Hate Rays – (hät’ räz) noun.

1. An intense feeling of anger or hatred directed physically towards an individual, group, or object. Direction is often indicate with an intense stare, though eye contact is not necessary. Usage: She sent hate rays in his direction as he, oblivious, slurped his soup loudly.

Prior art:

• Ben Folds’ song “Rockin’ The Suburbs” from the 2001 album of the same name includes the lyrics:
  

  In a haze these days, I pull up to the stop light,

  I can feel that something’s not right.

  I can feel that someone’s blasting me with hate,

  And bass, sendin dirty vibes my way.

• Marvel Comics’ villain, Mandarin “…constructed a gemlike device capable of broadcasting ‘hate-rays’ toward Earth… The Avengers managed to thwart the Mandarin’s scheme and destroyed his satellite.”

Since many of us use it every day, it is easy to lose sight of just how remarkable the internet can be. This morning, I had a quick chat with my friend Peter, who is usually downstairs in the building our companies share. Today, though, he is in Croatia.

If you are walking from point A to point B in the rain, do you get more or less wet depending on how fast you walk?

Sounds stupidly simple, doesn’t it. Not so (for me, at least). Here are some things we can assume for the sake of the problem:

• let’s assume you are rectangular – let’s say, 1 meter, 0.5 meters wide, and 0.5 meters deep
• forget about dripping rain – any drop that hits you counts as one drop
• the rain is evenly distributed and falls at a constant and consistent speed

The qestion is, over a given distance, does the rate at which you move (in a straight line, you can assume) affect how many drops of rain you come in contact with?

If you run fast, you’ll “run through” more drops, right? However, you’ll also be in the rain for less overall time (remember, we’re going a set distance).

It might help to think through the problem in two dimensions.

Tonight on As It Happens, a daily current affairs show on CBC Radio, the lead story was the CBS George Bush National Guard memos. It is weird to hear weblogs discussed in the “real world”. I feel like someone found out about our secret club…

Listen to the piece from As It Happens on CBC Radio (5.6MB MP3)

This week on Quirks & Quarks, Canada’s weekly science program on CBC radio discussed the issue of long term (really long term) nuclear waste management.

The program was well produced, covered the topics from interesting angles, and generally made for great listening. Eerie vignettes of speculative future news-bites were read by CBC host Michael Engright.

Listening to various scientists debate how best to deal with nuclear waste of time-lines that extend well over 10,000 years goes a long way to convince you that humanity is simply not capable of dealing with issues longer than our recorded history. I was reminded of the rule of thumb: don’t trust a warranty that purports lasts longer than the company offering it has existed.

The 9 minute segment is available for download in a 3.6MB Ogg file or or a 5.5MB MP3 file.

A few years ago, Stephan Wolfram published a 1200+ page book boldly called A New Kind of Science. Wolfram had been apparently working on the concepts for about 20 years. He was an early Sun engineer and went on to create Mathematica, a powerful mathematics application.

When the book came out, the reaction was somewhat confused. Here was a known genius, finally releasing the results of his life of his work. There was anticipation that it might have the impact of Newton’s Principia or Einstein’s Special and General Theory of Relativity. However, when it came out, most couldn’t figure out if it was important, because they couldn’t understand it.

Time will tell how significant Wolfram’s work will be, but in the mean time, for those of us with a passing interest in physics, computing, and philosophy, there is a way around reading the encyclopedic work. The web audio site IT Conversations has available for download a talk by Stephen Wolfram at the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series.

The talk isn’t easy to grasp, but he keeps things out of the stratosphere for comprehension by we mere mortals. It would be nice to have video, since he makes reference to some visuals during his talk, but the audio is worthwhile. The talk can be streamed or downloaded in MP3 format from ITConversations.com.

Not really an original thought, but a thought none the less, it occurred to me this week that some of the primary sponsors of the Olympic games are pushing products that actual Olympic athletes could never actually use.

Do you think someone setting a world track-and-field record would have been allowed to have a Coke and Big Mac in the last five years? No.

Having lived through a federal election here in Canada last month, and witnessing much of the partisan debate leading up to the presidential election in the US, I hereby declare that the word progressive is devoid of meaning.

If you do insist on using the word, please keep in mind that it is an adjective – not a noun. Pretending, for a moment, that the word had meaning, you cannot “be a progressive”.

Also see: words and phrases due for retirement.

Given the petty squabling and childish interuptions I’m seeing on the Canadian federal leadership debate, maybe it’s in his best interest that the leader of the Green Party was excluded from the debate.

I’m guessing there was a language issue when Gilles Duceppe said of Canada / US relations: “Being a friend doesn’t mean you’re kneeling in front of them.” That said – he presents himself as the most reasonable and rational candidate.