Click on title for link
From The Smirking Chimp
Accidental Empire: The Rise of the Liberal Blogosphere
by Eric Boehlert | May 20, 2009 - 10:30am
Two images, courtesy of Philadelphia blogger Chris Bowers, have stayed with me over the last two years as I wrote and researched my new, rise-of-the-netroots book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press. To me, the impressions perfectly capture the phenomena of the liberal blogosphere, which has come to define this decade in terms of politics and the press. The images capture how an unlikely band of (underpaid) liberals changed both landscapes and helped elect a new Democratic Congress and a new Democratic president.
Bowers is the young, former Temple University English professor who, following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, found himself both hunched over his laptop between classes reading the nascent liberal blogs, and in search of a new calling. He found his new path online, quickly abandoned the classroom, and threw himself into politics, but at a cost--he was mostly broke.
On the eve of the 2004's Election Day, just after Bowers hit the send button for a long, detailed breakdown of the final polling data set to be posted on MyDD, he lost his cable and internet connection in his apartment thanks to a late bill of $145. It was $145 he didn't have. His apartment lost power with disturbing regularity, which forced Bowers to blog from his friend's place. In fact, back then, Bowers often slept on the floor at his office in order to capitalize on the free, uninterrupted Internet connection it provided.
The second defining Bowers image came in November 2006, when the exhausted blogger starred in a brief YouTube clip that showed him slumped on a couch and staring into a video camera, explaining the harsh realities of being a political blogger: "If you have no children, no one to support, and no career ambitions, then you too can becomes a full time progressive bloggers, as long as you're wiling to do nothing else in your entire life."
But the endless hours, the obsessing over swings in web traffic stats, and the nearly 750,000 words he posted each year (enough to fill ten hardcover books), was worth it because, as Bowers told me, blogging gave him a voice to push for change.
And that's really how the progressive blogosphere--the netroots--was born. Creative people like Bowers were drawn to it because it represented a much-needed release valve for the pent-up political frustration so many Democrats and liberals had felt through the late 1990's and into the beginning of this decade. For them, blogs represented small-scale places where people could stand up to the conservative onslaught that had fueled Clinton's impeachment, the Florida recount, and the rush to war with Iraq. It was where citizens could at least try to launch a revolutionary, participatory democracy online.
The liberal blogosphere, at least at its inception, represented perhaps the most un-planned, un-thought-through media and political movement in modern America. It really was an accidental empire. Of course, bloggers would use 'empire' sarcastically, since they're quick to downplay their own influence. Plus, they had accumulated enough political disappointments to prove it. But there's no question they've changed politics and the press in a way that no other left-leaning movement had done in decades.
Yet early on, the netroots movement was built with very little coordination and no money. There were no memos', no outlines, no projections and no budgets. No nothing. It literally just happened. (Only later did some coordination begin to surface.)
The list of early blog pioneeers is a long one and I'd be a fool to try to name them for fear of leaving anybody out. But what an unlikely cast of eclectic characters! (Students, housewives, attorneys, professors, musicians, etc.) Most brought with them no experience in politics or journalism. Their career paths were never going to take them to the U.S. Capitol or inside big city newsrooms. And none of them ever dreamt their online essays-- posted in an effort just to keep themselves sane--would ever represent career options, or that White House candidates would come courting.
Basically, bloggers served as a conduit to the grassroots. Bloggers talked to people who talked to people, and collectively they amassed political power by raising hell together. And in truth, the liberal blogosphere--the crucial communication arm of the progressive movement that grew into the type of influential outreach platform that the Democratic Party hadn't been able to build despite decades of trying--was formed on a largely ad-hoc basis and for years was sustained by adrenaline and caffeine.
It really was an accidental empire.
For a behind-the-scenes look at the rise of the netroots, and how bloggers changed the 2008 campaign, see Bloggers on the Bus.
_______
About author
A senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and a former senior writer for Salon, Boehlert's first book, "Lapdogs: How The Press Rolled Over for Bush," was published in May. He can be reached at eboehlert@aol.com
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Ten Things You Can Do To Prevent World Hunger
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When many people do little things to help others, big things can happen. The following article touches on a things to do list. Please read.
From The Nation
May 13, 2009
This article appeared in the June 1, 2009 edition of The Nation
Our planet produces enough food to feed its more than 960 million undernourished people. The basic cause of global hunger is not underproduction; it is a production and distribution system that treats food as a commodity rather than a human right. In developing countries huge agribusinesses, fat with government subsidies, sell their unsustainable (and sometimes genetically modified) products at a reduced rate, thus making it impossible for local farmers to compete. Farmers who can't compete can't feed their own families or work their own fields. Hunger becomes both the cause and effect of poverty.
Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service, says sending food aid is not a sustainable way to end hunger. Rather, people must be empowered to raise their own food. She proposes Ten Things we can do to help solve the world's growing hunger problem.
1 Write letters to the editor and op-ed articles in your local paper calling on the government to cut or end subsidies that encourage large agribusinesses to overproduce grains and dump their surpluses on the developing world at sub-market prices. This ultimately places poor communities at the mercy of volatile global commodity prices. Learn more at The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy for more information.
2 Ask your representatives in Congress to demand that more foreign food aid be in the form of cash and training rather than food. Farmers in the global South know how to grow food but lack the resources, inputs and tools to farm effectively, develop markets and compete in the world marketplace.
3 Learn the specifics of what makes products "fair trade." Buy them where available. Download "Green America's Guide to Fair Trade" for a definition of "fair trade" and a list of organizations that follow these specifications.
4 Conserve energy. With a reduced demand for fuel, global commodity prices--which spiked as the cost of fuel for shipping rose dramatically last year--can remain more stable. This is important because while sending food to poor countries is not the ultimate solution for ending hunger, Food Aid has a role to play due to the desire for variety in food supplies. And, more importantly, natural disasters or political instability will always cause humanitarian emergencies where the flow of aid is crucial.
5 Pressure the Obama administration to come up with a renewable energy policy that does not stress ethanol and other biofuels. As demand for biofuels has grown over the past few years, farmers in the developed and developing worlds have set aside more and more land for fuel production, degrading the environment and reducing food for human consumption.
6 Eat less meat. Every pound of meat produced requires sixteen pounds of grain; food given to farm animals each year could feed the world's hungry with plenty to spare. Search "Diet for a Small Planet" and "We Feed the World".
7 Support grassroots projects that advance sustainable agriculture at the community level. Organizations like American Jewish World Service partner with grassroots organizations in the global South that use sustainable farming techniques.
8 Persuade your local editorial writers to cover hunger in a way that focuses on economic rights rather than food scarcity. Emphasize that the underlying causes of poverty are political instability, joblessness, gender inequality, illiteracy and limited access to education, loss of land, disenfranchisement, forced migration and preventable epidemics. These hamper local food production and sustainable development. Click here for current coverage.
9 Demand a worldwide reduction in the sale of pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified seeds, which benefit large agribusinesses like Monsanto because they do not reproduce, forcing farmers to purchase new seeds year after year. Watch Future of Food for more information.
10 Advocate for food security as a human right. Even though the United Nations has declared that nutrition is a universal right, many member nations have adopted policies that reinforce a global system whereby food is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold by speculators.
Read "The Politics of Hunger." Remember that global hunger is a local problem, a feminist problem, a socioeconomic problem and, most urgently, a political problem that can be overcome.
CONCEIVED by Walter Mosley with research by Rae Gomes
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Guns Kill, But Poverty’s the Trigger
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The youth violence consuming Chicago is an opportunity for us to start talking about how we save poor communities.
By: Andre C. Willis | Posted: May 19, 2009 at 6:48 AM
Recently, longtime Catholic priest and freedom fighter Father Michael Pfleger and members of his parish—the Faith Community of St. Sabina in the South Side of Chicago—made an eloquent plea for justice by flying the American flag upside down in front of his church. Hoisting a flag with the union down is done very rarely and usually only as a call of deep distress. Pfleger and St. Sabina’s are trying to call attention to the “dire emergency” of unprecedented levels of gun violence in their community: Over 36 teens and children, mostly black and Latino, have been murdered so far in 2009.
The flag hanging immediately attracted more media attention than the 36 dead youngsters. National media outlets came calling. Some veterans were offended. Critics speculated that this was another one of Pfleger’s stunts intended to generate more notoriety for Pfleger than solutions to the problem. Mayor Richard M. Daley, Chicago police superintendent Jody Weis and Chicago’s former superintendent of schools Arne Duncan were sympathetic but are confused by the problem.
Regardless of your personal opinions of Pfleger, we should all be saddened by the excessive gun violence by young people in our communities. And we should at least collectively heed the powerful call of St. Sabina’s flag raising: We must begin to ask what might be done about this complicated and distressing problem.
Common knowledge suggests that the sad economic conditions in their neighborhoods are some of the fundamental reasons for the gun violence. For example, in 2007, 24.4 percent of African Americans and 21.5 percent of Hispanics lived in poverty in the U.S. (compared to 8.2 percent of whites). Thus, most gun violence comes from those who are worse off economically in our society. The issue Pfleger is raising is, on the surface, about gun violence, but in a more fundamental way, he is calling our attention to issues of class and economics.
But the debates about what caused our current “financial crisis” and how we should repair our ailing economy have gone on mostly at the highest levels of government and business and within the intelligentsia. We have also heard from Big Labor, in particular the United Auto Workers, given Rev. Jesse Jackson’s recent proposal.
But the voices of local churches are missing from the debate. They’ve only found their way into the conversation through sermons and articles on “why Obama should do this” or why “Congress should do that.”
But St. Sabina’s example opens up the idea that churches all over the nation can have a more meaningful place in the debate. To talk about killings in one’s neighborhood linked to a simple class analysis is a much more compelling way into the conversation about how our nation’s economy should be restructured. Local congregations of color in poor neighborhoods can easily grasp the fact that the perpetrators of gun violence are poor and people of color. They understand intuitively that there are structural contradictions at the core of our capitalist economy. Thus, these communities can understand and begin to participate in the conversation knowing that how we fix a broken economy has as much to do with banks and government as it does about the reduction of young people killing themselves on our very streets.
This is not to suggest that a socialist agenda or a Marxist critique can emanate from some romantic collusion of black and Latino working-class and underclass Christians. It is only to say that St. Sabina’s has inadvertently opened up the conversation about achieving economic democracy in which ordinary people participate because they understand the implication to their communities.
Even if the capitalist structure survives, ordinary people might push harder for the kind of New Deal strategy that proposes major public infrastructure investments, particularly in education, to help reduce gun violence among our youngsters.
Whatever solutions emerge, we need to be in on the conversation. Pfleger and St. Sabina’s have shown us a way in. Our churches must follow their lead.
Andre C. Willis is an assistant professor of the philosophy of religion at Yale Divinity School.
Monday, May 18, 2009
A Vision, Why Blog?
A person can stumble upon something, unaware of the who, the what, the where and the why behind it. Millions of people out there in cyber space post something almost everyday. For some it is a diary or a journal, letting them express the ying and yang of their daily lives, and the impact it has had on them.
Some wish to put out their very souls in a cry for help in this often uncaring world, and find strangers that care about them and will help them off the floor, dust them off and send them on their way, much the better for it.
Some have a passion for a specific subject and want to share with the world their expertise.
Some are using the web to bring about a point of view, express interest in something, by lifting up the rock to see what crawls out, and lifting up the second rock to find out what has been hidden.
The ability to write can and should be developed to express one's self and open up an avenue for discussion. The give and take on any post is done in the comments section where like minded or not can exchange ideas.
I like doing this because its fun, and like now, my thoughts are out there, naked to the world. I have broad shoulders, somewhat worn down at this time in life. I hope I amuse some, get someone thinking, why didn't I think of that?, if you get angry, so be it.
You can't please everyone, I don't intend to try. Someone out there will love me, and it only takes one to make my day.
Some wish to put out their very souls in a cry for help in this often uncaring world, and find strangers that care about them and will help them off the floor, dust them off and send them on their way, much the better for it.
Some have a passion for a specific subject and want to share with the world their expertise.
Some are using the web to bring about a point of view, express interest in something, by lifting up the rock to see what crawls out, and lifting up the second rock to find out what has been hidden.
The ability to write can and should be developed to express one's self and open up an avenue for discussion. The give and take on any post is done in the comments section where like minded or not can exchange ideas.
I like doing this because its fun, and like now, my thoughts are out there, naked to the world. I have broad shoulders, somewhat worn down at this time in life. I hope I amuse some, get someone thinking, why didn't I think of that?, if you get angry, so be it.
You can't please everyone, I don't intend to try. Someone out there will love me, and it only takes one to make my day.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Angels and Demons, The Science Behind The Story, From Cern
Click on the title for link
The science behind the story is as amazing as the story itself. Take out the church aspect of the movie and the how and why is captivating!
Cern's website has managed to simplify common questions with answers the average person can comprehend.
Dan Brown's book Angels and Demons is a detective story about a secret society that wants to destroy the Vatican using an antimatter bomb. In the book, the antimatter is stolen from CERN.
(ambigram courtesy John Langdon)
Readers have asked us even more questions about the technologies used in the story. Here are our answers.Does CERN exist?
Well, yes, it does. You can see us to the left and slightly up from the centre of the city of Meyrin.
Is it located in Switzerland?
Part is in Switzerland, part in France across the border. CERN is not a Swiss institute, but an international organization. We are very close to Geneva's international airport.
What does the acronym CERN mean?
That is a long story, but the name CERN is derived from the French ‘Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire’.
Does it consist of red brick buildings with white-frocked scientists running around carrying files?
No, that is rather far from reality; we have mostly white buildings made of concrete and the scientists wear everyday clothes and they mostly do not carry files.
Was the Web really invented at CERN as the book states?
Yes, indeed, the Web came from CERN, invented here by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.
Does antimatter exist?
Yes, it does, and we produce it routinely at CERN. Antimatter was predicted by P.A.M. Dirac in 1928 and the first antiparticles were discovered soon after by Carl Anderson. CERN is not the only research institute to produce and study antimatter.
How is antimatter contained?
It is very difficult to contain antimatter, because any contact between a particle and its anti-particle leads to their immediate annihilation.
For electrically charged antimatter particles we know how to contain them by using ‘electromagnetic traps’. These traps make it possible to contain up to about 1012 (anti-) particles of the same charge. However, like charges repel each other. So it is not possible to store a much larger quantity of e.g. antiprotons because the repulsive forces between them would become too strong for the electromagnetic fields to hold them away from the walls.
For electrically neutral anti-particles or anti-atoms, the situation is even more difficult. It is impossible to use constant electric or magnetic fields to contain neutral antimatter, because these fields have no grip on the particles at all. Scientists work on ideas to use ‘magnetic bottles’ (with inhomogeneous magnetic fields acting on the magnetic moment), or ‘optical traps’ (using lasers) but this is still under development.
What is the future use of antimatter?
Anti-electrons (positrons) are already used in PET scanners in medicine (Positron-Emission Tomography = PET). One day it might be even possible to use antiprotons for tumour irradiation.
But antimatter at CERN is mainly used to study the laws of nature. We focus on the question of the symmetry between matter and antimatter. The LHCb experiment will compare precisely the decay of b-quarks and anti-b-quarks. Eventually we also hope to be able to use anti-hydrogen atoms as high-precision tools.
Do antimatter atoms exist?
The team of the PS210 experiment at the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR) at CERN made the first anti-hydrogen atoms in 1995. Then, in 2002 two experiments (ATHENA and ATRAP) managed to produce tens of thousands of antihydrogen atoms, later even millions. However, although "tens of thousands" may sound a lot, it's really a very, very small amount. You would need 10,000,000,000,000,000 times that amount to have enough anti-hydrogen gas to fill a toy balloon! If we could somehow store our daily production, it would take us several billion years to fill the balloon. But the universe has been around for only 13.7 billion years...So the Angels and Demons scenario is pure fiction.
Can we hope to use antimatter as a source of energy? Do you feel antimatter could power vehicles in the future, or would it just be used for major power sources?
There is no possibility to use antimatter as energy ‘source’. Unlike solar energy, coal or oil, antimatter does not occur in nature; we first have to make every single antiparticle, and we have to invest (much) more energy than we get back during annihilation.
You can imagine antimatter as a storage medium for energy, much like you store electricity in rechargeable batteries. The process of charging the battery is reversible with relatively small loss. Still, it takes more energy to charge the battery than you get back.
The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion (10-10) of the invested energy back. If we could assemble all the antimatter we've ever made at CERN and annihilate it with matter, we would have enough energy to light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes.
I was hoping antimatter would be the future answer to our energy needs. It seems more research is needed for this to happen.
No, even more research will not change this situation fundamentally; antimatter is certainly not able to solve our energy problems. First of all, you need energy to make antimatter (E=mc2) and unfortunately you do not get the same amount of energy back out of it. (See above, the loss factors are enormous.)
Furthermore, the conversion from energy to matter and antimatter particles follows certain laws of nature, which also allow the production of many other, but very short-lived particles and antiparticles (e.g. muons, pions, neutrinos). These particles decay rapidly during the production process, and their energy is lost.
Antimatter could only become a source of energy if you happened to find a large amount of antimatter lying around somewhere (e.g. in a distant galaxy), in the same way we find oil and oxygen lying around on Earth. But as far as we can see (billions of light years), the universe is entirely made of normal matter, and antimatter has to be painstakingly created.
By the way, this shows that the symmetry between matter and antimatter as stated above does not seem to hold at very high energies, such as shortly after the Big Bang, as otherwise there should be as much matter as antimatter in the Universe. Future research might tell us is how this asymmetry came about.
Can we make antimatter bombs?
No. It would take billions of years to produce enough antimatter for a bomb having the same destructiveness as ‘typical’ hydrogen bombs, of which there exist more than ten thousand already.
Sociological note: scientists realized that the atom bomb was a real possibility many years before one was actually built and exploded, and then the public was totally surprised and amazed. On the other hand, the public somehow anticipates the antimatter bomb, but we have known for a long time that it cannot be realized in practice.
Why has antimatter received no media attention?
It has received a lot of media attention, but usually in the scientific press. Also, antimatter is not ‘new’. Antiparticles have been known and studied for 75 years. What is new is the possibility to produce anti-hydrogen atoms, but this is also mainly a matter of scientific interest.
Is antimatter truly 100% efficient?
It depends on what you mean by efficient. If you start from two equal quantities m/2 of matter and m/2 of antimatter, then the energy output is, of course, exactly E=mc2. Mass is converted into energy with 100% efficiency.
But that is not the point: how much effort do you have to put in to get m/2 grams of antimatter? Well, theoretically E=mc2 because half of the energy will become normal matter. So you gain nothing.
But the process of creating antimatter is highly inefficient; when you dissipate energy into particles with mass, many different - also short-lived - particles and antiparticles are produced. A major part of the energy gets lost, and a lot of the stable antimatter-particles (e.g. positrons and antiprotons) go astray before you can catch them. Everything happens at nearly the speed of light, and the particles created zoom off in all directions. Somewhat like cooking food over a campfire: most of the heat is lost and does not go into the cooking of the food, it disappears as radiation into the dark night sky. Very inefficient.
Do you make antimatter as described in the book?
No. The production and storage of antimatter at CERN is not at all as described in the book: you cannot stand next to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and see it come out, especially since the LHC accelerator is not yet in operation.
To make antiprotons, we collide protons at nearly the speed of light (to be precise, with a kinetic energy of about 25 GeV) with a block of metal, e.g. copper or tungsten. These collisions produce a large number of particles, some of which are antiprotons. Only the antiprotons are useful, and only those that fly out in the right direction. So that's where your energy loss goes: it is like trying to water a pot of flowers but with a sprinkler that sprays over the whole garden. Of course, we constantly apply new tricks to become more efficient at collecting antiparticles, but at the level of elementary particles this is extremely difficult.
Why then do you build the LHC?
The reason for building the LHC accelerator is not to make antimatter but to produce an energy concentration high enough to study effects that will help us to understand some of the remaining questions in physics. We say concentrations, because we are not talking about huge amounts but an enormous concentration of energy. Each particle accelerated in the LHC carries an amount of energy equivalent to that of a flying mosquito. Not much at all in absolute terms, but it will be concentrated in a very minute volume, and there things will resemble the state of the universe very shortly (about a trillionth of a second) after the Big Bang.
You should compare the concentration effect to what you can learn about the quality of a wooden floor by walking over it. If a large man wearing normal shoes and a petite woman wearing sharp stiletto heels walk over the same floor, the man will not make dents, but the woman, despite her lower weight, may leave marks; the pressure created by the stiletto heels is far higher. So that is like the job of the LHC: concentrate a little energy into a very minute space to produce a huge energy concentration and learn something about the Big Bang.
Does CERN have a particle accelerator 27 kilometres long?
The LHC accelerator is a ring 27 kilometres in circumference. It is installed in a tunnel about 100 m underground. You can see the round outline of it marked on a map of the area.
In fact, why do you make antimatter at CERN?
The principal reason is to study the laws of nature. The current theories of physics predict a number of subtle effects concerning antimatter. If experiments do not observe these predictions, then the theory is not accurate and needs to be amended or reworked. This is how science progresses.
Another reason is to get extremely high energy densities in collisions of matter and antimatter particles, since they annihilate completely when they meet. From this annihilation energy other interesting particles may be created. This was mainly how the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider functioned at CERN until 2000, or the Tevatron currently operates at Fermilab near Chicago.
How is energy extracted from antimatter?
When a normal matter particle hits an antimatter particle, they mutually annihilate into a very concentrated burst of pure energy, from which in turn new particles (and antiparticles) are created. The number and mass of the annihilation products depends on the available energy.
The annihilation of electrons and positrons at low energies produces only two (or three) highly energetic photons. But with annihilation at very high energy, hundreds of new particle-antiparticle pairs can be made. The decay of these particles produces, among others, many neutrinos, which do not interact with the environment at all. This is not very useful for energy extraction.
How safe is antimatter?
Perfectly safe, given the minute quantities we can make. It would be very dangerous if we could make a few grams of it, but this would take us billions of years.
If so, does CERN have protocols to keep the public safe?
There is no danger from antimatter. There are of course other dangers on the CERN site, as in any laboratory: high voltage in certain areas, deep pits to fall in, etc. but for these dangers the usual industrial safety measures are in place. There is no danger of radioactive leaks as you might find near nuclear power stations.
Does one gram of antimatter contain the energy of a 20 kilotonne nuclear bomb?
Twenty kilotonnes of TNT is the equivalent of the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The explosion of a kilotonne (=1000 tonnes) of TNT corresponds to a energy release of 4.2x1012 joules (1012 is a 1 followed by 12 zeros, i.e. a million million). For comparison, a 60 watt light bulb consumes 60 J per second.
You are probably asking for the explosive release of energy by the sudden annihilation of one gram of antimatter with one gram of matter. Let's calculate it.
To calculate the energy released in the annihilation of 1 g of antimatter with 1 g of matter (which makes 2 g = 0.002 kg), we have to use the formula E=mc2, where c is the speed of light (300,000,000 m/s):
E= 0.002 x (300,000,000)2 kg m2/s2 = 1.8 x 1014 J = 180 x 1012 J. Since 4.2x1012 J corresponds to a kilotonne of TNT, then 2 g of matter-antimatter annihilation correspond to 180/4.2 = 42.8 kilotonnes, about double the 20 kt of TNT.
This means that you ‘only’ need half a gram of antimatter to be equally destructive as the Hiroshima bomb, since the other half gram of (normal) matter is easy enough to find.
At CERN we make quantities of the order of 107 antiprotons per second and there are 6x1023 of them in a single gram of antihydrogen. You can easily calculate how long it would take to get one gram: we would need 6x1023/107=6x1016 seconds. There are only 365 (days) x 24 (h) x 60 (min) x 60 (sec) = around 3x107 seconds in a year, so it would take roughly 6x1016 / 3x107 = 2x109 = two billion years! It is quite unlikely that anyone wants to wait that long.
Did CERN scientists actually invent the Internet?
No. The Internet was originally based on work done by Louis Pouzin in France, taken up by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in the US in the 1970s. However, the Web was invented and developed entirely by Tim Berners-Lee and a small team at CERN during 1989-1994. The story of the Internet and the Web can be read in ‘How the Web was born’. Perhaps not as sexy as Angels and Demons, but everything in ‘How the Web was born’ was first-hand testimony and research.
Does CERN own an X-33 spaceplane?
Unfortunately not.
October 2004
Last revised: January 2008
Related links
Interview with Rolf Landua, a CERN physicist who could have inspired Dan Brown for his character Leonardo Vetra
The Antiproton Decelerator at CERN
Antimatter experiments at CERN: ALPHA, ATRAP, ASACUSA
What the LHC will bring: the LHCb experiment
Antimatter experiments in the world: BaBar, Belle
Antimatter in Space: AMS
The science behind the story is as amazing as the story itself. Take out the church aspect of the movie and the how and why is captivating!
Cern's website has managed to simplify common questions with answers the average person can comprehend.
Dan Brown's book Angels and Demons is a detective story about a secret society that wants to destroy the Vatican using an antimatter bomb. In the book, the antimatter is stolen from CERN.
(ambigram courtesy John Langdon)
Readers have asked us even more questions about the technologies used in the story. Here are our answers.Does CERN exist?
Well, yes, it does. You can see us to the left and slightly up from the centre of the city of Meyrin.
Is it located in Switzerland?
Part is in Switzerland, part in France across the border. CERN is not a Swiss institute, but an international organization. We are very close to Geneva's international airport.
What does the acronym CERN mean?
That is a long story, but the name CERN is derived from the French ‘Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire’.
Does it consist of red brick buildings with white-frocked scientists running around carrying files?
No, that is rather far from reality; we have mostly white buildings made of concrete and the scientists wear everyday clothes and they mostly do not carry files.
Was the Web really invented at CERN as the book states?
Yes, indeed, the Web came from CERN, invented here by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.
Does antimatter exist?
Yes, it does, and we produce it routinely at CERN. Antimatter was predicted by P.A.M. Dirac in 1928 and the first antiparticles were discovered soon after by Carl Anderson. CERN is not the only research institute to produce and study antimatter.
How is antimatter contained?
It is very difficult to contain antimatter, because any contact between a particle and its anti-particle leads to their immediate annihilation.
For electrically charged antimatter particles we know how to contain them by using ‘electromagnetic traps’. These traps make it possible to contain up to about 1012 (anti-) particles of the same charge. However, like charges repel each other. So it is not possible to store a much larger quantity of e.g. antiprotons because the repulsive forces between them would become too strong for the electromagnetic fields to hold them away from the walls.
For electrically neutral anti-particles or anti-atoms, the situation is even more difficult. It is impossible to use constant electric or magnetic fields to contain neutral antimatter, because these fields have no grip on the particles at all. Scientists work on ideas to use ‘magnetic bottles’ (with inhomogeneous magnetic fields acting on the magnetic moment), or ‘optical traps’ (using lasers) but this is still under development.
What is the future use of antimatter?
Anti-electrons (positrons) are already used in PET scanners in medicine (Positron-Emission Tomography = PET). One day it might be even possible to use antiprotons for tumour irradiation.
But antimatter at CERN is mainly used to study the laws of nature. We focus on the question of the symmetry between matter and antimatter. The LHCb experiment will compare precisely the decay of b-quarks and anti-b-quarks. Eventually we also hope to be able to use anti-hydrogen atoms as high-precision tools.
Do antimatter atoms exist?
The team of the PS210 experiment at the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR) at CERN made the first anti-hydrogen atoms in 1995. Then, in 2002 two experiments (ATHENA and ATRAP) managed to produce tens of thousands of antihydrogen atoms, later even millions. However, although "tens of thousands" may sound a lot, it's really a very, very small amount. You would need 10,000,000,000,000,000 times that amount to have enough anti-hydrogen gas to fill a toy balloon! If we could somehow store our daily production, it would take us several billion years to fill the balloon. But the universe has been around for only 13.7 billion years...So the Angels and Demons scenario is pure fiction.
Can we hope to use antimatter as a source of energy? Do you feel antimatter could power vehicles in the future, or would it just be used for major power sources?
There is no possibility to use antimatter as energy ‘source’. Unlike solar energy, coal or oil, antimatter does not occur in nature; we first have to make every single antiparticle, and we have to invest (much) more energy than we get back during annihilation.
You can imagine antimatter as a storage medium for energy, much like you store electricity in rechargeable batteries. The process of charging the battery is reversible with relatively small loss. Still, it takes more energy to charge the battery than you get back.
The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion (10-10) of the invested energy back. If we could assemble all the antimatter we've ever made at CERN and annihilate it with matter, we would have enough energy to light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes.
I was hoping antimatter would be the future answer to our energy needs. It seems more research is needed for this to happen.
No, even more research will not change this situation fundamentally; antimatter is certainly not able to solve our energy problems. First of all, you need energy to make antimatter (E=mc2) and unfortunately you do not get the same amount of energy back out of it. (See above, the loss factors are enormous.)
Furthermore, the conversion from energy to matter and antimatter particles follows certain laws of nature, which also allow the production of many other, but very short-lived particles and antiparticles (e.g. muons, pions, neutrinos). These particles decay rapidly during the production process, and their energy is lost.
Antimatter could only become a source of energy if you happened to find a large amount of antimatter lying around somewhere (e.g. in a distant galaxy), in the same way we find oil and oxygen lying around on Earth. But as far as we can see (billions of light years), the universe is entirely made of normal matter, and antimatter has to be painstakingly created.
By the way, this shows that the symmetry between matter and antimatter as stated above does not seem to hold at very high energies, such as shortly after the Big Bang, as otherwise there should be as much matter as antimatter in the Universe. Future research might tell us is how this asymmetry came about.
Can we make antimatter bombs?
No. It would take billions of years to produce enough antimatter for a bomb having the same destructiveness as ‘typical’ hydrogen bombs, of which there exist more than ten thousand already.
Sociological note: scientists realized that the atom bomb was a real possibility many years before one was actually built and exploded, and then the public was totally surprised and amazed. On the other hand, the public somehow anticipates the antimatter bomb, but we have known for a long time that it cannot be realized in practice.
Why has antimatter received no media attention?
It has received a lot of media attention, but usually in the scientific press. Also, antimatter is not ‘new’. Antiparticles have been known and studied for 75 years. What is new is the possibility to produce anti-hydrogen atoms, but this is also mainly a matter of scientific interest.
Is antimatter truly 100% efficient?
It depends on what you mean by efficient. If you start from two equal quantities m/2 of matter and m/2 of antimatter, then the energy output is, of course, exactly E=mc2. Mass is converted into energy with 100% efficiency.
But that is not the point: how much effort do you have to put in to get m/2 grams of antimatter? Well, theoretically E=mc2 because half of the energy will become normal matter. So you gain nothing.
But the process of creating antimatter is highly inefficient; when you dissipate energy into particles with mass, many different - also short-lived - particles and antiparticles are produced. A major part of the energy gets lost, and a lot of the stable antimatter-particles (e.g. positrons and antiprotons) go astray before you can catch them. Everything happens at nearly the speed of light, and the particles created zoom off in all directions. Somewhat like cooking food over a campfire: most of the heat is lost and does not go into the cooking of the food, it disappears as radiation into the dark night sky. Very inefficient.
Do you make antimatter as described in the book?
No. The production and storage of antimatter at CERN is not at all as described in the book: you cannot stand next to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and see it come out, especially since the LHC accelerator is not yet in operation.
To make antiprotons, we collide protons at nearly the speed of light (to be precise, with a kinetic energy of about 25 GeV) with a block of metal, e.g. copper or tungsten. These collisions produce a large number of particles, some of which are antiprotons. Only the antiprotons are useful, and only those that fly out in the right direction. So that's where your energy loss goes: it is like trying to water a pot of flowers but with a sprinkler that sprays over the whole garden. Of course, we constantly apply new tricks to become more efficient at collecting antiparticles, but at the level of elementary particles this is extremely difficult.
Why then do you build the LHC?
The reason for building the LHC accelerator is not to make antimatter but to produce an energy concentration high enough to study effects that will help us to understand some of the remaining questions in physics. We say concentrations, because we are not talking about huge amounts but an enormous concentration of energy. Each particle accelerated in the LHC carries an amount of energy equivalent to that of a flying mosquito. Not much at all in absolute terms, but it will be concentrated in a very minute volume, and there things will resemble the state of the universe very shortly (about a trillionth of a second) after the Big Bang.
You should compare the concentration effect to what you can learn about the quality of a wooden floor by walking over it. If a large man wearing normal shoes and a petite woman wearing sharp stiletto heels walk over the same floor, the man will not make dents, but the woman, despite her lower weight, may leave marks; the pressure created by the stiletto heels is far higher. So that is like the job of the LHC: concentrate a little energy into a very minute space to produce a huge energy concentration and learn something about the Big Bang.
Does CERN have a particle accelerator 27 kilometres long?
The LHC accelerator is a ring 27 kilometres in circumference. It is installed in a tunnel about 100 m underground. You can see the round outline of it marked on a map of the area.
In fact, why do you make antimatter at CERN?
The principal reason is to study the laws of nature. The current theories of physics predict a number of subtle effects concerning antimatter. If experiments do not observe these predictions, then the theory is not accurate and needs to be amended or reworked. This is how science progresses.
Another reason is to get extremely high energy densities in collisions of matter and antimatter particles, since they annihilate completely when they meet. From this annihilation energy other interesting particles may be created. This was mainly how the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider functioned at CERN until 2000, or the Tevatron currently operates at Fermilab near Chicago.
How is energy extracted from antimatter?
When a normal matter particle hits an antimatter particle, they mutually annihilate into a very concentrated burst of pure energy, from which in turn new particles (and antiparticles) are created. The number and mass of the annihilation products depends on the available energy.
The annihilation of electrons and positrons at low energies produces only two (or three) highly energetic photons. But with annihilation at very high energy, hundreds of new particle-antiparticle pairs can be made. The decay of these particles produces, among others, many neutrinos, which do not interact with the environment at all. This is not very useful for energy extraction.
How safe is antimatter?
Perfectly safe, given the minute quantities we can make. It would be very dangerous if we could make a few grams of it, but this would take us billions of years.
If so, does CERN have protocols to keep the public safe?
There is no danger from antimatter. There are of course other dangers on the CERN site, as in any laboratory: high voltage in certain areas, deep pits to fall in, etc. but for these dangers the usual industrial safety measures are in place. There is no danger of radioactive leaks as you might find near nuclear power stations.
Does one gram of antimatter contain the energy of a 20 kilotonne nuclear bomb?
Twenty kilotonnes of TNT is the equivalent of the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The explosion of a kilotonne (=1000 tonnes) of TNT corresponds to a energy release of 4.2x1012 joules (1012 is a 1 followed by 12 zeros, i.e. a million million). For comparison, a 60 watt light bulb consumes 60 J per second.
You are probably asking for the explosive release of energy by the sudden annihilation of one gram of antimatter with one gram of matter. Let's calculate it.
To calculate the energy released in the annihilation of 1 g of antimatter with 1 g of matter (which makes 2 g = 0.002 kg), we have to use the formula E=mc2, where c is the speed of light (300,000,000 m/s):
E= 0.002 x (300,000,000)2 kg m2/s2 = 1.8 x 1014 J = 180 x 1012 J. Since 4.2x1012 J corresponds to a kilotonne of TNT, then 2 g of matter-antimatter annihilation correspond to 180/4.2 = 42.8 kilotonnes, about double the 20 kt of TNT.
This means that you ‘only’ need half a gram of antimatter to be equally destructive as the Hiroshima bomb, since the other half gram of (normal) matter is easy enough to find.
At CERN we make quantities of the order of 107 antiprotons per second and there are 6x1023 of them in a single gram of antihydrogen. You can easily calculate how long it would take to get one gram: we would need 6x1023/107=6x1016 seconds. There are only 365 (days) x 24 (h) x 60 (min) x 60 (sec) = around 3x107 seconds in a year, so it would take roughly 6x1016 / 3x107 = 2x109 = two billion years! It is quite unlikely that anyone wants to wait that long.
Did CERN scientists actually invent the Internet?
No. The Internet was originally based on work done by Louis Pouzin in France, taken up by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in the US in the 1970s. However, the Web was invented and developed entirely by Tim Berners-Lee and a small team at CERN during 1989-1994. The story of the Internet and the Web can be read in ‘How the Web was born’. Perhaps not as sexy as Angels and Demons, but everything in ‘How the Web was born’ was first-hand testimony and research.
Does CERN own an X-33 spaceplane?
Unfortunately not.
October 2004
Last revised: January 2008
Related links
Interview with Rolf Landua, a CERN physicist who could have inspired Dan Brown for his character Leonardo Vetra
The Antiproton Decelerator at CERN
Antimatter experiments at CERN: ALPHA, ATRAP, ASACUSA
What the LHC will bring: the LHCb experiment
Antimatter experiments in the world: BaBar, Belle
Antimatter in Space: AMS
Old and Fat
click on title for link
From Slate magazine
Were there obese people 35,000 years ago?
By Christopher Beam
Posted Friday, May 15, 2009, at 6:46 PM ET
Researchers say a "Venus" figurine discovered in 2008 in southern Germany and created an estimated 35,000 years ago may be the oldest statue ever found. Its sexually suggestive figure— large breasts, large rear end—is said to connote fertility. But it also looks extremely fat. Were there obese people in prehistoric times?
Few, if any. Obesity is defined as having a body mass index higher than 30—the equivalent of being about 5-foot-11 and 220 pounds. The best indicator of body type among prehistoric peoples is present-day societies with a similar lifestyle—that is, hunter-gatherers. From the San people of Botswana to the Pygmies in central Africa to the Batek of Malaysia, groups that fall into this category tend to be small and extremely thin. The Baka of Cameroon, for example, are about 5 feet tall and weigh around 105 pounds, giving them an average BMI of 20. Hunter-gatherers are usually thin because they subsist largely on fruits and vegetables, underground tubers, and, in some regions of Africa, honey. They also get calories from animal meat, and some of their diets are especially fish-heavy. But many tribes insist on distributing the meat evenly among the group, so there's rarely enough for one person to get fat on. Hunter-gatherer tribes also stay thin, unsurprisingly, due to a generally active way of life.
Fossils are of little use in determining the relative fitness of Stone Age humans because, for the most part, the bones of a 150-pound man look similar to the bones of a 250-pound man of the same height. Many old bones do have stress fractures or signs of arthritis, but it's hard to conclude that these indications of degradation are due to obesity. Neanderthals 200,000 years ago were shorter and stockier than we are now, but, again, there's no evidence that they were obese.
Obesity likely began with the advent of agriculture 12,000 years ago. Food surpluses and the relatively sedentary lifestyle on settlements made overconsumption possible for the first time in human history. Another factor was the rise of processed foods and, with the invention of the steel roller mill in the late 19th century, the possibility of mass-marketing those foods. Grains and other carbohydrates that have been broken down are easier to digest. As a result, you get hungry again faster. Some scientists also theorize that people weighed less in earlier eras because they were exposed to more infections. (If you're eating carrots out of the ground—as opposed to a sealed plastic bag—you're likely to have constant minor parasitic infections.) When you're fighting an infection, your body temperature rises, and you burn more calories.
Some women in hunter-gathering societies do have abnormally large buttocks, a condition called steatopygia. It's especially common among the Khoisan in southern Africa and tribes in the Andaman Islands. It is sometimes considered a sign of beauty, and may have inspired some of the more voluptuous ancient figurines. The most famous example of steatopygia was the Hottentot Venus, a Khoikhoi woman whose physical characteristics made her a sideshow sensation in 19th-century Europe.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Nathaniel Dominy of the University of California Santa Cruz and Jeff Leach of Paleobiotics Lab.
Christopher Beam is a Slate political reporter.
Photograph by H. Jensen © copyright Universität Tübingen.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Real Archaeologist Digs Up Fact, Fiction of 'Angels & Demons'
click on title for link
I love this stuff!
May 15th 2009
By Kristin Romey
Like we've said before, taking potshots at the scientific inaccuracies of Hollywood blockbusters is as easy as poking fun at the ShamWow guy. But there are some truly scary realities in "Angels & Demons," the sequel to "The Da Vinci Code." And, of course, some scarily obvious falsehoods.
Antimatter!
Early on in the movie a potentially catastrophic vial of antimatter is stolen from CERN setting the plot in motion. Antimatter sounds like a fantasy sci-fi movie product, but it has been created -- at the cost of about $1,772 trillion per ounce. Why? Because it takes enormous energy to create in particle accelerators like CERN. (Remember CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. They've got the huge underground particle accelerator that was supposed to create a black hole and swallow the earth last fall, until an accident took everything offline. Cross your fingers for this fall, when they start the accelerator up again.)
The only reassuring news about antimatter besides its prohibitive cost? The fact that, at this point, there's no way to store it, much less broadcast it on the Internet.
The Vatican LeadershipOh Vatican, oh Vatican, who's the most murderous of them all? Yep, probably because of the lousy press from the Catholic Church that followed "The Da Vinci Code," this film played nice with Catholicism's major domos. But in real life, popes and cardinals haven't been innocent when it comes to murder, bribery, rape, incest, etc. Around the time that so many of the fantastic churches in the film were built, for instance, there was Pope Alexander VI (d. 1503). Known as the "STD Pope," Alex allegedly committed his first murder at 12, slept with his daughter, and died drinking poison intended for a potential cardinal.
The Illuminati
OK, here's the problem with the secret society chronology in this movie: most of the groups we're familiar with today, like the Freemasons and the Illuminati, were founded during the Age of Enlightenment, which began in the 1700s. In fact, the Illuminati were founded in 1776 -- a good 100-150 years after the characters (Galileo, Bernini) mentioned in "Angels & Demons" existed. (By the way, the original Illuminati preferred to call themselves the "Perfectibilists," and "The Order of the Bees," neither of which is nearly as sexy or intimidating.)
Other, earlier "secret societies" known to pose a threat to the Church, like the Knights Templar, were ruthlessly stamped out by popes in the 1300s. So poor A&D author Dan Brown was essentially left with a secret society "dead zone" from 1400 to 1700 -- the time of Galileo.
The Swiss GuardLet's talk about how badass the Swiss Guard is. Would you mess with a Chechen, a Colombian, or an Afghani? Multiply that by 10 and we have the Swiss. Crazy-ass, take-no-hostages mountain people -- these are the men who have ruthlessly guarded the Vatican for 500 years. And those nasty-looking halberds they carry? Renowned since the 16th century for efficiently piercing human skulls. They also carry assault rifles. So don't make fun of their striped pajamas and funny hats the next time you find yourself in Rome.
Symbology
... is a load of crap. I'd love to teach it at Harvard too, but what our esteemed professor Dr. Robert Langdon does is actually some weird combo of western art history and anthropology.
Why is it impossible to teach "symbology"? Because those two crossed keys that mean "Vatican" in the West may mean something entirely different in say, Vietnam. And the whole elements-of-the-earth spiel that works for Langdon in Rome may mean nothing in the Peruvian desert. To be a symbologist, he'd have to have in-depth knowledge of all of the world's cultures in order to properly interpret symbols, which is impossible unless you're Stephen Hawking. Our dear Harvard professor doesn't even know Italian, for Pete's sake.
Kristin Romey is an anthropologist, explorer, former executive editor of Archeology Magazine and, most prestigiously, Asylum's scientific adviser.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Why Does It Matter?
Why does it matter?
Why does the smile of a baby make babies of us all?
Why does a falling flower petal softly swirling in the breeze know its destination?
Why does the look of a woman capture the heart and soul of a man?
Why does the mind of many create so many pleasures and so much pain in the world?
Why does walking by a pastry shop cause one to gain weight?
Why does one enjoy the most wonderful sunrise ever seen only to see it topped at nightfall by an enchanting sunset bringing a close to another day?
Why do we remember our first snowfall, our first kiss, the thrill of making a great play, making someone laugh?
Why do we remember the loss of a loved one, your first dog, staying up late, New Years Eve?
Why do we remember presents under the tree, hoping for a pony, happy with a bike?
Why do we remember that first school dance, or not going at all?
Why do remember our favorite song, when the moment was right, never to be forgotten?
Why do we remember our first crush, our first rejection, love found again?
Always questions, searching answers.
Why does the smile of a baby make babies of us all?
Why does a falling flower petal softly swirling in the breeze know its destination?
Why does the look of a woman capture the heart and soul of a man?
Why does the mind of many create so many pleasures and so much pain in the world?
Why does walking by a pastry shop cause one to gain weight?
Why does one enjoy the most wonderful sunrise ever seen only to see it topped at nightfall by an enchanting sunset bringing a close to another day?
Why do we remember our first snowfall, our first kiss, the thrill of making a great play, making someone laugh?
Why do we remember the loss of a loved one, your first dog, staying up late, New Years Eve?
Why do we remember presents under the tree, hoping for a pony, happy with a bike?
Why do we remember that first school dance, or not going at all?
Why do remember our favorite song, when the moment was right, never to be forgotten?
Why do we remember our first crush, our first rejection, love found again?
Always questions, searching answers.
European scientists launch new space telescope
This photo provided Thursday May 14, 2009 by the European Space Agency shows the Ariane-5 rocket taking off in Kourou, French Guiana, Thursday. European Space Agency has launched a space telescope and a spacecraft meant to gather information about the Big Bang cosmic explosion.
(AP Photo/P Baudon/ESA/CNES/Arianespace)
click on title for link
The continued hue and cry across the universe, Any One Out There?
By DANICA COTO, Associated Press Writer Danica Coto, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 3 mins ago
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – As American astronauts overhauled the aging Hubble, European scientists launched an even larger space telescope toward a far-flung orbit, hoping to help answer two questions: How did the cosmos begin and are we alone in it?
"We are seeking the origins of the universe," said Jean-Yves Le Gall, chairman and CEO of French satellite launcher Arianespace, which on Thursday launched the Herschel space telescope and a companion spacecraft from French Guiana.
The Herschel space telescope, the largest ever launched, will observe chunks of ice and dust left over from the formation of planets, playing a "complementary" role to the versatile Hubble, said Andreas Diekmann, director of the European Space Agency's Washington office.
A companion spacecraft called Planck separated from the Ariane rocket soon after launch on a mission to measure radiation from the Big Bang.
Unlike Hubble, which has become famous for its breathtaking images of the heavens, Herschel and Planck work in non-visible wavelengths of light. But they will provide scientists with crucial information about planet and star formation.
The Herschel telescope will allow scientists to study the birth of stars and galaxies and analyze the dust-clouds around stars. Astronomers will also look for the presence of water in deep space.
"One could get an impression on how life began in the universe and how widely it might be distributed, or whether we are totally alone," said Martin Harwit, a Washington-based mission scientist for Herschel. The telescope could also pinpoint molecules that serve as building blocks for primitive organisms.
"It will also be looking at very large distances across the universe, where the first stars and galaxies were beginning to form and tell us how those processes took place," Harwit said.
The Planck, which carries its own telescope, will be capable of observing radiation that could help astronomers understand the universe as it appeared when it was 380,000 years old.
As the Herschel telescope hurtled farther away from Earth on Friday, spacewalking astronauts from the shuttle Atlantis installed a refurbished pair of gyroscopes and fresh batteries aboard Hubble.
In all, five spacewalks are planned to repair the observatory so it can last another five to 10 years.
The Herschel telescope and Planck will need several weeks to reach their separate orbits nearly a million miles from Earth. The telescope will map the cosmos for up to three years. Planck will stay in orbit for 1 3/4 years.
Herschel is "the biggest telescope ever sent to space," bragged Jean Clavel, science director of the ESA, referring to the telescope's mirror, which has a diameter of 11.5 feet. The mirror on the Hubble has a diameter of 7.9 feet.
Data collected from the Herschel telescope could help answer questions such as what the universe was made of, how it has evolved and the rate at which it is expanding.
"Scientists will be able to explore the unknown," ESA director Jean-Jacques Dordain said.
To ensure accurate readings of tiny microwaves, equipment aboard the Planck and Herschel will be kept at nearly absolute zero (minus 273 degrees Celsius) using helium.
When the helium is used up, both instruments, worth a total of $952 million, will overheat and become inoperable.
"We are going toward discoveries that will surprise us," said Roger-Maurice Bonnet, who worked on the project for years when he was science director for the ESA.
___
Associated Press writers Marcia Dunn in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Geir Moulson in Berlin and Cecile Brisson in Paris contributed to this report.
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The Google Outage and Cloud Computing
click on title for link
When you count on one source for everything, well, stuff happens!
From Biz Box by Slate
The Google Outage and Cloud Computing
By Marc Tracy
May 14, 2009 5:41 PM
It is a dark, dark day for cloud computing advocates such as ourselves. We could go on and on about cloud computing's benefits, but at some point you do bump up against the fact that whatever you put in the cloud--which, if you take our suggestions, is pretty much everything that your company has--is stored on someone else's servers and space rather than your own (although obviously cloud computing doesn't preclude backing up every so often; but it does mean your stuff is out there, and that you use the cloud to conduct day-to-day computing). And what that means is that whether those servers go down is out of your control. And they can go down. Hint hint, Google.
Yes, Google was down today. It was a nightmare. We're speaking personally here--we couldn't access our Gmail or our Google Reader RSS feed for, like, an hour. As we say, a nightmare.
So yes, it's time for the anti-cloud computing people to gloat. Forbes is game. The piece actually has some many sage insights about what it means that so many are dependent on the servers of so few companies. It also points out that Google's guarantee (albeit for free services) of 99.9% uptime gives it almost nine hours each year to be down without even breaking its promise, which truly is terrifying. And then, yes, the piece concludes: "Of greater concern is what the outage implies for trust in cloud computing services, the biggest hope for the tech industry as it moves out of its slump."
Well, look. We talked about this before, when Google's cloud software suite was down for a bit in Western Europe. Servers crash all the time, whether they're under your roof or not. These outages are not an argument against cloud computing; they're an argument for taking extra security measures and for backing everything up.
Also, memo to Google: please don't ever do that to us again.
When you count on one source for everything, well, stuff happens!
From Biz Box by Slate
The Google Outage and Cloud Computing
By Marc Tracy
May 14, 2009 5:41 PM
It is a dark, dark day for cloud computing advocates such as ourselves. We could go on and on about cloud computing's benefits, but at some point you do bump up against the fact that whatever you put in the cloud--which, if you take our suggestions, is pretty much everything that your company has--is stored on someone else's servers and space rather than your own (although obviously cloud computing doesn't preclude backing up every so often; but it does mean your stuff is out there, and that you use the cloud to conduct day-to-day computing). And what that means is that whether those servers go down is out of your control. And they can go down. Hint hint, Google.
Yes, Google was down today. It was a nightmare. We're speaking personally here--we couldn't access our Gmail or our Google Reader RSS feed for, like, an hour. As we say, a nightmare.
So yes, it's time for the anti-cloud computing people to gloat. Forbes is game. The piece actually has some many sage insights about what it means that so many are dependent on the servers of so few companies. It also points out that Google's guarantee (albeit for free services) of 99.9% uptime gives it almost nine hours each year to be down without even breaking its promise, which truly is terrifying. And then, yes, the piece concludes: "Of greater concern is what the outage implies for trust in cloud computing services, the biggest hope for the tech industry as it moves out of its slump."
Well, look. We talked about this before, when Google's cloud software suite was down for a bit in Western Europe. Servers crash all the time, whether they're under your roof or not. These outages are not an argument against cloud computing; they're an argument for taking extra security measures and for backing everything up.
Also, memo to Google: please don't ever do that to us again.
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