You are currently using 257 MB (11%) of your 2428 MB.Once I got to 11% of my 2GB allotment, Gmail started increasing my maibox size to keep my allotment there (why 11%? prime number? symmetry?).
Constructing Your Own Universe | Cosmic VarianceSo this is what Carlos was talking about. There are wonderful sets of simulations which he talked about, called the “Millennium Simulation” (ahem…remember an earlier post?). The bottom line is that these guys simply took really big computers and put in as much as we know about the basic equations of the universe, and then play with sprinkling in different amounts of cold dark matter and simulate the evolution of the universe tracking 10 billion individual particles in the simulation. They let the computers run until they get to the equivalent time of where we are now in the universe, and then then stop and look inside the computer. They take out the universe they’ve made and compare it to our universe. For that, you need to do an accurate survey of where all the stars and galaxies are in a large piece of the universe so that you can get good data on the distributions of the lumps, and other structures. The survey his team compared to was the “2DF” survey.
So what did they see? How well did their universes do? Well, in short, they look an awful lot like our universe when you have (the right amount of) cold dark matter sprinkled in. (”An awful lot” is not yet an established scientific term. Heck, it is not established English either. However, there are very specific tests (comparison of the power spectra of the size distributions of the structures) which work very well.)
This is great stuff, and confirms several other pieces of work by other teams. (See the references in their paper I’ll give the link to below.)
Here’s the really fun part you can do right from here. You can look at all the wonderful slides he showed by looking at the video of this talk when it comes up on the SUSY 2005 site, but even better you can download some of the high quality movies he showed right now! These are movies of flying around inside these newly created universes and seeing all of the wonderful organic-looking structures which form due to the clustering seeded by the CDM. You can see some of the hotspots that form at the intersections of some of these filamentary tendrils, which will be the birthplaces of stars. It is all rather beautiful.
BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the devices were so similar there was speculation they could have been part of the same batch.It must be a rather peculiar feeling to detonate a suicide bomb -- and live. There is still the unlikely possibility that someone sabotaged the attack.
'The explosive might have degraded over time or had not been put together right in this case, or it could have been a completely different batch of explosives - homemade - that had not been cooked up properly.'
The bombers' plan might have been disrupted by the investigation into the 7 July attacks, forcing them to act before they had been fully prepared, Corera added.
Some witnesses said the Thursday's attackers seemed 'scared' or 'surprised' when their bombs failed to explode properly.
It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.Other writers think it's our policies -- change our policies, forget Israel, leave Iraq, don't meddle -- and the attacks will stop. They make good arguments too, though they sometimes tend to reference the Iraqi insurgency rather than to al-Qaeda itself. There may be more than one class of reason to hate America and the UK.
What was true for the first generation of Al Qaeda is also relevant for the present generation: even if these young men are from Middle Eastern or South Asian families, they are for the most part Westernized Muslims living or even born in Europe who turn to radical Islam. Moreover, converts are to be found in almost every Qaeda cell: they did not turn fundamentalist because of Iraq, but because they felt excluded from Western society (this is especially true of the many converts from the Caribbean islands, both in Britain and France)...
...The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations. And their vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are.
A remarkable instance of genome-environment interaction has been discovered in the maternal behavior of rats. Pups that receive lots of licking and grooming from their mothers during the first week of life are less fearful in adulthood and more phlegmatic in response to stress than are pups that get less personal care. Last year, Michael J. Meaney and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal reported that a gene in the brain of the well-groomed pups is chemically modified during the grooming period and remains so throughout life. The modification makes the gene produce more of a product that damps down the brain's stress response.So a gene can be modified such that it permanently alters temperament, eh? Hmm. What possibilities does that suggest? How about a gene bearing virus that renders a population permanently ... cooperative ...
It raises a key point: As the Israelis have already said in the context of suicide terrorism there, it's essentially impossible to profile. Keep in mind, this isn't the first evidence of this. There was the time when two British Muslims went to Israel in 2003 and carried out a suicide attack on Mike's Place, a bar on the Tel Aviv waterfront. They appeared to be similarly assimilated and well-adjusted; one was a graduate of the London School of Economics and was married and had children. So on the one hand you have people like Richard Reid [the convicted 'shoe bomber'], a juvenile delinquent who spent much of his young adult life in prison, where he converted to Islam; and on the other you have a graduate of a leading British university.This comes out the same day that Homeland Security announces they'll use more profiling when checking airline passengers. Sigh. It's fortunate that airline security is far less important than rugged cockpit doors. All the same, Homeland Security's decision will make air travel somewhat less safe in the US.
With these four suicide bombers, what I find both striking and alarming is that it isn't a matter of one size fits all. You've got an 18-year-old, you've got somebody who was a teacher; you have three of Pakistani origin, but also someone from the Caribbean. This is a particular problem in the United Kingdom; when you talk about rounding up the usual suspects, the short list is pretty long. There are the various immigrant communities, but also the phenomenon of British converts to Islam -- people of color, but also not.
