Ranga’s Blog

Two considerations persuade us the information the police discovered in this case — the totality of Jones‘s movements over the course of a month — was not exposed to the public: First, unlike one‘s movements during a single journey, the whole of one‘s movements over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood anyone will observe all those movements is effectively nil. Second, the whole of one‘s movements is not exposed constructively even though each individual movement is exposed, because that whole reveals more — sometimes a great deal more — than does the sum of its parts.

Source: United States v. Maynard, No. 08-3030, slip op. at 22 (D.C. Cir. Aug. 6, 2010) [PDF]; see also United States v. Pineda-Moreno, No. 08-30385, Order at 11514 (9th Cir. Aug. 12, 2010) (Kozinski, J dissenting) [PDF]:

I don’t think that most people in the United States would agree with the panel that someone who leaves his car parked in his driveway outside the door of his home invites people to crawl under it and attach a device that will track the vehicle’s every movement and transmit that information to total strangers. There is something creepy and un-American about such clandestine and underhanded behavior. To those of us who have lived under a totalitarian regime, there is an eerie feeling of déjà vu. This case, if any, deserves the comprehensive, mature and diverse consideration that an en banc panel can provide. We are taking a giant leap into the unknown, and the consequences for ourselves and our children may be dire and irreversible. Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we’re living in Oceania.

Source: Jorge Cham, The 2AM Dilemma, PhD Comics (Aug. 11, 2010).

R136a1 … sits toward the centre of RMC 137a, a crowded cluster of hot young stars some 165,000 light years away in the Large Magellenic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbours. … [It] is about 265 times the mass of the sun, making it the most massive star ever measured. In its infancy, roughly a million years ago, the star was probably even more massive — some 320 times the mass of the sun: it will since have shed much material in hot, violent winds. No one is sure how massive a star can be, but until now, the most massive ones seen have had about 150 times the mass of the sun.

Source: Rachel Courtland, Biggest Star Ever Found May Be a Ticking Time Bomb, New Scientist (July 21, 2010).

A team of astronomers has found  that in the dusty environment around a white dwarf star lying about 6500 light years from Earth, a few per cent of the carbon is in the form of buckyballs.  The astronomers used the Spitzer Space Telescope to detect  the distinctive infrared spectrum of buckyballs made of 60 and 70 carbon atoms in a dusty nebula around the white dwarf. The team suspects that abundant carbon and a lack of hydrogen in the nebula created just the right environment to give rise to buckyballs. When hydrogen is present, it combines with carbon, preventing the pure-carbon spheres from forming.

Source: David Shiga, ‘Buckyballs’ Spotted in Interstellar Space, New Scientist (July 22, 2010); see also J.R. Minkle, Astronomers Find Largest Molecules Ever Known in Space, Space.com (July 22, 2010).

A foreign accent undermines a person’s credibility in ways that the speaker and the listener don’t consciously realize, new research at the University of Chicago shows.

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To test the impact of accent on credibility, American participants were asked to judge the truthfulness of trivia statements by native or non-native speakers of English, such as, “A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can.”  Simple prejudice could affect ratings of truthfulness, so the researchers tried to minimize that effect by telling participants the information in the statements was prepared for the speakers, and was not based on the speakers’ own knowledge.  Despite knowing the speakers were reciting from a script, the participants judged as less truthful the statements coming from people with foreign accents. On a truthfulness scale prepared for the experiment, the participants gave native speakers a score of 7.5, people with mild accents a score of 6.95 and people with heavy accents a score of 6.84.

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In a second experiment, researchers tested whether awareness reduces the impact of accent on perceived truthfulness. Researchers told participants that they were being tested to see if accents undermine credibility.

That experiment was conducted with identical recorded statements, but with different results. While participants rated statements with mild accent just as truthful as statements by native speakers, they rated heavily accented statements as less truthful, [the researchers] said.

Source: William Harms, Foreign Accents Make Speakers Seem Less Truthful to Listeners, EurekAlert! (July 19, 2010); see also William Harms, Foreign Accents Make Speakers Seem Less Truthful to Listeners, Research Shows, University of Chicago News Office (July 19, 2010).

To disable the Facebook apps platform, log in to your Facebook account, select Privacy Settings under Account and then click “Edit your settings” under the Applications and Websites section. Here you’ll see an option to turn off all the platform applications with a single click.

Source: Amit Agarwal, How to Block All Facebook Applications Forever!, Digital Inspiration (July 18, 2010).

Uranium nitride, formed via a triple-bond between one atom of each constituent, is a ceramic compound that has a very high melting point and thermal conductivity. Its resilience is appealing to nuclear scientists, especially because it could allow reactors to run at cooler temperatures. But many of its specific properties, including how reactive it is, are unknown, because the molecule is hard to purify and work with.

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A group of researchers realized that they could chop a branch of this molecule off and liberate a nitrogen atom adjacent to a uranium core, enabling the formation of a uranium-nitrogen triple bond. The uranium nitride would then be exposed, and researchers could experiment with it to figure out whether it might be a good reactor material.

To break off the necessary atoms, researchers found they only needed to stimulate the right part of the molecule with a certain frequency of light. Once the scientists were able to get the right bond, they found that the uranium nitride was surprisingly reactive. The compound was easily able to break carbon-hydrogen bonds present in the rest of the cage molecule, and appropriate the atoms for itself.

Source:  Casey Johnston, Light Makes Potential Nuclear Fuel Highly Reactive, Ars Technica (July 15, 2010).

Finally posted some photos from our engagement:

http://grommit.com/gallery/v/ranga/2010-06-06-engagement/

There are more photos on Picasa and SmugMug.

Source: Chip Dunham, Three Billable Hours, Overboard (June 23, 2010); Shane Johnson, Who Looks at These Billing Sheets, Anyway?, My Life In A Cube (Aug. 25, 2008).