Quoth the press release: "About three times a second, a 10,000-year-old stellar corpse sweeps a beam of gamma-rays toward Earth. Discovered by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the object, called a pulsar, is the first one known that only 'blinks' in gamma rays."

Freeman Dyson is one of the few survivors of the age of giants in physics (he was one of the people who developed the mathematical underpinnings for Feynman's work), and he remains a fascinating, wide-ranging thinker, the author of works like Infinite in All Directions. Of late he seems interested in being an environmental heretic, but in a much more moderate, intelligent way than the usual "conservative" style. Most recently he's published a long, thoughtful article on the Galpagos islands, with emphasis on the difficulties of balancing the needs of locals against environmental preservation.

The word is that John C. Mankin's outfit has successfully transmitted a megawatt of power by microwave beam in a test conducted between Hawaiian mountain tops; this is a technique often discussed for beaming solar power down from orbit. Needless to say, most of the obvious jokes have been done already, so try to do better, eh?

The physicist Freeman Dyson -- who made Feynman diagrams mathematically comprehensible to mere mortal physicists -- discusses some recent books about Global Warming. He accepts that anthropogenic global warming is a reality, though he departs from conventional wisdom about the urgency of fixing the problem immediately.

I have problems with slashdot's new discussion system ("D2", no longer in beta, I gather), and I'd like to report them, but instead I'm writing about them here for now because of my first problem:

1. It's not clear how one is supposed to report bugs. Contact info is buried, and not well labeled. (I could just send email to taco, but he seems like an idiot... should I just email chromatic?). Ah, if you drill down through "Help & Preferences", there's a line how to report a bug. And as for mis-features?
2. There's some attempt at implementing "smooth scrolling" that's herky-jerky and irritating. Even if it worked right, it would still annoy me: when I punch "page down" or "down arrow" I want it to snap, not to stall. (Turns out this is a mis-feature of Firefox -- I needed to uncheck "Edit Preferences/Advanced/Smoothscroll".
3. Nested comments are indicated with a heavy side-bar -- this is unnecessary visual noise. Quotations inside of comments are also indicated with heavy side-bars and they've become very hard to see now.
4. Some comments default to a closed state, and I need to click on them to open them -- I hate this kind of thing myself, it forces me to read with my hand on the mouse. (Maybe this is fixable with pref changes? I'm trying it out).

Thus far, there's only one thing I've noticed about the new system that I like: I can get the entire current state of the discussion in one huge page: I've always disliked the way the old system split things up into several pages (it made it hard to use text searches to skim for mentions of particular sub-topics).

In any case, as the slashdot brain-drain continues apace, it's going to be harder to find things in the discussion that are worth reading. It's more like a place you duck in if you feel like arguing with 13 year-olds and government propagandists. The various "features" being added to slashdot don't seem to address any of the real problems with the system.

(Actually: there's one "new" feature that sort-of works: I was skeptical of the utility of a friends network -- it just seemed like imitating all those other sites -- but actually it's kind of useful to be able to identify a cluster of nominally intelligent folks and automatically, instantly, mod them up. Kind of like the stuff I've been doing with nn and/or gnus on usenet for many a year...)

The bradblog is carrying a request: Database Geek Wanted: Programmer Needed to Help Pima County, AZ, Election Advocates Sort Through Largest Stash of Diebold Data Ever!. This is a paid telecommute contract to do some open source programming and help save democracy. The catch? You need to know how to deal with the Microsoft JET database engine.

This San Francisco Chronicle story: Continent-size toxic stew of plastic trash fouling swath of Pacific Ocean, discusses "the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists. The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii."

But according to the wikipedia article on North Pacific Gyre, some details of this are in error: "Some sources[2] have incorrectly reported that there is a 'floating continent' of debris that is roughly twice the size of Texas, however no scientific investigation, including Moore's, has verified this." The Chronicle was using the terms "marine biologists" and "oceanographers" very loosely: this is not a finding that's been confirmed by any degree-holding scientists.

Jaron Lanier suggests in a New York Times op-ed that the web cannot survive on volunteerism and advertising alone, and it's time to figure out how writers can get paid: Pay Me for My Content; "Affordable turns out to be much harder than free when it comes to information technology, but we are smart enough to figure it out." So, is the time right to think about micropayments again?

You don't need slashdot to hear about this story: Three Share Nobel in Economics for Work on Social Mechanisms (New York Times, login required), but you might have missed this detail: "One recent subject of Professor Maskin's wide-ranging research has been on the value of software patents. He determined that software was a market where innovations tended to be sequential, in that they were built closely on the work of predecessors, and innovators could take many different paths to the same goal. In such markets, he said, patents might serve as a wall that inhibited innovation rather than stimulating progress." Here's one of Maskin's papers on the subject: Sequential Innovation, Patents, limitation (pdf).

A Survival Imperative for Space Colonization , in which John Tierney discusses the ideas of Dr. J. Richard Gott, an astrophysicist at Princeton. What we have here: a wonky technique for making predictions based on almost no data via the Copernican Principle; which demonstrates the pressing need to colonize Mars (not the moon? not the asteroid belt?); plus a dash of the Fermi Paradox along the way. Is this really the New York Times?

H.R.811 sounds great: It's stated purpose is "to require a voter-verified permanent paper ballot". Unfortunately, it sounds like the details have some devils, as per usual. From the Bev Harris article: Is a flawed bill better than no bill?: "the Holt Bill provides for a paper trail (toilet paper roll-style records affixed to DRE voting machines) in 2008, requires more durable ballots in 2010, and requires a complex set of audits. It also cements and further empowers a concentration of power over elections under the White House, gives explicit federal sanction to trade secrets in vote counting, mandates an expensive 'text conversion' device that does not yet exist which is not fully funded, and removes 'safe harbor' for states in a way that opens them up to unlimited, expensive, and destabilizing litigation. "

Here's some interesting thoughts on Adobe and Microsoft's attempts "at remaking the web in their own image": Silly Season... And on a completely unrelated note, the Gnu folks are at work on an up-to-date Free flash plug-in: Gnash, but of course, we're too busy giggling at youtube to care.

Here's a nice test case... Microsoft bans Xbox "hacking" to prevent cheating in networked gaming: Microsoft bans hackers from Xbox Live. My bet: more than half of the slash crowd will come out in favor of this particular example of DRM lockdown.

Annalee Newitz questions whether it's a good idea to store your life on someone else's servers: Data crash of 2027: "... this situation is worse than potentially being data-raped by some feds trolling for terrorists. When we store all our personal, financial, and social information on other people's computers, we risk losing everything for reasons even stupider than the war on terror."

After 13 years, Randal Schwartz has had his conviction "expunged". In effect, legally it never happened. If you haven't heard about this one before, my take is that as a contractor at Intel, Randal did some over-zelaous white-hat cracking free-of-charge; this embarrassed some people in management (he pointed out that their passwords were terrible) and management then chose to embarass themselves further by having him convicted of a felony under an "anti-hacking" law. More info can be had from the Friends of Randal Schwartz.