links for 2009-03-07

"The common thread of many of these discoveries is their goal: demonstrating that all the physical forces of nature are but different manifestations of a single, ‘universal’ force. This idea was a surprisingly modern one for Faraday’s time, and is known today as a unified field theory. Such research was likely on the minds of many researchers of that era, however: once Ørsted discovered that a magnetic compass needle could be deflected by an electric current, the notion that all forces might be related was a tantalizing dream. Faraday went further than any of his contemporaries in realizing that dream, and experimentally cemented the link between electricity and magnetism and light. Faraday was by no means done, however, and in 1851 he published the results of his attempts to demonstrate that electricity and gravity are related!"

"As the failure of many newspapers looms and public radio cuts its journalistic offerings, the complaint against new media by established journalists gets sharper and sharper. The key rallying cry is that new media can’t provide investigative reporting, that it can only piggyback on the work of the mainstream print and radio media, and that when the newspapers go, there goes investigative work and all the civic value it provided.

As a starting point in a conversation about the future, this complaint is much more promising that complaining about how people on the Internet are really mean or stupid. It narrows the discussion down to a central function of journalism, the independent investigation of government, industry and society and the delivery of information from such investigation. "

"Temperature is a pretty weird thing if you think about it. How do you best define temperature? Let me go ahead and give you my favorite definition:

Temperature is the thing that two objects have in common when they have been in contact for a long time.

Yes, that is a good definition. Maybe now you can see why temperature is weird. "

"Suppose that Earth has been visited by aliens 50 times since our solar system’s accretion disk started to cool 4,567 million years ago. What would the aliens have seen? In order to simulate this, I generated 50 random alien arrival times in between then and now, sorted them, and put them in geologic context. They are listed below, in stratigraphic order."