The NYT wins one: Melanine use is staggering

The NYT delivers. Full credit to the reporting team. Emphases mine.

Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China - New York Times
David Barboza reported from Zhangqiu and Alexei Barrionuevo reported from Chicago. Rujun Shen also contributed reporting from Zhangqiu.
April 30, 2007

ZHANGQIU, China, April 28 — As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.

For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

“Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed,” said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there won’t be any regulation.”

Melamine is at the center of a recall of 60 million packages of pet food, after the chemical was found in wheat gluten linked this month to the deaths of at least 16 pets and the illness of possibly thousands of pets in the United States.

No one knows exactly how melamine (which is not believed to be particularly toxic) became so fatal in pet food, but its presence in any form of American food is illegal...

...Now, with evidence mounting that the tainted wheat gluten came from China, American regulators have been granted permission to visit the region to conduct inspections of food treatment facilities.

... what is clear from visiting this region of northeast China is that for years melamine has been quietly mixed into Chinese animal feed and then sold to unsuspecting farmers as protein-rich pig, poultry and fish feed.

Many animal feed operators here advertise on the Internet, seeking to purchase melamine scrap. The Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company, one of the companies that American regulators named as having shipped melamine-tainted wheat gluten to the United States, had posted such a notice on the Internet last March.

Here at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory, huge boiler vats are turning coal into melamine, which is then used to create plastics and fertilizer.

But the leftover melamine scrap, golf ball-size chunks of white rock, is sometimes being sold to local agricultural entrepreneurs, who say they mix a powdered form of the scrap into animal feed to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying feed that is high in protein.

“It just saves money if you add melamine scrap,” said the manager of an animal feed factory here.

Last Friday here in Zhangqiu, a fast-growing industrial city southeast of Beijing, two animal feed producers explained in great detail how they purchase low-grade wheat, corn, soybean or other proteins and then mix in small portions of nitrogen-rich melamine scrap, whose chemical properties help the feed register an inflated protein level.

Melamine is the new scam of choice, they say, because urea — another nitrogen-rich chemical — is illegal for use in pig and poultry feed and can be easily detected in China as well as in the United States.

“People use melamine scrap to boost nitrogen levels for the tests,” said the manager of the animal feed factory. “If you add it in small quantities, it won’t hurt the animals.”

The manager, who works at a small animal feed operation here that consists of a handful of storage and mixing areas, said he has mixed melamine scrap into animal feed for years.

He said he was not currently using melamine. But he then pulled out a plastic bag containing what he said was melamine powder and said he could dye it any color to match the right feed stock.

He said that melamine used in pet food would probably not be harmful. “Pets are not like pigs or chickens,” he said casually, explaining that they can afford to eat less protein. “They don’t need to grow fast.”

“It’s true you can make a lot more profit by putting melamine in,” said another animal feed seller here in Zhangqiu. “Melamine will cost you about $1.20 for each protein count per ton whereas real protein costs you about $6, so you can see the difference.”

... Feed producers who use melamine here say the tainted feed is often shipped to feed mills in the Yangtze River Delta, near Shanghai, or down to Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong. They also said they knew that some melamine-laced feed had been exported to other parts of Asia, including South Korea, North Korea, Indonesia and Thailand.

Evidence is mounting that Chinese protein exports have been tainted with melamine and that its use in agricultural regions like this one is widespread. But the government has issued no recall of any food or feed product here in China.

Indeed, few people outside the agriculture business know about the use of melamine scrap. The Chinese news media — which is strictly censored — has not reported much about the country’s ties to the pet food recall in the United States. And few in agriculture here do not see any harm in using melamine in small doses; they simply see it as cheating a little on protein, not harming animals or pets.

As for the sale of melamine scrap, it is increasingly popular as a fake ingredient in feed, traders and workers here say.

At the Hebei Haixing Insect Net Factory in nearby Hebei Province, which makes animal feed, a manager named Guo Qingyin said: “In the past melamine scrap was free, but the price has been going up in the past few years. Consumption of melamine scrap is probably bigger than that of urea in the animal feed industry now.”

And so melamine producers like the ones here in Zhangqiu are busy.

A man named Jing, who works in the sales department at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory here, said on Friday that prices have been rising, but he said that he had no idea how the company’s melamine scrap is used.

“We have an auction for melamine scrap every three months,” he said. “I haven’t heard of it being added to animal feed. It’s not for animal feed.”

A price rise from 0 to 20% of the cost of real protein suggests a staggering trade in melanine. We need a heck of an overhaul in our food regulation; of course to do that we have to first get Cheney and Bush to retire ...

Poisoned pets: it's much worse than you think

It just keeps getting worse and worse. emphases mine.

The Blog | David Goldstein: Melamine-Spiking "Widespread" In China; Human Food Broadly Contaminated | The Huffington Post

... Tomorrow the New York Times will report from China, detailing how nitrogen-rich melamine scrap, produced from coal, is routinely ground into powder and mixed into low-grade wheat, corn, soybean or other proteins to inflate the protein analysis of animal feed:

The melamine powder has been dubbed "fake protein" and is used to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying feed that provides higher nutrition value.

"It just saves money," says a manager at an animal feed factory here. "Melamine scrap is added to animal feed to boost the protein level."

The practice is widespread in China. For years animal feed sellers have been able to cheat buyers by blending the powder into feed with little regulatory supervision, according to interviews with melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

[...] Many animal feed operators advertise on the Internet seeking to purchase melamine scrap. And melamine scrap producers and traders said in recent interviews that they often sell to animal feed makers.

"Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed," says Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company. "I don't know if there's a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says 'don't do it,' so everyone's doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren't they? If there's no accident, there won't be any regulation."

"The practice is widespread in China," the Times reports, and has been going on "for years." And it is not just wheat, corn, rice and soybean proteins that should be suspect, but the animals who feed on it, including all imported Chinese pork, poultry, farm-raised fish, and their various by-products. Despite FDA and USDA efforts to allay concerns about consuming melamine-tainted meat, the health effects are unstudied, and the permissible level is zero. If China could impose a three-year (and counting) ban on the import of U.S. beef after a single incident of Mad Cow disease, then surely the U.S. would be justified in imposing a ban on Chinese vegetable protein and livestock products due to such a prevalent, industrywide contamination.

And if in the coming weeks this ban is finally imposed, the question we must ask government regulators is... why so late? Why did they wait until our children licked the last remaining drop of bacon fat off their fingers before alerting the public to the potential health risk, however low? It seems inconceivable that the regulators tasked with overseeing the safety and purity of our nation's food supply did not at least imagine the potential scope of this crisis back in early March when they first learned that Chinese wheat gluten was poisoning dogs and cats. Indeed, the very fact that they were so quick to focus in on melamine as the adulterating agent suggests they at least suspected what they were facing.

It may make for entertaining TV, but popular shows like CSI get forensic toxicology exactly backwards. You don't run a substance through a mass spectrometer and 30 seconds later get a complete readout of its chemical makeup. Rather, you painstakingly look for specific chemicals or groups of chemicals one at a time, until you find the offending toxin. Once you get beyond the basic "tox screen," forensics is as much art as science -- investigators use evidence and intuition to narrow the search to those compounds that are most likely to be the culprit.

And so it begs the question as to why -- in the face of an apparent wheat gluten contamination that reportedly killed nine out of twenty dogs and cats in Menu Foods' quarterly taste test -- would FDA scientists test for melamine, a chemical widely believed to be nontoxic?

Why? Because they thought they might find it.

Lacking adequate cooperation from FDA officials one is constantly forced to speculate, but given the circumstances it is reasonable to assume that the search for melamine was prompted by the "nitrogen spiking" theory, rather than the other way around. Based on their knowledge of the evidence, Chinese agricultural practices, the globalizing food industry, and perhaps prior history, the FDA hypothesized that unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers may have intentionally adulterated low quality wheat gluten in an effort to pass it off as a high-protein, high-value product. And nothing would do the job better than melamine.

According to one synthetic organic chemist, melamine is by far the perfect candidate. It is high in nitrogen (66-percent by weight), nonvolatile (ie, it doesn't explode,) and dirt cheap. It is also -- at least according to both the scientific literature and chemical supply catalogs -- widely considered to be nontoxic. For FDA officials, the mystery never seemed to be how melamine made its way into wheat, rice and corn protein, but rather, why it was suddenly killing dogs and cats.

The technical answer may center on the unexpected interaction between melamine, cyanuric acid, and other melamine by-products, but the practical answer may be much more pedestrian. Some samples of adulterated wheat gluten reportedly tested as high as 6.6-percent melamine by weight, an off the chart concentration that was likely the accidental result of some less than thorough mixing. Had this accident never occurred -- had cats, with their sensitive renal systems, not been the canary in the coal mine of melamine toxicity -- we might never have known that our children and our pets were being slowly poisoned by Chinese capitalism.

Well, despite the FDA's best efforts, now we know.

And who has been suffocating all federal regulatory agencies since taking office in 2000? Gee, I wonder who.

This story is not going to go away. It's a good time to be an American organic food farmer.

Changing attitudes about mind and responsibility: Patricia Hearst

I was 15 when Patricia Hearst "joined" the SLA. I don't remember a lot of public sympathy in Canda for her then, I dimly recall she was thought to be another foolish youth. I don't think I paid that much attention really. When the SLA was caught Patricia Hearst, despite her wealth, went to prison.

DI recaps the story, and shows how our interpretation has changed. Today, I think, Hearst would not have been prosecuted. She would have been understood to have been a victim. In retrospect DeFreeze was an evil genius of manipulation, milder versions of this techniques are the modern basis of US torture standards.

Culture evolves. Our concept of responsibility is in transition.

Vernor Vinge likes Pratchett

Terry who? Vinge is of my era, but I've just read he likes Pratchett quite a bit. Never heard of the guy, but I suppose that's not surprising[1]. I'll have to take a look at... The Discworld Series

[1] It's a shame all that "Jane likes B and C, John likes B, therefore John likes C" stuff never worked out very well..

Update 11/1/2009: more than 33 books later ...

The Atlantic, finally, blogging

The Atlantic, back from the dead thanks to years of Bush, has added blogs. Fallows has a new home. (Shame on losing the quaint first posts in his "test" blog.)

There are blogs for Sullivan, Fallows, Douthat and Yeglesias so far.

Update: There's something funny with bloglines and this feed. The subscription seems right, but no postes appear. I can't say whether the bug is in the feed or in bloglines.

Mouse brain simulations. Plenty of time left.

There's no point in panicking. This is simply the way things go ...

BBC NEWS | Technology | Mouse brain simulated on computer

US researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer.

The scientists ran a "cortical simulator" that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer.

In other smaller simulations the researchers say they have seen characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains...

...The three researchers, James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, and Dharmendra S Modha, laid out how they went about it in a very short research note entitled "Towards Real-Time, Mouse-Scale Cortical Simulations".

Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons each one of which can have up to 8,000 synapses, or connections, with other nerve fibres.

Modelling such a system, the trio wrote, puts "tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform".

The team, from the IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada, ran the simulation on a BlueGene L supercomputer that had 4,096 processors, each one of which used 256MB of memory.

Using this machine the researchers created half a virtual mouse brain that had 8,000 neurons that had up to 6,300 synapses.

The vast complexity of the simulation meant that it was only run for ten seconds at a speed ten times slower than real life - the equivalent of one second in a real mouse brain.

On other smaller simulations the researchers said they had seen "biologically consistent dynamical properties" emerge as nerve impulses flowed through the virtual cortex.

In these other tests the team saw the groups of neurons form spontaneously into groups. They also saw nerves in the simulated synapses firing in a ways similar to the staggered, co-ordinated patterns seen in nature.

The researchers say that although the simulation shared some similarities with a mouse's mental make-up in terms of nerves and connections it lacked the structures seen in real mice brains.

Imposing such structures and getting the simulation to do useful work might be a much more difficult task than simply setting up the plumbing.

For future tests the team aims to speed up the simulation, make it more neurobiologically faithful, add structures seen in real mouse brains and make the responses of neurons and synapses more detailed.

Really. There's nothing to fear about this. The gap between a mouse brain and a human brain is vast. It could be another four years before they have a real mouse brain, and assuming performance doubles every year and there are no real breakthroughs in applied quantum computing it might be forty to fifty years before the next stage begins ...

Time, entropy and baby universes

CV talks about manufacturing universes that vanish as an evaporating black hole....

How Did the Universe Start? | Cosmic Variance

... The baby-universe idea at least has the chance to give rise to a spontaneous violation of time-reversal symmetry and explain the arrow of time. If we start with empty space an evolve it forward, baby universes can (hypothetically) be born; but the same is true if we run it backwards. The increase of entropy doesn’t arise from a fine-tuning at one end of the universe’s history, it’s a natural consequence of the ability of the universe to always increase its entropy. We’re a long way from completely understanding such a picture; ultimately we’ll have to be talking about a Hilbert space of wavefunctions that involve an infinite number of disconnected components of spacetime, which has always been a tricky problem. But the increase of entropy is a fact of life, right here in front of our noses, that is telling us something deep about the universe on the very largest scales.

Where entropy increases, there goes time. Or so it goes.

Update 4/28/07: Infinitely expanding universes birthing within infinitely expanding universes. Requirements for human observation to collapse probability waves. All interpretations of self-consistent mathematics, but way beyond bizarre. Which leads to the scary thought. Could he be right? Brrrr.

Broder - the Hindenburg of pundits

Paul Begala goes to town on David Broder. Mercifully I can mostly ignore Broder -- I've not read his column for many years. Alas, DeLong and others periodically expose me to Broder's choice gassings. Few people combine the role of toady, sycophant and pompous fool so perfectly as Broder. Begala cannot ignore Broder, and it's driven him to a very fine and artistic rant. I loved the phrase "Hindenburg of pundits", but he really hits hard on one of Broder's classic comments:

The Blog | Paul Begala: David Broder Is a Gasbag | The Huffington Post

...And so Mr. Broder lashes out at Reid, smearing and sneering at the man he calls 'the leading light of Searchlight, Nev.'

Mr. Broder has moved with ease from the elite comfort of the University of Chicago to the smug confines of Arlington, Virginia. And so he looks down at a man who rose from among the hard-rock miners and hard-luck hookers of Searchlight, Nevada to be the most consequential senator of his time. While David Broder was thinking great thoughts at his elite university, Harry Reid was working his way through Utah State. While David Broder was pontificating, Harry Reid was working his way through law school as a cop on Capitol Hill....

Wicked and justly deserved. I thank the miracle that brought Reid to the senate leadership every day.

A decline of the American general staff

Of all America's military leadership, only one spoke up. Shinseki may yet be the only military leader to emerge with honor from our multifaceted failure. Cheney/Bush, of course, kneecapped him.

Now others with much more to lose are also speaking. Phillip Carter highlights Lt. Col Paul Yingling, deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, on the crisis in American generalship. Writing in the Armed Forces Journal Yingling accuses his leaders of lacking courage. That doesn't require the same courage as falling on a grenade, but many a soldier might prefer a battle wound to abandoning their military career.

I haven't read the full article, but the excerpt makes clear where the cowardice lay. Men who knew better went along with Cheney and Bush to preserve their power and careers. They deserve to be publicly shamed for that act of cowardice.

Tenet speaks: the interesting parts

George Tenet has written a book that admits his errors but fingers Cheney as the fount of evil. He says, like every other former insider, that Bush and Cheney never gave any serious thought to anything but invading Iraq. I believe that, but that's not the interesting part of NYT summary of the book. There are only 4 statements in the article that are interesting:

Ex-C.I.A. Chief, in Book, Assails Cheney on Iraq - New York Times

...Mr. Tenet takes blame for the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s weapons programs, calling the episode “one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure.” He expresses regret that the document was not more nuanced, but says there was no doubt in his mind at the time that Saddam Hussein possessed unconventional weapons. “In retrospect, we got it wrong partly because the truth was so implausible,” he writes.

... He also expresses skepticism about whether the increase in troops in Iraq will prove successful. “It may have worked more than three years ago,” he wrote. “My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence.”...

... The book recounts C.I.A. efforts to fight Al Qaeda in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, and Mr. Tenet’s early warnings about Osama bin Laden. He contends that the urgent appeals of the C.I.A. on terrorism received a lukewarm reception at the Bush White House through most of 2001...

...Mr. Tenet expresses puzzlement that, since 2001, Al Qaeda has not sent “suicide bombers to cause chaos in a half-dozen American shopping malls on any given day.”...

I'll comment on each interesting part. For the record, I think we forget the powerful influence Tony Blair had on many democrats in the fall of 2001. Even then we didn't trust Bush at all, but Blair we trusted. We weighed his opinions very seriously and we were wrong to do so.

1. To the best of my knowledge the "truth" is that the UN inspections worked, but Saddam kept the story of WMDs alive to keep Iran at bay. It's possible he also thought he had more capability to resurrect WMDs than he had at that point. Seems plausible only in retrospect.
   
   
2. He's casting his vote for a deadline to leave Iraq.
   
   
3. Tenet is leveling a very serious charge at Bush -- that he and his team neglected warnings of an imminent threat, presumably because they were coming out of an administration they despised. He's not the first to say this. Arguably, this is among the greatest of the many sins of Bush/Cheney, and like all their sins it was rooted partly in arrogance and hatred.
   
   
4. Tenet is not the only one to wonder what the heck happened to al Qaeda in America.
   

Edwards on Iraq: Fight Bush, set the deadline

If I was given control of the US government, I don't know that I'd set a deadline to withdraw from Iraq. I do know I'd fire Bush, Cheney, whatshername, all their allies and most of their appointees. Then I might learn something that would help me personally decide what's the least horrible option.

As long as Cheney/Bush and their flock of raging incompetents is in power, however, the "set a deadline" movement is justifiable. John Edwards has firmly placed himself in that camp:

The Question I Wasn't Asked / John Edwards '08 Blog

... What should we be doing — right now — to end the war in Iraq?

As you've heard, the Senate has followed the House and passed a bill to fund our troops with a timeline to bring them home and end the conflict. Both houses of Congress have now passed funding bills that reflect the will of the American people that we must end the war in Iraq.

The president has said he will veto this legislation, which will defy the American people and deny our troops the funding they need. When that happens, the president will be the one blocking support for our troops, not Congress.

With so much at stake, Congress must stand firm.

If Bush vetoes the funding for our troops, Congress must send the same bill back to the president -- and they should do this again and again--as many times as it takes for Bush to understand that the American people are right and the war must be brought to an end.

In the next few days, the will of Congress will be severely tested. Bush will be doing everything in his considerable power to convince the nation that Congress is responsible for his reckless decision not to fund the troops. Plenty of people in Washington will say the political risks are just too great and Democrats in Congress should just back down.

If there ever was a time to replace political calculation with political courage, that time is now. If Congress shows courage, they can end this war.

But where will they find that courage in the face of Karl Rove's media machine? They'll find it if all of us speak up as loudly as we can in the next few crucial days and demand that our representatives do what is right. Political courage has always been found in the voice of the people - and our voice is needed today...

I pray John Edwards knows the American people well. I don't see that kind of energy and engagement in the people around me ...

Beg the BBC: Set 'In Our Time' Free!

We need to write the BBC and demand they liberate In Our Time. Let me explain why.

As I drove to work I started to compose a post in praise of an In Our Time episode on Anesthesia. I was going to connect it to a post I'd written on paleolithic suffering, the poignant prayers of 19th century futurists, and Vonnegut's Wheel of Samsara, with an oblique reference to poverty. I'd comment on how Bragg's guests connected the changing social perception of the benefits of pain and suffering to the availability of other options, and confess how whimpy I feel when reading my son stories about extraordinary survivors.

A cross-reference to my tech ravings would mention my whizzy car stereo that plays IOT MP3s and directions on how to capture the audio stream to an MP3 ...

That's when it hit me. Reality.

Only a complete geek loon like me is going to turn a useless streamed IOT program (it's not background music) into a useful MP3 file.

It's time to rebel.

The BBC has been running its experiment of "7 day downloads" for years now. The experiment must end. We need to convince BBC Radio Four to liberate its shelf-ware. Do it now! Send the BBC Radio Four some feedback. When you've sent your feedback in, pass on the feedback link or a link to this blog. Let the BBC feel your pain.

Here's what I wrote ... (edited to improve it, I admit)

I urge you to declare your MP3 download experiment a smashing success and make your archives available as MP3 files for downloading.

Put an audio ad at the beginning and end of each programme. Ask Apple to sell them for $1.00 a tune. Whatever, just do it.

Streaming simply doesn't work. I'm often blogging on excellent IOT programs, but it's a bit pointless since nobody is going to listen to them on their computer. In an era in which car stereos increasingly work with MP3/AAC CDs and iPods (mine works with any USB drive) it's the car radio where IOT will be listened to.

I beg you, stop dangling these unreachable sweets in front of your suffering public and liberate IOT.

The cat is undead until you open the box ...

A week or so ago I commented on recent research that both affirmed instantaneous non-local correlation of entangled quantum entities and attacked "realism". I couldn't however, really tell from the article what was meant by "realism".

This summary from a physics journal fills the gap. "Realism" is a way of saying that the "way of things" is not altered by the act of our observing them. The research seems to affirm an interpretation of quantum mechanics that gives special power to the act of perceiving, namely the power to collapse a wave function .... (emphases mine)

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality (April 2007) - News - PhysicsWeb

... Some 40 years ago the physicist John Bell predicted that many hidden-variables theories would be ruled out if a certain experimental inequality were violated – known as "Bell's inequality". In his thought experiment, a source fires entangled pairs of linearly-polarized photons in opposite directions towards two polarizers, which can be changed in orientation. Quantum mechanics says that there should be a high correlation between results at the polarizers because the photons instantaneously "decide" together which polarization to assume at the moment of measurement, even though they are separated in space. Hidden variables, however, says that such instantaneous decisions are not necessary, because the same strong correlation could be achieved if the photons were somehow informed of the orientation of the polarizers beforehand. [jf: In the transactional interpetation the "informing" can occur by meaning-free "messages" that travel back in time.]

Bell's trick, therefore, was to decide how to orient the polarizers only after the photons have left the source. If hidden variables did exist, they would be unable to know the orientation, and so the results would only be correlated half of the time. On the other hand, if quantum mechanics was right, the results would be much more correlated – in other words, Bell's inequality would be violated.

Many realizations of the thought experiment have indeed verified the violation of Bell's inequality. These have ruled out all hidden-variables theories based on joint assumptions of realism ... [reality exists when we are not observing it].... and locality ... [separated events cannot influence one another instantaneously]. But a violation of Bell's inequality does not tell specifically which assumption – realism, locality or both – is discordant with quantum mechanics.

Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger and colleagues from the University of Vienna, however, have now shown that realism is more [?] of a problem than locality in the quantum world. They devised an experiment that violates a different inequality proposed by physicist Anthony Leggett in 2003 that relies only on realism, and relaxes the reliance on locality. To do this, rather than taking measurements along just one plane of polarization, the Austrian team took measurements in additional, perpendicular planes to check for elliptical polarization.

They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell's thought experiment, Leggett's inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we're not observing it. "Our study shows that 'just' giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics," Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. "You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism."

This article is the best so far, but there were a few awkward phrases. I've tried to edit it minimally to clarify.

My current (weak) understanding is that locality fell a while ago. There was still hope of preserving realism, but now realism is at least partly gone. We're well into the realm of Schrodinger's "cat" being both alive and dead until an "observer" inspects the cat. I think this result may favor the "decoherence" interpretation of QM, and goes against the "transactional" interpretation favored by (among others) Gribbin.

Alternatively, there's always the reassuring possibility that mathematics is a less trustworthy guide to reality than commonly thought...

Update 5/26/2007: It turns out that in 2004 I posted on a fascinating discussion about how reality can be emergently structured that seems to fit very well with this experiment. I need to find more along the lines of that 2004 post!

CV is doing a tutorial on gravitational waves

Straight-up General Relativity is so refreshing after getting lost in the Escherian landscape of Quantum Mechanics. CV is doing a lovely tutorial on Gravitational Waves, which, for extra credit, includes a readable example of a gauge artifact:

The difficult childhood of gravitational waves | Cosmic Variance:

...It might sounds strange that, given an equation describing their existence, gravitational-waves could nonetheless be questioned by large numbers of physicists. However, general relativity can be tricky, and it’s not always straightforward to understand what it’s trying to tell us. In this particular case, the question was whether or not gravitational waves were a gauge artifact. It can sometimes get confusing as to whether an effect is truly physical, or is just a byproduct of the coordinate system one has chosen. For example, look at the latitute/longitude coordinate system on the Earth. This system gets weird at the poles, where suddenly the longitude is no longer well defined (there are an infinite number of valid longitudinal coordinates for the same point). The North and South poles are somehow special, and if all you had were the coordinates, you might be afraid to take a walk there. Who knows what lurks at the singularities?! Needless to say, the problem is with the coordinates, and not with the poles themselves...

I'm looking forward with bated breath to the next installment ...

Microsoft morphs into General Motors: my OneCare account termination story

In the early 1990s I couldn't understand why an acquaintance was delighted by Microsoft's ascendancy over IBM. IBM had been floundering for so long they seemed pathetically charming, whereas Microsoft was Darth Vader and Sauron united -- a blight on the world of personal computing and a ruthless destroyer of every better option.

That was then. Now I still fear Microsoft will resurrect itself, but Gen Y thinks of them as harmless incompetents. My latest experience is pushing me closer to the Gen Y camp. Here's what happened when I tried to kill my Windows Live OneCare account (866-663-2273, but listen for the option number, they permute it ..):

Gordon's Tech: Microsoft OneCare dies: XP hangs by a thread

.... Update 4/21/07: It's one thing to uninstall OneCare, another to kill the OneCare account. The account auto-renews forever. You can't change this online, you have to phone Microsoft to cancel. I tried this tonight. The phone rang a bit, then came a voice .. "Microsoft is closed". Click...

Update 4/22/07: OneCare support has the world's most obnoxious hold music. They alternative up-tempo elevator music with two repetitive sales pitches spoken in a cheerfully grating tone. I got to listen to a lot of that today. After a half-hour I went to lunch, when I returned the line had gone dead. So the wait time was probably 40 minutes. I'll try again tomorrow. ...

Update 4/24/07: Waited 30 minutes on hold. Called back and pushed 9,9,9. Got a support-referral person. They suggested I try option 2 for tech support. Got someone there. They said hours for the account services are 5am-10pm M-F PST and 5am-5pm PST Sat/Sun. They also suggested calling Microsoft's Money-Back-Guarantee line at 888-673-8624. They put through to another tech support number. They said I can't stop the account renewal process without support giving me an "ASIS" number. They transferred me to fee-based technical support where I listened to hold music. Then I gave up...

Update 4/25/07: I ignore the "get an ASIS number first" advice and and call the billing number again at 8:45am PT. Got through immediately -- but that was a false alarm. I'd hit option 3 twice, and errant key presses bring up a human router. She laughs maniacally when I mention OneCare and sends me back to the accounts line. I decide to wait 10 minutes. After seven minutes of the insanely irritating hold music and repetitive marketing patter I decide Microsoft owes me a copy of Macintosh Office 2007 and I contemplate piratical acts. At minute eight the phone picks up. I'm asked why I want to dump OneCare. "Because it has caused far more damage to my system than any virus I'm likely to see". There are no further questions, and to my disgruntled surprise I get a prorated credit of $32. End of story, except, of course, for a post to Gordon's Notes.

Once upon a time General Motors bestrode the American economy, an unassailable behemoth. It took them decades to fall, but by the 1960s they'd been rotted by easy money. Toyota entered.

Microsoft went from nothing to the greatest corporation in world history in about 15 years. If the trend continues they'll collapse even faster, though their massive cash flows will keep them standing no matter how bad they smell.

Gen Y, I gather, fears Google ...

Update 7/8/07: I've since been thinking of Microsoft as a monstrous brain-eating zombie, though both Photosynth and Windows Live Writer suggest the Zombie can still keep some brains on the shelf. It's my wife, however, who pointed out that American under Bush has followed the same progression as Microsoft and General Motors. Very powerful, very dangerous, but no longer meaningful -- simply a big slowly dying Zombie.

Also, I posted an aside about "Microsoft on crack" in August of 2006, I think that was after the Windows Live Cam debacle.