After blatantly ignoring my own advice and ordering one of the first Macbook Pros off the assembly line, all was peachy as my homeostasis (my powerbook) seemed to hum along with the occasional speed boost thanks to actualy Universal Binaried Ying-Yanged software. Soon random I/O errors became major ones, and a 2 week bad-block scan confirmed my greatest fears - I got a lemon. While I've been able to swing my weight around in the past for some better access to the Apple Death Star, they didn't seem to be having it this time around.

Around April this thing spent a week sitting in the Apple Store Soho, victim of an errant character in the serial number, which is odd because they use barcode scanners for those by now. Once finally shipped to Texas, my prognosis was confirmed, a bad HD. So not only had I lost all the work I had used it for since first getting it around April 15th, but I was without the book for almost a complete month. In other words, I've been in a personal hell because my powerbook is like an arm or a leg and without it I am severly disabled.

To make matters worse, I was excited to upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 until I realized I already was running it. The last major update to this blogging software was almost a full year ago! Only now are they pubicly beta-testing version 3.3. In this downtime, something seems to have zapped a great many comments, among other things, so this environment too, will need some significant maintenance.

So, to this of you who actually read this thing, I'm sorry sorry sorry, but I have a few long plane rides ahead of me to finally get everything humming along again...

Until then, it's baseball season!~!!! Let's play ball!

Blog along with me and some Mets diehards!!

Why is it that the number of Mets blogs completely dwarfs any other team, especially the evil empire up in the Bronx?

May 26, 2006— Building a cloak of invisibility, Harry Potter-style, just got a little easier.

Two methods now precisely describe how a new class of engineered materials could be used to guide waves of electromagnetic radiation — including light — around objects, bestowing invisibility.

In the near future, the technique could shield stealth aircraft from radar detectors and protect equipment from unwanted radiation. But in the long term, the optical illusion could offer new ways to hide things in broad daylight.

"To turn this into something practical is not easy. But there is hope that this could be done because of new developments in optic materials," said Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St. Andrews in the U.K.

Leonhardt and John Pendry of the Imperial College London independently reported their work in this week's issue of Science.

Specially-designed "metamaterials" built on semiconductor chips, they report, can be tuned to divert approaching electromagnetic radiation in another direction.

Other researchers have been investigating how to use these materials to produce invisibility devices.

But Leonhardt and Pendry are the first to precisely calculate how a sphere or cylinder made from metamaterial could be designed to redirect the flow of oncoming waves of radiation around it. An object inside such a sphere would be rendered invisible.

To manipulate the waves, the researchers capitalize on light's proclivity to move along the path of least resistance.

That phenomenon produces familiar optical illusions, such as the way light bends when passing between air and water. A fish beneath the surface appears to be in one place, but try to grab him and you quickly realize his location was a trick of light.

Scientists describe how light behaves in a given material with a number known as the refractive index.

Leonhardt and Pendry have shown that if a material's refractive index could be changed from point to point, light rays might avoid it entirely.

How a cloaking device might actually look remains unclear. But it would employ the metamaterials built onto semiconductor chips and move radiation or light waves at specific speeds along a path of least resistance—that path being the edge of the sphere. The waves would flow around the sphere like a fluid and return to their original path undisturbed.

To the observer, the item in the center of the sphere would go unseen.

But there are still big hurdles to overcome before an invisibility cloak can be made real. So far, the calculations only account for one wavelength of light at the same time. And while that might work for radar applications, it wouldn't work for the entire spectrum of wavelengths in visible light at once, said Mark Dennis, a research fellow at the University of Southampton in the U.K.

"The real ingenuity to making a cloaking device is yet to come," Dennis said.

Directing: Ang
Picture: Good Night
Actor: Hoffman
Actress: Witherspoon
Supporting Actor: Clooney
Sup Actress: Rachel Weisz
Animated: Howl's
Art Direction: King Kong
Cinematography: Brokeback
Costume: Geisha
Docu: March of the Penguins
Editing: Munich
Music: Brokeback
Sound Editing: King Kong
Sound Mixing: King Kong
Visual Effects: King Kong
Original Song: Hustle & Flow
Adapted Screenplay: Capote
Original Screenplay: Syriana

Dick Cheney shot somebody in the face Saturday (they covered it up until now, because that's all these people know how to do at this point)

wait

Dick shot a TEXAS REPUBLICAN (who are pretty much despicable enough on their own) in the face.

wait

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Poetic Justice anyone? Why couldn't it have been Scalia?