New Record for Most Distant Object in Sky Visible to Naked Eye

Naked-Eye Gamma Ray Burst.

A powerful gamma ray burst detected March 19th by NASA's Swift satellite has shattered the record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye.

One summer when I was in undergrad I did astrophysics research, specifically, working with data on high-energy particles emitted by black hole candidates. A high energy particle triggers a shower of lesser-energy particles when it hits the atmosphere and interacts with the particles that make up the atmosphere, and it all cascades farther and farther (if energetic enough) until the shower eventually propagates down to the ground. In general, the higher the energy of the incoming particle, the higher the energy of the particles in the shower hitting your detector on the ground. Plus, the more atmosphere the shower is propagating through, the more energy is used up.

So, the highest energy particles that come in almost horizontally have cascaded through the most atmosphere to get to you, and thus were really REALLY high energy before they started, and thus might be from a black hole.

I worked on processing those data measurements calculating the incident angle of the initial particle, to then determine if it was from a black hole candidate. Fun stuff. I love science.

Arthur C. Clarke, dead at 90

No!

Sci-fi guru Arthur C. Clarke dies at 90

Tent Cities in America Today

Bushburbs growing as more lose homes

Politicizing the DOJ

Christ, how are we even going to *start* cleaning this mess up?

Down the Politicized Rabbit Hole

Wanted: Good Biography of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek

After reading this intro to On Soong Mei-ling, who later became Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, at IntlLawGrrls, I need a good biography of her that really gets into the history of Taiwan, too.

Internet, recommend!

Choosing to do...

From Crooks and Liars, from The Daily Show:

Jon Stewart and Senior White House Correspondent John Oliver discuss Bush’s recent trip to Africa.

STEWART: It’s hard for you to accept that the President has done something admirable?

OLIVER: Well, it’s just [stammers] What’s his angle? He’s not running for reelection. There’s no ulterior military objective. He’s got no chance of becoming King of Africa. What the HELL is going on?

STEWART: Maybe he’s just trying to do something good in a difficult part of the world.

OLIVER: No! No! That makes it worse! Over the past seven excruciating years I’ve come to terms with the President being incompetent. The fact that we now know that he’s capable of doing good all along and has simply chosen not to, that really burns!

Yeah, it does.

This year's Dem race

I love it, we got a real live horse race, people. Now, that's reality TV worth watching. (I suppose if I had TV reception I'd feel otherwise, knowing me, and the crass, superficial reporting the U.S. seems so prone to broadcast.)

The news on the radio just mentioned something about folks in Rhode Island being thrilled to actually be relevant. That's how elections should be, neighbors. Every vote, in every state. Relevant.

Hate, Hate Speech, and Hate Crimes

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez on fear and loathing of Latinos. In Hollywood, and everywhere else.

Here's Something I Don't Get

Don't all you people with iPods jammed in your ears want to know what's going on behind you?

I'm quite sure that if I can hear someone's iPod music as they walk past me, it's drowning out quite a bit of the ambient sound. What does that mean? It means you don't hear the car engine behind you. Or someone on a bicycle trying to get past you and saying "excuse me". Repeatedly. Or the serial killer skulking in the shadows, muttering to himself about the blue angels with bloody hooks for hands, as he waits for his chance. (Made you look!)

I don't know about everybody else, but when I'm walking around Boston, one of the walkingest towns around, I'm pretty keen on my safety, as a general rule, and that requires paying attention to sounds, as well as to sights.

I just don't get this urge people seem to have block off one of their senses as they run their errands.

Next thing you know, all the cool kids will be wearing blinders or something, and blocking off their peripheral vision. Why bother?

Global Warming and Antarctic Glaciers

Antarctic glaciers surge to ocean

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Got a Great Piece of Male Privilege A Couple Weeks Ago

Being a feminist and having worked on sites like The 3rd WWWave (http://www.3rdwwwave.com), I get vitriol poured in my ear now and then (just like Hamlet's dad, only I'm not dead, although, on the Internet, can you really tell?).

A few weeks back, it was an email message addressed to "c*nts", describing all the ways in which women rule the world, topped off with the reminder that the author doesn't hate all women, just those women who think he's wrong.

Well, I'm one of those women. This person in his missive made a great many inaccurate assertions, broad sweeping statements to a one, and none of them substantiated:

1. A woman will be given a much lighter sentence than a man convicted of the same crime.

Not that I'm aware of. The federal sentencing guidelines (USSG), for example, do not distinguish by gender. Provide your data.

2. A woman can falsely accuse a man of rape or spousal abuse, and he'll be instantly presumed guilty; the law will by default take her side.

Alas, no, as first- and second-year law students get to learn. On the contrary, the woman is often unofficially placed on trial. If deemed "a slut", or otherwise "asking for it", and what c*nt isn't, you know, her attacker will go free and her life is ruined.

3. Women get everything in divorce settlements. Always.

Anything with "always" or "invariably" in a remark about the law is almost surely wrong. It's not at all uncommon these days for divorcing parties to sell the house and split the proceeds. That said, yes, women are more likely to be presumptively the proper parent for primary custody of children (and the attendant child support - and where do you think child support goes, for Mom's trips to Tahiti? No, to support the child), even though, as women, we earn between 70 and 80 cents to you masculine dollar. Both of those facts can be connected to sexist assumptions about proper child-rearing roles and a woman's "place".

4. Women are overcompensated in sexual harrassment lawsuits-an immature joke or gesture does not entitle you to a ten million dollar settlement.

Provide your data. And while you're at it, how many women don't report harrassment (or worse) because they know the system is against them?

Consider this: Rapists in the ranks: Sexual assaults are frequent, and frequently ignored, in the armed services.

5. Girls get more attention in school than boys do.

Bullshit. Boys are so used to getting the bulk of the attention, that when teachers start actually treating boys and girls equally, boys perceive the situation incorrectly, and see that equal time as unequal. See, e.g., Tanenbaum, L. (1994, July 28). Hey, Teach! The Nation, 280-284.

6. TV sitcoms stereotype men as idiots.

Yes, they do seem to. You, as a man, should do something about it. Don't expect me to clean things up for you, that's just pandering to the stereotype if you do that, isn't it? How about starting by asking yourself why the childlike male and mommy-like female is such an enduring icon. Is your mother the only woman in the world, ever? Why?

7. Violence perpetuated by women against men is seen as acceptable.

Provide your data.


If women ran the world, would we have less representation in government, less money, be told we have to hide ourselves at night to be safe, be demonized by various religions, and all the other crap we alternately fight and put up with daily?

Waterboarding is Officially Torture

As if anyone but a Bush toady had doubts: U.N. says waterboarding should be prosecuted as torture

"I would have no problems with describing this practice as falling under the prohibition of torture," the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, told a news conference in Mexico City.

Arbour made her comment in response to a question about whether U.S. officials could be tried for the use of waterboarding that referred to CIA director Michael Hayden telling Congress on Tuesday his agency had used waterboarding on three detainees captured after the September 11 attacks.

Violators of the U.N. Convention against Torture should be prosecuted under the principle of 'universal jurisdiction' which allows countries to try accused war criminals from other nations, Arbour said.

We're right up there with Latin American dictatorships in the 70s and 80s. Yes, dictatorships. "Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s were known to use waterboarding on political prisoners."

Yes, We Do Torture - Bonus! 9/11 Commission Corruption!

I. CIA admits waterboarding inmates

II. Ties Between White House, Sept 11 Chief

The Meaning of Feminism

M. LeBlanc over at Bitch Ph.D's blog writes about an epiphany from her own sense of surprise over arriving at a band's show and finding out the band is all female:

But in all this trying, all this thinking and learning and analyzing, I never understood something the way I had that night. I looked at these women of the band, these forceful, beautiful, human beings, and I cried. I cried, because seeing them shocked me. The scale of thousands of years of the oppression of women flashed before my eyes, like I was dying.

I thought of the billions of women who have lived and are living. I thought of women raped and forced into slavery, sold for money, held in subjugation. I thought of the sheer numbers of women, which is to say, nearly all of them, who were told explicitly or implicitly that they couldn't do something they wanted to do, because of their sex. Told that they were less smart, less capable, less strong, less worthy, less important than their brothers. Women who didn't go to school because resources were limited and funds were saved for their brothers' education. Women who dropped out of school to care for their siblings. Women who were beaten by their husbands or fathers, women fired for being too sexy or not sexy enough. Women ignored or silenced, women whose writings disappeared because they never existed or never mattered. Women who died trying to terminate a pregnancy. Women, all of them, who feel that they are not worth loving because they do not conform to impossible ideals of beauty, women who hate their bodies, women who starve themselves to death, women who refuse to live their lives the way they want for fear of being scorned because they are not acceptable. Women insulted, abused, downtrodden, scared. Women, all of them, limited by the forces outside them that keep them small and quiet.

If there is anything I can do with my life and my career, to lift women out of poverty and shame, to help them live as full human beings, to take away the shackles of oppression and free them, to exercise their power to live complete, unafraid, glorious lives, I will do it.

Bush: Lies: War

Study: Falsehoods Preceded Iraq War

A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top Administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and Administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaeda or both. "It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaeda," according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. "In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."

The center said the study was based on a database created with public statements over the two years beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, and information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches and interviews. "The cumulative effect of these false statements — amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts — was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war," the study concluded.