A scrapbook for my philosophical essays on the world, casual observations, and personal rants.

Jeff Reifman’s laptop was stolen when the alarm system he used malfunctioned. He had already taken some precautions so he impact of the theft wasn’t as great had he done nothing. But he compiled a list of tips anyone with a laptop to do just in case things like this happen. Some of these recommendations are for Macs only but the premise of these tips should apply to any computing device.

via The Loop

Techdirt reports:

While Google Fiber may never be a nationwide broadband presence, the company’s entry into a handful of markets has at least given us a hopeful glimpse at what healthy broadband competition should actually look like. In Austin, for example, Google Fiber expects to start connecting users later this year, offering symmetrical 1 Gbps connections for just $70 a month. They also offer a free (what a concept) 5 Mbps tier if you pay a one-time $300 connection fee. Google’s market entry in turn prompted AT&T to promise $70 1 Gbps connections in order to save face. More recently, a cable operator by the name of Grande Communications joined the fun, promising 1 Gbps lines for $65. Even Time Warner Cable, not known for aggressive or even pro-active deployments, is now offering 300 Mbps in Austin.

As much as I dislike the information Google collects on me, I’d gladly give up a bit of that information to bring 1 Gbps broadband to the New York City area – especially if it meant Verizon and Time Warner/Comcast started to compete.

The promise of nuclear fusion is one of those scientific prospects that seems so close yet so far away. The rewards could be limitless; cheap electricity, massive reduction of fossil fuels consumed, the possibility of stopping (and hopefully reversing) global warming.

This article from The New Yorker describing the attempts to harness fusion energy is long; Readability puts it at a 60 minute read. But after reading just the quoted selection, I was hooked. I’ve only gotten through the first few pages but it’s a fascinating read.

Years from now – maybe in a decade, maybe sooner – if all goes according to plan, the most complex machine ever built will be switched on in an Alpine forest in the South of France. The machine, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, will stand a hundred feet tall, and it will weigh twenty-three thousand tons – more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower. At its core, densely packed high-precision equipment will encase a cavernous vacuum chamber, in which a super-hot cloud of heavy hydrogen will rotate faster than the speed of sound, twisting like a strand of DNA as it circulates. The cloud will be scorched by electric current (a surge so forceful that it will make lightning seem like a tiny arc of static electricity), and bombarded by concentrated waves of radiation. Beams of uncharged particles – the energy in them so great it could vaporize a car in seconds—will pour into the chamber, adding tremendous heat. In this way, the circulating hydrogen will become ionized, and achieve temperatures exceeding two hundred million degrees Celsius – more than ten times as hot as the sun at its blazing core.

No natural phenomenon on Earth will be hotter. Like the sun, the cloud will go nuclear. The zooming hydrogen atoms, in a state of extreme kinetic excitement, will slam into one another, fusing to form a new element – helium – and with each atomic coupling explosive energy will be released: intense heat, gamma rays, X rays, a torrential flux of fast-moving neutrons propelled in every direction. There isn’t a physical substance that could contain such a thing. Metals, plastics, ceramics, concrete, even pure diamond – all would be obliterated on contact, and so the machine will hold the superheated cloud in a “magnetic bottle,” using the largest system of superconducting magnets in the world. Just feet from the reactor’s core, the magnets will be cooled to two hundred and sixty-nine degrees below zero, nearly the temperature of deep space. Caught in the grip of their titanic forces, the artificial earthbound sun will be suspended, under tremendous pressure, in the pristine nothingness of ITER’s vacuum interior.

The full article can be found here.

via Ordinary Times

I didn’t even know there was such a thing as “Dadcore” but it certainly explains why we see he same played out plot over and over.

Dadcore is a different breed of film, set apart entirely from the more widely appealing “dad-ertainment” of things like The Rookie or any movie directed by Edward Zwick. Those are movies that virtually anyone can watch and enjoy—there may be a core of dad-ness, but in terms of content and message, the appeal is pretty universal. Dadcore is more narrowly defined by being rip-snorting action movies—many of them hardcore and rated R—in which the plot is vaguely defined by a male character seeking revenge or vengeance or some kind of justice (spiritual or otherwise), usually outside the letter of the law. (Think Taken or True Lies, a movie that raised the standard for dadcore epics to come.) Most of the time, the main characters in these movies are either fathers or form some kind of surrogate father relationship with a younger character, keeping the “by dads, for dads” central message of dadcore steadily intact. These movies often contain extreme violence and occasional nudity, although the nudity is almost always desexualized, like the stripper that randomly flashes the audience in Under Siege, or the topless woman who is chased by a terrorist at the beginning of Die Hard. In dadcore, both women and explosions are objectified with the same level of bemused detachment. These are movies that your dad took you to but maybe shouldn’t have—things like Cliffhanger, Executive Decision, and, of course, the first Die Hard. Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.

And it shouldn’t be a surprise that these films do much better overseas than they do in the US; I’m going to take a stab at the reason: paternal views and traditions are stronger than they are in the US as American men shift their definition of what a father does.