Eideard

Maccone claims glass can unbreak – for example

Imagine if a cold cup of coffee spontaneously heated up as you watched. Or a cracked pane of glass suddenly un-broke. According to physicist Lorenzo Maccone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you see things like this all the time – you just don’t remember.

In a paper published last week in Physical Review Letters, he attempts to provide a solution to what has been called the mystery of “the arrow-of-time”.

Briefly, the problem is that while our laws of physics are all symmetrical or “time-reversal invariant” – they apply equally well if time runs forwards or backwards – most of the everyday phenomena we observe, like the cooling of hot coffee, are not. They never seem to happen in reverse…

So why will your coffee spontaneously cool down, but not heat up?

Maccone’s solution is to suggest that in fact entropy-decreasing events occur all the time – so there is no asymmetry and no associated mystery about the arrow of time.

He argues that quantum mechanics dictates that if anyone does observe an entropy-decreasing event, their memories of the event “will have been erased by necessity“.

Maccone doesn’t mean that your memories will never form in the first place. “What I’m pointing out is that memories are formed and then are subsequently erased,” he tells me.

When you observe any system, according to Maccone, you enter into a “quantum entanglement” with it. That is, you and the system are entangled and cannot properly be described separately.

The entanglement, Maccone says, is between your memory and the system. When you disentangle, “the disentangling operation will erase this entanglement, namely the observer’s memory”. His paper derives this conclusion mathematically.

Smacks of philosophic Idealism to me. Mind over matter. Or mind over matter over mind over matter.

In any case, accounting for physical processes with non-material devices.

A man has been arrested in Mumbai for marrying 14 women, each unaware of his other wives, over two and a half years…

Police officers said Tushar Waghmare registered his profile on a website, stating that he was divorced and looking for working Brahmin – upper caste – women who were either divorcees or widows. He claimed to have divorced his wife in 2006.

Waghmare fixed appointments with his targets at one of his rented apartments in the city, after visiting profiles of women on marriage websites.

“None of the women or their parents ever thought of doing a background check on him, as they would be impressed with his job profile,” deputy commissioner RM Vhatkar said.

Waghmare, who has since been sacked from his job with Air India, earned £946 a month and reportedly took care of all 14 “wives”. Three of them were professionals and the rest were housewives…

His last wife, a 29-year-old divorced architect, found him out when she visited him at one of his other homes.

Har! The man is obviously bent on self-destruction.

Facebook users enthusing about an upcoming holiday or a recently purchased high-tech gadget may not just be telling their friends but also potential burglars.

A survey of 2,092 social media users by British-based Legal & General found nearly four in ten, or 38 percent, of people using social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter post details about holiday plans and 33 percent details of a weekend away.

“Coupled with the finding that an alarmingly high proportion of users are prepared to be ‘friends’ online with people they don’t really know, this presents a serious risk to the security of people’s home and contents,” said the insurer.

In a report called “The Digital Criminal,” Legal & General said people used social media sites to connect with people who were essentially strangers, which could provide potential thieves with vital, personal information…

As well as information about trips away, people were posting party photos showing the interiors of homes and also chatting about their cool new purchases and presents.

“I call it “Internet shopping for burglars.” It is incredibly easy to use social networking sites to target people, and then scope out more information on their actual home … all from the comfort of the sofa,” said reformed burglar, Michael Fraser.

I remember the first decent color TV I owned being stolen a few days after it was delivered.

Turned out a gang of local burglars paid a finder’s fee to a warehouse worker at the store where I purchased the TV set. He’d provide them the addresses of TV deliveries.

Police officer covers Pitmon after arresting him

An angry, naked man hijacked a school bus of teenage students in Atlanta, driving it for less than a mile before it struck a wall off the road, police said.

Police said the man, 23-year-old Arris Pitmon, hoisted himself through an open window while the bus was stopped to let students disembark.

Police said students reported Pitmon seized control of the bus as the frightened driver ran to the back of the vehicle. While the bus was moving, the man abandoned the steering wheel and walked toward the back of the bus as well.

A student then moved toward the steering while, leading Pitmon to fight the student, CNN said. The driverless bus moved along the street until it left the roadway and crashed.

Students escaped, many using the emergency exit at the back of the bus, police said. Onlookers subdued the man until police arrived.

Are there more than a couple choices for motivation here?

Either the guy is a loonybird or he was chemically-stoned out of his mind.

BTW – witnesses said he wasn’t entirely naked. He was wearing a condom.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has written a searing critique of government efforts at “strategic communication” with the Muslim world, saying that no amount of public relations will establish credibility if American behavior overseas is perceived as arrogant, uncaring or insulting.

The critique by the chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, comes as the United States is widely believed to be losing ground in the war of ideas against extremist Islamist ideology. The issue is particularly relevant as the Obama administration orders fresh efforts to counter militant propaganda, part of its broader strategy to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate,” Admiral Mullen wrote in the critique (.pdf).

“I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all,” he wrote. “They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are…”

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Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Richard Nixon considered Ted Kennedy such a threat that he tried to catch him cheating on his wife, even ordering aides to plant secret service bodyguards to spy on the senator’s behaviour.

“Do you have anybody in the secret service that you can get to?” the US president asked his aide John Ehrlichman in a stark series of Oval Office conversations about Kennedy before the 1972 election. “Yeah, yeah,” Ehrlichman replied.

“Plant one,” Nixon said. “Plant two guys on him. This could be very useful…”

Because Kennedy was not a presidential candidate in 1972 he did not qualify for full-time secret service protection. But Nixon offered it to him, given the assassinations of his brothers, President John Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy…

“You understand what the problem is,” Nixon told Haldeman and Ehrlichman on 7 September 1972. “If the [son of a bitch] gets shot they’ll say we didn’t furnish it [protection]. So you just buy his insurance.

“After the election he doesn’t get a … thing. If he gets shot it’s too damn bad. Do it under the basis, though, that we pick the secret service men.

Nixon pressed for more wiretaps and a combing of tax records, not only on Kennedy but other leading Democrats. “I could only hope that we are, frankly, doing a little persecuting,” he said.

Republican “family values” have always been guided by corruption and deceit.

The Dems are just ordinary sleazy politicians. For the Republicans, the battle against representative democracy is a commandment in their state religion.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

As President Obama tries to turn around a summer of setbacks, he finds himself still without most of his own team. Seven months into his presidency, fewer than half of his top appointees are in place advancing his agenda.

Of more than 500 senior policymaking positions requiring Senate confirmation, just 43 percent have been filled — a reflection of a White House that grew more cautious after several nominations blew up last spring, a Senate that is intensively investigating nominees and a legislative agenda that has consumed both.

While career employees or holdovers fill many posts on a temporary basis, Mr. Obama does not have his own people enacting programs central to his mission. He is trying to fix the financial markets but does not have an assistant treasury secretary for financial markets. He is spending more money on transportation than anyone since Dwight D. Eisenhower but does not have his own inspector general watching how the dollars are used. He is fighting two wars but does not have an Army secretary…

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FBI Evidence Response Team on the scene

A woman kidnapped as an 11-year-old girl nearly two decades ago near her South Lake Tahoe home was kept prisoner in a squalid backyard compound outside Antioch and had at least two children with one of her alleged abductors, authorities said today.

Jaycee Dugard, now 29, turned up alive Wednesday, 18 years after she was snatched off the street as she walked to a school bus stop.

Arrested in the case were Phillip Craig Garrido, 58, and his wife, Nancy Garrido, 55, authorities said. Both were being held on $1 million bail…

Dugard apparently was kept for much of the time in a shed, authorities said. She and her daughters were also housed in tents and outbuildings in a part of the Garridos’ back yard not easily visible from outside the property on Walnut Drive, authorities said…

“He told us to come on over and hear him talk about God, but he was really weird,” [former neighbor] Erika Pratt said. “He had little girls and women living in that back yard, and they all looked kind of the same. They never talked, and they kept to themselves…”

Pratt added that she called police to investigate, but after officers went to Garrido’s door, “they told me they couldn’t go inside because they didn’t have a warrant. So they just told him they’d keep an eye on him…”

A Web site containing statements apparently from Garrido and others indicates that he gave a demonstration in Pittsburg last month to prove “the Creator has given me the ability to speak in the tongue of angels in order to provide a wake-up call that will in time include the salvation of the entire world.”

At least the loonybird thug didn’t have the neighbors buffaloed into thinking he was mister nice-guy.

Of course, if this was deep in the bible belt instead of just outside San Francisco – the religious babble might not have aroused suspicion.

You get the idea…

They have heard of people tunneling under it, scaling it and, on the Mexican side, defacing it. But it is not often, law enforcement authorities say, that people try to rip apart the border fence to sell it.

That appears to be the motive that led to the arrest this week in Tijuana, Mexico, of six people who, the authorities there say, were caught shearing off chunks of the metal plate fence to sell as scrap.

The case began Monday afternoon when United States Border Patrol agents spotted a group tampering with the fence on the Mexican side just over a mile west of the San Ysidro port of entry, in an area where smuggling of drugs and people is common, said Mark Endicott, a Border Patrol spokesman in San Diego…

The next afternoon, another group in the same area could be seen next to the fence “attempting to dismantle it,” Mr. Endicott said. Again, they were approached, again rocks sailed over the fence, and again the Mexican police were called. The Border Patrol later learned that six people were apprehended…

Tijuana police told local reporters there that the men were planning to sell the torn-off fence parts. The police said the men had used a soldering tool to cut off parts of the fence, which perhaps unknown to the culprits, is itself scrap. That part of the fence is made of recycled steel landing mats from the Vietnam War era, Mr. Endicott said.

I always wondered if the wall might be stolen as soon as we install it?

Tokyo police will try to rein in a wave of shoplifting by lonely elderly people by involving them in community service, a police spokesman said.

One out of four elderly shoplifters in the capital blamed their crime on loneliness, Japanese media quoted a police survey as saying. Another 8 percent said it was because they had “no reason to live.”

More than half the elderly shoplifters said they had no friends and 40 percent of them lived alone.

“Making shoplifters do volunteer work in the community is effective,” said professor Akihiro Sakai, head of a police research panel set up to tackle shoplifting. “Instead of increased punishment, I hope we can rehabilitate shoplifters with special care…”

Over 20 percent of Japan’s population is aged 65 or over, with that figure set to double by 2050.

Cultural differences really blow my mind sometimes. Not only nation to nation, you understand. My whole life rejected conformity – being part of the gray predictable body of our national culture.

But, folks I worked with from Asia – first of all from Japan, later from Taiwan and China – have impressed me as perfectly willing and able to reach out and move towards a new life and culture. I have to wonder how many of these seniors who turn inward – also never turned to the new ways of their whole nation after the war.