The Oil Crisis, Explained...

Via my mom:

A lot of folks can't understand how we came to have an oil shortage here in our country. Well, there's a very simple answer. Nobody bothered to check the oil. We just didn't know we were getting low. The reason for that is purely geographical. Our oil is located in Alaska, California, Coastal Florida, Coastal Louisiana, Coastal Alabama, Coastal Mississippi, Coastal Texas, North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Our dipsticks are located in DC.

Any questions? No? Didn't think so...

Civil War Photograph Collection...

The Atlantic has posted a collection of high-resolution Civil War photographs.  It's the best single collection I've seen. 

At right is one example, of a crew building a road...

GOP Race: the “Scores”...

563 Romney
263 Santorum
153 Gingrich
  50 Paul

The “magic number” is 1,144 (51% of the total).  Romney's got a long way to go to wrap that up.  A brokered convention is a real possibility...

Holy Areal Density, Batman!

In the hard disk business, the way to get more data capacity is to increase the number of bits you can store on a given piece of disk surface.  This is called “areal density”, and it's usually measured in bits per square inch.  Areal densities have been improving at a fairly steady rate ever since the '70s, and the density march continues.  Seagate has just demonstrated 1,000,000,000,000 bits per square inch (a terabit/sq. in.), and promises 60 TB (terabyte) disk drives as a result.  Wow!

Einstein Vindicated...

Excerpted from an article in today's WSJ by Michio Kaku:

But the floodgates finally burst open last week when a second group of physicists announced that they redid the entire experiment and found that Einstein was correct all along: Their neutrinos traveled at precisely the speed of light, not faster or slower.

What makes this second announcement so convincing is that they used much of the same apparatus as the previous group. They used the same particle accelerator at CERN, fired a beam of neutrinos over the same path, and used the same destination, a laboratory in Gran Sasso near Rome. The crucial difference between these two groups was the equipment used to measure the speed of the neutrinos. This gives enormous weight to the idea that the first group did not properly calibrate their instruments.

Last week the director for research at CERN, Sergio Bertolucci, issued a diplomatically worded statement that read, "The evidence is beginning to point towards the [earlier] result being an artifact of the measurement." Nobel Laureate Carlo Rubbia, a spokesman for the second group, was more blunt when he said, "We cannot be both right. One of us is wrong. I know who is right. We are right."

Since there is so much at stake, in the coming months more experiments will be done to verify this new result. But in the minds of most physicists the issue is now settled—Einstein's theory remains undefeated.

Do read the whole piece, as Dr. Kaku places this in context rather nicely...

Martian Dust Devil...