30. september 2003

Google news OJR writes about Google News, and has a great interview with its creator Krishna Bharat (picture), Google's principal scientist. It started as a personal toy, became an in-house favourite, and was then launched to the public. There is an interesting discussion of how the fully automated news service is set up, how it selects which articles to feature on the front page, when it will go out of beta (soon), and of course when it will become customised to the reader's interests and tastes (not soon). I have to say for myself that Google news is my primary blogging tool. The front page is cool, but the ability to trace a story, a term, a name and get different perspectives on everything is really great. 11:25:10 PM    comment []  trackback []

Measure the speed of light with a microwave and a bar of chocolate Here is an amusing article about the speed of light, how it was measured, and how you can do a measurement yourself in your own kitchen, provided you have a microwave oven (I don't) and a bar of chocolate (uh, I ate it). The only equipment you need for this experiment is a microwave, a ruler and chocolate, cheese or any other food that melts. Remove the turntable from the microwave and replace with chocolate on a plate (so the plate does not rotate), and heat until it just starts to melt - about 20 seconds, depending on the power of the oven. There will be some melted hot spots and some cold solid spots in the chocolate. The distance between the hot spots is half the wavelength of the microwaves, and the frequency of the microwaves will often be printed on the back of the oven. The speed of light is equal to the wavelength multiplied by the frequency of an electromagnetic wave (microwaves and visible light are both examples of electromagnetic waves). So from this simple experiment, and some easy math, you can work out the speed of light from Milky Way Magic Stars®! Clever. 7:44:40 PM    comment []  trackback []

White House under investigation The Justice Department has launched a full criminal investigation to find out who is responsible for leaking a CIA agent's name to the press. "The president has directed the White House to cooperate fully with this investigation," White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters. "The president wants to get to the bottom of this." Maybe Bush has learned a lesson from his predecessors. An attempted coverup, or just a conceived coverup, does far more damage than the original accusation. The dems argue that conflicts of interest means the Justice Dept is not the right party to investigate its own administration. They want an independent special counsel to look into the affair, probably remembering how much damage such a person can do, even if the original probe finds nothing. 7:06:05 PM    comment []  trackback []

UN withdraws almost all staff from Iraq The United Nations has reduced its staff in Iraq from more than 600 to fewer than 50 foreign employees. The UN cites security concerns. This is likely to endanger the handover of the oil-for-food programme from the UN to the provisional government by the end of November, not to mention other humanitarian projects. And the UN wants to take over everything in Iraq? 7:41:26 AM    comment []  trackback []

Layout-o-matic Inknoise has provided a very nice and simple web-based generator of stylesheet data for simple web pages. It makes browser-agnostic css/html that could be a good starting point for some fancy web page. 5:55:49 AM    comment []  trackback []

Professor to dummies: Please don't procreate! Helmuth Nyborg, a well known psychology professor at Denmark's University of Aarhus, has caused an uproar by suggesting that people with low IQ should be discouraged from having children, and intelligent people should be encouraged to have more. [Nyborg] said it was time to "abandon the politically correct" and to practice selection in order to "improve the coming generations and avoid degenerates in the population", in comments this weekend that have been widely reported on national television and the country's main newspapers. He suggests low-IQ people be paid to not have children, and that highly educated people be given more time off work to take care of their children. Many politicians and experts have responded with disgust. Integration Minister Bertel Haarder says the suggestions are "against all moral principles". 3:47:35 AM    comment []  trackback []

Gate Question: How long before the Wilson/Plame leak scandal-in-progress is dubbed something-with-gate by the press or the blogsphere? I found an anonymous writer suggesting "Wilson-gate" or "yellowcake-gate". Will it be called "plamegate" (hey, her cover is already seriously blown)? Any takers? 3:19:38 AM    comment []  trackback []

Those elusive WMDs The Bush administration and most others were convinced that Saddam still had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Now, everybody must face the real possibility that Iraq had actually destroyed its stockpiles, but yet for some reason failed to make a serious attempt to prove to weapons inspectors that this had happened. Bush Administration officials never anticipated this predicament. They expected that wmd arsenals would be uncovered quickly once the U.S. occupied Iraq. Since then, Iraq has been scoured, and nearly every top weapons scientist has been captured or interviewed. That the investigators have found no hidden stockpiles of VX gas or anthrax or intact gas centrifuges suggests that it may be time to at least entertain the possibility that Iraqi officials all along were telling the truth when they said they no longer had a wmd program. Over the past three months, TIME has interviewed Iraqi weapons scientists, middlemen and former government officials. Saddam's henchmen all make essentially the same claim: that Iraq's once massive unconventional-weapons program was destroyed or dismantled in the 1990s and never rebuilt; that officials destroyed or never kept the documents that would prove it; that the shell games Saddam played with U.N. inspectors were designed to conceal his progress on conventional weapons systems—missiles, air defenses, radar—not biological or chemical programs; and that even Saddam, a sucker for a new gadget or invention or toxin, may not have known what he actually had or, more to the point, didn't have. It would be an irony almost too much to bear to consider that he doomed his country to war because he was intent on protecting weapons systems that didn't exist in the first place. It may come back to Hans Blix' statement: A "beware of dog" sign is not necessarily evidence of an actual dog. But then again, the neighbours can hardly be faulted for taking it seriously. 1:04:14 AM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2003 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.10.2003; 01:28:56.