Why is there something rather than nothing? That's the kind of question the Large Hadron Collider in CERN is hopefully poised to answer. And what is the output of this beautiful 17-mile long, 6 billion dollar wabi-sabish proton smashing machine? Data. Great heaping torrents of Grand Canyon sized data. 15 million gigabytes every year. That's 1000 times the information printed in books every year. It's so much data 10,000 scientists will use a grid of 80,000+ computers, in 300 computer centers , in 50 different countries just to help make sense of it all.
At the urging of the FBI, Molly Norris, the Seattle-based illustrator and cartoonist whose satirical drawing marking "Everybody Draw Mohammad Day" resulted in death threats, global protests and impassioned debate about religion and censorship, has been forced to change her name and abandon her former life as a result of her controversial cartoon. via aolnews.com Not super surprising - but sad.
via nosql.mypopescu.com
Raheem, who lost a son to a stray American bullet a few years ago, is a pragmatic and pious Shiite Muslim who argues that while the cost of the invasion was high, Iraqis now have their first opportunity to do what they want—whether that means building a secular democracy or a religious autocracy.
“We feel that Bush has done something good for us, despite all the mistakes,” said Raheem, as we made our way through the dusty streets of Baghdad.
Since OpenStack was announced, we’ve seen a flurry of activity in the developer community. Hundreds of people have made over a thousand contributions and we couldn’t be more excited.
Today I’d like to share one of the more unconventional contributions with you. Most of the development activity in OpenStack is in the storage and compute systems, but we also have front end projects for people who use OpenStack and need an easy way to manage their cloud resources.
Iran has stockpiled enough low-enriched uranium for 1-2 nuclear arms but it would not make sense for it to cross the bomb-making threshold with only this amount, a former top U.N. nuclear official was quoted as saying via news.yahoo.com
In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000. Even Mexico’s infamous drug war has claimed fewer lives.
via nytimes.com Wasn't Chavez supposed to fix that sort of stuff? Worker's paradise and all?
As the latest wave of superinvolved parents delivers its children to college, institutions are building into the day, normally one of high emotion, activities meant to punctuate and speed the separation. It is part of an increasingly complex process, in the age of Skype and twice-daily texts home, in which colleges are urging “Velcro parents” to back off so students can develop independence. via nytimes.com
The medical authority of the U.S. state of Oregon – where physician-assisted suicide is legal – seems to have adopted this approach. Shortly before he died this month, Montreal journalist Hugh Anderson wrote in The Gazette that Oregon “has acknowledged that when it turns down an application to cover the cost of an expensive new drug, it sends out simultaneously a reminder that the state's assisted suicide program is available at an affordable cost.
Wrestling with difficult questions is routine work for ethicists. But some are much more difficult than others. MercatorNet’s question, “What did I believe was presently the world’s most dangerous idea?”, falls in the former category. My response, “The idea that there is nothing special about being human and, therefore, humans do not deserve “special respect”, as compared with other animals or even robots”, might seem anodyne and a “cop out”, but I’d like to try to convince you otherwise.