Monthly Archives: January 2009

Inauguration WebCam

If you haven’t finished your grading yet (nya-nya), you can while away the hours with this webcam that the Washington Post has pointed at the site of the inauguration.

Posted in Politics: US: 2008 Elections | 4 Comments

Countdown to the Restoration

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Posted in Politics: US | Comments Off on Countdown to the Restoration

All Deliberate Speed

Via Incertus, this YouTube video,

This is all happening in 2008.

Backstory at this (likely ephemeral) AP story Actor Freeman foots prom bill in Sundance doc.

Posted in Kultcha | Comments Off on All Deliberate Speed

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Still Doesn’t Have Our Interests at Heart

Lots of people remarked on how Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the other two local Florida Republicans who just survived tougher-than-usual re-election races switched their votes on S-CHIP and voted for it last week after being pilloried for a series of no votes back when it mattered.

I didn't join that chorus. I saw these as cheap votes for a bill that was now certain to pass; yes votes a year ago might have actually swung the tide on a bill that will particularly benefit South Florida due to the very large number of uninsured children in our community.

And only a few days later I feel vindicated: our own Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, supposedly one of those chastened Republicans, now more sensitized to our needs after a hard-fought (but ultimately not that close) election is right back to her old tricks: letting ideology trump reality.

One of our current realities is that the State of Florida is facing declining tax revenues, and is balancing its books on the backs of schoolchildren. And the schools of Miami-Dade are taking a fearsome hit in the budget the GOP-controlled legislature has just sent to the Governor.

One consequence of this disaster is a push to provide some funds at the national level. Again, that would be of disproportionate benefit to South Florida because we're in such dire straightsstraits. But — surprise — our own Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is against it.

U.S. House bill would pump millions into S. Fla. schools: Rep. Kendrick Meek, D-Miami, called the economic stimulus plan “a reflection of the state of this nation's priorities.”

“To secure our future, we must invest in our students today by reversing cutbacks in education, preventing teacher layoffs, keeping class sizes small and building modern schools outfitted with 21st-century classrooms,” he said.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami, was skeptical.

“Borrowing and spending are out of control in Congress,” she said. “Every week, we are confronted with a new massive bailout plan that is packaged as an emergency must-have bill. The true bill will be passed along to our children in massive deficits.”

I didn't hear any of that stuff when she voted — repeatedly — for tax cuts for rich people, did you? But now that the economy requires massive fiscal stimulus to stave off a Depression, now it's time to ration the children again.

Posted in Econ & Money: Mortgage Mess, Florida, Politics: FL-18 | 4 Comments

Shadows on Plato’s Cave: Giant Hologram Version

I don't pretend to understand all of this, but apparently, Our world may be a giant hologram.

According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

Hawking showed that black holes are in fact not entirely “black” but instead slowly emit radiation, which causes them to evaporate and eventually disappear. This poses a puzzle, because Hawking radiation does not convey any information about the interior of a black hole. When the black hole has gone, all the information about the star that collapsed to form the black hole has vanished, which contradicts the widely affirmed principle that information cannot be destroyed. This is known as the black hole information paradox.

Bekenstein's work provided an important clue in resolving the paradox. He discovered that a black hole's entropy – which is synonymous with its information content – is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. This is the theoretical surface that cloaks the black hole and marks the point of no return for infalling matter or light. Theorists have since shown that microscopic quantum ripples at the event horizon can encode the information inside the black hole, so there is no mysterious information loss as the black hole evaporates.

Crucially, this provides a deep physical insight: the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole – not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram. Susskind and 't Hooft extended the insight to the universe as a whole on the basis that the cosmos has a horizon too – the boundary from beyond which light has not had time to reach us in the 13.7-billion-year lifespan of the universe. What's more, work by several string theorists, most notably Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has confirmed that the idea is on the right track. He showed that the physics inside a hypothetical universe with five dimensions and shaped like a Pringle is the same as the physics taking place on the four-dimensional boundary.

One key fact out of all this is that the length of the fundamental unit might be hugely larger than the Planck length (10-35 metres) — maybe as much as a whopping 10-16 metres. I find that last a bit hard to believe, as that would make it a tenth of the size of a proton, and up to 100 larger than some estimates of the size of an electron.

Then again, this is quite weird:

If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.

Since the volume of the spherical universe is much bigger than its outer surface, how could this be true? Hogan realised that in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. “Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry,” says Hogan.

I suppose it explains Monday mornings rather well, though.

Posted in Science/Medicine | 1 Comment

MoDo Does SoBe’s Canyon Ranch

Maureen Dowd, the New York Times's drama queen of frivolity, takes a vacation in SoBe and pens Canyon Ranch in Miami Beach – What Recession?.

Choice bits:

To find out if spa guilt is rampant, Alessandra and I spent a long weekend at the new Canyon Ranch in the old Carillon Hotel in Miami Beach, which bills itself as the first condo, luxury hotel and wellness spa “of its kind!”

Like other spas, Canyon Ranch hopes to alleviate spa guilt by stressing the holistic benefits of “a deeper wellness,” “a healing energy,” “a Shamanic journey” — rather than simple exfoliating, waxing and cycling. It boasts a sensual 70,000-square-foot spa “where body meets soul” (while money leaves wallet).

But wait, it gets better.

I’d seen someone execute a daring escape from a spa once. Many years ago, when she was single, Nicole Miller, the pretty red-headed clothing designer, had broken out one night from the puritanical Golden Door in Escondido, Calif., and shown up the next morning with a cute guy and a satisfied smile.

At some spas, going AWOL produces a Mother Superior scowl from management. Here, the easygoing staff seems to expect it, even enable it. There’s a hair salon that will wash the massage oil out of your hair, give you a great blow dry and reasonably priced sun streaks, and send you on your way out into the warm night with some cheap dangly earrings.

I called the only person I knew in Miami and asked him to bust us out of there on Saturday night. Fortunately, he was chief of police, my pal John Timoney, so the great escape from Canyon Ranch went flawlessly in his white getaway S.U.V.

Gosh, that sounds familiar. Where have I heard something about Chief Timoney and his SUV? Could it be The Lexus Leprechaun in which the New Times wrote about his unethical and illegal acceptance of a free SUV from a local Lexus dealer? Could it be Miami's Top Cop Breaks the Law in which they described his stonewall when asked to testify about it? Or maybe is was when he had to buy the car at its $54K sticker price? Or that his ethics case was settled for a weeks pay and a $500 fine — which isn't much, but was the largest ethics fine in the history of the county (don't say it)? Or that there were suggestions the Chief might have committed perjury in a sworn statement in the case?

Not that MoDo lets on any hint of all that in her article. And why should she? The Chief took her somewhere nice:

Chief Timoney took us over to the most over-the-top spot in this over-the-top city: the leopard-skin-swathed, stained-glass-filled, Medusa-head-branded Versace mansion, a testament to what one man accomplished by reducing antiquity to a throw pillow.

The mansion, Casa Casuarina, had been turned into a private club but is now open to the public, with a restaurant on its patio that started out in September, and tours of the mannerist upstairs suites. We had a drink in the ornate bar with the owner, Peter Loftin, a mountain of Southern charm, a retired telecommunications mogul who bought the house for $19 million in 2000. Then we ate a sampling from the kitchen: a mound of succulent Kobe beef, fried pork belly, sea scallops with osetra caviar, black grouper, blue prawns cooked at the table on a salt block, foie gras with a riesling-pineapple-coriander emulsion and Meyer lemon tart and crushed amaretti mousse with vanilla-bean meringue, washed down by Champagne (Krug, Clos de Ambonnay 1995), at one of the outdoor tables under a tent by the elaborately tiled pool.

… did the NYT (or the Chief) really buy a champagne that costs $3,500 / bottle at retail? Somebody, or two somebodies, seems seriously overpaid. But then the Chief has long been known for high living and bashing into protesters and others. And it seems he makes $4,300 per week, so I guess he can afford it.

Having been fed and watered (no word about whether “Alessandra” came along), MoDo went back to work:

I had a massage where a woman walked on my back while holding on to rails in the ceiling — not relaxing — and another where I was rubbed down by a cute young Latino massage therapist wielding a mushroom-shaped ball wrapped in linen.

Aren't you glad that Maureen Dowd had a good time? And, in case you are wondering, we never do find out if “spa guilt” is “rampant”. Perhaps next time.

Posted in Miami | 1 Comment