Month: May 2013

Inside an atom

Imagine a chamber.  Now flip on the switch that creates a strong electrical field inside that chamber.  Now imagine not one, but two laser guns mounted inside that chamber.  Flip the switch that activates both of these guns and their targeting system.  It does sound a bit scary already, doesn’t?  Well, all we need know is a target.  Imagine that.  A moving one, inside the chamber. BZZZT!  Laser guns zap the target, which now rips apart and hangs in the middle of the air, because of the magnetic forces of the electrical field.  Snap the picture!

sn-hydrogen

Cool, isn’t it?  Well, now do a bit of scaling.  The target that you just zapped in the chamber is the size of the hydrogen atom.  It’s not tiny.  It’s beyond tiny.  You probably will need an industrial size telescope to even see the chamber!  Slashdot points to the story that covers the experiment.

But, maybe, I’m just way out of sync.  According to one of the Slashdot comments, it’s not as exciting as I picture it:

Now this would have been a fundamental breakthrough if it would have been done many decades ago. These days, we have extremely high confidence in our theoretical/computational models of the wavefunction of atoms and molecules. “Just as valuable for developing quantum intuition in the next generation of physicists?” Naah, this stuff has been well-known since before most of us were born.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to belittle this accomplishment – it’s all kinds of cool that they pulled off this experiment in the first place, and notwithstanding the huge body of other experimental evidence, it’s a beautiful direct confirmation of longstanding quantum mechanics theory. And as mentioned in TFA, provided they can scale this up to larger and less well-understood systems than the hydrogen atom, it might make it possible to obtain unique data on nontrivial materials like molecular wires. The only problem I have is that the Science editor is overselling it a bit; at the end of the day, it’s not going to change our quantum mechanical worldview the slightest.

On Google’s Transparency Report

While catching up with my RSS feeds, I saw the latest Google Transparency Report from the end of last month.  The summary of the report basically says that the number of governmental requests to remove content from Google is raising quite rapidly.

transparency report 2013

There are also some clarifications of why that might be:

  • There was a sharp increase in requests from Brazil, where we received 697 requests to remove content from our platforms (of which 640 were court orders—meaning we received an average of 3.5 court orders per day during this time period), up from 191 during the first half of the year. The big reason for the spike was the municipal elections, which took place last fall. Nearly half of the total requests—316 to be exact—called for the removal of 756 pieces of content related to alleged violations of the Brazilian Electoral Code, which forbids defamation and commentary that offends candidates. We’re appealing many of these cases, on the basis that the content is protected by freedom of expression under the Brazilian Constitution.
  • Another place where we saw an increase was from Russia, where a new law took effect last fall. In the first half of 2012, we received six requests, the most we had ever received in any given six-month period from Russia. But in the second half of the year, we received 114 requests to remove content—107 of them citing this new law.
  • During this period, we received inquiries from 20 countries regarding YouTube videos containing clips of the movie “Innocence of Muslims.” While the videos were within our Community Guidelines, we restricted videos from view in several countries in accordance with local law after receiving formal legal complaints. We also temporarily restricted videos from view in Egypt and Libya due to the particularly difficult circumstances there.

One thing that I am missing is a correlation to the actual size of the Google index.  I mean, I of course understand that it is incomparably larger than all these requests combined, but I keep thinking that the more content you’ll index, the more removal requests you’ll get.  So, I think, it would be interesting to see the correlation in growth of removal requests to the growth of the Google’s global index.

The F5 key is not a build process. It’s a quick an…

The F5 key is not a build process. It’s a quick and dirty substitute. If that’s how you build your software, I regret that I have to be the one to tell you this, but your project is not based on solid software engineering practices.

Jeff Atwood