Can You Spare a Second?

Why, yes, I can. I just happened to find an extra one floating around here.

The International Earth Orientation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) has announced a leap second.

A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2008.
The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be:

2008 December 31, 23h 59m 59s
2008 December 31, 23h 59m 60s
2009 January 1, 0h 0m 0s

The difference between UTC and the International Atomic Time TAI is:

from 2006 January 1, 0h UTC, to 2009 January 1 0h UTC : UTC-TAI = – 33s
from 2009 January 1, 0h UTC, until further notice : UTC-TAI = – 34s

The proud parents had previously stated they didn’t care whether the leap second were added or removed, just that it had all of its fingers and toes.

Finger on the Button

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 only want to prevent you from surreptitiously recording movies and concerts, they want your new television to enforce good “manners” on your computer, and not allow it to record any programs. They want your iPod to politely refuse to copy music to a computer other than your own. They want to enforce their legislated definition of manners: to control what you do and when you do it, and to charge you repeatedly for the privilege whenever possible.
“Digital Manners Policies” is a marketing term. Let’s call this what it really is: Selective Device Jamming. It’s not polite, it’s dangerous. It won’t make anyone more secure — or more polite.

Did I Read That Right?

This is the kind of post I start reading, and I begin to furrow my eyebrows as phrases and sentences pop up that don’t seem right or are obviously wrong. I though it was just bad science journalism, but realized it’s a rant-y agenda piece, with the supposed “science” reporting as a setup.

Superfluids, BECs and Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment

It starts off OK, giving some history, but then there was

Bosons are force carriers like photons of light and fermions are the matter we can touch.

Force carriers are bosons, but not all bosons are force carriers (universal affirmatives can only be partially converted, quoth the logician) — you can construct bosonic systems from an even number of fermions. Bosons have integral spin angular momentum, and fermions have half-integral spin, and the statistics that describe their behavior is different. An attempt to bridge the gap between science and a lay explanation that fails because it’s scientifically incorrect.

[helium is] produced by nuclear decay, as from radium and polonium, dangerous alpha radiation releasing, in fact bare nuclei of helium that eventually pick up electrons and form stable helium isotopes.

Here’s a journalistic archaeologism (it’s certainly not neo-) dangerous radiation. Nuclear radiation in invariably dangerous. Actually alpha radiation is pretty much harmless as an external dose, as it deposits its energy in a very short distance, so it doesn’t tend to penetrate even a layer of dead skin. The source is dangerous when ingested or inhaled. But the Helium nucleus is already stable (it doesn’t decay) even before it picks up the electrons — that makes it electrically neutral, not stable.

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