Want to alert those visitors to your WordPress blog who use Internet Explorer about upgrading to Firefox ?
This ‘Spread Firefox‘ plugin may be just what you want. As you can see from the screenshot below you can easily configure it to put a nice IE style warning bar at the top to tell them that they’re not getting the best from their current browser (the message is completely configurable), or you can pick banner ad’s, pop-ups (which I wouldn’t recommend) and other promotional methods.
Here’s an interesting thought, what if black holes didn’t exist but instead a collapsing star underwent a quantum critical phase change, turning into a rather peculiar, but QM compliant, object ?
This is what two physicists from LANL believe could be happening.
The report in New Scientist says:
[…] Chapline and Laughlin found some answers in an unrelated phenomenon: the bizarre behaviour of superconducting crystals as they go through something called “quantum critical phase transition” (New Scientist, 28 January, p 40). During this transition, the spin of the electrons in the crystals is predicted to fluctuate wildly, but this prediction is not borne out by observation. Instead, the fluctuations appear to slow down, and even become still, as if time itself has slowed down.
“That was when we had our epiphany,” Chapline says. He and Laughlin realised that if a quantum critical phase transition happened on the surface of a star, it would slow down time and the surface would behave just like a black hole’s event horizon. Quantum mechanics would not be violated because in this scenario time would never freeze entirely. “We start with effects actually seen in the lab, which I think gives it more credibility than black holes,” says Chapline.
With this idea in mind, they – along with Emil Mottola at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina in Columbia and colleagues – analysed the collapse of massive stars in a way that did not allow any violation of quantum mechanics. Sure enough, in place of black holes their analysis predicts a phase transition that creates a thin quantum critical shell. The size of this shell is determined by the star’s mass and, crucially, does not contain a space-time singularity. Instead, the shell contains a vacuum, just like the energy-containing vacuum of free space. As the star’s mass collapses through the shell, it is converted to energy that contributes to the energy of the vacuum.
The team’s calculations show that the vacuum energy inside the shell has a powerful anti-gravity effect, just like the dark energy that appears to be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Chapline has dubbed the objects produced this way “dark energy stars”.
A really intriguing possibility and one that, they believe, could be verified or disproved in 5-10 years.
Here’s an interesting story with a twist.. 🙂
ABC News today reported that Dr Simon Robson has “discovered a new type of ant, believed to be the only species that can live, swim and navigate under water“. It goes on to quote him saying:
“I was actually working with a film crew working on insects in the mangroves and they wanted to film one of these ants and I said, ‘Well, lets put it on a rock in a puddle of water and that’ll stop it going away and then you’ll be able to film it,’ and the ant promptly just leapt off the edge of the rock and swam across the water and disappeared”
First of all this is not a new type of ant, merely a newly discovered behaviour of Polyrhachis Sokolova, but that’s not unusual for a media translation of a science/technology story.
More interesting is that there is a JCU press release from 2001 that says:
Issue date: 31-AUG-2001
Bees might be known as the busiest of insects, but a JCU Honours student has discovered one species of ant which doesn’t sleep, knows how to swim and shares its babies with other nests.
School of Tropical Biology student Angela Shuetrim has spent most of this year investigating the behavioural habits of Polyrhachis sokolova, an ant species occupying the mangrove habitat at Three Mile Creek, near Pallarenda.
(Underlining added)
It turns out that Angela Shuetrim is a research student under Dr Robson and that there was another press release put out by JCU on March 10th 2006 that mentions all the researchers.
So my guess is that this apparent re-discovery is the result of a mangling of multiple stories together by the ABC, maybe to make it sound like groundbreaking research happened whilst the BBC was filming ‘Life in the Undergrowth’ – who knows ?
Still, it’s interesting to know that at least one species of ant can swim. 😉
Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2 that’s just come out to address some unpublished cross-site-scripting attacks.. If you notice anything odd then please let me know!
Leon is awake, is responding to voice command (can you squeeze my hand, can you look at me), and is opening and using his right eye to locate people! He is even smiling on demand, and kissed Lucy back when she kissed him.
Following on from a posting on Rich Boakes blog I left the following comment which struck me as interesting enough to be a post of its own right here.
Rich posits the question of what would happen if Schrödingers Cat had mirrors in its own box, would it collapse its own waveform ?
My guess is not, simply because it will never be capable of observing the moment of its own death as if it were able to it would, by definition, still be alive. However, I then brought up the following..
Strangely enough, I’ve been thinking about this problem from a different viewpoint – if the box with the dead/live cat in is opened by an observer inside a locked room who then dies before being able to pass on the information does the waveform collapse when he sees it and stay collapsed, or does it not collapse from the point of view of an observer outside the room?
I was wondering if it collapsed and then uncollapsed, but I suspect from a QM point of view it’s likely to be one of the two former cases – and my gut reaction is that it would be the latter..
So again it begs the question of who/what exactly constitutes an observer ? There is the participatory anthropic principle that says that conscious life is necessary to the universe in order for the collapse of QM waveforms to occur, but I think that’s a particularly long straw to grasp..
Point and click identification courtesy of Raman Spectroscopy!
ABC Science Show – Mars Science Laboratory Saturday 4 March 2006
Bonner Denton has a demonstration he uses upstairs. He takes a bottle of Tylenol, a white plastic container and the pills are inside. You can shoot the Raman and a laser goes through that white plastic, it identifies the three parts of Tylenol and it tells you what the plastic is made out of. It works on leaves. I can identify the species of trees by shooting their leaves. I don’t think the biologists are aware of this yet.
Potentially very useful indeed..
Another update from the PLUG list:
Leon was taken off the sedation on Saturday and has been waking up slowly since then. As you can imagine, this is a slow process because of the nature of the injuries and the level of morphine he is on. He was put in a chair/bed for a while today so he could be in a different position. He required support, but opened one eye slightly and was able to look at Lucy and move his head to see. He was responding to pain stimulus on his hands and feet yesterday, but today he has improved to respond to a more gentle touch on his feet, and squeezed people’s hands with his when requested (after a few seconds pause). He still has a tube down his throat, but the assisted breathing has been turned off – he is now breathing on his own!
It would appear that the last hope to contact Pioneer 10 has not succeeded according to this report from the Planetary Society. This was the last possible chance to communicate with the spacecraft, so it’s goodnight from it I guess (unless their post-processing of the data throws up any miracles)..
Been writing some stuff in shell that needs to be able to ensure it doesn’t start itself twice, so a bit of Googling for exclusive locks in shell scripts brought me to this page on “advanced shell scripting” which had something that looked good.
Problem is that when you put it into a script you’ll find it doesn’t actually work because of some trivial coding issues.
So here’s the fixed version of that function..
# Function to do atomic locking.
# Original found at http://members.toast.net/art.ross/rute/node24.html
# Fixed by Chris Samuel http://www.csamuel.org/
function my_lockfile ()
{
TEMPFILE="$1.$$"
LOCKFILE="$1.lock"
( echo $$ > $TEMPFILE ) >& /dev/null || (
echo "You don't have permission to access `dirname $TEMPFILE`"
return 1
)
ln $TEMPFILE $LOCKFILE >& /dev/null && {
rm -f $TEMPFILE
return 0
}
kill -0 `cat $LOCKFILE` >& /dev/null && {
rm -f $TEMPFILE
return 1
}
echo "Removing stale lock file"
rm -f $LOCKFILE
ln $TEMPFILE $LOCKFILE >& /dev/null && {
rm -f $TEMPFILE
return 0
}
rm -f $TEMPFILE
return 1
}