Friday, August 16th, 2013
MELODY KRAMER, - National Geographic News
Stephan: More and more basic research is telling us that the fundamental is information. Here is the latest in that trend. The hardest of hard sciences without meaning to is slowly pushing materialism to its limits.
It might seem like something straight from the Star Trek universe, but two new research experiments-one involving a photon and the other involving a super-conducting circuit-have successfully demonstrated the teleportation of quantum bits.
If that sounds like gobbledygook, don’t worry. We got in touch with one of the researchers, physicist Andreas Wallraff, of the Quantum Device Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, to explain how his team and a team based at the University of Tokyo were able to reliably teleport quantum states from one place to another.
People have done this before but it hasn’t necessarily been reliable. The new complementary research, which comes out in Nature today, is reliable-and therefore may have widespread applications in computing and cryptography.
Before we talk about the nitty-gritty part of teleportation, we need to define a few key words. Let’s start with a regular, classical bit of information, which has two possible states: 1 or 0. This binary system is used by basically all computing and computing-based devices. Information can be stored as a 1 or a 0, but not as both simultaneously. (Related: ‘The Physics Behind Schrodinger’s Cat.’)
But a quantum bit of information-called a qubit-can have two values at the same […]
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Thursday, August 15th, 2013
JARED METZKER, - Inter Press Service
Stephan: The most pernicious effect of Fracking is its potential to poison underground aquifers. In spite of that the corporations that control this desperate technology, fully supported by their governmental vassals, are doing everything in their power to sell their right to make obscene profits to an ignorant and gullible public. Here is a good assessment of what is going on, and I urge you to click through and look at the map that accompanies this story.
WASHINGTON — New signs have emerged in recent days which indicate that extreme measures are being taken in order to suppress evidence of the pernicious effects of the energy extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking
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Thursday, August 15th, 2013
DAVID DAYEN, Contributing Writer - Salon
Stephan: Recently Ronlyn and I moved our banking from Bank of America; it has been an incredibly time consuming process. Starting a banking relationship in the post 9/11 world we discovered, particularly if one receives money from non-US sources, as I do from foreign publishers of my books, and from lecture fees, took six hours of paperwork. Amazing experience. We did this for one reason: the incredibly unethical behavior of BoA. We felt that we could not bank with a corporation that behaved as BoA has. Here is an example of what I mean.
If you know about foreclosure fraud, the mass fabrication of mortgage documents in state courts by banks attempting to foreclose on homeowners, you may have one nagging question: Why did banks have to resort to this illegal scheme? Was it just cheaper to mock up the documents than to provide the real ones? Did banks figure they simply had enough power over regulators, politicians and the courts to get away with it? (They were probably right about that one.)
A newly unsealed lawsuit, which banks settled in 2012 for $95 million, actually offers a different reason, providing a key answer to one of the persistent riddles of the financial crisis and its aftermath. The lawsuit states that banks resorted to fake documents because they could not legally establish true ownership of the loans when trying to foreclose.
This reality, which banks did not contest but instead settled out of court, means that tens of millions of mortgages in America still lack a legitimate chain of ownership, with implications far into the future. And if Congress, supported by the Obama administration, goes back to the same housing finance system, with the same corrupt private entities who broke the nation’s private property system back […]
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Thursday, August 15th, 2013
JACK JENKINS, Senior Writer and Researcher - Climate Progress
Stephan: I was at the gym last night and while I was working out I listened to two young men discuss why climate change was a fraud and a scam perpetrated by Obama and the Democrats to create a one world government. It was very depressing because I realized these young men were two of millions of conservatives whose ignorance, fear, and anger is blocking the U.S. as a country from realistically addressing the problems we face. I am running this report on Rush Limbaugh because it articulates the kind of thinking I heard at the gym and, I suspect, is the source of the words I heard.
Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh chastised Secretary of State John Kerry during Monday’s show for having the audacity to believe in God and climate change at the same time.
Limbaugh evidently took issue with recent comments Secretary Kerry made while speaking before the State Department’s Office of Faith-Based Community Initiatives, particularly his assertion that climate change was ‘a challenge to our responsibilities as the guardians-safe guarders of God’s creation.
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Thursday, August 15th, 2013
KATHERINE PAUL, - Truthout
Stephan: The industrial animal husbandry operations in the U.S. are increasingly indifferent to the fowl, fish, and animals they exploit. It has broken the customary and ancient connection that has existed between humans and beings under their care. They are now nothing but products for profit.
‘A Culture that views pigs as inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly the human mind can conceive will view its citizens the same way – and other cultures.’
-Joe Salatin, Restoring Health, Wealth and Respect to Food and Farming
We associate food with at most, pleasure, at the very least, survival. It’s not too different for animals. Lambs turned out on new grass move ‘quickly over certain grasses to get to others – to nosh on clover and mustard grass, avoiding horse nettle and fescue along the way,’ writes Dan Barber in A Chef Speaks Out . Wild pigs, capable of seeking out the nutrients they need, ‘enjoy eating nuts, roots, fruits, mushrooms, bugs, rabbits, and, occasionally, dead animals.’
But what happens when animals are confined in cramped, filthy environments and force-fed monoculture diets of genetically modified corn and soy?
A lot can happen. Calves are born too weak to walk, with enlarged joints and limb deformities. Piglets experience rapidly deteriorating health, a ‘failure to thrive’ so severe that they start breaking down their own tissues and organs – self-cannibalizing – to survive. Many animals suffer from weak, brittle bones that easily fracture. Dairy cows develop mastitis, a painful […]
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