The 'CSI effect'

CBC News: 'CSI effect' adds drama to real-life crime solving

hahahahahahha. Funny and sad and true. I wonder if this means that there will be more guilty people going free, or fewer innocent people convicted: we all know how reliable some witnesses' testimonies are. Or - big thought - perhaps more money goes into the police force, so we can have evidence AND tesitmony! Then real people get to play with all those cool, slightly recognizable, scientific gadgets.

All this from a TV show. Gee, it's better than reality tv!

Don't use Google?

CBC News: Don't use Google, Tibetan protesters urge

"Google has agreed to adhere to Beijing's censorship policies and limit certain search results in China to get broader access to the large market.
...
Among the topics sensitive to Beijing are Taiwan's independence and 1989's Tiananmen Square massacre, human rights and issues involving Tibet. On Google's Chinese site, searches for topics, such as the Dalai Lama, often come up with omitted sites or name direct users to Chinese government websites. "


...And the world just felt so happy and wholesome.... dammit.

Funny though, because for some reason I'd always viewed Google as "the good guys": ousting the evil Microsoft overlords while providing a fantastic world-over search tool to better educate the nations.... I geuss its all about the bottom line with them too. hehe, or did msn buy them out? Maybe this is just a foot in the door until they can find a loophole around the censorship. But then again that might just be too optimistic.

Plane waves and other things.

Plane wave - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In the physics of wave propagation (especially electromagnetic waves), a plane wave (also spelled planewave) is a constant-frequency wave whose wavefronts (surfaces of constant phase) are infinite parallel planes normal to the phase velocity vector. By extension, the term is also used to describe waves that are approximately plane waves in a localized region of space. For example, a localized source such as an antenna produces a field that is approximately a plane wave in its far-field region. Mathematically, a plane wave is a solution to the wave equation of the following form:

u(x,t)=a exp[i(k.x-wt)]

where i is the

imaginary unit, k is the wave vector, ω is the angular frequency, and a is the (complex) amplitude. (In some conventions, this expression is conjugated.) The physical solution is usually found by taking the real part of this expression. For the vector wave equation of electromagnetism, a is the vector for the electric or magnetic field (and is orthogonal to k, for an isotropic medium). In this equation, the function ω(k) is the dispersion relation of the medium, with the ratio ω/k giving the phase velocity and dω/dk giving the group velocity. For electromagnetism in an isotropic medium with index of refraction n, the phase velocity is c/n (which equals the group velocity only if the index is not frequency-dependent). For the same reason, the ratio of c to the phase velocity is called the effective index and is proportional to the characteristic impedance of the medium. (The term is used in the same way for telecommunication, e.g. in Federal Standard 1037C and MIL-STD-188.)
J. D. Jackson, Classical Electrodynamics (Wiley: New York, 1998).



I know that should make sense to me. I know that I've been studying this for 4 months. And I know that sometime someone is going to ask me a crucial question where the knowledge of such concepts as "planewaves" is necessary. But dammit, I NEED A BETTER EXPLANATION. I get the words. I know what it says. I dont get the part where it becomes a system of protons, neutrons and electrons; with things like band-gaps and dielectric properties.

aaarrrgggg!!

If anyone out there has a reasonably clear grasp on the topics of Plane waves, Fermi energy surfaces, and/or Brillouin zones, among other key topics not covered in my collection of chemistry/physics courses... well, I would really appreciate about 6 hours of tutorial. For each.

Thanks in advance,
Laura Albrecht
BSc. Adv. Maj. Chemistry,
MSVU 2005

"All the other species are dying and so will we...

I'm whistling as I walk past the graveyard... whistling as beautifully as I can"

...

[Kurt] Vonnegut’s contempt for George Bush and his government is expressed with great force and clarity in A Man Without A Country, ... “the country is terribly at risk, because his [Bush] stupidities have terrible consequences, leading to deaths of many people, rotten schools, rotten healthcare. He should be protecting us not only from insurgents or terrorists but from disease and ignorance, and he’s not about to do either.

“Still, there’s not much difference. [Democratic candidate, John] Kerry said out of the side of his mouth at one point that he’s not for re-distributing wealth. He and George Bush belong to the same social class, went to the same university, belong to the same gentleman’s club. Can you believe that, in a country of 300 million people, we have to choose between two members of Skull & Bones [a secret society] at Yale?”

...

"We [the USA] have no army. What makes us the most powerful nation on Earth is our willingness to kill people in their thousands with remote-controlled missiles, the fact that we're prepared to set off nuclear explosions in the middle of unarmed people -- men, women and children.

"Only one country has been crazy enough to set off a nuke in the middle of a civilian population. Did it twice, and that's when members of my generation, soldiers, could see that 'we're not the good guys any more'. We were very careful not to hurt civilians."

~Kurt Vonnegut: A requiem for the USA

(SundayHerald)

(Read the article. Read the book.)