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Scott Rosenberg

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A good day for slashdotting

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Some days Slashdot is just an endless loop of Microsoft-bashing and obscure developer jokes. Other days, like today, it’s a treasure trove.

First, they alerted me to this bit of browser-skulduggery: Did MSN deliberately set out to make Opera users get a “broken” version of its home page? I tend to be skeptical of such claims — on the Web, things break easily enough by themselves, so my default assumption is glitch before malevolence — but the Opera site’s explanation sure is persuasive.

Then I clicked over to this unbelievably fascinating explanation of the continuing mystery of hiccups. It seems that the latest theory suggests they are related to that stage of our evolutionary development when we had gills; and fetuses hiccup as they’re recapitulating that stage. But read the New Scientist piece for yourself.

Free the research papers!

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Today’s NY Times has a piece by Amy Harmon about a new project by leading scientists to create free, online, peer-reviewed journals that get research widely disseminated without the delays and fees associated with the more traditional print-journal approach.

Bravo. Isn’t this what the Internet, and the Web, were created for in the first place?

Scariest item of the week — and it’s only Monday

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From yesterday’s N.Y. Times Week in Review, a brief item noting that an asteroid entered the earth’s atmosphere in June somewhere over the Mediterranean and exploded with the force of a Hiroshima-strength nuclear bomb. U.S. instruments detected the explosion and properly identified it as the random natural event it was. A U.S. officer quoted in the story asks us to imagine that the asteroid had been poised over, say, India or Pakistan: “To our knowledge, neither of those nations have the sophisticated sensors that can determine the difference between a natural N.E.O. [“near earth object”] impact and a nuclear detonation.”

Oh dear, what can the anti-matter be?

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Enough about Bob Greene already! What’s really important? Researchers at CERN — the Swiss physics lab that birthed the World Wide Web a dozen years ago — have “made 50,000 atoms of anti-hydrogen, the antimatter counterpart of normal hydrogen.” Read more here. (Link courtesy David Harris.) This “blob” is apparently enough anti-matter for scientists to test the entire basis of modern physics: “If antihydrogen does not behave as they expect, the model will need to be replaced, and our notions of the structure of the Universe overhauled.”

What do we root for? Do we keep our fingers crossed that the standard model holds? Or do we root for the world to be turned upside down?

NYTimes coverage is here.

Hop high

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It turns out that beer is probably just as effective, or more effective, than red wine in protecting you from heart attacks, raising the “good” cholesterol in your blood, and so on — according to today’s Wall Street Journal. Moderation matters, of course; one or two beers a day seems to be the happy medium, with emphasis on “happy.”

On, Voyagers

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It’s the stuff of a great old “Star Trek” episode: the Voyager planetary probes just keep on trucking, and as they near the outer edge of the Solar System, they’re becoming — unintendedly — the first human-made interstellar vehicles. The New York Times’ John Noble Wilford’s paean to the Voyagers is great reading.