Maybe the Mayans had it right ;-)

Submitted for your approval ...

"VW agrees to kick the "Crackberry" habit": Is it a harbinger of sanity or an omen of pending doom?

"Will China Break?" as Paul Krugman suggests? Or will the bull safely exit the porcelain emporium?

While teams of particle physicists feverishly search for a needle in a haystack's worth of haystacks, one physicist spends $2,600 for a custom Lego kit to build a 9,500-piece scale model of CERN's Atlas (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) detector -- part of the hunt for the Higgs boson. Heavy.

From the Department of Don't Believe Everything You Read, be sure to read "Doh! Top Science Journal Retractions of 2011."

Cosmic greetings of the season

WISE Presents a Cosmic Wreath

(But as with Arthur C. Clarke's classic short story "The Star," you wouldn't want be in the neighborhood when the show began ...)

Cyberwar heats up

Did you find my January cyberwar post futuristic?  If so, the future is now.

From AP (via Yahoo News), here's an item from security firm McAfee: "Report: Global cyberattack under way for 5 years." To begin: 

... cybercriminals have spent at least the past five years targeting more than 70 government entities, nonprofit groups and corporations around the world to steal troves of data.

 McAfee Inc. said in a report Wednesday that the attacks have targeted a broad range of organizations, including the United Nations, the International Olympic Committee and companies mostly in the United States.

McAfee did not say who may be behind the attacks but says the culprit is likely a nation state.

Cul de sac

My life is crazy-busy these days. So: what better time than today to share a few of the more interesting items from my web-clippings file?

Remember the 1993 movie Six Degrees of Separation? Neither do I. Regardless, the Kevin Bacon game proves too easy. See "Facebook Claims 4.74 Degrees of Kevin Bacon."

As the Eurozone and the EU itself crumple, Brussels bureaucrats took the time to tackle a vital consumer-protection issue. See "Europe's ruling on water preventing dehydration – another 'angels dancing on the head of a pin' moment."

(That topic has a certain Douglas Adams feel about it, does it not? How soon can we expect new workplace protections for telephone mouthpiece sanitizers?)

But truly exciting -- and now I'm not being sarcastic -- is a recent initiative of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. To wit: "Darpa seeks nanotechnology defense against novel pathogens." Consider:

Where credit is due

Unless this is your first visit -- in which case, "Hi!" -- you likely know that I'm a onetime physicist and computer engineer, and that I remain interested in science and technology.

It continually amazes me how few people I meet have any interest in either subject area.

Admittedly, seemingly esoteric things can fascinate me. (Like whether, as recent experiments suggest, neutrinos can travel faster than light. Like the nature of dark energy: a label of convenience for our present state of ignorance, not an explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe.)

But my fascination with the cutting edge of science isn't why others' disinterest in science and tech surprises -- and, yes, saddens -- me. Come. Travel with me to my youth.

Energizing! Explosive! Not to mention, Millennial!

Publishers and authors work on different time lines. And so, two books completed nine months apart can -- and in this case, will -- be published one month apart. Just a few days ago, covers for both new novels (covers that, with total objectivity, I think are keen) appeared on Amazon. The covers having gone public, I thought: why not show off them off here?

First up: Energized, a near-future technothriller about energy shortages, alternate-energy sources, and the assets available to us in space. The large foreground object -- if you weren't certain -- is a solar power satellite. (Aside to Analog-reading visitors: this novel is an updated version of the recently concluded serial of the same name.)

Look for Energized in July 2012.  (I'll have more to say here about the novel as that date approaches.)

Hacked off

It's not only me.  The list of folks being hacked -- about which we all should be hacked off -- is depressingly long. And no, this post isn't about the latest sorry litany of identity thefts or compromises of credit-card databases (as maddening as those incidents are).

It's about matters far worse.

A major factor in my novel Fools' Experiments (2008) was a hostile entity -- in this case, an artificial intelligence -- wreaking havoc on the physical world via the Internet. Born to cyberspace, the AI didn't understand the physical world, but -- justifiably ticked off, for reasons I won't go into here -- it undertook to compromise networked resources that it found to be well-protected. Someone obviously valued them.

If only network-accessible resources were well protected ...

Fast-forward merely three years. From PC Magazine: "Illinois Water Utility Pump Destroyed After Hack." On the same incident, also see, from Physorg.com: "Foreign cyber attack hits US infrastructure: expert."

And the SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) interface that provided the hacker with access to the physical-world pump? SCADA devices are common things -- widely at risk, at least in principle, to more such meddling.

Time traveling -- the old-fashioned way

None of us can travel to the past (as I've blogged: Trope-ing the light fantastic (time travel)), but that doesn't stop a person from wondering ....

I recently vacationed in England -- that's the Houses of Parliament to the left -- and my sightseeing tended toward the historical. Not exactly time travel, to be sure, but it sure carried my imagination far into the past. And I brought home some great (IMO) photos to help carry you there: