Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013
MAX FISHER, - The Washington Post
Stephan: I love data. It cuts like a knife through polemics. Here is a wonderful example: A profile of humanity by nation showing the power of culture, shared intention, in matters of race. Some good news. For all our racial struggles Anglo cultures followed by Latin America are the most tolerant.
Click through to see the map, which is very revealing.
There is a commentary on this report that is worth reading at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/17/5-insights-on-the-racial-tolerance-and-ethnicity-maps-from-an-ethnic-conflict-professor/
When two Swedish economists set out to examine whether economic freedom made people any more or less racist, they knew how they would gauge economic freedom, but they needed to find a way to measure a country’s level of racial tolerance. So they turned to something called the World Values Survey, which has been measuring global attitudes and opinions for decades.
Among the dozens of questions that World Values asks, the Swedish economists found one that, they believe, could be a pretty good indicator of tolerance for other races. The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose ‘people of a different race.
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Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013
LISA GROSSMAN, - New Scientist/Slate
Stephan: Here is an extraordinary physics story, moving us just a little closer to the nonlocal. I think the last five hundred years will one day be seen in one important sense as the evolution from materiality to the nonlocal.
Leo Kouwenhoven is a professor of physics at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He ended the 75-year hunt for the Majorana fermion-a particle that is its own antiparticle-by creating it on a chip.
Lisa Grossman: What is a Majorana fermion?
Leo Kouwenhoven: It is named for the physicist Ettore Majorana, who found that a particle could be its own antiparticle. If a particle has properties with values unequal to zero, then its antiparticle has the opposite values. What that means is that all the properties of a Majorana fermion, the charge, energy, what have you, it’s all zero. It is a particle, but it doesn’t have properties that we can measure. That makes it very mysterious. It also makes it difficult to find.
LG: Why hunt for these tricky particles?
LK: My background is quantum computing. Measurement is problematic for a quantum computer, because observation changes the quantum state. But if you don’t have an apparatus that can measure a Majorana fermion, you cannot change it. Its insensitivity makes it a robust quantum state. This could lead toward qubits that do not collapse. Usually everything dies, but these would be very robust and could live for a long time.
LG: Qubits […]
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Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013
Stephan: I have been thinking about how, using the power of intention, and nonlocal linkage we could change the game and orient our social policies towards national wellness in every sense. Is it madness to think we could? No. It is not. Here is the way it could be done.
Starting today if I, and each of you who read SR in one of its various forms each pledge this:
I will pledge to 10 people within two weeks that I will vote in the 2014 election. And in turn I will ask them to pledge that they will do the same.
I will tell them I am making my choices for that which is compassionate and life-affirming, and I will ask them to join me.
I will ask them to commit to pledge the same to 10 people, and so on, spreading through the matrix.
Each tranche just 10 people. That's all that is required. Between now and the election the expression of this shared intention could change the outcome to one oriented towards national wellness.
I am quite serious about this, and I make the commitment to you. Will you join me? This is doable.
-- Stephan
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Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013
Stephan: Why does humanity consensually measure seven days to a week? We use the model so universally that it is invisible as a shared intention. Breaking up time this way is entirely arbitrary. Here's why we do it. It is a perfect illustration of how nonlocal information architectures are created, and come to constitute reality.
Why does The Economist appear every seventh day? The answer is because we, like you, still regulate our lives by a septimal law that Mesopotamian star-gazers framed, and local warlords imposed, more than 40 centuries ago. Our weekdays and weekends and weeks off, our dress-down Fridays, hectic Saturday nights, Sundays sacred or profane, and Monday-morning blues all have their origin in something that happened around 2350BC. Sargon I, King of Akkad, having conquered Ur and the other cities of Sumeria, then instituted a seven-day week, the first to be recorded.
Ur was probably using weeks, less formally, long before Sargon came marching in. The Sumerians were great innovators in matters of time. It is to them, ultimately, that we owe not only the week but also the 60-minute hour. Such things came easily to people who based their maths not on a decimal system but on a sexagesimal one.
To the Sumerians, ultimately, we owe not only the week but also the 60-minute hour
Why were these clever chaps, who went for 60 because it is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30, fascinated by stubbornly indivisible seven? In ancient Egypt and ancient China, ‘weeks
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Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013
Stephen C. Webster, - The Raw Story
Stephan: This is the sort of story that gives you hope.
Click through and go to the bottom to see the video.
An 18-year-old science student has made an astonishing breakthrough that will enable mobile phones and other batteries to be charged within seconds rather than the hours it takes today’s devices to power back up.
Saratoga, Calif. resident Eesha Khare made the breakthrough by creating a small supercapacitor that can fit inside a cell phone battery and enable ultra-fast electricity transfer and storage, delivering a full charge in 20-30 seconds instead of several hours.
The nano-tech device Khare created can supposedly withstand up to 100,000 charges, a 100-fold increase over current technology, and it’s flexible enough to be used in clothing or displays on any non-flat surface.
It could also one day be used in car batteries and charging stations not unlike those used by the Tesla Model S, which includes ‘supercharger
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