No, your plans for galactic empires are pretty safe: the changes in alpha are only on the order of ten parts per million. At most, bond strengths would be different by about that amount in long-ago galaxies (note, probably by now alpha is more uniform everywhere).

Now, if my hypothesis is correct and if we could make an extremely concentrated dark matter beam that could slow down the speed of light tremendously for all objects in its path, it could seriously alter the chemistry of anything it hits. The target's colour would change, chemical bonds could break, etc. How's that for a weapon to keep your imperial galactic subjects in line?

To be clear, I'm not proposing my hypothesis has been sufficiently demonstrated yet to be convincing. It's not even a theory yet, and I don't have the time or training to make it one. Moreover, even if it's correct, dark matter interacts extremely weakly with anything else - that's why it's dark - so making a beam of the stuff would be so difficult it would hardly qualify even as science fiction. Still, it's fun to think about!

So, a few weeks ago we heard that light travels a little bit slower than the fastest objects we've measured. This week we hear that in galaxies far, far away, either the electric charge is larger, Plank's constant is smaller or the speed of light is smaller. If it's the speed of light that's smaller, the required slow-down is of the same order of magnitude as the factor by which photons are slower than neutrinos as observed by OPERA.

Here's my take. There's a field of undetected particles (dark matter?) that refract light a tiny bit, and this field was denser in the early universe. This field would not affect the apparent speed of light as an observer moves through it, just as (ignoring dispersion) light traveling through moving glass doesn't pick up the glass' motion vector (i.e. this wouldn't manifest itself as the Luminiferous aether, which is experimentally disproven).

There: three mysteries (dark matter, OPERA neutrinos and the fine structure "constant") all tied together with a bow on top. If you know more physics than I (honours undergrad) and you think I've missed something, please tear into this hypothesis, either here or on my blog: http://many-ideas.blogspot.com/2011/11/ftl-neutrinos-and-fine-structure.html. I look forward to hearing from you!

Best,

LeDopore

Hey dude,

Want to reduce scan times? Check out compressed sensing MRI [1]. You should be able to take way fewer scans than thought possible with 20th century math. Regularized reconstructions are the new hotness, but don't take the word of a Slashdot user who says "dude" and "new hotness"; read these fricking things.

[1] M. Lustig, D. Donoho, J. Santos, and J. Pauly, “Compressed sensing MRI,” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 72–82, 2008.

I've noticed a disturbing trend that as funding levels drop, agencies are receding more to their core areas of study and leaving interdisciplinary scientists high and dry. Furthermore, it seems that there's an inverse relationship between the fund-ability of a project and its efficiency: if a (say) particle physics project is so inefficient it requires 1000 scientists 10 years to get 1 bit of data (like the Top quark discovery) then they're guaranteed to have well-coordinated funding and lobbying effort, whereas projects that deliver results on only a shoestring budget might not have enough people working on them to get any funding at all.

I'm working at the interface between neuroscience and algorithm theory, and I've already made some very interesting discoveries using borrowed time/funding, but I have trouble shopping my ideas to either pure neuroscience/medical funding agencies (who don't understand the math) or to computer science funding agencies (who don't appreciate the biology). Both sides seem generally excited and encouraging, but neither is willing to fund my future research, since (despite a promising track record) I'm out of the expertise of anyone out there.

My question is, are we doomed to a future dominated by big science projects working in entrenched specialties on the least-efficient, longest-term, too-big-to-fail science investigations out there? If not, how do we promote efficient, small-scale, interdisciplinary project funding?

OPERA has just found that either neutrinos travel 0.03% faster than photons we've measured, or their equipment has an unknown systematic error. Assuming there's no equipment error, I would find it more palatable to assume that light around Earth travels a bit below c and that neutrinos travel closer to c. What we think of as vacuum could really be a medium with refractive index 1.0003, perhaps due to a uniform background of weakly-interacting particles (maybe even dark matter) that affect photons but not neutrinos.

I have a physics undergrad degree; if there's someone here with better qualifications, would you care to weigh in on the idea that c could be 0.03% faster than the speed of light we measure on Earth?

From TFA: “We should have a result in 4-6 months as the data is already taken. We just have to measure some of our delays more carefully,” - Jenny Thomas.

MINOS was already repeating their measurements, but CERN got the jump on them. It's anyone's guess too whether there was a back channel of information from OPERA to MINOS that might have tipped them off and encouraged them to start taking data early. With so many people involved, you almost have to assume that preliminary findings migrate across the Atlantic pretty quickly.

"Given that Universities are for the most part funded by government and other public funding sources one could make the case that they should ALL operate this way. Universities are the last entity that should be locking up ideas with patents."

Sounds great, provided that the funding universities give up would come from extra public support. I'd be all for it, but I'm probably not in the majority.

I set up my dad's law firm with rsnapshot (http://rsnapshot.org/) to synch and archive documents over the net to an offsite storage server. It's like rsync, but it keeps a rolling list of previous states, so you can undo any mistakes easily enough. Best part about it: it uses hard links to store multiple instances of the same file, so the overhead of keeping your entire document history is pretty minimal (unless you edit a whole lot of videos all the time). YMMV, but I'm one satisfied customer.

I agree with your sentiment. However, when's the last time you installed a binary from a company you've never heard of? When's the last time you've visited an active website from a similarly obscure company?

The barrier to entry for web apps is so absurdly low that many companies or projects are going to use them just because it's the only way to run code on users' computers. Given web apps are here to stay for at least a certain market segment, ask yourself if WebAPI is a good or a bad thing; that's really the only question left.

It gets better. If Google borrowed an amount of $ with a nonzero imaginary component, through the miracle of complex number exponentiation eventually the bank would owe *them* money.

I know I'm posting against the prevailing opinion here, but I think AT&T might be doing the right thing. Consider that communication technology gets better and cheaper every year. Upgrading now not only cuts into profits, but it also means buying capacity for more money than the competition who doesn't upgrade for a few years.

The sign of a well-managed telecom is that its network is just at the point of being so crappy that folks are leaving. Any more capacity and they're wasting their dough. Erring a little to one side or the other is probably understandable too.

I don't think so. Rather than storing the hash of every password, rainbow tables store the hash of every, say, alphanumeric password less than X characters long. The character set and the password length are set by the reduction function - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table for more info. That means for a given set of possible passwords, the MD5 and SHA-1 rainbow tables will be about the same size.

There are about 10^500 possible string theories. We haven't yet found any that conform to all our observations. We don't know if it's even possible to search efficiently for that needle in the 10^500-big haystack, so string theory might be like the evil hall of mirrors in a bad B-movie: "yes, my childish nemesis, you falsified THIS one, but which one is the REAL string theory? HA HA HA!".

String theory may not be on a par with astrology, but IMHO it sullies the term theory. Anyone who has defended the theory of Evolution against fundies knows that's a bad move. It wouldn't be a bad idea to rename it string physics, even though arguably it's not physics yet either.

SSL is a PITA. It's much easier to configure Apache to only serve admin pages to the local machine. SSH tunnels are more secure and easier to maintain too.