This Could Fly Us To Another Planet

Proving yet again that Star Trek was scarily prescient, NASA has announced that its NEXT ion drive â€" NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster â€" has operated continually for over 43,000 hours (five years). This is an important development, as ion thrusters are pegged as one of the best ways to power long-term deep-space missions to other planets and solar systems. With a proven life time of at least five years, NEXT engines just made a very big step towards powering NASA’s next-gen spacecraft.

Ion thrusters work, as the name suggests, by firing ions (charged atoms or molecules) out of a nozzle at high speed (pictured above). In the case of NEXT, operation is fairly simple. Xenon (a noble gas) is squirted into a chamber. An electron gun (think cathode ray tube TV) fires electrons at the xenon atoms, creating a plasma of negative and positive ions. The positive ions diffuse to the back of the chamber, where high-charged accelerator grids grabs the ions and propel them out of the engine, creating thrust. The energy to power the electron gun can either come from solar panels, or from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (i.e. a nuclear battery, just like Curiosity).

A diagram of an electrostatic ion thruster (as in NASA’s NEXT, and most other ion thrusters)

The downside of ion thrusters, though, is that the amount of thrust produced is minuscule: State-of-the-art ion thrusters can deliver a grand total of 0.5 newtons of thrust (equivalent to the force of a few coins pushing down on your hand), while chemical thrusters (which power just about every spacecraft ever launched) on a satellite or probe deliver hundreds or thousands of newtons. The flip side of this, though â€" and the reason ion thrusters are so interesting â€" is that they have a fuel efficiency that’s 10 to 12 times greater than chemical thrusters. Obviously, for long trips through space, fuel efficiency is very important.

With such puny thrust, a NEXT-based ion drive would need to run for 10,000 hours â€" just over a year â€" to reach a suitable speed for space travel. Dawn, a NASA probe that’s powered by previous-generation NSTAR ion thrusters, accelerated from 0 to 60 mph in four days. As a corollary, ion thrusters only work at all because of the near-vacuum of space; if there was any friction at all, like here on Earth, an ion drive would be useless. The good news, though, is that the (eventual) max speed of a spacecraft propelled by an ion drive is in the region of 200,000 miles per hour (321,000 kph).

Moving forward, it now remains to be seen if NASA will use the NEXT on an actual spacecraft. In 2011, NASA put out a request-for-proposals for a test mission that will likely use a NEXT engine, and presumably, following this successful engine test, we might soon hear more news about that. Other space agencies, including the ESA, are also working on spacecraft propelled by ion thrusters.

Now read: NASA working on faster-than-light space travel, says warp drives are ‘plausible’

[Image credit]

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The Real Story Behind The Most Famous Quote In History

_{Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon Photo: Getty}

Dean Armstrong, the astronaut’s brother, said that Neil Armstrong had asked him to read the famous quote shortly before the Apollo 11 crew left for Cape Canaveral, where they would spend the months before the launch preparing for their journey.

He insisted that the original phrase, handed to him on a piece of paper by his brother as they played the board game Risk, contained the infamous missing “a”, although during the interview, even he dropped the letter as he told the story.

He said: “Before he went to the Cape, he invited me down to spend a little time with him. He said 'why don’t you and I, once the boys go to bed, why don’t we play a game of Risk’.

“I said I’d enjoy that. We started playing Risk and then he slipped me a piece of paper and said 'read that’. I did.

“On that piece of paper there was 'That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’. He says 'what do you think about that?’ I said 'fabulous’. He said 'I thought you might like that, but I wanted you to read it’.”

He then added: “It was 'that is one small step for A man’.”

The missing indefinite article in the transmission from the surface of the Moon has prompted more than forty years of arguments over what he had actually said. Many accused Armstrong of fluffing his lines while others attempted to read meaning into the phrase.

Without the “a”, the sentence refers to “man” abstractly as the whole of humanity in the same way as mankind in the second half of the sentence.

Armstrong himself always insisted he had said “a”, but in 1999 admitted that he could not hear it either in audio recordings of the event, and that they were perhaps wiped out by transmission static.

Analysis of Armstrong’s words have also suggested that they were spontaneous rather than pre-prepared, but it is now hoped that the revelation by his brother will finally end the speculation over the quote.

Dr Christopher Riley, a lecturer in science and media at Lincoln University who has analysed the lunar landing transmissions and directed the new BBC biopic, said: “Neil always maintained that he’d thought it up after landing, before the walk.

“Dean’s story rather suggests that he gave it a bit more thought than that.

“Neil used to play the game 'Mother may I..’ when he was young, and would say 'Mother may I take one small step ...’ - so maybe this was another source of inspiration for his famous words.

“I think the reason he always claimed he’d thought it up after landing was that he was bombarded by suggestions in the run up to the mission, and found them a distraction to the business of landing on the Moon.

“It was probably easier to just say that he’d thought it up after landing, thus dodging the issue of where the words came from, and who maybe suggested them, or influenced him.”

The BBC biopic, titled Neil Armstrong â€" First Man on the Moon, also provides new insights into why Armstrong shunned the public glare after returning to the Earth from the moon.

Two years after walking on the Moon, Armstrong, a former Navy fighter pilot and test pilot, resigned from Nasa to work as a university engineering lecturer and only rarely made public appearances.

His family suggest that Armstrong was racked with anxiety about how he could top walking on the Moon and how to live up to the expectations placed on him as an international icon.

His son Mark Armstrong also suggests that as a workaholic, his father took on too much, ultimately costing him his marriage to his first wife Janet.

Dr Riley added: “He had this impossible job â€" to fulfil this role as the first man to walk on another world. If you give a workaholic an impossible job, then they will try to do it. This is what Armstrong did when he came back from the Moon.

“He carries on trying to fulfil everyone’s requests. He was seen as this sort of superhuman. He was required to do these impossible things â€" to bring people together and facilitate impossible projects.

“We all struggle with our work life balance and he was no exception.”

* Neil Armstrong â€" First Man on the Moon will be broadcast on BBC Two at 9pm on Sunday 30 December

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Amazon Is Selling Stolen iPhones

Gizmodo Twitter friend Ben Dreyfuss. bought his mom an iPhone for Christmas. Ben is a good son! Christmas morning: Mama D. tears open the package, finds a shiny aluminum bundle of joy, and then decides to set it up. One problem: When she called Verizon to activate the thing, they told her that her new iPhone was stolen. Whaaat?

I bought my my Mom an iPhone for Christmas off Amazon and when she tried to activate it they told her it had been stolen.

â€" Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) December 25, 2012

Ben had bought the phone off Amazon, one of their refurbished warehouse dealsâ€"which are usually smart buys. (Buying refurbished Apple gear is always a good call.) This time, however, it turned out to be a raw deal. Sorry, Ben's mom; we hope you have a merry Christmas and get issue this resolved quicklyâ€"you've got to load up that new phone with awesome apps!

This was probably an honest mistakeâ€"Amazon is a stand-up company. We've reached out for comment, but, you know, it's Christmas Day, so we're not holding our breath. Ben has already contacted Amazon, and they said to return the thing.

If this happens to you, do not pass go: Get on the phone with Amazon's customer support line. As an online-focused company, Amazon prefers to communicate over email, but this is a "talk to a real person" moment, and Amazon has people working today. Here's the fastest way to get them:

• Have the person who placed the order go to Amazon's "Contact Us" pageâ€"it's not super easy to find so, again, click here.
• Click "An order I placed"
• Select your item from the list that appears below.
• Fill out Step 2 exactly like this:
• Click the "Call Us" button in step 3, fill out your phone number.
You'll have to give them a phone number, and they'll call you-make sure your phone is not busy; if you're using a cellphone, make sure you have good reception. Once someone sees the all caps, deliberately vague phrase, "STOLEN ITEM," they'll put your case at the top of their list. Have a little patience, though; it's Christmas Day.

Every time I've spoken with Amazon about an issue with an order, they've been super helpful, so there's no reason to expect this to be anything more than an annoyance. We'll keep you updated if the situation changes. Has this happened to anyone else?

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The Psychology Of Food Cravings

As the holiday season approaches, Tom Stafford looks at overindulgence, and explains how our minds tell us we want something even if we may not like it.

Ah, Christmas, the season of peace, goodwill and overindulgence. If this year is like others, I’ll probably be taking up residence on the couch after a big lunch, continuing to munch my way through packets of unhealthy snacks, and promising myself that I’ll live a more virtuous life once the New Year begins.

It was on one such occasion that I had an epiphany in the psychology of everyday life. I’d just finished the last crisp of a large packet, and the thought occurred to me that I don’t actually like crisps that much. But there I was, covered in crumbs and post-binge guilt, saturated fats coursing through my body looking for nice arteries to settle down on. In an effort to distract myself from the urge to reach for another packet, I started to think about the peculiar psychology of the situation.

Every bite seemed essential, but in a way that seem to suggest I was craving them rather than liking them. Fortunately for my confusion (and my arteries), there's some solid neuroscience to explain how we can want something we don't like.

Normally wanting and liking are tightly bound together. We want things we like and we like the things we want. But experiments by the University of Michigan's Kent Berridge and colleagues show that this isn't always the case. Wanting and liking are based on separate brain circuits and can be controlled independently.

To demonstrate this, Berridge used a method called "taste reactivity", in effect, recording the faces pulled when animals are given different kinds of food. Give an adult human something sweet and they'll lick their lips. This might sound obvious, but when you take it to the next level in terms of detail and rigour you start to get a powerful system for telling how much an animal likes a particular type of food. Taste reactivity involves defining the reactions precisely â€" for example, lip-licking would be defined as "a mild rhythmic smacking, slight protrusions of the tongue, a relaxed expression accompanied sometimes by a slight upturn of the corners of the mouth" â€" and then looking for this same expression in other species. A baby human can't tell you they like the taste like an adult can, but you can see the same expression. A chimpanzee will do the same with a sweet taste. A rat won't do exactly the same thing, but they do something similar. By carefully observing and coding the facial expressions that accompany nice and nasty tastes, you can tell what an animal is enjoying and what they aren't.

Pleasure principles

This method is a breakthrough because it gives us another way of looking at how non-human species feel about things. Most animal psychology uses overt actions â€" things like pressing levers â€" as measures. So, for example, if you want to see how a reward affects a rat, you put it in a box with a lever and give it food each time it presses the level. Sure enough, the rat will learn to press the lever once it learns that this produces food. Taste reactivity creates an additional measure, allowing us insight into how much the animal enjoys the food, as well as what it makes it want to do.

From this, the neuroscientists have been able to show that wanting and liking are governed by separate circuits in the brain. The liking system is based in the subcortex, that part of our brain that is most similar to other species. Electrical stimulation here, in an area called the nucleus accumbans, is enough to cause pleasure. Sadly, you need brain surgery and implanted electrodes to experience this. But another way you can stimulate this bit of the brain is via the opioid chemical system, which is the brain messenger system directly affected by drugs like heroin. Like brain surgery, this is also NOT recommended.

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Why Were The Germans Obsessed With The Beatles's Hair In 1965?

In the middle of 1965â€"more than a year into the trans-cultural phenomenon of Beatlemania and the British Invasionâ€"the East German pop music magazine Melodie und Rhythmus (Melody and Rhythm) published a rather poorly punned article titled “A Hairy Issue.” It begins with a fan letter from the Queens resident and Beatle-hysteric Cookie E.:

I was there when you arrived at Kennedy Airport in New York. I was almost killed and was only a meter and a half from you. Everything was crazy. I twisted my ankle and my dress was shredded. I have a scratch on my face and one eye is blue. Isn’t it wonderful? I worship you all.

Below the letter, the photographed face of Ringo grins. Instead of his signature Beatle hair, however, someone has doctored the photo to give him a military-issue high and tight. Underneath, he gives a penciled-in two-thumbs-up with the gem-laden hands of some sort of caricatured Scrooge McDuck.

From John Stave, “Eine haarige Angelegenheit,” Melodie und Rhythmus 11 (1965): 3-4.

On the following page, there is a pictorial comparison and competition between two “rivals”: Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones (mop topped, suited, and wielding a Vox Mark VI) vs. a full-maned curly haired dog (standing up-right, dressed in an oversized dark sweater, and holding an unidentifiable acoustic guitar).

From John Stave, “Eine haarige Angelegenheit,” Melodie und Rhythmus 11 (1965): 3-4.

Why so much attention to hair in a piece ostensibly about music?

This focus on hair length and style was not an isolated phenomenon. East German newspapers, cultural bureaucrats, and policemen all had a minor obsession with youth coiffure. They consistently cited Beatle cuts as prime evidence of the danger the music posed and the degeneracy it actualized. The article, in many ways, sums up rather neatly the main fears and objections that official East Germany had to British Invasion, or, as Germans called it, Beat music. The music reduced socialist youth to little more than animals and, when properly trimmed and unmasked, the Fab Four were nothing more than agents in a nefarious plot by the Western military-industrial complex to invade the socialist countries and destroy it from within (hence Ringo’s buzz cut and banker attire).

But the article exposes other, more interesting things about the postwar reception of Beat music and the assumptions which surrounded it. Beyond showing that William Wegman was not nearly as original as we all had previously supposed, or that the East Germans had taken up the tried and true practice of Soviet photo-doctoring, the article’s hair-centered discussion and depiction of Brit Invasion points to a rather intriguing aspect of the socialist postwar interpretation of the sensory impact and composition of pop music.

The article clearly means to challenge the aesthetic status of the British boy bands and blues groups, but, interestingly, it avoids speaking about anything off the two groups’ most recent records. It says nothing of A Hard Day’s Night or 12 x 5 and, for that matter, it avoids discussing any recording or aspect of the group’s musical performance altogether.

For East German authorities and parents, Beatlemania and its children were not comprised of guitar-driven distortion, back beats, and limited vocal ranges alone. Beat wasn’t just sound, but was also something that showed up in the visual and tactile aspects of the body and on the person. It wasn’t something that just sounded unpleasant or simplistic but something that manifested itself in the nervous system, in behavior, and in one’s appearance. Beat was also long hair, unkempt and frivolous clothing, frenetic and unorthodox dancing, hysterical fits, violence, and/or loose attitudes towards sex. One 1965 East German report, for example, depicted a West German concert as a den of wild, hypnotized children who, because of their state, urinated all over themselves.

The fact that Western Beat appeared as more than sound is what proved most vexing and troubling. It wasn’t necessarily the sound of it that was objectionableâ€"between 1964 and 1965, the state recorded and distributed some records and allowed local performances by East German bands like the Sputniks and the Butlers. The problem was that it seemed to be a whole mode of being and an array of sensory phenomena. In fact, it was its appearance as more than just sound that was one of the main problems. The East German musical ideal was based in the 19th century doctrine of Absolute Music: music should be pure, contemplative listening; it should offer access to a higher reality and, for some, the romantic Infinite through the ears. Music should ultimately be about the acoustic. Beat was clearly more than just aurality.

The Soviet Bloc was not alone in its condemnation of the Beatles and the Stones; English and American parents also fretted over the implications of screaming young girls and what they saw as androgynous musicians (in the case of the Beatles) or over-sexed and lurid boys (in the case of the Stones). What is fascinating about the Eastern response to Western pop music was that they invested the music with such power and social gravity. East German officials interpreted it as a challenge to both the goals of socialism and the progressive movement of History (which were, in their mind, essentially the same thing). Socialism offered the utopian promise of a society of creative, freely developed, and independent individualsâ€"Marx’s vision of a person who could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as [one had] a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” That promise seemed to be thwarted through the conjunction of the rhythm and lyrics of Beat music and the style and attitudes of its audience. In the first two decades after the collapse of the Third Reich, the hope of a breakthrough into socialism had been pinned on the new generation of postwar youth, a generation who would grow up under socialism and be relatively free from the burdens of the recent capitalist and fascist past.

In late 1965, however, it seemed like the steam engine of Brian Jones was pushing History off the rails and into the ditch.

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A Sound Collage Featuring Musicians Who Died In 2012

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1. An Illustrated Talk With Maurice Sendak

2. The Music They Made

3. Jerry Seinfeld: How to Write a Joke

4. Feast in a Day

5. A Formula for Blue-Collar TV

6. Hollywood Issue | Wide-Awake

7. Cooking Dal Tarka

8. Goal to Go

9. Spain’s Inditex Spins Gold

10. State of the Art

11. Off the Rails

12. Editor's Note: The Food Issue

13. Alicia Keys on ‘Girl on Fire’

14. Editor's Note: The Inspiration Issue

15. Tweets From Day 4 at the R.N.C.

16. Mark Leibovich on the Candidates

17. Live Illustrating Tweets of the R.N.C.

18. Sisters on Set

19. Competitive Armchair Olympics: Finale

20. Send Bittman Packing

21. The Once and Future Dream of New York

22. Jersey Boys

23. All Eyes on Uchimura

24. TimesCast Politics: Terry MacAuliffe

25. TimesCast Tech | Tumblr's David Karp

26. Democrats’ Super-PAC Operatives

27. How to be a YouTube Celebrity

28. Bob Kerrey's Run For His Old Seat

29. Editor’s Note: The Innovation Issue

30. Editor's Note: The Money Issue

31. Editor's Note: The Health Issue

32. Why the Debt Deal Failed

33. Playing the Debt Deal Blame Game

34. Northern Soul, Revived Again

35. Climbing Rock and Ice

36. Exclusive Preview: 'Damsels in Distress'

37. Exclusive Preview: 'Friends With Kids'

38. Nollywood Heights

39. TimesCast | Retailers' Predictions

40. Sharon Van Etten, Back at the Sycamore

41. Wonder Dogs

42. Bout Time: Alex Love

43. Bout Time: Tiara Brown

44. Bout Time: Claressa Shields

45. Preservation Hall’s Legacy

46. Making Fun of Hipsters for a Living

47. Touch of Evil

48. The Music They Made

49. Sunday in the Magazine

50. Sand Toys

51. Prioritizing Pakistan

52. Touch of Evil

53. Introducing KJ Dell’Antonia

54. The Hollywood Issue | Jean Dujardin

55. The Hollywood Issue | George Clooney

56. The Hollywood Issue | Ryan Gosling

57. The Hollywood Issue | Adepero Oduye

58. The Hollywood Issue | Gary Oldman

59. The Hollywood Issue | Brad Pitt

60. The Hollywood Issue | Glenn Close

61. The Hollywood Issue | Jessica Chastain

62. The Hollywood Issue | Viola Davis

63. The Hollywood Issue | Rooney Mara

64. The Hollywood Issue | Kirsten Dunst

65. The Hollywood Issue | Michael Shannon

66. The Hollywood Issue | Mia Wasikowska

67. An Awakening

68. The Case of Juan Rivera

69. Sunday in the Magazine

70. Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe

71. Fracking in One Town

72. ‘Life’s a Happy Song’

73. The Lost Secret of Running

74. An Education

75. The Sky Cowboys

76. Andy Samberg Prepares for His Matchups

77. The Caucus | Travels With John Kerry

78. Behind the Scenes with Miranda July

79. A Light Lunch in Spain

80. Clip: The First Mark

81. Clip 1: The First Mark

82. Creating a Cake For Jeter

83. The Reddest Village in China

84. Life and Death in Diepsloot

85. Two, United as One

86. Life Is Short, Opera Is Long

87. Covering the California Governor

88. A New Book on Obama's Mother

89. How to Carve a Lamb in Three Cuts

90. Soccer Sensation

91. A Marked Man in America

92. How to Butcher a Chicken

93. WikiLeaks: The Back Story

94. In Concert: Girl Talk

95. The Music They Made

96. Behind 'The Scene Makers'

97. Eli (Paperboy) Reed, New-Old Soul

98. Screen Test: Margareth Madè

99. Victoria Azarenka | Belarus

100. Samantha Stosur | Australia

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Wikipedia's 10 Most-Visited Pages In 2012

Wikipedia dominates Google search results. That's something any amateur googler knows after a few searches for anything mildly popularâ€"from, say, the word "Google" itself to Facebook to Fifty Shades of Gray.

As further proof of the Wiki-dominance, we present the following list of the 10 most-visited Wikipedia pages in 2012. The data comes via Johan Gunnarsson, a Swedish computer science student at the Lund Institute of Technology in Lund Sweden.

It's a naked look at the information most people in the English-speaking Internet world were looking for over the past yearâ€"a somewhat embarrassing mixture of pop culture phenomena and what we can only assume are Google miscues. Interestingly, none of the Wikipedia pages from Gunnarsson's data correspond to this year's top 10 Google search terms, which were dominated by celebrity deaths (Whitney Houston), natural catastrophes (Hurricane Sandy), and obnoxious international dance trends (“Gangnam Style”).

1) Facebookâ€"32,647,942 views

Why Facebook? We can only imagine the social network's top spot comes thanks to the bumbling of Internet novices who, in their attempts to reach the massively popular site, type "Facebook" directly into the address bar (sans ".com"). Either that, or the world is very curious to learn what exactly a "Facebook" is.

2) Wikiâ€"29,613,759

As above, this is probably thanks to a truncated Web address typed into Googleâ€"or to put it another way, 30 million people forgot to add the "pedia" to their "wiki."

3) Deaths in 2012â€"25,418,587

An end-of-year list to satisfy the morbid curiosity in all of us.

4) One Directionâ€"22,351,637

The English boy band rules the chartsâ€"and the English-language Wikipedia, apparently. Perhaps the group's Wikipedia page is so popular thanks to confused parents, taking to Google to educate themselves about their tweens' latest obsession.

5) The Avengers (2012 film)â€"22,268,644

The Avengers, crushed its competition at the box office this year, grossing well over $620 million. Now the film's producers can add another accomplishment to their list: "No. 5 on Wikipedia."

6) Fifty Shades of Greyâ€"21,779,423

The Wikipedia about the mommy porn phenomenon features writing that is far superior  to the book. In fact, save your sanity and forget about the book entirely. Just read the plot summary here.

7) 2012 phenomenonâ€"20,619,920

The world didn't end in 2012, but you can go ahead and feel despair for the future of humanity. One of the most absurd cultural phenomenons ever was the seventh most-popular article on the eight most popular website in the world.

8) The Dark Knight Risesâ€"18,882,885

Christopher Nolan's epic conclusion to the Dark Knight series came in second this year at the box office, grossing nearly half a billion dollars. It's the second most-popular movie on Wikipedia, too.

9) Googleâ€"18,508,719

What happens when you google Google? Wikipedia, apparently.

10) The Hunger Gamesâ€"18,431,626

The Hunger Games closes out the trifecta of big-name Hollywood movies that dominated on Wikipedia this year. Though this page is actually for the book seriesâ€"and not the filmâ€"we can only imagine that the page's popularity has something to do with the film's nearly $410 million box office gross.

Illustration by giulia.forsythe/Flickr

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The Year In False, Viral Emails

Summary

We’ve long warned our readers to make good use of the delete key when emails spreading sketchy claims pop up in their inboxes. But we’ve found that old viral emails, unfortunately, never die â€" and new ones spread like a highly contagious disease.

These overwhelmingly anonymous messages are, by and large, bogus. Many not only twist the facts but also peddle pure fabrications, urging recipients to forward these “shocking” revelations to all their friends. And despite all good common sense, people do pass along these malicious attempts to deceive, often in the same amount of time it would take to check their tenuous hold on veracity. Our readers â€" some clearly trying to beat back the onslaught from friends â€" constantly ask us to put these viral claims to the truth test. In 2012, we found that:

• Dueling graphics on the debt both overstated and understated President Obama’s contribution to the debt.
• No, Obama didn’t give Alaskan islands to Russia, and his early records weren’t “sealed.”
• Over-the-top “death panel” claims about the Affordable Care Act included purely invented stories about elderly Americans being denied dialysis or brain surgery.
• Vote-rigging conspiracies claimed that Tagg Romney owned voting machines in Ohio (he doesn’t) and that uncounted military ballots swung the election for Obama (from a “faux news” site).
• In the tin-foil-hat category, one conspiracy said Obama was creating martial law and a “standing army of government youth.” The adult-aged FEMA Corps members help with natural disasters and can’t carry weapons.
• General Motors is still firmly based in the U.S., despite claims that it’s becoming “China Motors.”
• Old-but-still-kicking emails percolated, claiming that Medicare premiums were about to skyrocket, everyone’s home sales would be taxed, and the Obama administration wanted to ban weapons among U.S. citizens â€" none of which is true.

Here’s our year-end roundup of the most egregious and most asked-about viral claims of 2012.

Analysis

We cautioned our readers years ago that with viral email claims, not just skepticism but “outright cynicism is justified.” Despite clear evidence to debunk some of these claims, and the far-removed-from-reality assertions in others, they still make the rounds.

And they’re filled with plenty of warning signs that their claims don’t hold up: anonymous authors, an inordinate use of capital letters and exclamation points (not to mention bad spelling), links to supposed source material that doesn’t back up the message. Some even implore readers to confirm the email by checking Snopes.com â€" a rumor-debunking site that, it turns out, finds the message to be false.

Yet these emails are believed. Why? It could simply be the desire to accept information that conforms with one’s beliefs and to reject facts that don’t. David Emery, author of About.com’s Urban Legends page, told us in 2008: “I have come to the conclusion that especially where political rumors are concerned, most people are so locked into a particular world view that they tend to reject any information, no matter how well supported, that contradicts their cherished assumptions.”

Much of what we’ve seen lambasts the president, or Democrats. It’s to be expected that whoever is sitting in the White House would bear the brunt of online discontent. But we can’t give a definitive reason for why the viral chatter is more conservative in nature.

Facebook Falsehoods

Social media â€" not just email â€" is used to spread false claims. We found dueling graphics on the debt â€" one conservative, one liberal â€" making the rounds on Facebook early this year.

The Democratic version, which originally came from the office of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, claimed the debt had increased by only a relatively small percentage under President Barack Obama, compared with large percentage hikes under Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. A “corrected” version of the graphic increased the number for Obama, but it was still too low. And it didn’t reflect that the rate of rise had been faster under Obama, who was only in his first term in office.

The Republican debt graphic, meanwhile, wrongly claimed Obama had increased the debt by more than all other presidents combined. Its figures were simply made up. They were easily debunked by visiting the Treasury Department’s “debt to the penny” website. The truth is that the debt has been increasing for years under presidents of both parties. It has gone up 54 percent under Obama, as of Dec. 24.

We made our own charts and graphics on the debt. Sadly, they weren’t widely posted on Facebook.

Obama Bashing

Ever since the 2008 presidential election, we’ve seen a healthy dose of viral emails that bash the president. We find as the vitriol level rises, so, too, does the egregiousness of the false claims.

One popular email said Obama was giving Alaskan islands to Russia as part of some kind of secret agreement, adding, “Can you believe the nerve of this guy?” But that question is better asked of the anonymous author of this bogus tirade. The islands, which are much closer to Siberian shores than the Alaskan coast, have never been claimed by the United States. One conservative California activist has been arguing for decades that the islands should belong to the U.S., but over the past 85 years, or longer, no U.S. president has staked a claim to them.

Readers also asked us about Facebook postings claiming that Obama had a plan to eliminate private retirement accounts and create a “national retirement system.” But there’s no such plan. The claim comes from a conservative, anti-Obama group that has pushed its misguided speculation about legislation that would require employers without retirement plans to set up private IRAs for their workers. Employers would automatically deposit a percentage of wages, but employees could opt out of the program. The idea for these “automatic IRAs” originally came from scholars at the Brookings Institution and the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2006.

Another chain email claims Barack and Michelle Obama had to “surrender” their law licenses to avoid ethics charges. But that’s made up, too. No ethics charges or proceedings have been brought against either of them. Instead, they both voluntarily inactivated their licenses, negating the need to take continuing education courses and pay annual fees. They can practice law again anytime they choose.

Another viral falsehood claims that Obama’s early records are “sealed.” They’re not. The email lists several documents that are public â€" Obama’s Selective Service registration, his Illinois state Senate record, his medical records, and, perhaps not surprising for a viral claim, his birth certificate. The message says Obama’s college records are “sealed” by a court, but instead Obama, like presidential candidates before him, hasn’t released them. 

A false claim about the stimulus law also has made the email rounds. It claims that Obama gave stimulus money to China to build U.S. bridges. Not true at all. Whoever wrote this email distorted an ABC News report, which only mentioned federal money (not the stimulus) that California officials had turned down to avoid “Buy American” laws. It was the state that hired a Chinese contractor.

This message also gave us a peek into how distortions grow as emails are forwarded and those with a less-than-high regard for the truth tweak them. Readers first forwarded us messages about the Chinese firms building U.S. bridges â€" no mention of the president. Then, we received emails that wrongly said stimulus money was involved. Then, somewhere along the forwarding chain, someone changed the message to say Obama was to blame. Some emails carried the line “I pray all the unemployed see this and cast their votes accordingly in 2012!” All the unemployed â€" or anyone else â€" would need to do to debunk this bogusness is to watch the original ABC News report, which doesn’t mention the stimulus, or blame the president.

‘Death Panel’ Never Dies

Fear and disdain for the Affordable Care Act have spawned rather absurd email messages, claiming that older Americans would be denied care under the law. In one, an anonymous person fabricated the story of an emergency room doctor in Tennessee saying that the law denies dialysis to some Medicare patients, and that in 2013 major procedures for anyone over the age of 75 would have to be approved by “locally administered Ethics Panels.” The Tennessee physician, who was named in the message, is real, but that’s where the truth in this story ends. The law doesn’t call for any “ethics panels.” A spokesman for the hospital in question told us that the story was made up by a guest in the doctor’s home, that the doctor was upset about it, and that “if there has been any effect from the healthcare reform law, it has been increased access for patients.”

Another chain email spread a link to a YouTube clip of a caller on a radio talk show falsely claiming to be a brain surgeon and saying Obama wanted to deny emergency brain surgery for anyone over 70. The caller, identified as only “Jeff” from Chicago, claimed that a document outlining this policy was discussed at a seminar of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. But those groups said they didn’t know what “Jeff” was talking about. A spokeswoman also told us that they knew who this man was and that he is not a brain surgeon or a neurosurgeon.

Vote Rigging? Not So Much.

Many readers asked us if the fix was in before voters even headed to the polls â€" asking if Mitt Romney’s son Tagg owned electronic voting machines in the pivotal state of Ohio. (We received questions from readers, not a full-fledged viral email, in this case.) But there was no evidence that Tagg Romney’s company, Solamere Capital, had invested in the voting-machine company Hart InterCivic, nor does Solamere own it. Hart InterCivic’s machines, by the way, were in two of Ohio’s 88 counties.

A day after Obama won reelection, a blog article started circulating, claiming that military absentee ballots were delayed and not counted, which swung the vote for the president. But that story came from a satirical bit on a “faux news” site. Whether this attempt at humor is funny is a matter of opinion, of course, but many readers didn’t get â€" or didn’t want to get â€" the joke. “We are in no way, shape, or form, a real news outlet,” the site, called The Duffel Blog, warns. It serves up “military humor, funny military pictures, and faux news.”

Conspiracy Theories Run Amok

Viral emails have pushed the theory that Obama is aiming to institute some kind of police state. One message claimed he had issued more than 900 executive orders, some of them creating martial law. But the real number at the time was 139 orders â€" none of which called for martial law. In one order, Obama, as previous presidents have done, updated his office’s power to use national resources to prepare the nation for a war or emergency. That authority was first granted to the president by Congress in 1950.

What do Obama’s executive orders have to do with a New York Times photo from a story on a Boy Scouts program? Answer: nothing. Yet those elements, along with a civilian FEMA program, Department of Homeland Security ammunition purchases, and a picture from Nazi Germany, were strung together in a nutty message claiming that DHS was creating a “standing army of government youth” known as FEMA Corps. The Boy Scouts program, for youths interested in a career in law enforcement, has nothing to do with FEMA. And FEMA Corps is a civilian community service program, part of AmeriCorps, for adults ages 18 and 24, who help FEMA in responding to natural disasters. FEMA Corps members are prohibited from carrying any weapons, including guns.

Even the National Rifle Association had come out to squash conspiracies over DHS’ ammunition purchases, saying that the suggestion that Obama was “preparing for a war with the American people” displays “a lack of understanding of the law enforcement functions carried about by officers in small federal agencies.” But cyberspace accepts all kinds: This convoluted rant has found a home, being forwarded by those whose motivations we can’t begin to understand.

Distortions on General Motors

General Motors found itself caught up in a viral spiral this year. One message pointed to a YouTube video claiming the automaker was becoming “China Motors” and using taxpayer bailout dollars to do it. But GM remains firmly incorporated and headquartered on U.S. soil. Its sales in China, the largest auto sales market in the world, have been growing â€" both before and after the bailout. GM was the largest foreign car company there in 2008, pre-bailout. And it has been expanding sales in both China and the U.S. since it was restructured in 2009.

Another email wrongly said that “79% of GM’s sales last month were government purchased,” and claimed those government sales were the reason for GM’s positive sales figures. But all fleet sales, not just to governments, accounted for under 33 percent of sales for that month. GM sales to government fleets were up 79 percent year over year, not in one month.

A Rare Glimmer of Truth

As we said, we overwhelmingly see far-fetched and distorted claims being spread from inbox to inbox. But we did get one this year that was actually true. The message correctly cited a story by Indianapolis television station WTHR-TV, which wasn’t the first to report on billions in refundable tax credits going to people without valid Social Security numbers. The Treasury Department’s inspector general found that $4.2 billion was paid in 2010 to “individuals who are not authorized to work in the United States.”

The credits are refundable child tax credits (currently $1,000 per child), and it’s possible to claim the credit with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, given by the IRS to those who don’t qualify for a Social Security number â€" so that the IRS can collect taxes. The whole issue became a political fight between Republicans, who wanted to end the payments, and Democrats, who said it was the U.S.-born children of these workers who would be hurt.

Alive and Kicking

Some false viral claims continue to circulate, years after they first surfaced. In 2010, we first knocked down a false claim that the Affordable Care Act instituted a 3.8 percent “sales tax” on homes. But we found ourselves beating it back again this year. The truth is this tax affects only net investment income of individuals earning more than $200,000 a year ($250,000 for couples). It’s not a tax on sales, but on profit â€" and only profit that exceeds $250,000 ($500,000 for couples) for a primary residence. The National Association of Realtors has been trying to stop the spread of this nonsense for years.

That chestnut was paired in an email this year with another old falsehood: the imaginary claim that the health care law causes monthly Medicare premiums to more than double. But the law doesn’t change how Medicare premiums are calculated, as we first reported in 2011, and the figure hyped by this email â€" that premiums would shoot up to $247 in 2014 â€" is nowhere close to the truth. Medicare officials say the real number will be $112.10, less than half of the made-up number being passed through email chains.

Three years ago, we debunked an email claiming that Obama wanted to ban the possession of guns through a United Nations treaty. But this year, the message started popping up again in our inbox. The truth is that the treaty in question pertains to international exporting and importing, and it’s still in the discussion stage among various countries. The State Department, however, has said it wouldn’t support anything that conflicts with the Second Amendment or covers domestic transfer of firearms.

We urge readers to purge their inboxes of this malicious misinformation. If it seems too outrageous to be believed, we say follow that instinct. Curious about the truth? Pick a few keywords from the message and use the search function on our website. There’s a good chance we’ve already debunked it and posted a response on our Viral Spiral page.

â€" by Lori Robertson

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3 Reasons Not To Take Obama's Pot Prosecution Comments Too Seriously

By David A. Graham Tweet Dec 15 2012, 10:15 AM ET Comment

The president says the government has bigger fish to fry than small-time smokers, but that doesn't mean it's safe to get baked.

Is it time to break out the bong and have a high time? 

The big question since two states passed laws legalizing marijuana for non-medical use on November 6 has been how the federal government would respond. And thus far it's been silent -- until Friday. Here's what President Obama told Barbara Walters: "We've got bigger fish to fry ... It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it's legal."

That's set off some celebration. My colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates offers some (tempered) praise, writing, "This is typical Obama, and about what I would expect -- carving out an argument that attempts to appeal to the most people while not interfering with Washington and Colorado." So does Andrew Sullivan, who was apoplectic about this just days ago. But I'm not so sure that pot smokers, legalization advocates, and states' rights champions should be celebrating yet, for three reasons.

1. The Administration Talks the Talk, But ... Not long after the Obama Administration came in, the Justice Department very noisily made clear with a guidance memo that while the president certainly didn't think it was a good idea to legalize weed -- he literally laughed at it when asked -- there was no way the federal government was going to spend its meager resources during a recession on busting California distributors of medical marijuana. But as Alex Seitz-Wald notes, the feds did just that. U.S. Attorneys launched a series of raids against dispensaries, and then Washington rolled reversed its original guidance.

2. Talking About Individuals Misses the Point. So the guy sitting in his basement toking up and watching DVDs of Planet Earth can breathe easy (although perhaps with a persistent cough). But the federal government was never going after him anyway, and he's always been able to buy pot in small quantities. What's revolutionary about the laws passed last month is that they change (at least in theory) the rest of the distribution system. Matt Yglesias explains:

Colorado and Washington didn't legalize recreational marijuana use. They set up a framework for legal marijuana cultivation, for marijuana processing, and for wholesale and retail sales of marijuana .... The actual question on the table isn't whether the federal government is going to be able to replace state and local law enforcement, the question is whether the federal government will do everything in its power to subvert the new frameworks in CO and WA. The president's statement to Walters is entirely consistent with a posture of maximum subversion.

3. Most Importantly, This Isn't an Official Statement of Policy. Why take all this time analyzing a statement so carefully calculated to reveal little? There's not much reason to tune into until the Justice Department actually makes a public announcement about how it intends to deal with Colorado and Washington. A spokesperson at the Justice Department said Friday afternoon, with a verbal eyeroll, that the fuss was unwarranted. "The legislation in Colorado and Washington is still under review by the Department of Justice and as it stands marijuana is still a Schedule 1 drug." And that's the most important thing for now.

More at The Atlantic

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Social Advertisers Spooked By Instagram Backlash

Tuesday night, John Bell had to convince his wife not to quit Instagram. At the beginning of the week, she'd been a die-hard user but, like many others, recent changes in the Terms of Service had convinced her it was time to give it up. The awkward part: he’s the global marketing manager of social@ogilvy, the new-media wing of legendary ad firm Ogilvy & Mather. In short, he's one of the guys who's bringing ads to Instagram.

"I told her, 'You're overreacting!'" Bell relayed to The Verge. "But then, we're all overreacting."

"It just goes against everything we know about the web."

As the ad industry responds to new concerns over how Instagram might leverage users' photographs, it's a common scene. "I actually found out about this through Facebook," said Joe McCaffrey, marketing strategist at HUGE. "People outraged, up in arms. That's how I was introduced to the new Terms of Service." Using Facebook to complain about Facebook (or Facebook properties like Instagram) is an old irony, but this latest outcry is particularly startling because it seems to have come out of nowhere. "They're sort of alarmed because other people are alarmed," said Hashem Bajwa, CEO of marketing and product development startup DE-DE. "I hope that will calm down."

If users are worried about their photos being used in ads... that's happening already. 360i's David Berkowitz pointed us to this Ben & Jerry's campaign as an industry model. In November, the ice cream company asked its 120,000 Instagram followers to use a special "Capture Euphoria" hashtag, and then repurposed those pictures for local ad campaigns. "It's all in the parameters of their campaign," Berkowitz said, "so it's very clear that's what they're doing." Instagram shows dozens of other examples on their own help page, repurposing user photos with a certain hashtag for an interactive map or for a real-time slideshow at a concert. The hashtag is key because brands want the social crediblity that comes with it, They don't want the actual photos; they just like the act of giving them up.

It's one of the few tried-and-true marketing plays Instagram has, and in the latest furor, it's being tarred as outright theft. "They got hit very visibly," Bajwa said of Instagram, "and I don't think they were prepared for it."

The sudden backlash comes with high stakes because marketers stand to gain so much from Instagram’s success. "There's a broadening base of people who are using their smartphones but are not engaged in other ways," Bell told us. "And Instagram is one of the few social, digital platforms that's distinctly mobile in nature." The fact that it deals in photos, an ad medium that's widely considered the most shared content on the web, is icing on the cake. Facebook and Twitter are both making plays for the space, but a mass exodus from Instagram would make reaching that audience much trickier. As a result, the industry is treading carefully.

A photo by itself isn't worth that much, especially when it's tied to an angry user

The next step, when Instagram's ready for it, is likely to be more about data than pictures. A photo by itself isn't worth that much, especially when it's tied to an angry user. The metadata that comes with the photo is much more valuable, since it can be used to fuel Google-style user-tracking algorithms. That would make ads work more efficiently for the network Facebook is reportedly building, both on its social network and the web at large. If you "like" a bunch of pictures of your cat on Instagram, and you’ll start seeing more ads for pet toys with a feline friend of the same breed and complexion. As Berkowitz put it, "these are things that marketers really want. They always want better analytics. Any kind of data that they can get out of these services is a huge win for them."

Concerned users might not have the law straight, but they’ve also misunderstood what social marketers really want from them. The new style of ad could be a sponsored GE page, or a promoted photo of a Bud Light Platinum, or something no one’s even seen yet. But whatever it is, it’s likely to be more focused on getting users to engage than harvesting their photos. "It just goes against everything we know about the web," Bell said. "Users will rebel, they will object, and it will start to destroy or undermine their relationship with the brand."

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Yes, Randi Zuckerberg, Please Lecture Us About 'Human Decency'

Interwebs drama of the day: Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Mark Zuckerberg, threw a fit when someone tweeted a copy of a Zuckerberg family photo (see above) that Randi herself had posted to Facebook, the confusing-to-use social Web site created by her strange, reclusive brother. Randi was furious because she wanted the photo to be seen only by her friends, but someone who is friends with Randi's sister saw the photo on Facebook, assumed it was public, and spread it on Twitter.

Randi complained that this was "way uncool." The friend apologized for her mistake. Lots of people had a laugh about how this just shows again how stupid and confusing Facebook's privacy settings are, as in, "Hey, even the Zuckerbergs can't figure this stuff out!"

But then Randi took everything to a whole new level of mental when she summed the whole thing up with a tweet: "Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend's photo publicly. It's not about privacy settings, it's about human decency." 

Yes, she said that: human decency. Because this dumb issue about her dumb photograph is that important.

It's so important, in fact, that now Randi Zuckerberg, a not-universally-acclaimed aspiring chanteuse who rocks Silicon Valley with an awesome band called Feedbomb, as well as producer of a terrible reality series about Silicon Valley (See Bravo's Silicon Valley: The Painful Truth Behind A Caricature Of Excess), as well as sister of the guy who created that beacon of morality known as Facebook, would like to use this as a teaching moment in which she can instruct the world about basic human decency.

Let's acknowledge that Randi Zuckerberg is not Mark Zuckerberg. But let's also acknowledge that she has benefited tremendously from her brother's creation.

And what is that creation?

• A company that has made billions by gathering people's personal information and using it to sell ads;
• A company whose original privacy statement was a simple sentence but now is longer than the U.S. Constitution and requires a law degree to understand;
• A company that has continually pushed people to "share" more of their private information in order to use Facebook;
• A company that just four days ago was criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for yet another creepy experiment that would let people pay money to send mail to your inbox, which is just the latest in a long line of criticisms brought by the EFF;
• A company that once claimed it wasn't tracking users when they were logged off, only to turn around and admit that it was, just before someone reported that Facebook in fact had applied for and received a patent on technology that would do exactly that;
• A company that once got caught trying to run a clumsy covert smear campaign against Google;
• A company that once settled claims brought by the FTC that charged Facebook had deceived consumers and violated federal law;
• A company that ran a scuzzy IPO marred by allegations of self-dealing, one in which insiders got info about weak revenues and backed away from the deal even as Facebook was touting the stock to suckers, raising both the price of the shares and the number of shares for sale;
• A company that has since been the subject of an investigation by the state of Massachusetts. which led to fines levied against its bankers and fears that authorities "will throw the book at Facebook" in 2013 and that "the real liability to Facebook and Morgan Stanley is yet to come";
• A company whose Instagram subsidiary recently caused outrage by changing its terms of service but then walked those changes back.

Yes, Randi Zuckerberg, speak to us about human decency.

Because a photo that you posted on Facebook got shared on the Internet.

How awful this must have been for you! How... invasive. What a violation. How terrible that someone might take something that belongs to you and use it in ways that you had not anticipated, and for which you had not given explicit permission!

What kind of world are we living in when just because you post something on a website someone else can just take your stuff and do things with it?

Oh wait.

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Half The Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong

Dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boost public school student outcomes. Most of the DNA in the human genome is junk. Saccharin causes cancer and a high fiber diet prevents it. Stars cannot be bigger than 150 solar masses.

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In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong. In the modern world facts change all of the time, according to Samuel Arbesman, author of the new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date (Current). 

Fact-making is speeding up, writes Arbesman, a senior scholar at the Kaufmann Foundation and an expert in scientometrics, the science of measuring and analyzing science. As facts are made and remade with increasing speed, Arbesman is worried that most of us don’t keep up to date. That means we’re basing decisions on facts dimly remembered from school and university classesâ€"facts that often turn out to be wrong.

In 1947, the mathematician Derek J. de Solla Price was asked to store a complete set of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society temporarily in his house. Price stacked them in chronological order by decade, and he noticed that the number of volumes doubled about every 15 years, i.e., scientific knowledge was apparently growing at an exponential rate. Thus the field of scientometrics was born.

Price started to analyze all sorts of other kinds of scientific data, and concluded in 1960 that scientific knowledge had been growing steadily at a rate of 4.7 percent annually for the last three centuries. In 1965, he exuberantly observed, “All crude measures, however arrived at, show to a first approximation that science increases exponentially, at a compound interest of about 7 percent per annum, thus doubling in size every 10â€"15 years, growing by a factor of 10 every half century, and by something like a factor of a million in the 300 years which separate us from the seventeenth-century invention of the scientific paper when the process began.”

A 2010 study in the journal Scientometrics, looking at data between 1907 and 2007, concurred: The “overall growth rate for science still has been at least 4.7 percent per year.”

Since knowledge is still growing at an impressively rapid pace, it should not be surprising that many facts people learned in school have been overturned and are now out of date. But at what rate do former facts disappear? Arbesman applies to the dissolution of facts the concept of half-lifeâ€"the time required for half the atoms of a given amount of a radioactive substance to disintegrate. For example, the half-life of the radioactive isotope strontium-90 is just over 29 years. Applying the concept of half-life to facts, Arbesman cites research that looked into the decay in the truth of clinical knowledge about cirrhosis and hepatitis. “The half-life of truth was 45 years,” he found.

In other words, half of what physicians thought they knew about liver diseases was wrong or obsolete 45 years later. Similarly, ordinary people’s brains are cluttered with outdated lists of things, such as the 10 biggest cities in the United States.

Facts are being manufactured all of the time, and, as Arbesman shows, many of them turn out to be wrong. Checking each one is how the scientific process is supposed to work; experimental results need to be replicated by other researchers. So how many of the findings in 845,175 articles published in 2009 and recorded in PubMed, the free online medical database, were actually replicated? Not all that many. In 2011, a disquieting study in Nature reported that a team of researchers over 10 years was able to reproduce the results of only six out of 53 landmark papers in preclinical cancer research.

In 2005, the physician and statistician John Ioannides published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” in the journal PLoS Medicine. Ioannides cataloged the flaws of much biomedical research, pointing out that reported studies are less likely to be true when they are small, the postulated effect is likely to be weak, research designs and endpoints are flexible, financial and nonfinancial conflicts of interest are common, and competition in the field is fierce. Ioannides concluded that “for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” Still, knowledge marches on, spawning new facts and changing old ones.

Another reason that personal knowledge decays is that people cling to selected “facts” as a way to justify their beliefs about how the world works. Arbesman notes, “We persist in only adding facts to our personal store of knowledge that jibe with what we already know, rather than assimilate new facts irrespective of how they fit into our worldview.” All too true; confirmation bias is everywhere. 

So is there anything we can do to keep up to date with the changing truth? Arbesman suggests that simply knowing that our factual knowledge bases have a half-life should keep us humble and ready to seek new information. Well, hope springs eternal. 

More daringly, Arbesman suggests, “Stop memorizing things and just give up. Our individual memories can be outsourced to the cloud.” Through the Internet, we can “search for any fact we need any time.” Really? The Web is great for finding an up-to-date list of the 10 biggest cities in the United States, but if the scientific literature is littered with wrong facts, then cyberspace is an enticing quagmire of falsehoods, propaganda, and just plain bunkum. There simply is no substitute for skepticism.

Toward the end of his book, Arbesman suggests that “exponential knowledge growth cannot continue forever.” Among the reasons he gives for the slowdown is that current growth rates imply that everyone on the planet would one day be a scientist. The 2010 Scientometrics study also mused about the growth rate in the number of scientists and offered a conjecture “that the borderline between science and other endeavors in the modern, global society will become more and more blurred.” Most may be scientists after all. Arbesman notes that “the number of neurons that can be recorded simultaneously has been growing exponentially, with a doubling time of about seven and a half years.” This suggests that brain/computer linkages will one day be possible. 

I, for one, am looking forward to updating my factual knowledge daily through a direct telecommunications link from my brain to digitized contents of the Library of Congress.  

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The Diaries Of Christmas Past

With December 25th fast approaching we have put together a little collection of entries for Christmas Day from an eclectic mix of different diaries spanning five centuries, from 1599 to 1918. Amid famed diarists such as the wife-beating Samuel Pepys, the distinctly non-festive John Adams, and the rhapsodic Thoreau, there are a sprinkling of daily jottings from relative unknowns â€" many speaking apart from loved ones, at war, sea or in foreign climes.

All diaries are housed at the Internet Archive â€" click the link below each extract to take you to the source.

From Diary, 1816, relating to Byron, Shelley, etc. Edited and elucidated by William Michael Rossetti (1911) by John William Polidori and William Michael Rossetti â€" Source.

From Journal (1835) by Mary Kemble â€" Source.

From Journal of Captain Solomon H. Davis, a Gloucester sea-captain, 1828-1846 (1922) by Solomon Haskell Davis â€" Source.

From Memoirs, journal, and correspondence of Thomas Moore (1853) by Thomas Moore and Earl John Russell â€" Source.

From From the deep of the sea; being the diary of the late Charles Edward Smith, M.R.C.S., surgeon of the whale-ship Diana, of Hull (1922) by Charles Edward Smith and Charles Edward Smith Harris â€" Source.

From My war diary (1917) by Mary Alsop King Waddington â€" Source.

From Napoleon at St. Helena (1888) by Barry Edward O’Meara â€" Source.

From Andersonville diary; escape, and list of dead, with name, company, regiment, date of death and number of grave in cemetery (1881) by John L. Ransom â€" Source.

From Diary in Turkish and Greek waters (1855) by George William Frederick Howard, Earl of Carlisle â€" Source.

From The diary of Henry Teonge (1675/1825) by Henry Teonge and Charles Knight- Source.

From The diary of Orville Hickman Browning (1925) by Orville Hickman Browning â€" Source.

From The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1664/1893) by Samuel Pepys â€" Source.

From Diary of Mary countess Cowper, lady of the bedchamber to the Princess of Wales, 1714-1720 (1864) by Countess Mary Cowper â€" Source.

From The diary of the Right Hon. William Windham, 1784 to 1810 (1866) by William Windham and Cecilia Baring â€" Source.

From Dyott’s diary, 1781-1845; a selection from the journal of William Dyott, sometime general in the British army and aide-de-camp to His Majesty King George III (1907) by William Dyott and Reginald Welbury Jeffrey â€" Source.

From Early voyages and travels in the Levant (1599/1893) by Thomas Dallam, John Covel, and J. Theodore Bent â€" Source.

From Gass’s journal of the Lewis and Clark expedition (1904) by Patrick Gass and James Kendall Hosmer â€" Source.

From Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont: Diary of Viscount Percival afterwards first Earl of Egmont, 1730-33 (1920) by Ear John Percival â€" Source.

From Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, comprising portions of his diary from 1795 to 1848 (1874) by John Quincy Adams and Charles Francis Adams â€" Source.

From The new journal of Marie Bashkirtseff: from childhood to girlhood (1912) by Marie Bashkirtseff â€" Source.

From A portion of the journal kept by Thomas Raikes, esq., from 1831 to 1847 : comprising reminiscences of social and political life in London and Paris during that period (1858) by Thomas Raikes â€" Source.

From Sir Edward Seaward’s narrative of his shipwreck, and consequent discovery of certain islands in the Caribbean Sea: with a detail of many extraordinary and highly interesting events in his life, from the year 1733 to 1749, as written in his own diary (1841) by Sir Edward Seaward, Jane Porter and William Ogilvie Porter â€" Source.

From The private journal of Aaron Burr (1903) by Aaron Burr, William H Samson, and William K. Bixby â€" Source.

From Private Smith’s journal; recollections of the late war (1963) by Benjamin T. Smith â€" Source.

From A war diary in Paris, 1914-1917 (1931) by John Gardner Coolidge â€" Source.

From Winter: : from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau (1888) by Henry David Thoreau, H. G. O. Blake, and Jacob Chester Chamberlain â€" Source.

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Mark Cuban Answered Questions On Reddit About Being Rich, Other Stuff

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban visited Reddit on Christmas Eve to answer questions about pretty much anything. Why, you ask? He can do whatever he wants. Don't question Cubes.

All questions/answers are fully [sic]'d:

On how stars are viewed in the NBA:

Reddit: Hey, Mr. Cuban.
Why do basketball players only get recognition after they've been a part of a championship team? For instance, Dirk has been an amazing player for 10 years now, but only got the respect he truly deserved from fans after having a championship caliber supporting cast (Including coaches) around him. If it's a team game, why do players only get appreciated after they accomplish something that's mostly out of their control (Since, most of the time, they don't decide who they get to play with)?

Cuban: Thats the stupid , macho element of all professional sports. Its a lot easier to just pin a lable on someone than to actually do the work to determine the impact of a player. ITs the same reason everyone over values scoring in the NBA. Scoring is usually the easiest part of the game.

On Shark Tank, the entrepreneurial television show he's part of:

Reddit: On Shark Tank, how many of the deals get modified or cancelled after the cameras stop rolling? Also, have you ever decided to make a deal with someone after the cameras stop?

Cuban: we get the chance to do due diligence after the show. As a result you uncover things that were not brought up in the show , so its not unusual for a deal to fall through in the DD phase. I have had things like people who never paid their taxes, people who lied on the show, people who didnt think that if they spent money on their personal credit cards it should be considered an expense., you name it.
There is so much pressure on the entrepeneur during the show that sometimes they say what they think we want to hear rather than the truth. The DD helps us seperate the two

On Toronto and the Raptors:

Reddit: Hi mark,
There seems to be this stigma in the NBA, that no one really wants to play for the Toronto Raptors especially superstars. I myself have lived there in the past and its a wonderful city and i can't see why anyone wouldn't want to live there. Canada is a great place to live but it seems to really scare players away, it could be the high taxes or the cold weather, but other teams have that too.
Why do you think Toronto is avoided by major NBA stars?

Cuban: i dont get that either. I think TO is an amazing city

On technical fouls:

Reddit: Do you think the increased number of technical fouls called is necessary, or are the refs being a little too sensitive?

Cuban: I think a tech is more a reflection on the officiating than it is on the player with the exception being the guys who just love to yell. ie, the old school Rasheed Wallace.
There are so many fewer techs in college and the coaches in particular there get a lot more beligerant than what you see in the NBA

On Dirk Nowitzki and O.J. Mayo:

Reddit: Thanks for doing this! What do you think gives the Mavs an advantage in a stacked Western Conference this year, whether it be how the coaching staff game plans or certain personnel advantages? Do you think there will be any difficulty in having Dirk and Mayo on the floor at the same time in a sort of Stoudemire/Melo situation? What advice would you give to a young entrepreneur?

Cuban: I think dirk will help OJ's game a bunch. Up till now teams have really overloaded their Ds to stop OJ. With Dirk back it should open things up for OJ and the rest of our offense.
If we can stop turning the ball over we will ok. If not, not. The turnovers are driving me crazier than this damn kidney stone surgery Ive had to deal with. I think the turnovers are more painful

On the possibility of buying the Chicago Cubs:

Reddit: Hey Mark, how close did you come to buying the Cubs?

Cuban: not close at all. When I couldnt get the owner of the Cubs to sit in a room with me that pretty much told me it wasnt going to happen. I never made a final formal bid

On Deron Williams:

Reddit: Thoughts on Deron Williams?

Cuban: none

On Skip Bayless:

Reddit: How's your relationship with Skip Bayless?

Cuban: who ?

On buying Christmas presents as a rich person:

Reddit: I hate to be so straight forward, but what does a billionaire buy his kids for Christmas?

Cuban: the same junk that everyone else buys.

On what Cubes would change about the NBA:

Reddit: If you could change one thing about the NBA, what would it be?
Also, thank you for voting against the Sonic's move to OKC.

Cuban: the officiating. Ive spent 13 years trying to make it better and I havent really accomplished anything.

Reddit: In regards to the officiating, which rules need to be watched (corrected) the most?

Cuban: I think we have to re evaluate the mechanics of officiating . We miss far too many 3 secs and travelling calls. I think we need to devise a way where officials can help each other more. Right now its very limited when and how officials can help change a call

On making it rain:

Reddit: Have you ever "made it rain"?

Cuban: no. thats dumb shit that people with real money dont do .

[Reddit]

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