Antimatter matters

One of the biggest mysteries of physics (and life, the universe, and everything)  is this: why is anything even here?

In physics, the question crops up at two levels. First, why did the Big Bang happen? Second, once the Big Bang did happen, matter and antimatter were, per theory, created in equal quantities. So: why didn't the universe's matter and antimatter eradicate each other and leave behind nothing but energy? 

(I'm not complaining that we're here. Merely puzzled.)

Cyber war

If you visit this blog with any regularity, you'll know that I'm a technophile. That said, for all the many wondrous things technology offers, it also creates new ways to become vulnerable. One vulnerability I particularly monitor is attacks on our increasingly networked infrastructure.

Recent years have offered inklings of cyber warfare. 

• In 2007, after Russia took umbrage over Estonia removing a Soviet-era war memorial, Estonia blamed Russia for a massive denial-of-service attack on government servers.
• In 2008, the Georgian government claimed Russian cyber attacks accompanied the more visible aggression of bombings and troop incursions.
• In 2010, Google and many other American companies were attacked by Chinese hackers. Almost immediately the rumor was that at least the attack on Google was geopolitically motivated, orchestrated by the Chinese government. A recent WikiLeaks data dump of American diplomatic cables backs the theory of Chinese leadership involvement. And it was Google who hacked right back, although as far as I've read, the counter hack was (perhaps wisely) limited to collecting evidence.
• A case can be made that the 2010 WikiLeak disclosures were a form of nongovernmental  cyber war waged against the U.S. government (and/or other governments whose laundry was aired by these leaks).  See "Why WikiLeaks Is Unlike the Pentagon Papers."

Getting smashed

No, not a New Year's Eve hangover retrospective.  Rather, reflections on the near-term prospects for particle accelerators (what in my youth we called atom smashers).

UPDATED FEBRUARY 1, 2011

First came word that the brand-new, scarcely operational Large Hadron Collider would will shut down for maintenance throughout 2012. Then CERN, the trans-European organization that runs the LHC, announced the shutdown will last more than a year and that they'll also be shutting down the rest of their accelerators in 2012.

UPDATE (2/1/2011): CERN has reconsidered. The LHC will continue running in 2012. Yea!

Now comes word that FermiLab plans to turn off the Tevatron later this year.

Head in the clouds

One of the hottest ideas in information technology these days is "cloud computing."

The expression originates in an early Internet convention: customer-centric drawings that showed detail of Internet connectivity only at the end points. That is, you're likely to care how your computer (or phone) connects to the Internet. You're likely to care about the server that's providing a function to you. And the gear that lies between? The redundant components and fail-over mechanisms and keen in-the-background software that make the Internet resilient? For most end users, not so much.

To network engineers, those "between" things -- routers and comm links and protocol stacks and specialty servers for background functions like domain-name look-ups -- are, collectively, "the cloud." And so, many a network diagram (like the one nearby) shows connections into and out of a featureless cloud.

Spacing out

As the year wraps up, some miscellaneous space news ...

One of the most fascinating results to come from the Apollo program concerned the longstanding puzzle of the origins of Earth's moon. (Our moon is anomalous, most visibly because it is so large compared to the planet it orbits.) The conclusion, based upon rock samples collected on the lunar surface: the moon likely resulted from the cataclysmic collision of a Mars-sized object with the (then very young) Earth.

This year's semi-related news item concerns Phobos, Mars's largest (but still tiny) moon. (The nearby picture is a [color-enhanced] image of Phobos taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.) Phobos likely formed from a smaller impact with Mars itself.

The space-shuttle fleet will be retired in 2011. For the foreseeable future, the US will have to pay the Russians for crew rides to the International Space Station. As disappointing as is that situation (I've commented on it before), at least getting supplies to the International Space Station aboard American spacecraft just became more credible with the successful test flight of Space-X's Dragon.

History sniffing

My concern/dismay(/obsession?) about privacy -- or modern lack thereof -- has been fed again ...

It seems that the websites you visit can access (through your browser) the history of other websites you've visited. The practice is called "history sniffing," and I, for one, find it disturbing.

Ring(world) around the betrayer

(Updated December 14th)

The release (last October) of Betrayer of Worlds led to several interview requests, which Larry and I divvied up.  For those of you curious about things like how the book came to be written, how we work together, or about Larry's massively award-winning Ringworld -- to which Betrayer (and the rest, so far, of the Fleet of Worlds series) is a prelude -- here are a few items that you may find interesting:

Of cabbages and kings

The time has come, the blogger said, to talk of many things.  You guessed it: another potpourri posting.

JAXA, the Japanese space agency, has lost contact with its Venus Climate Orbiter. Perhaps this is only a temporary setback. JAXA's recent success with an asteroid-sample return mission shows what can be accomplished with perseverance (and a fault tolerant design)(and luck).

(This image, if you wondered, is a radar map of Venus composited from data captured by NASA's Magellan probe). 

But wait, there's (much) more!