"Do government aides routinely receive or send top secret documents with their blackberries?"

In the UK? I wouldn't be suprised (at least they seem to occasionally leave them in the tube, or commuter train, etc...)

I didn't read the press but had Brazillian friends tell me about it when these photos came out and they described it precisely as it is back then. The existence of these was known, they were tracked but left uncontacted. (Therefore the reserve)

I don't see the controversy, looks like plain old bad/sensationalist reporting to me.

Eustace, why? a d20 is a platonic solid a natural shape known since thousands of years before plato. And around his time it was known that there are only 5 convex regular polyhedra (which are the properties you want for dice).

Games have been part of human culture from the very beginning, and the technical abilities to manufacture such a d20 must have been around for centuries when this was made.

I see no reason to suspect that this isn't authentic.

The whole "Where is your tolerance for anti-rational religious nutjobs" thing reminds me of this old article:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39182

Seriously, though I wish that people pretending to have perpetual motion machines would get the same treatment here. It seems that some forms of anti-rational nuttery, if packed up in the right aesthetics (engineering, underdog scientist, etc...) is not as well criticised here as it maybe should be.

A lot of people here fail utterly at the "imagine what it would be like" test, still thinking completely within our contemporary categories just replacing a few details or single variables with their presumed version of what it must have been like.

What #64 said, those were functional societies with a functional body of knowledge you'd have no access too.

Also the whole idea that if you invent something you can make billions somehow. How? How do you manufacture it? How do you distribute it? How do you prevent others who are more powerful and better connected from simply killing you and building it yourself? How do you even create a prototype if you are not in the right guild in the right city? etc... I personally have basically no idea how economy really functioned back then, do you?

You are assuming that only the knowledge is gone but that somehow you still have access to the infrastructure and social structures of today to reap the benefits of reinserting the knowledge into the system.

On another note, someone interesting I came across while looking up stuff today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_von_Bingen

How do you survive the first week?

Also you are not familiar with the culture, the language, etc. People got along, social structures existed as did "wisdom of the crowds" style knowledge both of which you have no access too. You basically will have a tough time doing anything.

What would I do? Head for a monastry. Become a monk. That's probably one of the few ways to get the materials and time to seriously write. If you want to improve things for the future generations forget about trinkets and gadgets like penicillin or the motor.

Establish the scientific method! All you guys have been thinking about is giving them technology. They already have all the technology they need, the Romans who disappeared a few centuries ago had far superior technology! Gears, heated floors (a concept that still hasn't made it to the UK for example), etc.

At the time around 1000ad you can find a few universities if you manage to get enough stuff together to be able to travel that far, there is one in Marocco, the University in Bologna is still a few decades off. Now these universities are preserving knowledge gained during greek times but aren't contributing too much, new scientific and mathematical knowledge will only start to be produced a few centuries hence after the renaissance sweeps Europe. At around 1000ad Fes, Marroco might be the best place to try to kickstart the scientific revolution.

But to get started, seek out a monastry! Live as a monk. Brew beer. tend the gardens. This seems to be the place where your modern knowledge would be most likely to come in useful towards your everyday survival.

To put this in context, his father founded the British fascist party, his mother was a good friend of hitler, and the scenes were supposedly roleplayed as in a concentration camp:

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/artikel/899/166422/

For somebody who is as much a public figure as him that barely qualifies as his "private business".

(still I concur with the yawns on this)

Actually one of the prostitutes alleges that he ordered Nazi scenes.

Build a big machine and I'll believe it. Tokamaks were expected to easily scale up a few decades ago, as well. Until people started building bigger ones and finding instabilities much worse then equilibrium theory had anticipated.
Fusors have shown to be inherently incapable of producing energy (though cheaply generating low level fusion).
The new Polywells by Bussard claim to overcome the fundamental problems somehow, but at what consequences we don't know.

That said, it's probably well worth investing, say, 1% of the ITER budget on these alternative approaches, they are based on feasible physics after all.

Mike Edmmunds was giving lectures on his research into this all over the UK recently, a truly marvelous collaboration of archaeologists and astronomers.

It is remarkable also because it implies a long tradition of metal/gear work of high sophistication existed that was previously unknown. We knew they knew the astronomy that went into it (remember 200bc is earlier then 100bc), but the only other mechanisms using gears that we know of (before the middle ages that is) use 2 or 3 simple gears and date from centuries later.

In other words, drugs of the one form or the other, in the context of religious ceremonies or coping with everyday life, have been part of our culture, and probably any culture really, as long as agriculture and domestication at least, if not longer.

Monasteries predate cities as centers of culture and learning and appropriately this was true for food and drinking culture as well.

S, it's "Satte Literschüssel".

This is associated with one of Germanies most beloved comic (anti-but not really anti-)heroes: Werner, e.g.:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8fxdzQPGro

Jeff, why not, given that Christian Monks (remember Friar Tuck?) started the whole beer brewing thing (at least in the western world):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weihenstephan_Abbey

And the best breweries in Bavaria were operated by Monks until secularisation and are still named after the corresponding monastic orders:

Augustiner (Augustinian)
Paulaner (mendicant orders)
Franziskaner (Franciscan)

Starkbier, a particularly strong beer is brewed exclusively during lent, and was brewed to nourishment during fasting times (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelbock).

Mind you, today Weihenstephan also houses a university faculty on brewing beer, so secularisation has clearly made some impact.

One of the breweries still operated by a monastrie is Andechs:
http://www.andechs.de/englisch/brauerei/

A favorite for school trips in the area.

Hold the printing press! I have just proved all of mathematics wrong! These stupid people living on only one side of the magnetic timecube do not understand the essence of identity because they have been taught by their science to think apart! But I can show you:

* Step 1: Let a=b.
* Step 2: Then a^2 = ab ,
* Step 3: a^2 + a^2 = a^2 + ab ,
* Step 4: 2a^2 = a^2 + ab ,
* Step 5: 2a^2 - 2ab = a^2 + ab - 2ab ,
* Step 6: and 2a^2 - 2ab = a^2 - ab.

* Step 7: This can be written as 2(a^2 - ab) = a^2 - ab ,
* Step 8: and cancelling the (a^2 - ab) from both sides gives 1=2.

I'll explain this in a youtube video soon!!!!

(credit goes here: http://www.math.toronto.edu/mathnet/falseProofs/first1eq2.html)

"Cooperating with Chinese authorities on filtering search results qualifies in my book."

Well then maybe you should think about this issue a bit more. It definitely qualifies as operating under the local laws. If the laws are evil you must make a judgment whether to pull out or subvert as far as possible (which more often then not qualifies as a very difficult real life grey area).
If they were (required to be) actively helping Chinese authorities with identifying authors for persecution I'd hope they'd pull out (I believe that's why they didn't operate blogger in China).

For search results it's a completely different issue. Any information you get into a society makes it more open, as long as they don't actively help spread misinformation there is nothing morally objectionable here.

"The only rule is work."

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

"I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached."

And much better (but in German):

http://www.uni-flensburg.de/asta/pol_kultur_anekdote.htm

In general, the US (and EU) has imposed free trade on a lot of nations in the past decades, and benefited from it massively.

Its about the most immoral thing you could think of to now turn around and say: "Oh you want to sell your software/culture/labor on our markets to? Not just the other way around? Sorry nope, cant do that need to close the market/borders".

@29 LOL. Literally. :D

What gives you the idea that working scientists would exclusively/predominantly write hard SF?

As for pong, just make the ball alternate between red and blue, your paddle is a red 3d box in 3d space represented in the intuitive way, and the enemy paddle is a blue 3d box in 3d space.

The red-blue axis would be the 4th dimension, so just as in 2D pong you need to make sure that your 1D object, which is part of your 1 dimensional boundary of the playing field is at the location of the 0 dimensional ball when it hits your 1 dimensional boundary of the 2 dimensional playing field, 4d pong would require that your 3d paddle is at the location of the 0 dimensional ball when it hits your 3 dimensional boundary of the 4d playing field.

Now tetris... you'd need rotations and be able to represent 4d objects rather then just 0d and 3d objects in 4d space... that'd be a whole different ball park of mindfuck.

Not just can you project 4D onto a 2D screen just as well as 3D (well you lose some more information and all intuition, but mathematically speaking....), you can equally well do this with any dimension.

If you want to truly fry your brain I'd recommend trying to solve the 5 dimensional Rubik's cube:

http://www.gravitation3d.com/magiccube5d/

if you get stuck, don't despair, there is an algorithm for arbitrary dimensions:

http://www.plunk.org/~hatch/MagicCubeNdSolve/

(Really, dimensions aren't as weird as people make them out to be...)

Heh, I should have known to be more precise here *g* Okay:

As long as the systems mass density is small enough that its complete gravitational behavior can be accurately modeled through first order perturbation theory using g_{\mu\nu} = \eta_{\mu\nu} + \epsilon h_{\mu\nu} with \eta the Minkowski metric.

Alternatively: If the gravitational interaction of the system can be modeled entirely as a geodesic motion.

Or if spacetime is asymptotically flat.

Which incidentally includes pretty much everything we have ever measured I think.

As conservation of energy is tied to the structure of time, it is no long valid in GR which itself is a theory of the structure of spacetime. It remains valid in certain scenarios in different senses, eg the first case has a notion of energy similar to our standard one, the second one has a purely local concept of energy, valid only along each geodesic, and the final concept of energy is purely global and not the sum of the energies of local systems.

There is no energy density in the solar system significant enough to create even measurable, never mind exploitable effects to this end by a many orders of magnitude.

More details here:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/energy_gr.html

For everyone unfamiliar with it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem

"invariance with respect to time translation gives the well known law of conservation of energy"

In other words, the fact that the laws of physics are the same today, tomorrow and yesterday implies conservation of energy.

Even if fundamentally in some sense the mathematical framework of the Noether Theorems is insufficient for the theory of everything, then these mathematical frameworks are still good enough to describe all observed phenomena within regimes far exceeding those this toy probes.

The impossibility of perpetual motion (in flat background space time) is probably one of the strongest statements possible in science. Meaning it's stronger then the statement: "If I let go of this apple it will fall down."

"...the point is to know more about the world than you did before."

With Kitten pictures on top, to compensate the evil?

This is not exactly an informative or thought provoking article. It's clearly written to induce a bit of disgust and a few giggles. At best its a form of infotainment. (Fair enough it's on cracked.com a humor site, but don't pretend that you are informing your readership, or increasing knowledge in meaningful ways by linking this! This is merely great smalltalk knowledge ala "Did you know..." "No shit!")

It makes you feel a bit of indignation and a bit of outrage and most of all makes you feel good about yourself for feeling the indignation and outrage.

This is NOT a matter of something we should put behind us, or forget. But this article is merely thoroughly trivializing the issue. "Look how incredibly evil Siemens is!"

What's Ratzinger got to do with this?

A bigger and more pervasive story is that through time we rarely hold companies morally responsible. The allies ignored many of the economy/nazi involvements in order to get Germany on its feet economically as soon as possible.
Nevermind that the US and all the allies benefited from technology developed by the Nazis after the war as well, the rocket program, during which more forced laborers died then it killed soldiers on the battle field, being probably the best known example.

Following up on what 8# and 16# said, this is common knowledge in Germany, as a matter of fact in the past decade or two the companies themself have (often following some public pressure and lawsuits) started to scientifically investigate their own past.

The latest example would be the Quandts: http://www.zeit.de/2007/47/Quandt

Basically the entirety of the German economy was of course collaborating with the Nazis. They were, after all, a totalitarian regime. Forced labor was ubiquitous.

The linked article is a joke.

There's a good writeup here:

http://botherer.cream.org/?p=186

He doesn't trick or suggest or program, he simply lies:

"So that means Brown leaves two options:

a) He defies all known science
b) He is using actors and stooges despite having said he would not"

It somewhat bothers me how frequently somewhat or highly unscientifc worldviews are espoused repeated and propagated in boingboing.
Where is your scepticism? We'd all like to believe that amazing things would be possible, and they are, but by deep and patient study of the structure of reality (science) and the application of these discovered structures (technology), not by wishfully thinking that our fantasies might be a little bit true.

Scientists aren't idiots if these effects existed they would have made some scientist famous a long time ago.

Doesn't this tie in directly with the recent discussion on book price fixing?

I think in the case of book prices there is absolutely no question that it benefits readers, as it forces competition between bookstores in quality rather then price and therefore keeps the quality one can get without major personal time investment up.

The ability to compensate for the hit driven nature of the buisness in house also enables publishers to focus more on off beat titles therefore increasing the diversity of products offered.

In the context of the "culture industry" I can't see a good reason not to give the publishers this power. It puts control one step closer to those who create as opposed to those who market.

Yes everyone is guilty but in very different ways. If you do not differentiate you are ignoring the reality of what happened (just as you would be if you take the excuses Germans made afterwards as literally true).

You are ignoring history, at least in crucial parts, and you are not taking the lessons it must teach.

Yes everyone who abode fascism, in Germany and in many of the occupied nations, is guilty to some degree, many civilians much more so then common soldiers.

And sometimes this guilt does stem simply from accepting the law and doing your job (e.g. ).

If anything, the banality of evil makes the evil that much bigger and unbearable.