Seventeen piconewtons: that's the force required to move a cobalt atom over a copper surface.

It takes 210 piconewtons to move a cobalt atom over a smooth platinum surface, according to a new research paper from IBM's Almaden Research Center and the University of Regensberg.

A piconewton is a trillionth of a newton. A newton is the amount of force required to accelerate a kilogram one meter per second squared. Lifting a penny weighing 3 grams takes about 30 billion piconewtons. The atoms in IBM's experiments are moved with atomic force microscopes. (Andreas Heinrich, lead scientist in the scanning tunneling microscopy lab at IBM Almaden and the lead author of the paper, recently let us move some atoms with a scanning tunneling/atomic force microscope in his lab.)

The breakthrough marks the first time anyone has been able to measure the force required to move individual atoms around, according to IBM, and helps the company move toward its goal of molecular computing.

IBM calculates the force it takes to move atoms

E. Benjamin Skinner recorded the following conversation inside a brothel in Bucharest, Romania. Listen as a pimp offers Skinner and his translator a handicapped, suicidal girl in exchange for a used car.

From the archive:

In prior eras, the slave trade was conducted openly, with ads prominently posted and the slaves paraded and inspected like animals, often at public auctions. Today’s sex traffickers, the heirs to that tradition, try to keep their activities hidden, although the rest of the sex trade, the sale of the women’s services, is advertised on a scale that can only be characterized as colossal.

As a society, we’re repelled by the slavery of old. But the wholesale transport of women and girls across international borders and around the U.S. — to serve as prostitutes under conditions that in most cases are coercive at best — stirs very little outrage.

And from earlier this week (or, rather, from 1902):

The American Public takes another sip of its coffee and remarks, “How very unpleasant!”

And from farther back, and farther afield:

It hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

The Price of Life

Some writers complain that semicolons are subversively ambiguous, that they vaguely imply a connection between two statements without having to specify what that connection is.

Punctuated (Pause) With a Semicolon

We all thought it was time to party, that the enemy was finally vanquished, that it was time for Champagne and cigars. We learned our lesson yesterday afternoon, though, when SCO smacked us all in the face with a hundred million dollars.

That's right, SCO suddenly has deep pockets, courtesy of their friend Stephen Norris, the uber-finance geek. Norris and his private equity firm — Stephen Norris Capital Partners, LLC — have decided to buy a stake in SCO, though the exact amount won't be clear until the Utah courts decide how much SCO has to pay IBM and Novell. What is clear is that they suddenly have a $95 million line-of-credit to pursue all the litigation their cold, black hearts desire. Others have pointed out that these guys are the biggest, baddest, beat-the-crap-out-of-anyone-in-their-way-ist, and won't have a moment's pause about coming after everyone in the Linux world, from IBM and Novell right down to us, the everyday users.

As the ever-vigilant White Knights over at Groklaw point out, there's still some hope — the all-powerful Bankruptcy court can quash them with the stroke of a pen, and the European Commission not to mention the SEC may well have a thing or two to say — but the outlook certainly isn't as rosy as it was on Wednesday.

Lord have mercy..

I think i am going to vomit...

SCO is Back, and This Time It's Personal | Linux Journal

Human Rights Watch has appealed to Saudi Arabia to halt the execution of a woman convicted of witchcraft.

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Pleas for condemned Saudi 'witch'

By the Bush administration’s standards, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was remarkably candid last week: acknowledging that popular opposition in Europe to the Iraq war was making it harder to persuade European governments to send more troops or take more risks to salvage Afghanistan.

Nearly everything about President Bush’s botched war of choice in Iraq has made it much harder to win Afghanistan’s war of necessity. The fact that Mr. Gates is permitted such truth-telling is a measure of how bad things have gotten in Afghanistan and how much the United States needs more outside help.

definately -- Europe needs to stand up and be counted -- this is our fight just as the US stood up during WW2 -- belatedly and reluctantly but it did -- Japan attacked but defeating Germany was made the priority -- the European priority has to be to secure a stable Afganistan in the global struggle against al-Qaeda -- that means troops and understanding that there will be casualties -- we as Europeans can play ostrich or get real (a new President will help but we shouldn't undermine the struggle by waiting for Jan 2009)

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from related article this

These are difficult days for NATO, for reasons few are prepared to admit. The difficulty is finding combat troops for Afghanistan. This is treated by Washington as a failure of political courage due to misinformed public opinion in Europe, potentially correctable if sufficient pressure is applied. It is no such thing.

Gates, Truth and Afghanistan - New York Times

Roy Scheider, who has died at the age of 75, was one of Hollywood's most iconic stars of the 1970s.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Obituary: Roy Scheider

Entries for an art contest at the Hirshorn Modern Art Gallery in DC. The rule was that the artist could use only one sheet of paper.

Dan Van Malsen : photos : Hirshorn Modern Art Gallery in DC- powered by SmugMug

Iran has launched a research rocket to inaugurate a newly built space centre.

oh bollocks

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Iranians inaugurate space project

Whatever the individual reasons that drive people to suicide, the one thing that puts you most at risk is being a man under the age of 35.

BBC NEWS | UK | The silent epidemic of male suicide