“It’s a serious problem for American democracy to have a public forum that is so vulnerable to distortion. Fewer conglomerates control the media, reporters have been fired, news holes are smaller. Reporters are more vulnerable to pressure, and sometimes react by using the short cut of on-one-hand and on-the-other-hand, this faux-balance routine that insulates them against criticism but ends up misleading the public. “So and so says the Earth is round but we found someone who believes the world is flat: You decide for yourself.”
Al Gore
Archive for May, 2006
31MayQuote of the day
Science at its best.
Using a new design theory, researchers at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering and Imperial College London have developed the blueprint for an invisibility cloak. Once devised, the cloak could have numerous uses, from defense applications to wireless communications, the researchers said.
Such a cloak could hide any object so well that observers would be totally unaware of its presence, according to the researchers. In principle, their invisibility cloak could be realized with exotic artificial composite materials called “metamaterials,” they said.
“The cloak would act like you’ve opened up a hole in space,” said David R. Smith, Augustine Scholar and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke’s Pratt School. “All light or other electromagnetic waves are swept around the area, guided by the metamaterial to emerge on the other side as if they had passed through an empty volume of space.”
Electromagnetic waves would flow around an object hidden inside the metamaterial cloak just as water in a river flows virtually undisturbed around a smooth rock, Smith said. The research team, which also includes David Schurig of Duke’s Pratt School and John Pendry of Imperial College London, reported its findings on May 25, 2006, in Science Express, the online advance publication of the journal Science. The work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
First demonstrated by Smith and his colleagues in 2000, metamaterials can be made to interact with light or other electromagnetic waves in very precise ways. Although the theoretical cloak now reported has yet to be created, the Duke researchers are on their way to producing metamaterials with suitable properties, Smith said. “There are several possible goals one may have for cloaking an object,” said Schurig, a research associate in electrical and computer engineering. “One goal would be to conceal an object from discovery by agents using probing or environmental radiation.”
“Another would be to allow electromagnetic fields to essentially pass through a potentially obstructing object,” he said. “For example, you may wish to put a cloak over the refinery that is blocking your view of the bay.”
By eliminating the effects of obstructions, such cloaking also could improve wireless communications, Schurig said. Along the same principles, an acoustic cloak could serve as a protective shield, preventing the penetration of vibrations, sound or seismic waves.
The group’s design methodology also may find a variety of uses other than cloaking, the scientists said. With appropriately fine-tuned metamaterials, electromagnetic radiation at frequencies ranging from visible light to electricity could be redirected at will for virtually any application. For example, the theory could lead to the development of metamaterials that focus light to provide a more perfect lens.
“To exploit electromagnetism, engineers use materials to control and direct the field: a glass lens in a camera, a metal cage to screen sensitive equipment, ‘black bodies’ of various forms to prevent unwanted reflections,” the researchers said in their article. “Using the previous generation of materials, design is largely a matter of choosing the interface between two materials.” In the case of a camera, for example, this means optimizing the shape of the lens.
The recent advent of metamaterials opens up a new range of possibilities by providing electromagnetic properties that are “impossible to find in nature,” the researchers said.
Their design theory provides the precise mathematical function describing a metamaterial with structural details that would allow its interaction with electromagnetic radiation in the manner desired. That function could then guide the fabrication of metamaterials with those precise characteristics, Smith explained.
The theory itself is simple, Smith said. “It’s nothing that couldn’t have been done 50 or even 100 years ago,” he said.
“However, natural materials display only a limited palette of possible electromagnetic properties,” he added. “The theory has only now become relevant because we can make metamaterials with the properties we are looking for.”
“This new design paradigm, which can provide a recipe to fit virtually any electromagnetic application, leads to material specifications that could be implemented only with metamaterials,” Schurig added.
The team’s next major goal is an experimental verification of invisibility to electromagnetic waves at microwave frequencies, the scientists said. Such a cloak, they said, would have utility for wireless communications, among other applications.
http://www.pratt.duke.edu
Posted 30th May 2006 on AZom.com
This is all done with light, but I wonder what would happen if you could do the same with matter?
Imagine walls spanning the planet with bracket edges. Being on the other side of the planet could be a matter of taking as many as 60 steps through a phase-fluxed metamatter wall.
Remember the line “The cloak would act like you’ve opened up a hole in space”. Cool stuff to keep an eye on.
The PSP is a great media device but it sadly has a “politically correct” low volume sound system. Even with AVLS (Automatic Volume Limiter System) turned off, the headphone volume is an excruciatingly low whisper when you’re doing what the Playstation Portable was meant for in the first place: Being portable.
The solution is not only to turn off AVLS, but also to replace the white headphones provided with the PSP all together. In my case with a pair of big ass Studio Monitor headphones. There were also also small ass headphones availible at the store, but at home on my PC I use big ass headphones and they work best for me. Once you go big ass, you never go back. Now when I’m traveling I can actually hear the dialog while watching movies and the tires screeching while playing Ridge Racer!
In an update to a recent spying story, USA Today reports that the US National Security Agency (NSA) is building a massive database of all private and corporate phone calls made in the US.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Washington, lawmakers are frustrated that the National Security Agency refuse to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the domestic spying matter, forcing them to halt the investigation.
The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers’ role in the program.
“We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,” OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey’s office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans %u2014 most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.
“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.
For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made %u2014 across town or across the country – to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.
Gaining more strength than ever, it is sadly the Military-Industrial Complex that essentially runs the US and not its people or its lawmakers.
