Google has taken a public stand against Proposition 8, an anti-gay marriage measure on the November ballot in California.

Co-founder Sergey Brin, who made the announcement in a blog Friday afternoon, acknowledged that it is unusual for his company to take stands on issues outside the tech realm. The company "especially" avoids taking stands on social issues, he said, because of the diversity of its workforce.

However, Brin said, "it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8."

"We should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love," he said.

Brin did not mention whether Google will do anything else to oppose the measure, other than taking a stand.

The official site opposing the proposition includes a long list of backers. No companies are listed there. However, on Thursday, Levi Strauss & Co. and PG&E became co-chairs of the No On Prop 8 Equality Business Council. And in July, PG&E donated $250,000 to the campaign.

Google opposes anti-gay marriage measure....

Do you wish your computer was faster? Engineers and physicists from Germany have demonstrated the quickest prototype yet of an advanced form of RAM tipped by hardware manufacturers to be the future of computing. The device is so fast it brushes against a fundamental speed-limit for the process.

Magnetoresistive random access memory MRAM is a faster and more energy efficient version of the RAM used in computers today, and hardware companies think it will in a few years dominate the market. Its speed and low power will in particular boost mobile computing.

Whereas conventional RAM stores a digital 1 or 0 as the level of charge in the capacitor, MRAM stores it by changing the north-south direction of a tiny magnet s magnetic field. Each variable magnet is positioned next to one with a fixed field. Reading a stored value involves running a current through the pair to discover the direction of the variable magnet s field.
Spin flips

The MRAM that IBM and most other manufacturers are betting on uses the spins of electrons to flip the magnetic fields, called spin-torque MRAM.

Now researchers in Germany have built a spin-torque system that is dramatically faster than any other. Santiago Serrano-Guisan and Hans Schumacher of the Physical-Technical Federal Laboratory of Germany worked with University of Bielefeld and Singulus Nano-Deposition Technologies researchers to build it from tiny pillars 165 nanometres tall.

The tOP ENd of each pillar acts as a variable magnet that stores data, whereas the bottom ends are fixed magnets. A current passing through a pillar from bottom to top has the spin of its electrons lined up by the permanent-magnet region.

When those electrons reach the pillars other end, they flip the variable magnet region s field to match. The field can be flipped back by reversing the current.

Usually when the field is flipped it takes some time to settle into its new orientation. The north-south axis draws a few circles in the air before settling into place.

Spin flip trick points to fastest RAM yet....

Like the Large Hadron Collider? Feel like you’ve been reading the same LHC articles or watching the same videos over and over again? Then check out the latest addition to the YouTube pantheon of LHC videos, the Large Hadron Rap.

The rap is the brainchild of Kate McAlpine, a.k.a. alpinekat, a freelance science writer and one of the editors of the ATLAS e-News. Having just produced her first physics rap, McAlpine was already planning an LHC rap when she arrived at CERN in October for a six-month stint in U.S. LHC communications.

“I’d just finished a rap about a neurochip, and my head was filled with information about the LHC and its goals,” said McAlpine. “I had access to experimental halls as well as stock footage. To not rap would have been a wasted opportunity.”

The dancing and rapping segments were filmed on LOCATION at CERN and in the LHC’s underground areas. While actors, musicians and even a dance troupe had visited the LHC, this was the first time it had starred in a rap video.

“The response was dubious when we were trying to get permission to film and intrigued once people found out what we were up to,” she said.

McAlpine’s newest venture has been attracting much more attention than she expected – she’s been interviewed by the BBC, and in the video’s first dozen hours on YouTube it attracted more than 1,300 views.

“You know what the status was eight hours after uploading N3UROCH!P her first rap ? 14 people had seen it,” she added.

While alpinekat hasn’t yet signed with a record label, she’s already planning her next physics rap.

Rapping the LHC

Initially, Fermilab management questioned the wisdom of diverting Zimmerman from a full day of work at the laboratory, where his projects require a mix of physics, computer programming, and mechanical engineering skills. Now management views his show as educational outreach, a vital part of running a government-funded physics laboratory in a heavily-populated area in tight economic times. The two-hour show connects everyday citizens with a complex scientific field where jargon often stands in the way of easy understanding.
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“I feel it is the responsibility of people who work in science to do things like this because that is the only way people know what we do,” Zimmerman says. “Cryogenics provides an easy entry point. About anybody can understand hot and cold. And there are lots of things you can do—not quite limitless, but close.”

Zimmerman consistently adds new components to his show, but staple crowd-pleasers include mixing soap with nitrogen to create geysers of bubbles, using compressed gas to shoot confetti or rubber balls, shattering roses, and using a frozen banana to pound frozen rubber tubing through wood. Sometimes he “accidentally” breaks off the fingers of his safety glove as it emerges from a tank of nitrogen.

“I have had girls in the front row scream their heads off, like I just maimed myself,” he says with a slight smile.

Gasps and giggles aside, the show teaches the basics of gases, liquids, and solids and the cryogenics used to run particle accelerators at Fermilab. Zimmerman brings the complicated, mammoth machines down to Earth by comparing them to everyday objects such as the television, which is a type of particle accelerator.

Day in the Life: Mr. Freeze

Physicists of the DZero experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a new particle made of three quarks, the Omega-sub-b (Ωb). The particle contains two strange quarks and a bottom quark (s-s-b). It is an exotic relative of the much more common proton and weighs about six times the proton mass.

The discovery of the doubly strange particle brings scientists a step closer to understanding exactly how quarks form matter and to completing the "periodic table of baryons." Baryons (derived from the Greek word "barys," meaning "heavy") are particles that contain three quarks, the basic building blocks of matter. The proton comprises two up quarks and a down quark (u-u-d).

Combing through almost 100 trillion collision events produced by the Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab, the DZero collaboration found 18 incidents in which the particles emerging from a proton-antiproton collision revealed the distinctive signature of the Omega-sub-b. Once produced, the Omega-sub-b travels about a millimeter before it disintegrates into lighter particles. Its decay, mediated by the weak force, occurs in about a trillionth of a second.

DZero Omega-sub-b

The new Tennessee law (PDF) that taxes "the retail sale, lease, licensing, or use of specified digital products transferred to or accessed by subscribers or consumers" takes effect in January 2009

Including Nebraska and Tennessee, there are 17 states, plus the District of Columbia, that tax digital downloads,Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Washington...

Tax something that does not physically exist ... how ?

TN TAX : "the retail sale, lease, licensing, or use of specified digital products transferred to or accessed by subscribers or consumers"

Pickin' On Series - American Idiot (Green Day)
I’m normally first in line to criticize series like this, which tend to just take the chords to a song and play them on a different instrument (banjo, accordion, distortion guitar, whatever). For this song at least, these anonymous session musicians sound like they tried for more than a paycheck, with a harmonies, solos, etc. And, unusual for the genre, it’s not instrumental – a big plus.

http://covermesongs.blogspot.com/

Sounds good for bluegrass...

Cover Me: Pickin' On Series - American Idiot

So where were the quants?

That’s what has been running through my head as I watch some of the oldest and seemingly best-run firms on Wall Street implode because of what turned out to be really bad bets on mortgage securities.

Before I started covering the Internet in 1997, I spent 13 years covering trading and finance. I covered my share of trading disasters from junk bonds, mortgage securities and the financial blank canvas known as derivatives. And I got to know bunch of quantitative analysts (”quants”): mathematicians, computer scientists and economists who were working on Wall Street to develop the art and science of risk management.

They were developing systems that would comb through all of a firm’s positions, analyze everything that might go wrong and estimate how much it might lose on a really bad day.

We’ve had some bad days lately, and it turns out Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and maybe some others bet far too much. Their quants didn’t save them.

I called some old timers in the risk-management world to see what went wrong.

I fully expected them to tell me that the problem was that the alarms were blaring and red lights were flashing on the risk machines and greedy Wall Street bosses ignored the warnings to keep the profits flowing.

Ultimately, the people who ran the firms must take responsibility, but it wasn’t quite that simple.

In fact, most Wall Street computer models radically underestimated the risk of the complex mortgage securities, they said. That is partly because the level of financial distress is “the equivalent of the 100-year flood,” in the words of Leslie Rahl, the president of Capital Market Risk Advisors, a consulting firm.

But she and others say there is more to it: The people who ran the financial firms chose to program their risk-management systems with overly optimistic assumptions and to feed them oversimplified data. This kept them from sounding the alarm early enough.

Top bankers couldn’t simply ignore the computer models, because after the last round of big financial losses, regulators now require them to monitor their risk positions. Indeed, if the models say a firm’s risk has increased, the firm must either reduce its bets or set aside more capital as a cushion in case things go wrong.

In other words, the computer is supposed to monitor the temperature of the party and drain the punch bowl as things get hot. And just as drunken revelers may want to put the thermostat in the freezer, Wall Street executives had lots of incentives to make sure their risk systems didn’t see much risk.

“There was a willful designing of the systems to measure the risks in a certain way that would not necessarily pick up all the right risks,” said Gregg Berman, the co-head of the risk-management group at RiskMetrics, a software company spun out of JPMorgan. “They wanted to keep their capital base as stable as possible so that the limits they imposed on their trading desks and portfolio managers would be stable.”

“There was a willful designing of the systems to measure the risks in a certain way that would not necessarily pick up all the right risks”

....

So where were the quants? How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers...

Federal authorities are ramping up an investigation of a 20-year-old college student for allegedly hacking into Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's e-mail account.

First of all WTF was she doing using web mail for government communications?

Second, these kids should be commended on bringing that and the reason for secure passwords to the for front...

FBI searches TN apartment of alleged Palin hacker

An enormous, taxpayer-financed program to buy up bad mortgages and other distressed debt is necessary to protect the savings and aspirations of millions of Americans, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said on Friday.
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Statement by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.

“We’re talking hundreds of billions” of dollars, Mr. Paulson said at a briefing in which he underscored the depth of the problem, pledged to work with Congress to address it quickly and voiced optimism that, in the end, the country would emerge from the financial chaos.

Seeking to dispel any impression that the bailout would amount to a rescue of greedy Wall Street executives by Main Street Americans, Mr. Paulson said the program “will cost Americans far less than the alternative.”

Resolving the financial problems is of paramount importance, not just for major corporations and investment banks but for people who have never set foot in the corridors of corporate and political power, Mr. Paulson said. “Their retirement savings, their home values, their ability to borrow for college” and their chance to find and keep good jobs depend on it, he said.

Mr. Paulson said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were recently taken under the federal government’s wing, would expand their purchases of mortgage-backed securities to help ease the problems.

He declined to lay out specifics of the unfolding recovery program, which he said he would work on through the weekend with lawmakers so that it can be acted upon next week. But he said that the program must be well-designed and “sufficiently large” to protect taxpayers “to the maximum extent possible.”

What needs to happen is the wealth of the greedy *&^%$ that let this happen needs to be stripped. This is turning into a Tax payer bailout of every dumb ass and every rich person in America.

But he said that the program must be well-designed and “sufficiently large” to protect taxpayers “to the maximum extent possible.”

Spend more money? Our, Joe taxpayer, money.

Seeking to dispel any impression that the bailout would amount to a rescue of greedy Wall Street executives by Main Street Americans, Mr. Paulson said the program “will cost Americans far less than the alternative.”

What alternative? He does not have one, that he can think of, so this is really a bail-out of people who should be in pound-you-in-the-ass prison...!!!

So lets bail out the rich folks so they can keep their monies intact and continue to f&^% us, the average Joe, over again...

I THINK NOT!

Paulson Explains Need for Plan to Buy Mortgages (Total Bull$hit IMHO)