However, what the Lenovo ad totally fails to address is all the crap you have to deal with while using Windows... well nothing's perfect I suppose! Meanwhile, I can't wait until someone with lots of time of their hands pastes a BSoD on the supposed MacBook competitor's screen in a remake of the above video. That'll make it more truthful.

Free Radicals (Len Lye, 1958)

This is perhaps one of the coolest animations of all time: Len Lye's Free Radicals. Brilliant by its simplicity.

Snap! - Cult of Snap!

A cool video of one of my favorite dance bands from the 90's, Snap! these two German DJ's had that awesome sense of rhythm served with great energy by M.C. Turbo. And don't forget to watch such other great hits as 'Rhythm is a Dancer,' 'The World in my Hands' and of course, 'The Power.'

R.I.P., John Wheeler and Edward Lorenz

I know this past week I've been rather caught up in other business so now I'd like to make up for it and finally comment on the passing last week of two of the 20th century's physics giants: John Wheeler and Edward Lorenz.

John A. Wheeler passed away on Sunday, April 13th at the respectable age of 96. Dr Wheeler, a professor of physics at Princeton became famous for his considerable body of work in theoretical physics, which in particular led him to coin the term 'black hole' to describe the singular solutions to Einstein's equation of general relativity. During the war, Wheeler was a major contributor to the Manhattan project and later on did some design work on the hydrogen bomb. But more importantly, John Wheeler was the PhD advisor of none other than Richard P. Feynman, who said of him, "Some people think he's gotten crazy in his later years, but he's always been crazy."

At the opposite end of the physics spectrum, Edward Lorenz was the classic example of a very practical-minded experimental scientist, whose great sense of observation led him to the realization that a great sensitivity to initial conditions in a numerical weather simulation model he was working on at MIT was not just a bug in his program but an essential feature of the dynamics of the atmosphere itself and many other physical systems. Lorenz subsequently published an article entitled 'Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?', which gave the chaotic nature of the weather its nickname of 'Butterfly Effect.' Chaos theory was born, setting off what was qualified as the third revolution of twentieth century physics, after relativity and quantum physics.

May both of you gentlemen find peace in the Nirvana of physics!

Deal or no deal

The Economist's brilliant cartoonist Kal has just produced this animated version of the debate between the two democrats-well his version anyway. The conclusion is: they're both losers!

XOS exoskeleton

After reading an article on the BBC's website, I dug up this awesome video showing a demonstration of this amazing exoskeleton currently being developed by Sarcos-Raytheon in the U.S.. To be honest, I was quite surprised to see how far along this technology is, so much so it really does look like science-fiction come true.

World's smallest BSOD

Speaking of cell phones, here's the latest from Chinese gadget manufacturer Epoq: the EGP-98B wristwatch phone. Best of all, it runs Windows Crappy Edition. It also features quad-band GSM, wifi and bluetooth and you can admire the Blue Screen of Death on its gorgeous 1.4-inch OLED screen. Now if the phone hangs up when your mother-in-law calls, you can blame it on Windows!

Phone addicts

I instantly started laughing my a** off when I saw this on c|net this morning: a couple of porcelain wedding cake figurines glued to their cell phones. Actually, they're already looking kinda outdated. I mean the girl should be texting, not talking on her phone.

And now that the EU has just allowed the use of cell phones on board domestic airplanes, this is definitely not going to get any better. That said, cell phones are awesome. Like, how else would you ever be able to watch The Colbert Report during a boring meeting?

Measuring the fine constant with graphene

Physicists at the University of Manchester in the UK have carried out a new and extremely interesting series of experiments to measure the fine-structure constant of quantum mechanics. This dimensionless number (meaning it has no unit), denoted by alpha, describes the intensity of the electromagnetic interaction between electrons and photons in quantum mechanics. Its exact value is close to 1/137.

So far the most accurate way of measuring alpha involved measuring the quantum Hall effect on electrons in a cyclotron-a very sophisticated technique. Now the researchers from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Manchester, led by Professor Andre Geim, have suggested using graphene, a chemical state of carbon recently discovered, to measure the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between electrons and photons in a very direct manner. Graphene is a new variety of nanomaterial in the same family as the fullerenes, which consists of single layers of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal mesh.

Professor Geim and his team, who first discovered graphene in 2004, have now come up with a method for easily obtaining large sheets of graphene. Furthermore, they have realized that these one-atom thick sheets are not clear; they absorb about 2.3% of the light that passes through them. Their models and calculations then show that this percentage divided by Pi gives exactly the fine-structure constant alpha.

This experiment is indeed truly exceptional for its simplicity: a digital camera suffices to measure the amount of light that passes through the graphene sheets and a pocket calculator can be used to derive the final value for alpha!

Boycotting the Olympics?

Boycotting the Olympics? but when else would we get a chance to pole-vault over the Great Wall? asks Stephen Colbert.

Snakelike robot for heart surgery

This article I just read in MIT's Technology Review magazine describes a fantastic new robotic device, which allows heart surgeons to operate through only one small incision. It consists of a snakelike articulated robot that is capable of accurately sliding along a path in three dimensions described by the surgeon in real-time with a joystick. That way the robot does not risk exerting uncontrolled lateral pressure on the patient's inner organs as it moves. The two photos (credit: Amir Degani) illustrate the functioning of the CardioArm device, which really does have the creepy appearance of a snake. In the second photo you can spot the snake robot crawling right underneath the membrane tissue of a pig's heart. Absolutely amazing. This is totally the kind of thing that really gets me excited about science and technology, especially as in this case when engineers take a cue from nature to design higher-performing systems.

What are you sinking?

On the value of learning a proper English accent... or not! The only thing funnier I can think of would be a similar ad but featuring the French. Kudos to Florent for bringing this essential piece of advice to my attention.

FSM statue inaugurated

In a magnificient throwback to the 2005 erection of a Ten Commandments monument in front of a Kentucky courthouse, the Crossville, Tenn. chapter of the Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster have now inaugurated a statue of His Noodly Appendage in front of their local courthouse. In fact, they have made it into a monument to all faiths and to freedom of speech. Of course, beyond the hilarious goofiness of the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster movement lie the extremely serious issues of the separation of Church and State and, equally importantly, the separation of religion and science in general.

Coming from a Roman Catholic family and having grown up as an agnostic physicist myself, I am indeed feeling very much concerned by this question. In Europe one would hardly ever hear the suggestion that creationism, the biblical description of how God created the Universe and the Earth in seven days, should be taught in public schools. So it's always come as a shock to me, as I was living in the United States, that some states were imposing the teaching of neo-creationism, also called intelligent design, alongside evolution in biology classes.

Of course, I have nothing in general against people who do believe in the Genesis. I have always had friends of extremely diverse religious backgrounds, whether Buddhist, Christian or even Hindu, and who each have a completely different understanding of how the Universe and us inside it ever came into being and, perhaps more importantly, why. Since I've studied quantum physics, I am indeed well aware that characterizing what reality really is is a complicated question and that science does not always have all the answers yet, and perhaps never will. In fact, as U.S. president Bill Clinton once famously put it, "it all depends what the meaning of is is."

But I do find the Flying Spaghetti Monster both so hilariously funny and philosophically essential when it comes to making it clear that religion is not science and conversely science should not be confused with religious beliefs. From Darwin's first observations of evolutionary patterns within populations of Galapagos tortoises and mockingbirds, to the very contemporary experiments in genetics and all of the serious problems we are now having with TB germs that have evolved to become resistant to antibiotics, there is no doubt in my mind that much value is to be found in modern biology.

Most importantly, science does have its own clear set of rules that one must follow in order to come up with reasonably meaningful experiments and conclusions. From this point of view, intelligent design is not at all science and should not be taught either as such or even alongside Darwinian theory in biology classes. For this would be very much like imposing the teaching of, say, Karl Marx's Das Kapital at Sunday school-not very appropriate. I am all about exposing young people to a variety of points of view but at the very least it seems to me that education ought to be about teaching kids something both meaningful and consistent.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is indeed a wonderful reminder of that and an illustration of how teaching creationism in biology classes is complete nonsense: it will only sow confusion in the minds of young children who are otherwise quite capable of recognizing the value of both science AND religion to their own intellectual development. RAmen!

Idiots sue CERN

Apparently a couple of idiots have decided to sue CERN in a Hawaii district court (!), along with the U.S. Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the National Science Foundation. Mr Walter L. Wagner and Mr Luis Sancho contend that there exists a non-negligible risk that CERN's new Large Hadron Collider might generate a black hole that could eat up all of Earth-and us with it. Or it could spit out a particle called a "strangelet", which might also contaminate all matter on Earth and turn it instantly into a dead cluster of strange particles. So they are seeking an injunction to stall the construction and powering up of LHC until it has been proven such catastrophy will not happen. Which, by the way, physicists say is impossible to prove with 100% certainty. Scary, huh!

Look, idiots: I've studied particle physics in grad school and particularly quantum gravity and I can reassure you on this-you're not about to get eaten up by a black hole from CERN. Not in a million years. The truth is, according to quantum physics, conceivably anything might potentially come out of the energy-to-matter conversion process at play inside the accelerator experiments. And that precisely is the whole point! Yet there is much less of a chance that either a black hole or even a clone of U.S. president George W. Bush might come out it at any time to destroy us than the two of you ever receiving the Nobel prize in physics. That said.

Tron sweded

Tron
by freres-hueon

Here's adding to the list of sweded classic movie scenes: the Tron neon bike race. Enjoy!
Copyright les frères Hueon 2008.

One is having a party

Copyright Steve Bell 2008. I'm speechless!

Hillary in Bosnia: Action footage

Another hilarious political video I got from FSJ's blog: Hillary Clinton dodging bullets in Bosnia. Apparently her claims were NOT exaggerated, like, at all!

That cartoon bunny

Remember that picture I just posted below with US president George W Bush hugging a cute-cute Easter bunny? Well here's The Guardian's Steve Bell's take on it (Copyright Steve Bell 2008) :)

Latino midget Hillary

I just saw this on FSJ's blog and after watching it I spent about half an hour rolling on the floor in uncontrolled laughter. OK maybe not. But still, this is crazy stuff :)

I was wrong

In my previous post, Doraemon joins Japanese govt, I joked about the fact that, unlike their Japanese colleagues, neither French president Nicolas Sarkozy nor US president George W. Bush would ever have their picture taken with a cartoon character. Clearly I was wrong, as illustrated in the photograph above... thanks Fake Steve Jobs for pointing it out :)

Antarctica meltdown

A gigantic chunk of ice has apparently broken away from the Antactica shelf today, as had happened before both in 1995 and 2002. This time it was the edge of the Wilkins ice shelf that separated, a piece of ice which had been there for an estimated 1,500 years. It was in fact the sixth major piece of ice to have melted away from this part of the continent. The iceberg thus formed is now about the size of Manhattan. See article and video on BBC news here.

Bhutan

Yesterday the kingdom of Bhutan have held their first general election ever, by decree of former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck. The king had been slowly trying to bring the best of the modern world to his country, without sacrificing the cultural heritage and also the environmental beauty of his tiny nation. In particular, the king came up with the idea of measuring the development of Bhutan not in terms of GDP but rather in terms of what he calls Gross National Happiness aka GNP. I just find the whole idea totally fantastic! I mean, this is genius... so I've decided now I have got to learn to speak the language of Bhutan, Dzongkha. Just the name of it I find absolutely awesome :) see article on BBC there and Wikipedia entry on Bhutan here. See also Bhutan's official site.

Lego war

This essential post on c|net today points out one of the most important shortcomings of the familiar Lego bricks: the manufacturer has always been loth to provide their little brick characters with real guns. Sure, Lego knights have their sword and Lego cowboys do have revolvers but these are always period weapons-not the real deal. So far no way to fight jihad with your Lego people :(

Thankfully, this company called BrickArms is there to help us catch up with the times and fight the true conflicts of the twenty-first century! They make both figures, such as Lego terrorists or a Lego James Bond, and a credible set of weapons, including shotguns and assault rifles, and even a briefcase Uzi "for setting up failed Lego drug deals!"

See the BrickArms website for more info.

Big Bang

Two days ago astronomers from the Swift X-ray space telescope observed a spectacular supernova, believed to be by far the most intense ever recorded. It was even visible to the naked eye-see article here. Since the collapsing star itself was located at an estimated 7.5 billion light-years away from Earth, this makes it the most intrinsically bright stellar object ever observed. Scientists are still speculating on why such a distant supernova turned out to be so luminous as seen from Earth. If the explosion had occurred within our Milky Way galaxy, it would have been brighter than the sun for almost an entire minute-on the same day that Arthur C. Clarke passed away!