Science Achieves Fiction: "Perfect" Invisibility Cloak

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Monday November 12, 2012 · 5:03 AM PST

2012/11/12 · 05:03

Move aside, flim-flam wizard of Oz. Move aside, magic red shoes. (I saw that Judy Garland's Oz dress sold for $480K this weekend.) We now have a magic invisibility cloak on the horizon. A team at Duke University in purple NC has perfected an invisibility device they premiered in 2006.

As announced today here and here,

Scientists at Duke University have created the first invisibility cloak that perfectly hides centimeter-scale objects. While invisibility cloaks have been created before, they have all reflected some of the incident light, ruining the illusion. In this case, the incident light is perfectly channeled around the object, creating perfect invisibility.

Does a one-centimeter screen mean we'll have magic cloaks? Apparently, yes. Or at least maybe. In a few years or so.

It is now just a matter of time before visible-light, omnidirectional invisibility cloaks are created.

Somebody here will understand the stuff I don't, about metamaterials and such.

In theory, invisibility cloaks operate by bending electromagnetic waves around objects — so that instead of seeing the object, you see what’s behind the object. Negative index metamaterials get you most of the way, but they still need to be arranged in such a way that the illusion is perfect. To get around a 3D object, you have to turn a corner at some point — and previous cloaks have struggled to fashion metamaterials that bend waves around corners without causing reflections, which ruin the illusion. In this case, Nathan Landy, a graduate student at Duke University, tweaked the metamaterial itself, and then fashioned it into a diamond, which is apparently the best shape for minimizing reflections.

"Each quadrant of the cloak tended to have voids, or blind spots, at their intersections and corners with each other. After many calculations, we thought we could correct this situation by shifting each strip so that it met its mirror image at each interface," says Landy.
"We built the cloak, and it worked. It split light into two waves which traveled around an object in the center and re-emerged as the single wave with minimal loss due to reflections."

I wonder what this will cost when it first hits the market. $450K?

Anxiety and Elections Here at DKos

pianogramma

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Wednesday November 07, 2012 · 10:17 AM PST

2012/11/07 · 10:17

Yesterday a worried first-time diarist was hounded to the point of deleting his diary and posting a second diary to apologize for the first. To their credit, Kossacks quickly assured him that some of the insensitive comments arose from anxiety, as everyone was a bit stressed out.

A sarcastic diary that has been posted twice this morning by MRDFS, at 1:56 and again with a slightly different title at 9:27, and lightly Rec'd, turned my thoughts back to some comments from yesterday that I found disturbing. The diary:

Nothing about Tagg Romney's voting machines and software patches?
You mean that can't just "flip" a switch and "steal" and election?

You mean even if we only have 3 point lead in a state we can still win it?

You mean we actually have the ability to fight their voter suppression schemes and we aren't helpless victims going up against the almighty Karl Rove secret cabal.

We should always be diligent and stand up against those seeking to curb voting rights (which they do IN THE OPEN). We should learn the lessons from the past

But it's time to get over the PTSD from 2000 and 2004 and drop the conspiracy theories and the victim posture.

More below the squiggle. Read More

Minimum Age to Vote, Drink, Smoke, Marry, Fight for Your Country: Our Weird National Disconnect

pianogramma

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Tuesday November 06, 2012 · 6:51 AM PST

2012/11/06 · 06:51

Dealing with my election anxiety, which thanks to Nate Silver is more or less limited to Republican fraud and voter suppression at this point, I was reviewing the history of voting rights in this country (quick summary here). It's been years since I reflected on a major extension of voting rights in my lifetime, ratified in 1971: the lowering of the minimum age from 21 to 18, in response to outcry about the unfairness of drafting young men of 18 to fight in Vietnam when they had no say in the government that drafted them.

Oddly, as some of us thought at the time, the legal drinking age in the US remained at 21. (In conservative Austria, where I studied for six months, college-age students could legally drink beer and wine, as students could and can throughout most of Europe.) Reagan nationalized this in 1984. The drinking age is still 21 in the US, of course -- widely flouted, and despite considerable evidence that a legal age so high (we share the world's highest with a few other outliers) may be counterproductive. Also in 1971, a lot of us liked to point out the absurdity of keeping pot illegal while the three-martini lunch was a common white-collar ritual. Even today, we still hear "alcohol and drugs," as if alcohol weren't a drug. And now I read that Washington State is on the verge of legalizing small amounts of marijuana, for persons 21 and over, when the legal age for tobacco is 18.

I don't get it. We can legally operate a motor vehicle at 16; marry, addict ourselves to tobacco, die for our country, and vote at 18; but we can't legally have a beer with our burger until we turn 21? If Washington does legalize small amounts of weed (and I hope they do, though I'm the rare Boomer who can honestly say she never inhaled), welcome to another silly rule on college campuses.

Truth vs Profit in 1898 Louisiana: death from media suppression

pianogramma

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Monday November 05, 2012 · 6:44 AM PST

2012/11/05 · 06:44

My husband startlingly resembles his great-uncle Walter, or rather Walter's photo. Walter died at 28, in 1898, leaving a wife and three young children. The yellow fever that killed him had been epidemic in the region for some time, and local merchants had done everything in their power to suppress reports of it, like the fictional merchants in Jaws suppressing reports of a shark, because yellow fever was bad for business.

Here below is the story as it evolved in local newspapers. I recommend reading it with an eye to what the CDC and the FDA would look like in a Rmoney (or any other money) administration. I will spare you Walter's heartbreaking obituary.

[NOTE: I withdrew, retitled, and reposted this because I decided the first title didn't make any sense]

pianogramma

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Saturday November 03, 2012 · 2:26 PM PDT

2012/11/03 · 14:26

This is our third double rainbow since the day before the second Presidential debate.

As I diaried at 7 AM the day of the debate, the rainbow the day before struck me as a good omen for Obama/Biden, particularly when considered together with an unexpected bright shiny object I received from a crow. Well, yesterday I received another present from a crow -- a clear, shiny cap to a beverage cup. Not sure if it was the same crow (the previous pair has more company now, including one with an injured toe and one with a useless right eye, neither of whom appears to be starving), but still a good omen for Four More Years!

Climate Change in the Paranoid Mind: A New Ice Age is Coming!

pianogramma

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Thursday November 01, 2012 · 8:27 AM PDT

2012/11/01 · 08:27

The "ice age" meme has been around a long time. I recall my John Birch Society father perseverating about it during the Fifties. It has the advantage of being scary, true (several thousand years from now), and not attributable to human actions. So it's no surprise that climate change deniers love to invoke the next ice age as a reason to keep spewing carbon into the atmosphere.

For example, at a cynical outfit called Winningreen, described on its website as

a campaign communications company founded on the principle that conservative positions can win, even on issues thought to be the property of the other side. We do this by selling voters on your positions so elected officials can be confident they have the backing of their constituents.

we find retired physicist Gerald E. Marsh writing in 2012 about "The Coming of a New Ice Age" http://www.winningreen.com/...
His conclusion:

So, rather than call for arbitrary limits on carbon dioxide emissions, perhaps the best thing the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the climatology community in general could do is spend their efforts on determining the optimal range of carbon dioxide needed to extend the current interglacial period indefinitely.
NASA has predicted that the solar cycle peaking in 2022 could be one of the weakest in centuries and should cause a very significant cooling of Earth’s climate. Will this be the trigger that initiates a new Ice Age?

We ought to carefully consider this possibility before we wipe out our current prosperity by spending trillions of dollars to combat a perceived global warming threat that may well prove to be only a will-o-the-wisp.

Yes, wonderful idea, let's have more of Katrina and Sandy, only worse. Climate instability won't cost us a dime!

More below.

pianogramma

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Wednesday October 31, 2012 · 6:33 AM PDT

2012/10/31 · 06:33

Not even the stench of Sandy's sewage-filled floodwaters can drown out Romney's smelly, smelly taxes.

Calvin Johnson, the tax expert who alleges fraud in Romney's tax returns (diaried here two days ago http://www.dailykos.com/...) published a ten-page paper in Tax Notes on July 30, 2012, describing how Romney got rich, as best he can determine from the coy public record of Bain Capital http://papers.ssrn.com/.... A law professor at the University of Texas, Johnson is a product of Columbia University and Stanford Law School. He has worked in the private sector and at the US Department of Treasury. He was Visiting Professor at the Office of the Chief Counsel of the IRS in 2007, and a Fellow at the Tax Policy Center in 2011.

As he puts it in the introduction to his paper,

The increase in debt that generated Bain’s LBO [leveraged buyout fund] profits was not a very good idea from a national point of view. Corporations with a lot of debt are more fragile than corporations that get their capital through stock. Indeed, the high debt gives shareholders an incentive to move into high-risk transactions because they win when the transaction wins and they shift losses to creditors when the transactions lose. The stock becomes more valuable if the managers bet the company. When a corporation fails because of its high debt, it imposes harms on employees, suppliers, and customers who were not privy to negotiating the debt contract.
The profit from tax deductions from the LBOs is not what is meant when those who make a lot of money are praised. Pretax economic income is associated with making something people really want to buy, or reducing the cost of making or delivering it, with creating jobs and improving the wealth of the nation. The tax deductions, by contrast, are at the expense of the government dollar for dollar, without any increase in the size of the overall pie. With high deficits, the government revenue loss is probably not a good idea. Moreover, when tax deductions cause economic harm by incentivizing high debt and high risk, they reduce the wealth of the nation. Making money with more tax deductions is certainly not illegal or immoral, but it is also not what speakers mean when they speak of duty to God and country.

His letter to the editor published on Monday, October 29, 2012, asserts that Romney deeply and fraudulently undervalued his Bain assets when he transferred them into his childrens' trust and his IRA. It concludes as follows:

Romney made most of his fortune at the expense of the tax system by wiping out corporate tax on the acquired companies. Wiping out tax had nothing to do with improving operating income or jobs. Thus, he made most of his money at the expense of other current or future taxpayers, and while that may be distasteful, it was not illegal. But the misevaluation of his assets - an act which may have defrauded the federal government out of millions of dollars - is not simply playing the game: It is fraud, subject to tens of millions of dollars of penalty.
When you're asking the taxpayers to pay your future salary if you win the elective office you seek, shouldn't they have the right to know whether you've paid all your taxes?

People here at Kos and elsewhere have said more or less the same thing since Romney deigned to release his 2010 tax return. When someone with Johnson's expertise and reputation comes out and says it, Rachel ought to interview him on TRMS.

Lawless Greed plus East Coast Hurricane: The Lost Colony of 1590

pianogramma

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Tuesday October 30, 2012 · 10:58 AM PDT

2012/10/30 · 10:58

Watching entitled equity pirate Mitt Romney pretend to care about victims of Hurricane Sandy, after tall ship HMS Bounty sank in the Atlantic, I was reminded just how far back our roots go, here in North America, of white men flouting legal authority and common sense for the sake of unadulterated greed, with disastrous results for their country. It was because of rapacious delay by a ship's crew and a rip-roaring windstorm on our eastern seaboard that England lost (to follow-up, at least) an entire colony of men, women, and children.

One of my hobbies (surprisingly for a person who hated history in high school) is genealogy in historical context. I love reading handwriting from the 1600's and 1700's. Recently because of my husband's roots in early 1600's Virginia, I delved into the history of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island. From what I gleaned, it wouldn't have been lost if England and Spain weren't killing each other over gold and timber, and if English privateers weren't out there primarily to enrich themselves at others' expense.

Below the orange squiggly, for anyone who's interested, is the footnote-free summary I put together, from 1584 through Walter Raleigh's beheading in 1618, to a sighting of white Tuscarora near what is now Tarboro NC in 1696.

pianogramma

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Monday October 29, 2012 · 3:08 PM PDT

2012/10/29 · 15:08

In case you missed this by Zach Carter at Huffington today (Oct 29, 2012) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... "respected tax attorney and deficit hawk" Calvin Johnson has outlined his suspicion of major tax fraud by Mitt Romney, in a letter to the editor of Tax Notes (full text below the orange squiggly).

The letter, by University of Texas Law School Professor Calvin Johnson, focuses on two trusts Romney has set up: one for his children, which is worth over $100 million, and an $87 million retirement trust. These trusts have grown at an enormous rate -- Johnson notes that they have been more than 10 times as profitable as Warren Buffett's investments over the same time frame. Johnson writes that Romney may have played fast and loose with the law by undervaluing Bain Capital assets that were contributed to the trusts. By undervaluing the assets, Romney could avoid paying gift taxes.

Quoting from the letter,

Misvaluation of that order of magnitude is subject to a penalty of 400 percent of the tax at issue, without regard to the subjective state of mind of the contributor. For Romney, the misevaluation penalty would be many tens of millions of dollars.

For the few voters who haven't made up their minds, this sounds like a timely reminder that Romney's 2009 tax return probably contains information that disqualifies him from the Presidency.

I have posted Johnson's full letter below the squiggly. He also sent me an article supporting the basis for his allegation of fraud. Free download at http://papers.ssrn.com/...

pianogramma

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Monday October 29, 2012 · 6:37 AM PDT

2012/10/29 · 06:37

I want

...a President who can bluff and dissemble when necessary to deal with America's enemies

...a President who can shade the truth for the public good, to get legislation passed or to get a point across

...a President who can attack and "go negative" when necessary to protect his/her agenda

...a President who can take a bargaining position that exceeds his/her idea of a reasonable compromise.

I also want

...a President who can be trusted to level with the American people

...a President whose word means something on the international stage

...a President who encourages transparency at all levels of government, at home and abroad

...a President who qualifies for Top Secret clearance without a special exemption

...a President who doesn't profit financially, "blind" or otherwise, from investments that harm American workers

...a President who doesn't siphon money from the US Treasury via secret overseas tax shelters

...a President who can apologize when he/she has erred or strayed too far from the truth.

It's that simple.

Trust matters. It cuts across jobs, the economy, education, women's rights, war or peace, the environment, you name it.

I'm voting for Barack Obama. I wouldn't vote for Mitt Romney if he offered me a million dollars.

Sandy as God's Will (not)

pianogramma

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Sunday October 28, 2012 · 9:22 AM PDT

2012/10/28 · 09:22

Remember how in 2005 the religious right blamed Hurricane Katrina on abortion and gays, calling it a punishment from God?

Less than two weeks after the Hurricane, Pat Robertson implied on the September 12th broadcast of The 700 Club that the Hurricane was God's punishment in response to America's abortion policy. He suggested that 9/11 and the disaster in New Orleans "could... be connected in some way".[8] Steve Lefemine expressed a similar view, stating that "In my belief, God judged New Orleans for the sin of shedding innocent blood through abortion.... Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.... Greater divine judgment is coming upon America unless we repent of the national sin of abortion."[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Also see http://mediamatters.org/...

Well, since everything including rape pregnancies is the will of their "all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful" god, you can bet the likes of Ryan, Mourdock, Akin and Santorum will be all over Sandy if somehow Romney lies his way to a win. But Sandy won't be god's will if Obama wins, because these folks are mind-blowingly selective in their use of biblical tropes.

The Extreme "Pro Life" Position as a Psychological Defense

pianogramma

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Friday October 26, 2012 · 1:21 PM PDT

2012/10/26 · 13:21

My father, a strict 1930's Catholic, was an officer in the John Birch Society, as I've mentioned elsewhere. Shortly before President Kennedy's assassination, when I was 14, he told me privately in all seriousness that the country was doomed if somebody didn't kill Kennedy. His position on abortion was exactly the same as Mourdock's, minus Mourdock's self-described "struggle" over rape and Mourdock's exception for the life of the mother.

My father also hated his mother, not that he would have admitted this in so many words, and not that she didn't deserve it in certain ways. Of his five daughters, the one he abused most severely, both physically and emotionally (to the point that she ran off at 18 and married the unemployed, confabulating sociopath who still controls her), was the one who inherited his mother's looks and temperament. He emotionally abused my passive, complicit mother on a daily basis. But it wasn't cut-and-dried misogyny or sexism, because when my high school tried to elevate a boy to valedictorian over two girls with higher GPA's, on grounds that it was natural for boys to be above girls, my father went roaring up there and demanded fairness for his daughter (me, trembling at the prospect of being forced to give a speech).

More below the burnt orange squiggly.

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Science Achieves Fiction: "Perfect" Invisibility Cloak

Anxiety and Elections Here at DKos

Minimum Age to Vote, Drink, Smoke, Marry, Fight for Your Country: Our Weird National Disconnect

Truth vs Profit in 1898 Louisiana: death from media suppression

Omen Update: Crows and Rainbows

Climate Change in the Paranoid Mind: A New Ice Age is Coming!

Mitt Romney, Tax Revenue Pirate

Lawless Greed plus East Coast Hurricane: The Lost Colony of 1590

Tax Expert Smells a Rat in Romney's Taxes, calls it "fraud" -- UPDATE x 2

I want a President who can bluff and dissemble

Sandy as God's Will (not)

The Extreme "Pro Life" Position as a Psychological Defense