English: Flood warning siren Sirens like this one in Magdalen are quite common around the River Great Ouse. I think they're used for flood warnings. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
High Falls Grand Portage State Park Minnesota/Canada (Photo credit: Jim's outside photos)Top Stories mark as read
Forecast failure: How flood warnings came too late for southern Albertans
It was shortly after 7 a.m. on June 20 when Trevor Allan finally
got his first heads-up that High River was about to be overwhelmed by
the worst flood in living memory.
NSA Court Battles: The Covert Report w/ Mark Novitsky
National security whistleblower and former private security
analyst, Mark Novitsky shreds the latest Court decisions on NSA
surveillance in the Battle of the Judges and the rights of privacy.
Novitsky traces the long range plan to control every aspect of
technology in order to manipulate and beguile the citizenry, as first
articulated by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Novitsky is a security expert who
called the game 10 years ago, before 9/11 and the Patriot Act. He got
fired from Tele-tech when he tried to fix corruption in the system. For a
powerful understanding of the coming police state, don’t miss
Times Square ball drop to be powered by Citi Bike this New Year's Eve
A stationary bike generator will light up the New Year's Eve ball.
A stationary bike generator will light up the New Year's Eve ball.
blogger-following
Rare 'frost quake' causes mystery boom
A rare seismic phenomenon has been blamed for reports of
mysterious booming noises around Toronto. On Christmas Eve residents of
several Canadian town...
Our New Champion in Self-Defeating Soft Power: Japan
At first I didn't believe the news this evening that Japanese
prime minister Shinzo Abe had visited Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. I didn't
believe it, because such a move would be guaranteed to make a delicate
situation in East Asia far, far worse. So Abe wouldn't actually do it,
right?
It turns out that he has. For a Japanese leader to visit Yasukuni, in
the midst of tensions with China, is not quit
White man charged with ‘knockout game’ hate crime. Racial hypocrisy?
The Obama administration’s decision to charge a white man with a
hate crime for allegedly punching a black man as part of the knockout
game has led to criticism that it is applying the law unevenly.
By Patrik Jonsson, Christian Science Monitor
The US Department of Justice on Thursday stepped into the cultural fray
about the so-called “knockout game” when it brought federal hate crime
charges agai
Dozens injured in Christmas piranha attack
Festive revelers were set upon by a school of carniverous fish at
the Parana River in Argentina. Those celebrating Christmas with a swim
in the cool w...
Scientists build tiny Terminator-style muscle
Researchers have developed an ultra-strong robotic muscle that can
throw objects 50 times its own weight. In an achievement that could
foreshadow the ...
You Might Have Missed: Drones, U.S. Arms in Iraq and Civil-Military Relations
“Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap: FY2013-2038,” U.S. Department of Defense, 2013.
Inventory of DoD UAS (page 5)
read more
Creepy App: ‘Flu Tracker’ Shows Which Symptoms Worse In Your Neighborhood
How Bad Is the Flu in Your Neighborhood?
By Caroline Winter, Bloomberg
Update, 2:45 p.m.: Adds comment from WebMD.
Want to see how bad the flu is in your neighborhood? Health site WebMD
(WBMD) has created a tracker that relies on crowdsourcing to estimate
levels of illness by Zip Code. According to the site’s users, flu and
cold symptoms on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, for example, are moderate
to
Pilot reports near-collision with a UFO
A pilot flying over the UK had a near-miss with an unidentified
object that flew towards his plane. The incident, involving an Airbus
A320, took place...
Not Even Wrong
Top Stories
Trust the math? An Update
Back in September, I wrote here about the news that Snowden’s
revelations that confirmed suspicions that back in 2005-6 NSA
mathematicians had compromised an NIST standard for elliptic-curve
cryptography. The new standard was promoted as an improvement using
sophisticated mathematical techniques, when these had really just been
used to introduce a backdoor allowing the NSA to break encryption using
this standard. There still does not seem to have been much discussion in
the math community of the responsibility of mathematicians for this
(although the AMS this month is running this opinion piec
Peter Higgs: “Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that”
The Guardian has an interesting piece about Peter Higgs, evidently
their reporter talked to him on his way to the Nobel Prize ceremonies
this week in Stockholm. Higgs will be speaking tomorrow (Sunday), and
I’m curious to hear what he will have to say. His talk will be available
live at the Nobel Prize website.
Higgs points out that the kind of work he was awarded the prize for was
done in an environment that no longer exists:
He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic
culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and
keep churning out papers. He
Milner-Zuckerberg Prizes for Mathematics
At the Hollywood-style awards ceremony last night for $3 million
string theory and biomedical research prizes, it was announced that Yuri
Milner and Mark Zuckerberg will now start funding something similar in
mathematics, called the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. According to
the New York Times:
Yuri Milner, the Russian entrepreneur, philanthropist and self-described
“failed physicist” who made a splash two years ago when he began
handing out lavish cash awards to scientists, announced Thursday that he
was expanding the universe of his largess again: This time, he will
begin handing out $3
Dec 19
Latest on abc
In case you haven’t been following this story, “abc” refers to a
famous conjecture in number theory, for which Shin Mochizuki claimed
last year (see here) to have found a proof. His argument for abc
involves a new set of ideas he has developed that he calls
“Inter-Universal Teichmuller Theory” (IUTeich). These are explained in a
set of four papers with a total length over 500 pages. The papers are
A Bubble-Universe at Stanford
Video from last weekend’s Fundamental Physics Prize scientific
meeting at Stanford is now available, in unedited form, here.
The first video there is a discussion moderated by Yuri Milner, who does
a good job of asking Strominger, Polchinski, Green, Schwarz and Vafa
questions, although getting pretty much exactly what you’d expect out of
them (the hot topic is firewalls).
After skimming through th
Dec 11
2014 Milner Prizes
Last March an Oscar-style ceremony hosted by Morgan Freeman was
held in Geneva (see here) to award the 2013 $3 million Milner Prize to
Princeton string theorist Alexander Polyakov. Tomorrow an even more
lavish ceremony designed to turn “Oscars of Science” into instant
multi-millionaires will be held in Mountain View, California (see here).
It will feature Kevin Spacey, Conan O’Brien and Glenn Clos
Dec 10
Latest on Amplitudes
This week the Simons Center is hosting a workshop on “The Geometry
and Physics of Scattering Amplitudes”, talks are available here. Last
week they (and the YITP) held a one-day symposium on Trees, loops and
precision QCD, based around the work of Zvi Bern, Lance Dixon and David
Kosower that was recently awarded the 2014 Sakurai Prize. For more about
this, see Dixon’s guest post here, or his talk a
Dec 09
What’s Next?
Last week’s public lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study by
Nati Seiberg is now available online. He was speaking with the title
What’s Next? and promoting a story about where particle physics is and
where it is going pretty much identical with that coming from his IAS
colleagues. Despite the overwhelming failure of string theory
unification and the dramatic evidence from the LHC ruling out
Dec 05
News from CERN
Here’s a roundup of recent CERN-related news:
The status of the LHC and the LHC experiments was discussed here
yesterday. The LHC shutdown is more or less on track, first beams at 13
TeV total energy Jan. 2015, physics starting April 2015.
Both ATLAS and CMS have announced new data on tau-tau decays of the
Higgs, providing stronger evidence for this signal than was available
earlier. ATLAS sees a
Nov 27
Last week I gave a colloquium talk at the Texas Tech math
department, slides are here if you’re interested. One motivation for the
talk was to advertise the book project I’m working on, which gives a
lot more detail about these topics if you find something interesting in
the slides.
The current state of the book is visible here. There are 31 chapters
done, about another 5 to go. I also need to go
Not Even Wrong
/
by woit
/
30d
Related articles
NSA Struggles to Make Sense of Flood of Surveillance Data(rinf.com)
NSA Court Battles: The Covert Report w/ Mark Novitsky(truthfrequencyradio.com)
Posts
2 comments:
Started on one of your archive pages. Clicked on the header to see your most recent stuff. Another webpage pops up (BlinkX?). Closed it. Looking at this post and it is mostly unreadable. Half of the text has been over printed with other text. Might be my browser (Chrome), or maybe your page has been hi-jacked. Probably the North Koreans, they are my favorite villains these days.
Feedly is a pain to recreate: I was thinking in terms of the material itprovides as illustration only. Likely I should remove excess formatting by using Opera to post...but I've been too lazy to go back and add links what with the amount of material I go through. The popup is not welcome news, however. I may have to rethink priorities.
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