Swans on Tea

OK, maybe not the latter. This is about integrity, after all. The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest
I got an email invitation for this, but it was too close to the deadline for me to do anything about it. First prize is a trip to Washington, DC. (Some [...]

Kill Switches and Remote Control at Schneier.
Don’t be fooled by the scare stories of wireless devices on airplanes and in hospitals, or visions of a world where no one is yammering loudly on their cellphones in posh restaurants. This is really about media companies wanting to exert their control further over your electronics. They not [...]

Roundest objects in the world created
[A]n international group of engineers and craftsmen has . . . built a pair of nearly perfect spheres that are thought to be the roundest objects in the world.
The unusual balls, discussed last week at the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference in France, were created as an answer to [...]

The War on Photography
Photographers being treated as security threats, because that’s how Hollywood portrays things
A movie-plot threat is a specific threat, vivid in our minds like the plot of a movie. You remember them from the months after the 9/11 attacks: anthrax spread from crop dusters, a contaminated milk supply, terrorist scuba divers armed with [...]

Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake discovers (among other things) a fine tradition: volunteering in absentia.
Do not oversleep and miss a meeting because the meeting announcement was sent to the e-mail address you don’t use because it’s continually broken, or else you too may draw the short straw in absentia and find yourself [...]

Be good for goodness’ sake. Or maybe out of fear of being watched.
A while back I posted about being able to track people using their cell phones. Well, some scientists did a study doing that very thing — “Understanding Individual Human Mobility Patterns” using cell phone signals.
The location of cell phone users [...]

Titanic Was Found During Secret Cold War Navy Mission
Ronald Thunman, then the deputy chief of naval operations for submarine warfare, told Ballard the military was interested in the technology—but for the purpose of investigating the wreckage of the U.S.S. Thresher and U.S.S. Scorpion.
Since Ballard’s technology would be able to reach the sunken subs and take [...]

The other day I was talking with my brother, who lives in NYC, and we were comparing pope-visit stories (his attempts to get around the city were screwed up on consecutive days). I mentioned how we had gotten a road repaving out of the visit to DC, and how we seemed to get the [...]

Great, now I’m scared of cellphones
A service called World Tracker lets you use data from cell phone towers and GPS systems to pinpoint anyone’s exact whereabouts, any time — as long as they’ve got their phone on them.
[...]
Once connected, the service shows you the exact location of the phone by the minute, conveniently pinpointed on [...]

mustventmustventmustventmustventmustventmustvent
There seem to be a lot of bureaucratic jobs out there. People shuffling papers around and about, sending them to and fro, ostensibly with a goal in mind of accomplishing some task. Sometimes that task is helping someone else get something done. Somehow, though, there are cases in which the metric by [...]

Just when you think things can’t get any sillier. Boeing Patent Shuts Down AMC-14 Lunar Flyby Salvage Attempt
Primarily this is because SES is currently suing Boeing for an unrelated New Skies matter in the order of $50 million dollars - and Boeing told SES that the patent was only available if SES Americom dropped [...]

Aussie Laser-Pointer Ban in New South Wales.
No mention if there is a power threshold. (see update, below)
Legitimate users, like astronomy enthusiasts, will have to apply for prohibited weapons permits.
That’s right, mate. You’ll need a frikkin’ carry permit for your laser pointer (especially if it’s mounted on the head of an endangered [...]