We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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As is rather common in Belfast, it was cloudy earlier this evening. Even so, I laid the latest two issues of Sky and Telescope out on the bed, open to the sky map pages. I tried to interpolate where Mars would be tonight. The charts are basically for the East Coast USA, so they aren’t quite right for my considerably different longitude and latitude.
I needn’t have bothered.
Somewhat after midnight the clouds parted. I pulled on a jumper against the chill of the night. I went out into the too well lit parking lot hoping to navigate my way around the sky based on what ever made it through the glare. It’s not as bad as being in the city centre, but the sky glow here is still considerable.
I found Cygnus. Then I started looking for where I thought the plane of the ecliptic should be. Over in the general direction of the Belfast City Airport there appeared to be a plane in the pattern, and the brightness of its’ lights were an annoyance while looking for…. HOLY SHIT!!!
That was when I realized just how bright Mars is. I’ve seen oppositions before, but nothing remotely like this. The various astronomical news items have been just words. One suggested Mars might be bright enough to throw a dim shadow if you are in a sufficiently dark place. Another said Mars is nearer and brighter than it has been since Neanderthals were hunting Wooly Mammoths in Europe.
You really can’t miss it.
The September Astronomy issue reports what may be a cosmological bombshell. Time is continuous. It is not quantized. There is no such thing as an ‘instant’ of time, only a continuim. This makes the paper I discussed a few weeks ago look even more interesting than it did then.
The test is quite an elegant one. Light waves from a distant source exhibit fringes called an Airy disk. This is a set of rings around a central bright point with an appearance much like a Fresnel lens.
If we assume time is discrete, there are definable instants a quantum or Planck time interval apart. The speed of light in a vacuum becomes slightly fuzzy rather than exact. Photons that leave a source at the ‘same’ time would go out of phase by a small amount as they travel because some would travel slightly faster than others.
The theoretically proposed smallest time interval (the Planck time) is incredibly short. Phase slippage could not possibly be detected unless the light had travelled for an almost unimagineably long time: such as from a very distant galaxy. If time is quantized, the slippage in the phases should fuzz out the Airy disks of such distant objects.
Astronomers found sharp Airy disks. QED: time is not quantized. The work has already been replicated and seems fairly solid.
I await the theoretical fallout with great interest.
Last week we had a rather stiff debate on the downsides of Coalition policing in Iraq here, here and here.
In this post Salam Pax responded to a recent email. He could just as well have been reading and responding to the comments of many of our readers. Go read it.
As for me, the more I read, the more I like the guy. I hope someday we will either have the honour of his presence at a Samizdata London Blogger Bash, or an opportunity to sit an afternoon in a Baghdad cafe with him… sipping only culturally allowable beverages of course!
If you like your music with a positive, pro-technology and pro-future outlook, ZIA is the band for you.
ZIA has gigged successfully in the competitive New York City scene for nearly a decade. They have had their Rite of Passage: a review by The Village Voice. They developed a following and produced a number of excellent recordings. You can download a bunch of tracks from their web site and order any of the discography.
ZIA is 1990’s music, full of sythesizers and strange instruments. If you aren’t a cultural “old fart”, you’ll love it. Even if you are, you may still love the subject matter. They talk about settling Mars, going back to the Moon, winning the X-Prize and about the simple yearning of all us spacers… to get off this frigging planet. True, ‘filkers’ cover some of the same ground, but they and their material are not suitable for a Lower East music venue. Kids who haven’t even looked up at the seven or so stars in the nightime sky of Manhattan can drink and party to ZIA.
Full disclosure: I’m not exactly unbiased since I know the writer, Elaine Walker, and work with her in the National Space Society. Remember her name. Someday she’ll be running an industrial conglomerate in space.
ZIA performance at 1999 International Space Development Conference
Photo: D. Amon, all rights reserved
PS: I understand Elaine is moving out of NYC, so I don’t know what is happening with the band. Watch their web site. I’m sure the information will show up there.
According to the new FBI statistics, violent crime in the US just keeps falling. It’s down 50% in the last decade.
“Right to carry” laws also became very common in the last decade. There couldn’t possibly be a connection could there?
I have several items in my list of ‘stories to watch’ on the Iraq campaign. The silence on two of them has been deafening. They are dogs ‘that didn’t bark’.
- What is the story on the Iraqi Salman Pak training facility? That is where an old Boeing 707 airframe was seen from overhead photography. Ground truth reports said it was used to train terrorists in the fine art of hijacking. What has been found there? Why hasn’t it been reported on? Why hasn’t someone from the army of Baghdad news correspondents been out to the suburbs to tell us?
- Where in hell are those ships? You know the ones I’m talking about. Osama’s fleet. In March we heard how they were floating around the world’s oceans and changing name and flag in mid voyage. Other reports suggested they might carry weaponry Saddam wanted both preserved and not found.
The latter seems to have slipped entirely into the black world. Did a Navy Seal team board and sink them with all hands dead?
Stories don’t go away in the blogosphere. They aren’t forgotten. They’ll keep popping up until satisfactory answers are found. Perhaps someone in ‘big media’, someone with resource enough for real intelligence work, can dig for the facts.
The truth is out there.
I read an article over on Fox News which does as a good a job explaining media bias as any I’ve seen.
22 engineers and technicians died instantly in an explosion on the pad. This is the worst pad accident since the Nedelin disaster in Russia in 1960.
The X-Prize entry from Armadillo Aerospace is coming along nicely. They’ve carried out a helicopter drop test. They’ve acquired a Russian space suit – sans gloves so far – from eBay. They’ve got the landing legs sorted. Most importantly, they have finally sourced more high purity 50% Hydrogen Peroxide. They are still having difficulties convincing the manufacturer (FMC) to sell them the hi-test rocket fuel grade. Nonetheless, this lets them continue the engine test series so they can solve problems identified in an earlier firing.
Armadillo Aerospace was created by John Carmack, one of the founders of Id Software. If you want to support private enterprise in space, buy their games! Of course, since they are the creators of such titles as “Wolfenstein”, “Doom” and “Quake”, you probably have already done so.
X-Prize entry under construction
Photo: Courtesy Armadillo Aerospace
Tax greed is running rampant in California these days. The Statists have managed to, if not quite kill, make the golden goose quite ill. Revenues are falling and they have no way to fund more welfare for politicians and bureaucrats. They need a new victim – one that has not yet been bled to within an inch of its’ life.
The American Indians are in their sights once again. Over the last decade or so many tribes have gone from rags to riches. They’ve done it the old fashioned American way: capitalism. Some of this may be due to the leadership of people like American Indian Movement leader Russell Means, although I cannot state that as proven fact.
Russell’s imposing warrior’s frame is well known in the Libertarian community: he ran against Ron Paul for the 1988 LP Presidential slot. He lost the nomination but gave a memorable concession speech, spiced with his signature line, “Individual liberty; Individual Responsibility”. His after-the-vote party was also much more fun than Ron’s… almost as much fun as a Kansas Caucus.
Reservations are far from libertarian. They’ve been inundated by socialist activists for many decades. Even so, Marxism has not displaced the traditional culture. As Russell wrote in a paper long ago in his more radical youth, socialism is just another alien European philosophy. It has nothing to say to Indians.
It’s time again for the American Indian’s to string their lawyers and sharpen their lobbyists. The Great White Liars in State Houses across the continent are once again on the march to expropriate Indian wealth.
On the ITV Channel 4 news tonight I saw some of the more disturbing of news footage I have seen.
A cameraman points his camera at a group of US soldiers by a tank or other armoured vehicle. A soldier by the vehicle raises his gun and fires. You hear the crackle of rounds and see the muzzle flashes.
Then the camera drops to the ground. The cameraman was already dead.
I think many will find this newspaper opinion piece of interest. It’s straight out of Iraq, by and for Iraqi’s.
It’s good to see the local view point of current events. I recommend reading other articles as well.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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