Links for 2010-06-29

"But knowing their hypocrisy, he said unto them, "Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a dime and let me see it."

And they brought one. Then he said to them, "Whose head is this -- FDR's or Herbert Hoover's?"

They answered, "Roosevelt's."

And he said unto them, "Right. So shut up. Have you morons already forgotten the 20th Century? When the choice is between imitating what worked and what really, really didn't work, why are you pretending it's terribly complicated?"

And after that, no one dared to ask him any question."

Schadenfreude is an ugly thing, but it's a nice comfort after the US's washout in the round of 16.

"'Blog-reporter ethos' appears to consist of

* original reporting on first-hand sources
* a frankly stated point-of-view
* tempered by a scrupulous concern for fact
* an effort to include a fair account of differing perspectives
* ending in a willingness to plainly state conclusions about the subject

I submit that this is just 'magazine-journalism ethos' with the addition of cat pictures."

"It seriously messes with your head to read slush. Being bombarded with inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters -- not to mention ton after metric ton of clichés -- for hours on end induces a state of existential despair that's almost impossible to communicate to anyone who hasn't been there themselves: Call it slush fatigue. You walk in the door pledging your soul to literature, and you walk out with a crazed glint in your eyes, thinking that the Hitler Youth guy who said, "Whenever I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my revolver" might have had a point after all. Recovery is possible, but it'll take a while (apply liberal doses of F. Scott Fitzgerald). In the meantime, instead of picking up every new manuscript with an open mind and a tiny nibbling hope, you learn to expect the worst. Because almost every time, the worst is exactly what you'll get."

"Labs worldwide are trying several different squeezing schemes, but a team led by Vladan VuleviÄ of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and another led by Eugene Polzik of the University of Copenhagen [1] are the first to make a clock. In their February PRL paper, the MIT team described using laser-light pulses to entangle atoms in an optical cavity. The conditions allowed the two complimentary variables--phase and atomic state populations--to affect one another without either being measured directly. This situation led to entanglement and to narrowing of the uncertainty ellipse.

In their latest work, the team translated their reduced phase uncertainty into a clock."