A team at Purdue University needed to generate a string of random numbers, a surprisingly tricky task that is complicated by the fact that whatever method you use to generate the numbers will have some influence on them. Physics professor Ephraim Fischbach decided to use the decay of radioactive isotopes as a source of randomness. Although the overall decay is a known constant, the individual atoms would decay in unpredictable ways, providing a random pattern.

That's when they discovered something strange. The data produced gave random numbers for the individual atoms, yes, but the overall decay wasn't constant, flying in the face of the accepted rules of chemistry. Intrigued, they checked out long range observations of silicon-32 and radium-226 decay, both of which showed a slight but definite variation over time. Intriguingly, the decay seemed to vary with the seasons, with the rate a little faster in the winter and a little slower in the summer.

At first, the researchers tried to rationalize the seasonal fluctuations as the result of instrument error, perhaps caused by changing heat and humidity. But that idea fell apart when nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins noticed the decay rate of the short-lived isotope manganese-54 dropped slightly during a solar flare. In fact, the decrease began a good 36 hours before the flare occurred.

Alasdair Wilkins

Am I wrong in thinking that Pakistan has minimal US or world concern? As opposed to like...New Orleans or even Haiti? http://huff.to/aQ0UoD

SageFrancisSFR

It's not clear how broadly the order was communicated. Some officers who heard it say they refused to carry it out. Others say they understood it as a fundamental change in the standards on deadly force, which allow police to fire only to protect themselves or others from what appears to be an imminent physical threat.

The accounts of orders to "shoot looters," "take back the city," or "do what you have to do" are fragmentary. It remains unclear who originated them or whether they were heard by any of the officers involved in shooting 11 civilians in the days after Katrina. Thus far, no officers implicated in shootings have used the order as an explanation for their actions. Only one of the people shot by police - Henry Glover - was allegedly stealing goods at the time he was shot.

Still, current and former officers said the police orders - taken together with tough talk from top public officials broadcast over the airwaves -- contributed to an atmosphere of confusion about how much force could be used to combat looting.

Sabrina Shankman, Tom Jennings, Brendan McCarthy, Laura Maggi, A.C. Thompson

During the Katrina disaster, victims were perceived as criminal vermin by media, law enforcement, and the military. It was never quite clear how starving people would get very far swimming down the road with big screen TVs, but for a time that concern was seen as more important than people simply trying to eat or drink fresh water.

Atrios

His email is peppered with exclamation points and condescension. At one point he urged Carson to read a certain graph, "which I hope you are able to discern if you are any good at reading graphs."

Simpson concludes by implying that leading a major organization dedicated to the interests of middle-aged and elderly women is not "honest work."

"If you have some better suggestions about how to stabilize Social Security instead of just babbling into the vapors, let me know," he writes. "And yes, I've made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know 'em too. It's the same with any system in America. We've reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million tits! Call when you get honest work!"

Ryan Grim

I can appreciate the White House's difficulties when shaping the deficit commission's membership. The goal was to find credible, knowledgeable, sincere officials -- "elder statesman" types, I suppose -- who'd be willing to work in good faith on a bipartisan compromise. It was deemed important for President Obama to choose two co-chairs, one from each party, and all things being equal, Simpson probably seemed like a reasonable choice.

It's unfortunate, but the "bench" of serious Republicans available for a role like this one is depressingly thin.

Six months later, though, it seems increasingly clear that Simpson lacks the judgment and temperament for the job.

Steve Benen

Analysts at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore Labs have run the numbers on the US energy use in 2009, and come up with similar results to those obtained when examining the country's carbon emissions: energy use is dropping at a pace that is faster than would be expected based on the slowing economy alone. Even better, the growth in renewable energy, coupled with increased use of natural gas, is displacing significant amounts of coal. …

According to the Livermore analysts, both economics and higher-efficiency appliances and vehicles helped push down the energy use last year, dropping consumption from 2008's 99 Quads. Coal and petroleum use both declined significantly (coal was down by 10 percent), with more efficient vehicles accounting for much of the latter. Lowered electricity use accounted for much of coal's drop, as did displacement by natural gas. But total natural gas use also dropped, at least in part because solar, hydro, and geothermal power all increased slightly, and wind power increased significantly. It's now at 0.7 Quads, and on pace to clear a full Quad within the next couple of years.

John Timmer

I think a key to AI is the need for several representations of the knowledge, such that when the system is stuck (using one representation) it can jump to use another. When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.

Marvin Minsky

A recurring theme in my blog is my belief that we must become renaissance men -- a unison of *nix hackers, vision scientists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, athletes, machine learning scientists, skilled orators, and much more -- if we are to have any hope of chiseling away at the problem of computational intelligence.

Tomasz Malisiewicz

After dutifully reporting even the smallest profits on their tax filings this year, a number -- though no one knows exactly what that number is -- of Philadelphia bloggers were dispatched letters informing them that they owe $300 for a privilege license, plus taxes on any profits they made. …

Even though small-time bloggers aren't exactly raking in the dough, the city requires privilege licenses for any business engaged in any "activity for profit," says tax attorney Michael Mandale of Center City law firm Mandale Kaufmann. This applies "whether or not they earned a profit during the preceding year," he adds.

So even if your blog collects a handful of hits a day, as long as there's the potential for it to be lucrative -- and, as Mandale points out, most hosting sites set aside space for bloggers to sell advertising -- the city thinks you should cut it a check. According to Andrea Mannino of the Philadelphia Department of Revenue, in fact, simply choosing the option to make money from ads -- regardless of how much or little money is actually generated -- qualifies a blog as a business.

Valerie Rubinsky

Conning homeowners by announcing a government program designed to help them when in fact it was designed to help the banksters is, in my world, "cruel."

Atrios

The reason I focus on HAMP is that it is entirely the administration's baby. They didn't need to get President Snowe or Lord High Everything Else Baucus on board, or reassure Vice President Lieberman that hippies would hate it sufficiently. They used TARP money, and it was the main portion of the TARP funds that were supposed to be used to help people instead of banksters. They could have done just about anything with the allocated funds, and instead they barely even spent any of them. I actually don't believe this was their initial intention, but it's the line that they themselves are running with in declaring victory so who am I to disagree.

Atrios

Was HAMP a bait-and-switch? Did Treasury know all along that it was likely to fail in its stated aim, but go ahead with it anyway because of its second-order effects? That seems to be the message they're sending -- that HAMP was a way of encouraging owners to apply for loan modifications, not because they were likely to get those modifications, but just because the sheer fact of applying for the modifications would help out homeowners generally, by reducing the rate of foreclosures, and banks too.

At the same time, I find it hard to believe that Obama personally was quite that cynical when he announced HAMP. And even within Treasury, I suspect that there was rather more hopefulness and rather less cynicism than the present viewpoint would suggest. On the other hand, if Treasury really did think at the time what it's thinking now, Atrios is right. It's undeniably cruel to raise people's hopes like that if you know those hopes will end up being dashed.

Felix Salmon

It has come to this: Parents are now being asked to send their children to school with their own toilet paper. And not just toilet paper, but all sorts of basic items that schools themselves used to provide for kids. It's all part of a disturbing trend, highlighted by the New York Times last week, of cash-strapped public schools -- their budgets eviscerated by state cutbacks -- shifting more and more financial responsibility onto parents.

Privatization meant transferring responsibility for entire programs or functions to the private sector. But with the drastic budget cuts that states have been forced to make, responsibility for public services and programs is literally being forced into private hands one roll of toilet paper at a time. We've entered the era of backdoor privatization.

On the surface, these stop-gap measures don't seem unreasonable. After all, it's hardly new for parents in well-off school districts to chip in for supplies, music classes and even teacher's salaries in an effort to minimize the effect of school budget cuts on their children. What is new, though, is the extent to which families are being asked to contribute basic items. This may be too much to ask of parents who are struggling to pay their own bills -- especially since they've already paid taxes that are supposed to support the public school system.

Alyssa Battistoni

Because nothing says 'superpower' like when your public schools can't afford toilet paper

NatashaChart

The future does not happen in America anymore.

Sean Paul Kelley

In the early '70s, as the trade towers were nearing completion, Saudi Arabia was awash in oil revenues, and the state embarked on a massive modernization and building campaign. Yamasaki was premier among the many foreign architects hired during this period. Unwilling to take on too much work, Yamasaki decided to accept just three choice projects in Saudi Arabia: the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency head office, the Eastern Province International Airport, and the King Fahd Royal Reception Pavilion at Jeddah Airport. In all three projects he continued his explorations in melding traditional Islamic form with modern materials, methods, and functions.

As a scion of the Binladin contracting firm, destined to inherit some portion of its vast operations, Osama Bin Laden would certainly have been aware of Yamasaki's Saudi Arabian projects. Indeed, his family may have built them. (Minoru Yamasaki Associates won't say, but the Binladens were involved with almost all royal construction.) While Osama was in college in the mid-'70s, Yamasaki was designing his second generation of Saudi work, and the World Trade Center--then the tallest building in the world times two--came to completion in New York. This period was the high-water mark both for Yamasaki's world reputation and for the Saudis' national construction plan--which in Saudi Arabia must have brought a heightened sense of importance to the World Trade Center.

Having rejected modernism and the Saudi royal family, it's no surprise that Bin Laden would turn against Yamasaki's work in particular. He must have seen how Yamasaki had clothed the World Trade Center, a monument of Western capitalism, in the raiment of Islamic spirituality. Such mixing of the sacred and the profane is old hat to us--after all, Cass Gilbert's classic Woolworth Building, dubbed the Cathedral to Commerce, is decked out in extravagant Gothic regalia. But to someone who wants to purify Islam from commercialism, Yamasaki's implicit Mosque to Commerce would be anathema. To Bin Laden, the World Trade Center was probably not only an international landmark but also a false idol.

Laurie Kerr

An Indian entrepreneur is relaunching the famous East India Company with the opening of a luxury food store in London on Saturday.

The event takes place on the same day that - more than 135 years ago - the company was dissolved.

At the height of its power, the East India Company controlled large parts of India with its own armed forces.

But it was disbanded after soldiers of the company's own army rose in revolt against the British in 1857.

A tiny rump of the company lived on, however, consisting of its trading name and a small tea and coffee concern.

This shadow of what was once a global trading power was acquired in 2005 by Indian businessman Sanjiv Mehta, who has turned it into a consumer brand focused on luxury foodstuffs.

BBC

One team whose point of view will remain unshaken by the Bibi Aisha report are analysts for the CIA's "Red Cell," an office created after 9/11 by the Director of Intelligence and charged with finding "outside-the-box" solutions to problems. The group's brainstorming sessions to shore up war support were exposed in last month's dump of 76,000 files by WikiLeaks hacker Julian Assange.

Aryn Baker, like a number of others in the embedded press corps, shrugged off the material in the leak. Writing in Time, she contrasted the WikiLeaks files with real war reporting, calling the secret memos unreliable. "The data are raw, unfiltered and unqualified," she wrote in a Time piece exploring reports that the Pakistan intelligence service is working against NATO, and said that on this issue, "[t]aken as a whole, they are about as useful as Googling..."

Okay. But one item that Time has left you to Google for yourself -- perhaps owing to its rawness -- is the March 11, 2010 memorandum from the Red Cell problem-solving group. This time the issue at hand was faltering public support of the war and the solution was promoting women's horror stories. Subtitling their memo "Why Counting On Apathy Might Not Be Enough," the agents warned that sending more soldiers to Afghanistan threatened to outrage the French and German publics. "Indifference might turn into active hostility," they wrote, especially if soldiers and civilians die. The fix? Instead of using generals in desert camo as the face of the NATO mission, use oppressed Afghan women. These victims could make "ideal messengers," the analysts wrote, "in humanizing the ISAF [NATO International Security Assistance Force] role in combating the Taliban because of women's ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory." The report also urged that these stories be pitched to TV shows with large female audiences.

After the WikiLeaks dump, the Red Cell's phone numbers given in the memo no longer worked and the Red Cell could not be reached for comment.

John Gorenfeld

Ads in e-books? The very thought of it might make most of us want to cry, while visions of dollar signs dance in the heads of the advertising-inclined. But Dartmouth professor Ron Adner and former book editor William Vincent write in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that it's inevitable. The book's shift to a medium that can be continually updated, they say, provides the perfect platform and opportunity for advertisers. Especially if you've been considering taking the plunge into e-reading, this prediction might give you pause. Adrianne Jeffries of ReadWriteWeb makes a point that has been brought up by GMSV readers before: "E-books aren't a possession. You can't lend an e-book to a friend. Amazon can even cause your e-book to disappear to disappear from your e-library." But it's almost beside the point in this context. We buy magazines with ads in them. We pay admission for movies at theaters that force us to sit through commercials first. We don't ask this lightly: Are books really more sacred?

Levi Sumagaysay

The moment one ad shows up in my Kindle or iPad reader I will never again buy another e-book.

Jaysus-fuck: is nothing sacred anymore?

Wait, don't answer that.

Sean Paul Kelley

Schmitt, wanting to side with his Pentagon friends, publicly suggested that Assange was lying when he claimed that he offered to allow the Government to suggest redcations, even as Schmitt himself acknowledged that "Assange wrote that WikiLeaks would consider recommendations made by the International Security Assistance Force 'on the identification of innocents for this material if it is willing to provide reviewers'," an offer Schmitt says he conveyed to the White House. In other words, Schmitt defended the Pentagon's denials that Assange made this offer even as he himself described the very events which proved Assange was telling the truth. At the very least, WikiLeaks clearly indicated its willingness to have government officials review the documents and make recommendations about redactions -- something those officials refused to do.

Exactly the same thing is happening now concerning the 15,000 remaining documents which WikiLeaks originally withheld in order to engage in "harm minimization." On Wednesday, Newsweek's Mark Hosenball wrote an article -- entitled "Pentagon Says WikiLeaks Is Fibbing" -- which quotes DoD officials essentially calling Assange a liar (again) because of Assange's "latest claims about alleged attempts he has made to establish some kind of working relationship, or at least cordial contact, with U.S. defense authorities." Hosenball repeatedly quotes these officials insisting that, contrary to Assange's claims, WikiLeaks has made no efforts to communicate with the Pentagon about obtaining help in redacting the rest of the documents in order to protect innocent Afghans.

But yesterday, WikiLeaks released a letter -- dated August 16 (two days before the Newsweek article) -- which makes clear that WikiLeaks did exactly that which DoD officials denied they did: namely, they asked DoD for help redacting these remaining documents. That letter, written by DoD Legal Counsel Jeh Charles Johnson to WikiLeak's counsel, Timothy Matusheski, explicitly recounts -- contrary to the emphatic denials in Newsweek -- that WikiLeaks' lawyer had contacted the Pentagon and requested help in the "harm minimization" process. The DoD, however, is explicitly refusing to offer any help whatsoever

Glenn Greenwald

I've found in life that when I am wrong the best thing to do is just come right out and admit it.

Here goes: I was wrong. Wikileaks, based on the evidence that the DoD has presented, did its level best to work with the DoD to redact any names that might harm innocent Afghans. The Pentagon not only lied about it, but has even refused to cooperate going forward

The blood, if there is to be any, is on the Pentagon's hands. It's that simple.

Sean Paul Kelley

I realize he's just a dirty blogger, so this mea culpa can't be accepted without a full ethics panel investigation, but I'll go out on a limb to say that it appears that he's doing the right thing and being civil and gracious about it.

mistermix

A marijuana farm in western Canada has been raided by police, but officers were left shocked when they found bears guarding it.

Around 13 black bears strolled around the fields but police soon realised that they showed no signs of aggressive behaviour and were in fact tame. …

Royal Canadian Mounted Police sergeant Fred Mansvield, said: 'They (the bears) were tame, they just sat around watching.

'At one point one of the bears climbed onto the hood of a police car, sat there for a bit and then jumped off.'

Jessica Satherley

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann