You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 3rd, 2007.
George Takei, better known as Sulu to the world of non-hardcore Trek fans, now has an asteroid named after him. I say non-hardcore Trek fans because hardcore Trek fans know his real name. Or maybe it’s semi-hardcore. Super hardcore probably have lost all touch with reality and believe he really is Sulu. In any case, asteroid 7307 is now 7307 Takei, joining the mighty ranks of 4659 Roddenberry and 68410 Nichols (Lt. Uhura’s real name). In an unfortunate bit of news, the asteroid was knocked off a balcony roof in New York and fell to its death.
I keep feeling the need to write about the battle of the media-darling corporate stooge warhawks. Everyday I see something about fundraising by this candidate or that (and by this I mean Clinton and by that I mean Obama). And everyday I am troubled. When I start to write about it, my thoughts on the subject lack cohesiveness.
Clinton had someone fundraising for her who turned about to be a fugitive of justice, wanted for grand theft. Norman Hsu used a fundraising tactic called bundling, which combines the contributions of many different donors to give it more weight. What does more weight mean?
Today Clinton’s blog is reporting that she raised $27 million for the third quarter, beating Obama in both gross money raised and number of new donors. Yesterday, the NY Times was going on about Obama’s link to a group of black entrepreneurs who supported him back in Illinois. They bailed his campaign out of hot water and he saw that their agenda got pushed in the state legislature. But it looks like their agenda wasn’t all bad (I certainly don’t know enough details to make that assessment), since he was working to remove some racial inequities they were facing. Or is that he was opening up opportunities? Again I was troubled, by his seeming willingness to take a buck and then turn those dollars into actual legislation.
John Edwards’ campaign sent an email a while back pointing the finger at Hillary over her fundraising practices. She hosted a dinner in DC where several congress people were in attendance. Cost of admission to this event was $2000 per plate, as is typical of these woo-the-rich-people functions (a mainstay of Republicans). So it seems she was trading quasi-political influence (here, look at all these Congressmen and women I can connect you too if you support me) for support. Washington business as usual.
Meanwhile principled men like Dennis Kucinich are struggling to raise dollars, because despite seeming to match the actual beliefs of voters much more closely, they haven’t been tapped by the big corporations and their media mouthpieces as electable. Doesn’t it bother people that the candidates the media has branded as electable are the only ones getting attention?
There has been work done over the past year or so by the Department of Mysteries at St. Andrews College. They also are working on levitation, which I talked about before. They created an invisibility cloak that worked in the microwave region. A group in the US has just produced an invisibility cloak that works in the visible spectrum. The technology works by converting light that hits the surface into plasmons which then move around the object like water around a rock in a stream.
There are a few disappointing caveats here. First, the technology only works in two dimensions at the moment. Controlling plasmons in three dimensions would be considerably more complicated and is unlikely to be done, according to John Pendry of Imperial College. Second, it’s not clear that the plasmons won’t reflect light themselves, which means an invisible object would have a glare on it similar to glass.
There are potential applications for computer chips, though, so we’ll see. As cool as invisibility cloaks are, there really is no good use for them. If you can think of one that isn’t just as evil in the wrong hands, leave me a comment. The only thing I can come up with involves the military or peeping Toms.
