Two quotes by Justice Antonin Scalia

/ Politics

Comments by Justice Antonin Scalia on whether Guantánamo Bay detainees have protections under the Geneva or human-rights conventions, as quoted by Newsweek (March 8, 2006):

“If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs. I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I’m not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it’s crazy.”

Confirmation Testimony of Hon. Antonin Scalia, To Be U.S. Supreme Court Justice (August 5, 1986):

Senator Mathias: “…if a reasonable litigant actually believed that your judgment would be distorted because of some strong personal bias or belief, would that dissuade you from sitting on a case?”

Judge Scalia: I think the statute reads that way, Senator. I have the statute somewhere. I am quite sure that the way you put it is about the way the statute reads, requiring disqualification. If I may, title 28, United States Code, section 455: “Any justice, judge or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

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Wish-list: Google-Earth image search

/ Wish List

google-maps-ipod.jpg

Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped has posted a link to a Google Maps image that looks like an iPod.

The story that this is an abandoned mine that was won by Steve Jobs in a poker game sounds too good to be true, but the image got me thinking: I wonder how good the results would be for a “find the closest match to this image in Google Earth” app — something that picks the best location and zoom level for a given query image from all the locations on Earth. The feature’s no doubt already in place in some GIS systems (for things like “here’s an unannotated fly-by image of a missile silo; find the likely origin”) but I’m really just thinking for arty things like “create a font of letters made up entirely of satellite and fly-by images.”

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Flash Surfing

/ Media Technology

Long before flash mobs became the phonebooth-stuffing of the naughts, science fiction author Larry Niven speculated how the invention of teleportation would cause sudden flash crowds of gawkers to appear wherever a newsworthy event is taking place. Over at Searchblog, John Battelle suggests we’re bound to see something similar happen in couch-potato-land once channel surfers can automatically see what show or media event everyone else is watching…

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European Space Agency measures gravitomagnetism

/ Science

I don’t know enough physics to really grok how important or not this is, but man this sounds interesting:

Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity and could help physicists to make a significant step towards the long-sought-after quantum theory of gravity.

…

Small acceleration sensors placed at different locations close to the spinning superconductor, which has to be accelerated for the effect to be noticeable, recorded an acceleration field outside the superconductor that appears to be produced by gravitomagnetism. “This experiment is the gravitational analogue of Faraday’s electromagnetic induction experiment in 1831.

It demonstrates that a superconductive gyroscope is capable of generating a powerful gravitomagnetic field, and is therefore the gravitational counterpart of the magnetic coil. Depending on further confirmation, this effect could form the basis for a new technological domain, which would have numerous applications in space and other high-tech sectors” says de Matos. Although just 100 millionths of the acceleration due to the Earth’s gravitational field, the measured field is a surprising one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein’s General Relativity predicts. Initially, the researchers were reluctant to believe their own results.

(Via /. via Kurt.)

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Finally, Bush has a plan for victory…

/ Politics

After three years of bloody war in Iraq, President Bush has finally announced his hitherto super-secret plan for victory. Step 1: elect a more competent U.S. president…

President Bush said yesterday that future administrations will have to grapple with how and when to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, indicating that he doesn’t see an end to U.S. commitments until at least 2009.

“That’ll be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq,” Mr. Bush said at his second press conference of the year, during which he also said Iraq is not in the middle of a civil war and defended his continued commitment of U.S. troops.

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Build your own Eclipse Webcast Viewer

/ Hacks

On March 29, 2006 there will be a total solar eclipse, which is when the moon moves directly between the sun and the Earth. It won’t be visible here in the U.S., but even if you don’t live in Brazil, North Africa, Turkey or East Asia you can join in the fun! The San Francisco Exploratorium is hosting a big eclipse party starting at 9pm Pacific time, and they’ll be hosting a webcast of the eclipse live from a Roman amphitheater in Turkey.

The most important thing to remember when viewing an eclipse is never view an eclipse with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope! That’s because the sun will fry your eyeballs like a grape in the microwave. So to enjoy next week’s eclipse webcast safely, just follow these simple instructions to build a pinhole eclipse webcast viewer.

[more]

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Battery cost of DRM

/ Intellectual Property

MP3.com has the skinny on battery life for portable music players, with this little gem on how much decoding the DRM on purchased music costs you:

Take, for instance, the critically acclaimed Creative Zen Vision:M, with a rated battery life of up to 14 hours for audio and 4 hours for video. CNET tested it at nearly 16 hours, with MP3s–impressive indeed. Upon playing back only WMA subscription tracks, the Vision:M scored at just more than 12 hours. That’s a loss of almost 4 hours, and you haven’t even turned the backlight on yet.

We found similar discrepancies with other PlaysForSure players. The Archos Gmini 402 Camcorder maxed out at 11 hours, but with DRM tracks, it played for less than 9 hours. The iRiver U10, with an astounding life of about 32 hours, came in at about 27 hours playing subscription tracks. Even the iPod, playing back only FairPlay AAC tracks, underperformed MP3s by about 8 percent.

In other words, you pay between 8 and 25% of your battery life for the privilege of not being able to listen to your music where ever you want… now that’s customer service!

(Thanks to Nerfduck for the link!)

Update 3/23/06: Some folks are pointing out that comparing WMA or AAC format with DRM to MP3 isn’t a fair test since it conflates the effect of DRM with the effect of the format itself (a fair test would be to compare WMA with DRM to the same files without DRM). And Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker comments that regardless of whether the test compares apples to oranges, wouldn’t it be nice if we could choose which fruit we wanted to eat?

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