Philosophy of Science Portal

Big Bang cosmology

2012-01-26T11:57:00.000-08:00

"What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology"

by

Ross Andersen

January 2012

The Atlantic

What existed before the big bang? What is the nature of time? Is our universe one of many? On the big questions science cannot (yet?) answer, a new crop of philosophers are trying to provide answers.

Last May, Stephen Hawking gave a talk at Google's Zeitgeist Conference in which he declared philosophy to be dead. In his book The Grand Design, Hawking went even further. "How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Traditionally these were questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead," Hawking wrote. "Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics."

In December, a group of professors from America's top philosophy departments, including Rutgers,* Columbia, Yale, and NYU, set out to establish the philosophy of cosmology as a new field of study within the philosophy of physics. The group aims to bring a philosophical approach to the basic questions at the heart of physics, including those concerning the nature, age and fate of the universe. This past week, a second group of scholars from Oxford and Cambridge announced their intention to launch a similar project in the United Kingdom.

One of the founding members of the American group, Tim Maudlin, was recently hired by New York University, the top ranked philosophy department in the English-speaking world. Maudlin is a philosopher of physics whose interests range from the foundations of physics, to topics more firmly within the domain of philosophy, like metaphysics and logic.

Yesterday I spoke with Maudlin by phone about cosmology, multiple universes, the nature of time, the odds of extraterrestrial life, and why Stephen Hawking is wrong about philosophy.

Your group has identified the central goal of the philosophy of cosmology to be the pursuit of outstanding conceptual problems at the foundations of cosmology. As you see it, what are the most striking of those problems?

Maudlin: So, I guess I would divide that into two classes. There are foundational problems and interpretational problems in physics, generally --say, in quantum theory, or in space-time theory, or in trying to come up with a quantum theory of gravity-- that people will worry about even if they're not doing what you would call the philosophy of cosmology. But sometimes those problems manifest themselves in striking ways when you look at them on a cosmological scale. So some of this is just a different window on what we would think of as foundational problems in physics, generally.

Then there are problems that are fairly specific to cosmology. Standard cosmology, or what was considered standard cosmology twenty years ago, led people to the conclude that the universe that we see around us began in a big bang, or put another way, in some very hot, very dense state. And if you think about the characteristics of that state, in order to explain the evolution of the universe, that state had to be a very low entropy state, and there's a line of thought that says that anything that is very low entropy is in some sense very improbable or unlikely. And if you carry that line of thought forward, you then say "Well gee, you're telling me the universe began in some extremely unlikely or improbable state" and you wonder is there any explanation for that. Is there any principle that you can use to account for the big bang state?

This question of accounting for what we call the "big bang state" -- the search for a physical explanation of it -- is probably the most important question within the philosophy of cosmology, and there are a couple different lines of thought about it. One that's becoming more and more prevalent in the physics community is the idea that the big bang state itself arose out of some previous condition, and that therefore there might be an explanation of it in terms of the previously existing dynamics by which it came about. There are other ideas, for instance that maybe there might be special sorts of laws, or special sorts of explanatory principles, that would apply uniquely to the initial state of the universe.

One common strategy for thinking about this is to suggest that what we used to call the whole universe is just a small part of everything there is, and that we live in a kind of bubble universe, a small region of something much larger. And the beginning of this region, what we call the big bang, came about by some physical process, from something before it, and that we happen to find ourselves in this region because this is a region that can support life. The idea being that there are lots of these bubble universes, maybe an infinite number of bubble universes, all very different from one another. Part of the explanation of what's called the anthropic principle says, "Well now, if that's the case, we as living beings will certainly find ourselves in one of those bubbles that happens to support living beings." That gives you a kind of account for why the universe we see around us has certain properties.

Is the philosophy of cosmology as a project, a kind of translating then, of existing physics into a more common language of meaning, or into discrete, recognizable concepts? Or do you expect that it will contribute directly to physics, whether that means suggesting new experiments or participating directly in theoretical physics?

Maudlin: I don't think this is a translation project. This is a branch of the philosophy of physics, in which you happen to be treating the entire universe --which is one huge physical object-- as a subject of study, rather than say studying just electrons by themselves, or studying only the solar system. There are particular physical problems, problems of explanation, which arise in thinking about the entire universe, which don't arise when you consider only its smaller systems. I see this as trying to articulate what those particular problems are, and what the avenues are for solving them, rather than trying to translate from physics into some other language. This is all within the purview of a scientific attempt to come to grips with the physical world.

There's a story about scientific discovery that we all learn in school, the story of Isaac Newton discovering gravity after being struck by an apple. That story is now thought by some to have been a myth, but suppose that it were true, or that it was a substitute for some similar, or analogous, eureka moment. Do you consider a breakthrough like that, which isn't contingent on any new or specialized observations to be philosophical in nature?

Maudlin: What occurred to Newton was that there was a force of gravity, which of course everybody knew about, it's not like he actually discovered gravity-- everybody knew there was such a thing as gravity. But if you go back into antiquity, the way that the celestial objects, the moon, the sun, and the planets, were treated by astronomy had nothing to do with the way things on earth were treated. These were entirely different realms, and what Newton realized was that there had to be a force holding the moon in orbit around the earth. This is not something that Aristotle or his predecessors thought, because they were treating the planets and the moon as though they just naturally went around in circles. Newton realized there had to be some force holding the moon in its orbit around the earth, to keep it from wandering off, and he knew also there was a force that was pulling the apple down to the earth. And so what suddenly struck him was that those could be one and the same thing, the same force.

That was a physical discovery, a physical discovery of momentous importance, as important as anything you could ever imagine because it knit together the terrestrial realm and the celestial realm into one common physical picture. It was also a philosophical discovery in the sense that philosophy is interested in the fundamental natures of things.

Newton would call what he was doing natural philosophy, that's actually the name of his book: "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy." Philosophy, traditionally, is what everybody thought they were doing. It's what Aristotle thought he was doing when he wrote his book called Physics. So it's not as if there's this big gap between physical inquiry and philosophical inquiry. They're both interested in the world on a very general scale, and people who work in the foundations of physics, that is, the group that works on the foundations of physics, is about equally divided between people who live in philosophy departments, people who live in physics departments, and people who live in mathematics departments.

In May of last year Stephen Hawking gave a talk for Google in which he said that philosophy was dead, and that it was dead because it had failed to keep up with science, and in particular physics. Is he wrong or is he describing a failure of philosophy that your project hopes to address?

Maudlin: Hawking is a brilliant man, but he's not an expert in what's going on in philosophy, evidently. Over the past thirty years the philosophy of physics has become seamlessly integrated with the foundations of physics work done by actual physicists, so the situation is actually the exact opposite of what he describes. I think he just doesn't know what he's talking about. I mean there's no reason why he should. Why should he spend a lot of time reading the philosophy of physics? I'm sure it's very difficult for him to do. But I think he's just . . . uninformed.

Do you think that physics has neglected some of these foundational questions as it has become, increasingly, a kind of engine for the applied sciences, focusing on the manipulation, rather than say, the explanation, of the physical world?

Maudlin: Look, physics has definitely avoided what were traditionally considered to be foundational physical questions, but the reason for that goes back to the foundation of quantum mechanics. The problem is that quantum mechanics was developed as a mathematical tool. Physicists understood how to use it as a tool for making predictions, but without an agreement or understanding about what it was telling us about the physical world. And that's very clear when you look at any of the foundational discussions. This is what Einstein was upset about; this is what Schrodinger was upset about. Quantum mechanics was merely a calculational technique that was not well understood as a physical theory. Bohr and Heisenberg tried to argue that asking for a clear physical theory was something you shouldn't do anymore. That it was something outmoded. And they were wrong, Bohr and Heisenberg were wrong about that. But the effect of it was to shut down perfectly legitimate physics questions within the physics community for about half a century. And now we're coming out of that, fortunately.

And what's driving the renaissance?

Maudlin: Well, the questions never went away. There were always people who were willing to ask them. Probably the greatest physicist in the last half of the twentieth century, who pressed very hard on these questions, was John Stewart Bell. So you can't suppress it forever, it will always bubble up. It came back because people became less and less willing to simply say, "Well, Bohr told us not to ask those questions," which is sort of a ridiculous thing to say.

Are the topics that have scientists completely flustered especially fertile ground for philosophers? For example I've been doing a ton of research for a piece about the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and none of the astronomers I've talked to seem to have a clue as to how to use it to solve the mystery of dark energy. Is there, or will there be, a philosophy of dark energy in the same way that a body of philosophy seems to have flowered around the mysteries of quantum mechanics?

Maudlin: There will be. There can be a philosophy of anything really, but it's perhaps not as fancy as you're making it out. The basic philosophical question, going back to Plato, is "What is x?" What is virtue? What is justice? What is matter? What is time? You can ask that about dark energy - what is it? And it's a perfectly good question.

There are different ways of thinking about the phenomena which we attribute to dark energy. Some ways of thinking about it say that what you're really doing is adjusting the laws of nature themselves. Some other ways of thinking about it suggest that you've discovered a component or constituent of nature that we need to understand better, and seek the source of. So, the question -- What is this thing fundamentally? -- is a philosophical question, and is a fundamental physical question, and will lead to interesting avenues of inquiry.

One example of philosophy of cosmology that seems to have trickled out to the layman is the idea of fine tuning - the notion that in the set of all possible physics, the subset that permits the evolution of life is very small, and that from this it is possible to conclude that the universe is either one of a large number of universes, a multiverse, or that perhaps some agent has fine tuned the universe with the expectation that it generate life. Do you expect that idea to have staying power, and if not what are some of the compelling arguments against it?

Maudlin: A lot of attention has been given to the fine tuning argument. Let me just say first of all, that the fine tuning argument as you state it, which is a perfectly correct statement of it, depends upon making judgments about the likelihood, or probability of something. Like, "how likely is it that the mass of the electron would be related to the mass of the proton in a certain way?" Now, one can first be a little puzzled by what you mean by "how likely" or "probable" something like that is. You can ask how likely it is that I'll roll double sixes when I throw dice, but we understand the way you get a handle on the use of probabilities in that instance. It's not as clear how you even make judgments like that about the likelihood of the various constants of nature (an so on) that are usually referred to in the fine tuning argument.

Now let me say one more thing about fine tuning. I talk to physicists a lot, and none of the physicists I talk to want to rely on the fine tuning argument to argue for a cosmology that has lots of bubble universes, or lots of worlds. What they want to argue is that this arises naturally from an analysis of the fundamental physics, that the fundamental physics, quite apart from any cosmological considerations, will give you a mechanism by which these worlds will be produced, and a mechanism by which different worlds will have different constants, or different laws, and so on. If that's true, then if there are enough of these worlds, it will be likely that some of them have the right combination of constants to permit life. But their arguments tend not to be "we have to believe in these many worlds to solve the fine tuning problem," they tend to be "these many worlds are generated by physics we have other reasons for believing in."

If we give up on that, and it turns out there aren't these many worlds, that physics is unable to generate them, then it's not that the only option is that there was some intelligent designer. It would be a terrible mistake to think that those are the only two ways things could go. You would have to again think hard about what you mean by probability, and about what sorts of explanations there might be. Part of the problem is that right now there are just way too many freely adjustable parameters in physics. Everybody agrees about that. There seem to be many things we call constants of nature that you could imagine setting at different values, and most physicists think there shouldn't be that many, that many of them are related to one another. Physicists think that at the end of the day there should be one complete equation to describe all physics, because any two physical systems interact and physics has to tell them what to do. And physicists generally like to have only a few constants, or parameters of nature. This is what Einstein meant when he famously said he wanted to understand what kind of choices God had --using his metaphor-- how free his choices were in creating the universe, which is just asking how many freely adjustable parameters there are. Physicists tend to prefer theories that reduce that number, and as you reduce it, the problem of fine tuning tends to go away. But, again, this is just stuff we don't understand well enough yet.

I know that the nature of time is considered to be an especially tricky problem for physics, one that physicists seem prepared, or even eager, to hand over to philosophers. Why is that?

Maudlin: That's a very interesting question, and we could have a long conversation about that. I'm not sure it's accurate to say that physicists want to hand time over to philosophers. Some physicists are very adamant about wanting to say things about it; Sean Carroll for example is very adamant about saying that time is real. You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn't really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical objects don't change -- which is perfectly true -- and then you're always using mathematical objects to describe the world, you could easily fall into the idea that the world itself doesn't change, because your representations of it don't.

There are other, technical reasons that people have thought that you don't need a direction of time, or that physics doesn't postulate a direction of time. My own view is that none of those arguments are very good. To the question as to why a physicist would want to hand time over to philosophers, the answer would be that physicists for almost a hundred years have been dissuaded from trying to think about fundamental questions. I think most physicists would quite rightly say "I don't have the tools to answer a question like 'what is time?' - I have the tools to solve a differential equation." The asking of fundamental physical questions is just not part of the training of a physicist anymore.

I recently came across a paper about Fermi's Paradox and Self-Replicating Probes, and while it had kind of a science fiction tone to it, it occurred to me as I was reading it that philosophers might be uniquely suited to speculating about, or at least evaluating the probabilistic arguments for the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. Do you expect philosophers of cosmology to enter into those debates, or will the discipline confine itself to issues that emerge directly from physics?

Maudlin: This is really a physical question. If you think of life, of intelligent life, it is, among other things, a physical phenomenon -- it occurs when the physical conditions are right. And so the question of how likely it is that life will emerge, and how frequently it will emerge, does connect up to physics, and does connect up to cosmology, because when you're asking how likely it is that somewhere there's life, you're talking about the broad scope of the physical universe. And philosophers do tend to be pretty well schooled in certain kinds of probabilistic analysis, and so it may come up. I wouldn't rule it in or rule it out.

I will make one comment about these kinds of arguments which seems to me to somehow have eluded everyone. When people make these probabilistic equations, like the Drake Equation, which you're familiar with -- they introduce variables for the frequency of earth-like planets, for the evolution of life on those planets, and so on. The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you'll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence. There is just too much we don't know.

*Updated: This piece has been amended to include Rutgers in the list of participating universities.

Deceased--Bingham Ray

2012-01-24T11:43:00.001-08:00

Bingham Ray
October 1st, 1954 to January 23rd, 2012

"Bingham Ray dies at 57; leading force in independent films"

Ray, who co-founded October Films, one of the top independent distribution firms in the '90s, suffered a stroke at the Sundance Film Festival.

by

Dennis McLellan

January 24th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Bingham Ray, the co-founder of October Films, one of the top independent film distribution companies of the 1990s, and a former president of United Artists who was a leading force in independent films for more than two decades, died Monday. He was 57.

Ray, who was named executive director of the San Francisco Film Society in November, died in a hospital in Provo, Utah, after suffering a stroke last week while attending the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, said Sarah Eaton, a spokeswoman for the family.

"We lost a true warrior for independent voice today with the passing of Bingham Ray," Sundance founder Robert Redford said in a statement. "He was a valued member of the Sundance family for as long as I can remember, and he is responsible for mentoring countless seminal storytellers and bringing their work to the world."

A onetime manager and programmer at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York's Greenwich Village in the early 1980s, Ray co-founded October Films in 1991 with Jeff Lipsky in Lipsky's garage in Sherman Oaks.

Six months after its first release, Mike Leigh's "Life Is Sweet," the company had raised capital and opened its doors in New York City. Ray served as co-president until the company's sale to USA Networks in 1999.

During his years with October Films, Ray distributed films such as Leigh's "Secrets & Lies," Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves," John Dahl's "The Last Seduction," Robert Duvall's "The Apostle," David Lynch's "Lost Highway," Robert Altman's "Cookie's Fortune" and Jim Jarmusch's "The Year of the Horse."

"He was very beloved by the filmmakers he worked with and very dedicated to preserving their vision in bringing their films to the marketplace," John Schmidt, one of Ray's former partners in October Films, said Monday.

"He was a man whose passion for film just embodied everything good about our industry," Schmidt said. "He did it with tremendous drive and passion, not because he wanted to become a millionaire and not because he wanted to be a big shot, but because it was in his heart and soul."

After leaving October Films in 1999, Ray continued to be a familiar presence at film festivals, where he served on judging panels. But after nearly dying in a traffic accident in 2000, he later told the New York Times, "I realized where my place really is."

In 2001, after six months as president of New York-based Crossroads Films, Ray was named president of United Artists, the specialty films division of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.

During his nearly 2 1/2 years at UA, Ray bought Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," which won the Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2003.

In a Twitter message on Monday, Moore said he would "deeply miss" Ray. "He bought & distributed Bowling for Columbine when no one else would. He stood by me all the way."

Among other films the company acquired/and or produced during Ray's tenure are Danis Tanovic's "No Man's Land," an Oscar winner for best foreign language film; "Nicholas Nickleby," "Jeepers Creepers" and its sequel, and "Pieces of April."

When Ray resigned from UA in 2004, the Hollywood Reporter reported that sources close to the situation said that he and MGM executives "often clashed over the types of films that Ray chose to champion, with the studio regarding his taste as too esoteric and arty."

Independent producer Jonathan Dana described Ray on Monday as being "one of a kind."

"I don't think there is anybody more passionate or dedicated or more courageous than Bingham in terms of what he believed in and what he would fight for and who he would challenge if it meant moving something forward that he believed in," Dana said.

"He's a true testament to what we all do in the independent film world."

Ray, who was born Oct. 1, 1954, in Bronxville, N.Y., told the San Francisco Chronicle in December that his father, a civil engineer, taught him to love movies in elementary school: His reward for finishing his homework was being allowed to watch movies on TV with his dad.

His film education continued at Scarsdale High School, where he took a film class that introduced him to foreign films and prompted him to make his first film with a Super 8 camera provided by the teacher. He graduated with a degree in theater arts and speech from Simpson College in Iowa.

After his stint at the Bleecker Street Cinema, Ray worked for New Yorker Films, the Samuel Goldwyn Co. and Alive Films before co-founding October Films.

He joined L.A.-based production company Sidney Kimmel Entertainment in 2007 and over the next three years served as president of Kimmel Distribution and president of creative affairs.

Before being named executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, he served as the first-run programming consultant to the Film Society of Lincoln Center, executive consultant to the digital distribution company SnagFilms and adjunct professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

Ray is survived by his wife, Nancy King; their children, Nick, Annabel and Becca; and his sisters, Susan Clair and Deb Pope.

"Bingham Ray, Executive Who Championed Independent Films, Dies at 57"

by

Brooks Barnes

January 23rd, 2012

The New York Times

Bingham Ray, a colorful indie-film executive who helped steer art-house movies like “Bowling for Columbine” and “Hotel Rwanda” to the masses, died on Monday in a hospice in Provo, Utah. He was 57.

The cause was a series of strokes, according to the San Francisco Film Society, where he had only recently become its executive director, an appointment he described in October as “too good to be true.” He was in Utah to attend the Sundance Film Festival.

Volatile and blunt, Mr. Ray championed stylized, intellectually challenging films, buying distribution rights to movies that few believed had a box-office prayer. “The words ‘fearless’ and ‘brave’ are tossed around a lot in our world, but that’s the only way to describe Bingham,” said Eamonn Bowles, the president of Magnolia Pictures.

Mr. Ray helped create a business model in which art-house movies grew into a powerful economic and cultural force. He co-founded one of the first major indie distributors, October Films, in 1991, working with Jeff Lipsky in a house in suburban Los Angeles.

October Films, along with Miramax Films and Sony Pictures Classics, was designed to snap up indie gems from festivals like Sundance and distribute them broadly, relying on guerrilla marketing campaigns and the Oscars to get them noticed. “Secrets & Lies,” directed by Mike Leigh, and Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves,” both from 1996, were two of October’s biggest successes. October Films was also responsible for David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” and one of the first widely seen Iranian movies, “The White Balloon,” directed by Jafar Panahi.

Mr. Ray left October Films in 1999, when it was sold to USA Networks. After a series of mergers and acquisitions, the company emerged in 2002 as Focus Features, which remains an art-house leader. “If you draw a line back to the rise of independent film, you find Bingham,” Mr. Bowles said.

Born on Oct. 1, 1954, Mr. Ray grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y. He was fascinated with movies from an early age; one of his first jobs was as a projectionist in a Greenwich Village theater. He started his formal career in 1981 in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s New York office, where he sold library titles to hospitals, colleges and ships at sea.

He worked at five other distribution companies, including New Yorker Films and Avenue Pictures, where he oversaw the release of Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy” in 1989 before founding October Films.

From 2001 to 2004 Mr. Ray was president of United Artists, working to revive its reputation for serving up top-notch specialty films. “Bowling for Columbine,” a Michael Moore documentary on the American gun culture, and Terry George’s “Hotel Rwanda,” starring Don Cheadle in a fact-based tale set during the Rwandan genocide, were two United Artists films released under Mr. Ray’s watch. His subsequent jobs included running Sidney Kimmel Entertainment.

He was also a consultant to the Film Society of Lincoln Center, IFC Films and Snag Films, which focuses on documentaries, and an adjunct professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Mr. Ray is survived by his wife, Nancy King; their children Nick, Annabel and Becca; and his sisters, Susan Clair and Deb Pope.

Peter Biskind’s book “Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film” (2004), captured the excitement Mr. Ray felt about art-house movies. “We’re not as well-heeled as some of these other companies, but we’re hungrier, because it’s me, and I’m really, really hungry,” Mr. Biskind quotes him as saying during a Sundance bidding war. “This film, I’m drooling. I would chop my left arm to do it.”

Crusty ole Sir Patrick Moore

2012-01-24T10:54:00.000-08:00

"Brian Cox? He's no astronomer! Patrick Moore turns his telescope on the young pretender - and concedes he's really rather good (for an ex-rock star)"

by

Jane Fryer

January 24th, 2012

Daily Mail

Sir Patrick Moore is 88 years old and he looks it. His huge body is battered by age — lurid purple bruises decorate his enormous forearms, his baby-soft hands are clawed with arthritis, and an old wartime spinal injury has left him dependent on a rotating team of carers who share his fairytale 15th-century cottage in Selsey, West Sussex.

They help him from bed to chair and back again, glue his famous monocle (yes, really) to his eyelid to stop it tumbling out, launder his lurid Hawaiian shirts and fix him a daily G&T at 12.30pm, on the dot.

His enormous brain, however, is as sharp as ever and flits from his beloved cats Jeannie and Ptolemy ('they rule the house), to his loathing of all Germans ('if I saw the entire German nation sinking into the sea, I'd help push it down') and the national obsession with Professor Brian Cox — the pop star-turned-physicist who idolised Moore as a child, presented the 700th episode of Sky At Night with him last year, and is adored by the British public.

Now, thanks to the BBC2 Stargazing Live show, Professor Cox has increased telescope sales by more than 500 per cent and is poised to take on Sir Patrick's mantle.

'These young ones come and they go, but he's a nice chap, you know,' barks Sir Patrick in his fabulously posh voice. 'Came on my show once. Can't say I've seen his, though. I've been so busy I keep forgetting. Sheer stupidity on my part. I think he and I could learn from each other.

'Though, of course, he's not an astronomer — he's a particle physicist!' he hurrumphs. 'And he was in a rock band! But I suppose the more people that come into astronomy the better. I'm all for it. And it's a good thing, because I'm ancient.'

So ancient, that he's planned his own death. In meticulous detail.

'I've got it all mapped out. I don't want a funeral. So they can take all my good bits and use them for medical science.'

What about the less 'good bits'?

'They can chuck it all away! I couldn't care less. But I've left some money in my will for a very good party. There will be a candle and a tape with a message from me, and they'll light the candle and play the tape, and at exactly the right moment I'll blow the candle out.'

And the message?

'I've already recorded it! I say: “I'll blow that candle out if it kills me”, ha ha ha!'

Goodness.

Sir Patrick may be cruelly incapacitated by a failing body, but it's hard to imagine his candle spluttering out any time soon. For one thing, he's too busy.

He's still filming The Sky At Night — the longest-running programme with the same presenter in the history of television ('I think we're on about instalment 760 . . . I can't see anyone beating it now, can you?') — recorded here in his cluttered study.

The first programme went out live on April 26, 1957, and he has missed just one since — in 2004, when he accidentally ate a rancid goose egg and nearly died of salmonella.

He has also just finished his Data Book of Astronomy — an enormous compendium of pretty much everything you'd ever want to know about the cosmos, which took him ten years ('so much has happened — the probing of the planets, huge advances in astronomy') and is now sitting glossily on his desk, topped by Jeannie the cat.

But for all his impressive industry, his world has shrunk dramatically in the past few years.

But for all his impressive industry, his world has shrunk dramatically in the past few years.
Sir Patrick and his trademark monocle, pictured in his home in Selsey, Sussex

'I went to sleep one night about ten years ago and woke up like this,' he says, looking down in disgust at his crippled body. 'Look at my hands. I can't play the piano or the xylophone any more. It killed everything.' Including regular games of tennis, cricket (his unorthodox bowling style involving lots of leaps, bounds and whirling of arms), travelling and even walking.

'My active life came to an abrupt full stop. It was a tremendous shock and it was permanent. Unlike all those new telescope users out there, I can't even operate my telescope any more — I can't handle the controls. I try to make the best of it, but I could have done without the last ten years.' So he'd rather not have woken up that morning?

'It might have been better, yes,' he says. 'I'm not scared of dying. I believe in some form of afterlife: I just hope my uncle George isn't there — silly, bald-headed old coot. But you've got to make the best of things and that's what I've always tried to do.'

Patrick Alfred Cauldwell-Moore was born in Pinner, Middlesex, in 1923, only child of Charles, a soldier ('who survived the Great War with a Military Cross and a lungful of gas') and Gertrude, a trained opera singer.

He had a weak heart and so was tutored at home. In his spare time, he would lie on the sofa reading about the moon and the stars, and saved his pocket money until, aged 11, he had enough (£7 10s) to buy his first telescope and became the youngest member of the British Astronomical Association. Fifty years later to the day he was elected its president.

On the outbreak of World War II, he lied about his age (he was 16) and his dodgy heart and joined the RAF ('I knew if I joined the Army or Navy I'd last ten minutes with my heart').

Today he's rather tight-lipped about his war years, admitting only to spending five years as a navigator in RAF Bomber Command, losing all his teeth in an accident, sustaining the spinal injury that has finally caught up with him and, rather mysteriously, 'learning enough Norwegian to get by'.

With the war, though, came great personal tragedy.

'My girl, Lorna, was killed,' he says. 'We were both 20 and engaged. She was a nurse and she was in the wrong place when a German bomb fell. There was no question of anyone else — I still think about her all the time. Second best was no good for me. So I didn't marry and had no family.'

He lived with his beloved mother, Gertrude, until her death aged 94 in 1981 ('the worst day of my life after Lorna died'), became an amateur astronomer and travelled the world chasing eclipses, mapping the moon, reporting from meteorite craters for The Sky At Night and playing the xylophone on Morecambe And Wise.

Despite being 88, he continues to work and has left money in his will for an almighty party when he dies. He has also created a video, at the end of which he blows out a candle

'I never thought the programme would go on so long, but there are various reasons for it — it's cheap, it goes on late at night so it doesn't bother anybody, and it's not controversial. Though we had plenty of disasters.'

Like the time he swallowed a bluebottle live on air — 'it buzzed all the way down' — and his ten-minute interview in pidgin French with a Russian who spoke no English — 'we just about got away with it, ha ha!'

His high point was when he saw the dark side of the Moon for the first time after it was photographed from a space probe.

Nearly 760 Sky At Nights later, his letterbox is still overflowing with enthusiastic fan mail (they haven't all defected to Cox yet), which he answers in full — despite barely being able to type on his specially adapted computer keyboard — though he does now lean on a few stock replies for the bog-standard queries. 'You know . . . how do I take up astronomy? What's that bright thing in the sky? Is there life out there?'

And is there?

'I'm sure there is. I refuse to believe we're the only living things. But I can't prove it. The clue is maybe Mars — not little green men, or not any near here, anyway — but if we can find trace of any life on Mars, that will be our pointer.'

He is also a magnet for rather more eccentric correspondence — from the man convinced the Earth was shaped like a teacup, the women who wanted to send a carrier pigeon to the moon . . . He wrote back suggesting a parrot-pigeon hybrid, so it could say hello when it got there.

Celebrating a continuous 25-year run of the Sky at Night in 1957 with a piece of cake. To this day he still gets hundreds of letters of fan mail

'There are plenty of nuts — the “flat-earthers” and “hollow-globers”,' he says. And he replies to every letter he receives, no matter how nutty.

Sir Patrick is surprisingly cheerful for a man whose physical life is restricted to his downstairs bedroom, wood-panelled study and a view through the mullioned windows at his cats playing on their very own scale model of Saturn in their luxury cat run. (He's paranoid about keeping them safe — there's a typewritten sign by the front door: 'Patrick's cats are fiendishly clever masters of escape. Please observe the airlock procedures'.)

'I used to wake up and think: “What have I got time for today?” Now, I get up, drink my usual four coffees, have a look at the obituaries in The Times, and if I'm not in them, I'll get on with the day's work.'

He is not a man afraid to speak his mind, whether it's regarding his own disabilities, or sharing some of his rather more, er, trenchant views.

There was an uproar two years ago when he said the BBC had been ruined by women executives drowning us in soap operas, cooking and quiz shows, and advocated two separate television stations — one for each gender. 'There should be a mix of men and women — that's what I actually said,' he insists (not very convincingly) today.

When I ask him about his comparing of EastEnders to diarrhoea, he smirks naughtily and says: 'I've never been a fan of soap operas.'

And don't, whatever you do, get him onto the Germans.

'Eughhh! A Kraut is a Kraut is a Kraut. And the only good Kraut is a dead Kraut.'

'Of course I'm a lot older than (Brian Cox),' he relents. 'In a fortnight's time I'll be 89! But I'm okay, just. Though I can't play cricket any more.'

Like many men of his generation, he is fervently anti-European (though he loves the Norwegians and the Greeks — 'the only people who fought gallantly all through the war'), is a keen member of UKIP ('if I were 20 years younger I'd be fighting for a seat next time') and frets about immigration.

'They need to be controlled. I'm not sure how, but let in the people you want and not the riff-raff,' he says. Perhaps it's time to change the subject, and ask if he wishes he'd made it to the moon himself. 'I had no chance,' he says, 'wrong age, wrong nationality and wrong medical grade.'

Yet he must take comfort in how many budding astronomers he has inspired and how much he has crammed into his 88 years.

He has mapped the moon (when the Russians and Americans went to the moon, they used his guides), played duets with Einstein ('exactly what I expected — charming, old-worldly, courteous and never wore socks'), excelled as a musician and composer ('one thing that is no credit to me is perfect pitch and perfect timing') and written more than 70 books on astronomy.

And he is surely one of the very few people to have met the first man to fly, Orville Wright, the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, and the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong.

He's done an extraordinary amount in his 88 years. So would he feel happy to be passing on the stargazing baton to Professor Cox? 'I'm not dead yet!' Oh dear.

And, er, Professor Cox? 'Well, he's not the only one taking on the mantle. But he is very good . . .'

That's high praise indeed from the great man.

And with that I leave him planning his next project — 'I think it's high time I started concentrating on my composing' — fussing over his beloved cats and rubbing his vast hands at the thought of all those budding astronomers with their shiny new telescopes — ('a wonderful thing').

Sir Patrick is an exceptional man and one whom, for all his outrageously un-PC views, it's impossible not to like enormously.

After all, there aren't many octogenarians who can wear a glued-on monocle and a lurid green Hawaiian shirt and still exude gravitas. Professor Brian Cox has some very large shoes to fill.

More on Moore

An interview with Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw on physics

Academic life after retirement...way to go Ed Gerjuoy

2012-01-24T10:39:00.001-08:00

Ed Gerjuoy, 93, is an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. He works in his campus office during the week and often returns to work on Saturdays and Sundays. “Sometimes I’m the only one there on weekends,” he says.

"Recollections of Oppenheimer and Schwinger", a talk given by Prof. Edward Gerjuoy, (University of Pittsburgh) at the Institute for Theoretical, Atomic and Molecular and Optical Physics, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge Massachusetts, November 3, 2009

The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was born on April 22, 1904, was celebrated in a June, 2004 Los Alamos Symposium, wherein I recalled my experiences as a Ph.D. student of Oppenheimer's in Berkeley, California during the period August 1938 to January 1942. I shall recount some of these recollections, concentrating on conveying a portrait of Oppenheimer as creator and inspiration of probably the most important pre-war United States school of theoretical physics. During a portion of this period (the 1940 academic year) Julian Schwinger, who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for the development of the modern formulation of quantum electrodynamics and deservedly has been termed a genius, was employed as what today would be termed Oppenheimer's post doc. Therefore, especially because Schwinger now seems almost forgotten, although he died only fifteen years ago (on July 16, 1994), I also will recall some of Schwinger's interactions with Oppenheimer and Oppenheimer's students including myself, in an attempt to convey some comprehension of Schwinger's astonishing theoretical physics talents.

"Recollections of Oppenheimer and Schwinger"

Soooooooooo, is the Earth safe for 2012?...NASA knows

2012-01-23T05:13:00.001-08:00

Much like Y2K, 2012 has been analyzed and the science of the end of the Earth thoroughly studied. Contrary to some of the common beliefs out there, the science behind the end of the world quickly unravels when pinned down to the 2012 timeline. Below, NASA Scientists answer several questions that we're frequently asked regarding 2012.

Question (Q): Are there any threats to the Earth in 2012? Many Internet websites say the world will end in December 2012.
Answer (A): Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.

Q: What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in 2012?
A: The story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was moved forward to December 2012. Then these two fables were linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012 -- hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.

Q: Does the Mayan calendar end in December 2012?
A: Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then -- just as your calendar begins again on January 1 -- another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar.

Q: Could phenomena occur where planets align in a way that impacts Earth?
A: There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades, Earth will not cross the galactic plane in 2012, and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible. Each December the Earth and sun align with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy but that is an annual event of no consequence.

Q: Is there a planet or brown dwarf called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris that is approaching the Earth and threatening our planet with widespread destruction?
A: Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.

Q: What is the polar shift theory? Is it true that the earth’s crust does a 180-degree rotation around the core in a matter of days if not hours?
A: A reversal in the rotation of Earth is impossible. There are slow movements of the continents (for example Antarctica was near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago), but that is irrelevant to claims of reversal of the rotational poles. However, many of the disaster websites pull a bait-and-switch to fool people. They claim a relationship between the rotation and the magnetic polarity of Earth, which does change irregularly, with a magnetic reversal taking place every 400,000 years on average. As far as we know, such a magnetic reversal doesn’t cause any harm to life on Earth. A magnetic reversal is very unlikely to happen in the next few millennia, anyway.

Q: Is the Earth in danger of being hit by a meteor in 2012?
A: The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today NASA astronomers are carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit. We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs. All this work is done openly with the discoveries posted every day on the NASA NEO Program Office website, so you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012.

Q: How do NASA scientists feel about claims of pending doomsday?
A: For any claims of disaster or dramatic changes in 2012, where is the science? Where is the evidence? There is none, and for all the fictional assertions, whether they are made in books, movies, documentaries or over the Internet, we cannot change that simple fact. There is no credible evidence for any of the assertions made in support of unusual events taking place in December 2012.

Q: Is there a danger from giant solar storms predicted for 2012?
A: Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history.

Mr. Wizard times two

2012-01-22T19:38:00.001-08:00

Betty Sue Albert learns about "vibrations" from Mr. Wizard [Don Herbert].

Offering is in three parts unfortunately.

Vibrations

Part 1

Vibrations

Part 2

Vibrations

Part 3

And a rare color episode...

Electromagnetism

Watch Mr. Wizard [Wikipedia]

Mr. Wizard...missed mentor

Mr. Wizard--more

"Watch Mr. Wizard"--1954 episode

Many scientists are bereft of knowledge of the philosophy of science

2012-01-22T15:15:00.001-08:00

It is certainly true here too.

"Philosophy is a weak point for science students"

by

William Reville

January 19th, 2012

The Irish Times

It is important to know the nature and strength of the pillars on which scientific knowledge is based, writes WILLIAM REVILLE

IRISH AND UK science suffers from a defect – there is no formal and mandatory coursework in the history and philosophy of science for third level science students. Although many scientists educate themselves in this regard, this is a haphazard way to go about things.

A scientist who has never pondered the history and philosophy of science cannot reflect deeply on science. He/she will know how to use the scientific method to investigate nature but will not have a sophisticated grasp of the scope of the method, the reliability of the knowledge it reveals, or the ethical implications of pursuing certain investigations, and cannot benefit from a knowledge of science history that could usefully guide current developments.

University philosophy departments teach courses on the philosophy of science, but science departments do not send their students to these courses and philosophy departments do not promote it outside their own discipline. We recently introduced an introductory university-wide module at UCC on science in society and another on the history/philosophy of science. These modules are popular and I see no reason why they shouldn’t be mandatory. It is time to deflate the old witticism that “the average scientist knows as much about the philosophy of science as the average fish knows about hydrodynamics”.

Scientific laws are generalisations that describe a natural behaviour, often in the form of a mathematical formula, following exhaustive observations of the behaviour. Such derivation of laws is called inductive reasoning. Thus, no exception has ever been noted to the observation that two material bodies attract each other by a force we call gravity, and the strength of this attraction is proportional to the product of the masses of the bodies and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Innumerable measurements have formalised these observations into the Law of Universal Gravitation. But the fact that no exceptions have been found does not mean that exceptions will never be found. David Hume (1711-1776) was the first philosopher to point out that, although the inductive method works empirically, it cannot be proven on rational grounds.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) pointed up the weakness of induction with the following story. A farmer bought some turkeys and fattened them up by feeding them every morning at 9am. The more rigorous thinkers among the turkeys drew up a law stating – “turkeys are fed every morning at 9am”. This law held up well until several days before Christmas, when . . .

Much of science ultimately depends on the expectation that the world will continue to behave according to its present and past behaviour. The early modern scientists felt safe in having this expectation because of their belief in a faithful creator, but if you remove that grounding you are left with something that can flap around a bit. And that grounding must be removed. The modern and mature understanding of science is that it stands alone in a natural sphere and has no connection with the supernatural.

So, if science cannot prove that its findings can never be wrong, what differentiates it from other ways of investigating the world? Philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994) made a very useful contribution here by proposing that the essential characteristic of a scientific proposal is that we are able to imagine circumstances under which the proposal could be disproved.

Although it is not possible to have certain objective knowledge of anything, science comes closer to this standard than any other means of acquiring knowledge. However, it is important to know the nature and strength of the pillars on which scientific knowledge is based, the ethical implications of pursuing scientific investigations, and the history of how science has unveiled the secrets of nature and how this knowledge has been applied.

[William Reville is a professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer at UCC.... ]

Deceased--James Arnold

2012-01-22T05:52:00.001-08:00

James Arnold
May 5th, 1923 to January 6th, 2012

"James Arnold dies at 88; pushed to unlock secrets in moon rocks"

Nuclear chemist James Arnold, whose efforts helped lead NASA to preserve and analyze a treasure trove for lunar research, also founded UC San Diego's chemistry department.

by

Elaine Woo

January 22nd, 2012

Los Angeles Times

When President John F. Kennedy announced in 1961 that America was committed to "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth" by the end of the decade, winning the race became the paramount objective of the national space program.

But UC San Diego nuclear chemist James R. Arnold played a crucial role in drawing official attention to another goal: preserving and studying the soil and rock samples that Apollo astronauts would bring back with them.

Arnold, 88, who died Jan. 6 in La Jolla from complications of Alzheimer's disease, was a member of a group of four scientists — dubbed the Four Horsemen by colleagues — who sounded the alarms that led NASA to establish a program for analyzing what proved to be a treasure trove for lunar research.

Along with fellow scientists Paul Gast, Bob Walker and Gerald Wasserburg, Arnold recognized that the moon rocks were "not just souvenirs but the subject of important scientific investigation," Wasserburg, a Caltech emeritus professor of geology and geophysics, said last week. "He was a sound and resolute fighter on behalf of doing science."

The precious specimens — more than 800 pounds were retrieved between 1969 and 1973 — yielded clues to many of science's most important questions, including the age and composition of Earth's closest celestial neighbor and the history of the sun.

"They are a major source of information about how things happen in the solar system," said Caltech geochemistry professor Donald S. Burnett, who was also involved in the early efforts to safeguard the moon rocks. He said the efforts of Arnold and his colleagues more than 40 years ago have left a rich legacy, including the discovery of water in moon rocks in 2008.

"Every few years some breakthrough is possible because these rocks are available to science," Burnett said.

For Arnold, who grew up on the science fiction of Jules Verne and idolized Buck Rogers, unlocking the secrets within the lunar materials was essential.

The problems they could solve, he told The Times in 1989, include "how to understand why our solar system got here, and ultimately perhaps whether our sun and planets are typical of the stars we see at night, or whether we are rare, or whether we are alone."

The son of a lawyer and archaeologist, Arnold was born in Metuchen, N.J., on May 5, 1923. At 16, he entered Princeton University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in chemistry. His 1946 doctorate was awarded for his work on the Manhattan Project, the military program that produced the atomic bomb and stirred the fears of nuclear fallout that led him to join the Union of Concerned Scientists.

After earning his doctorate, he helped University of Chicago chemist Willard Libby develop radiocarbon dating in 1949. The process, which enabled archaeologists and paleontologists to estimate the age of long-dead specimens, later earned Libby a Nobel Prize.

In 1955, Arnold joined the faculty at Princeton, where he expanded his investigations into the effects on meteorites of cosmic rays, the high-energy particles that speed through space. His work produced a method for recording the age of rocks, which helped scientists understand "how long a meteorite has been a rock in space and where it might have come from," Arnold once explained.

His research on cosmic rays drew him to the young UC San Diego, where he founded the chemistry department in 1960. He became a consultant to NASA, which in 1970 gave him its top medal for "exceptional scientific achievement." In 1980, two colleagues named an asteroid after him, after he created a computer model describing how meteorites traverse the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

He held UC San Diego's Harold Urey Chair in chemistry from 1983 until his retirement in 1993.

In Arnold's last decades, he advocated the colonization of space.

It was, Wasserburg said, "an obsession he had. We would fight about it. I thought it was nonsense. But he pressed hard to search for water on the moon, which was a cause for subsequent NASA missions. They found some water. He always worried that you have to have water if you go there."

Arnold's survivors include his wife, Louise, and three sons.

Reverence or a clever enterprise?...human ashes into beads

2012-01-22T05:45:00.001-08:00

"South Korea firm turns human ashes into beads"

South Koreans who dread the idea of keeping relatives' ashes in urns can opt to have the remains turned into gem-like beads and placed in a dish.

by

Jung-yoon Choi

January 21st, 2012

Los Angeles Times

When Jeon Gyeong-suk lost her husband to cancer three months ago, she agonized over how to keep his remains.

Because land is at a premium, burial was out, and she found the idea of a heap of ashes stored in an urn sort of creepy. So the 51-year-old widow paid $900 to transform her husband's ashes into a few handfuls of tiny bluish beads that have the look of beluga caviar.

Even though the beads look like pebble-sized gems, they aren't meant to be strung into a necklace. Instead, some mourners keep them in dishes and glass containers, the point being to keep a lost loved one close by.

"I miss my husband so much," said Jeon, who buried his beads in her front yard.

For Jeon and others here, the image of ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust just seems like unfinished burial business. Death beads, they say, are a thing of beauty. But the beads are not without their critics, who insist that they dishonor the dead by needlessly manipulating human remains.

Bae Jae-yul, founder and CEO of the "death bead" firm Bonhyang, says he's served more than 1,000 customers in 10 years. He remembers one client who didn't want to burden his children with overseeing the tomb where their grandparents were kept. So he razed the grave and created a group of beads with the mixed remains of both parents. Now the beads are kept at home, where they're accessible to the whole family.

Bae, 56, and his business-partner wife, Hong Yang-ja, say the work has changed their outlook on death.

"The name of the company itself means 'returning to one's homeland,'" he said. "Death is not something that one should be fearful of or dread. It's a natural process."

In Confucian South Korea, paying regular respects at the grave site of elders was for generations the preferred practice. But by the late 1990s, when the nation acknowledged its shortage of buildable land, cremation slowly became more popular.

Nearly 70% of those who died in 2010 were cremated, nearly twice the percentage only a decade before, according to government statistics. Whereas some South Koreans bury the ashes, most store them in mausoleums.

Death beads, Bae says, were just the next step, with the unique process receiving government approval in 2000. A few competitors also cropped up.

Bae got into the ashes-to-beads business by accident. The former real estate and construction businessman was looking for a use for a patch of rural land he owned outside Seoul. As he considered establishing a crematorium, he met some people interested in exploring the burial bead business.

"They had the idea but didn't have capital for R&D," he said.

Bae quickly got involved. "My father ran a machine construction company, so I had knowledge of the basics of machines. I wanted to challenge myself and make a bead-making machine."

After years of trial and error, he developed a mechanism to make the death beads. At first he couldn't attract customers, but slowly the idea caught on.

"They're very beautiful to look at," said Bae, running a few samples through his fingers. "You don't feel that these beads are creepy or scary. In fact, there's a holiness and warmth to them."

The ashes-to-beads process takes about two hours. In a corner of a massive room in an industrial area an hour outside Seoul, Bae keeps an altar to hold rites for the dead. He often leads the rites with family members present.

"This is an important process, because I am announcing that I will take good care of the deceased and handle it with utmost care," he said.

The ashes are ground inside a special machine into a finer powder, which is reheated and shaped into beads. "The color and density of the beads vary from person to person," Bae said, adding that the finished colors range from coral and topaz to gray and black.

Jeon Gyeong-suk is one of Bae's happy customers. Recently, she called him to express her appreciation for the beads. "I was so moved by how beautiful they were," she said. "The pearly blue color calmed me."

Laura Dekker...remember her?

2012-01-22T05:37:00.000-08:00

"Teen ends globe-circling voyage in St. Maarten"

January 21st, 2011

USA TODAY

Laura Dekker set a steady foot aboard a dock in St. Maarten on Saturday, ending a yearlong voyage aboard a sailboat named "Guppy" that apparently made her the youngest person ever to sail alone around the globe, though her trip was interrupted at several points.

Dozens of people jumped and cheered as Decker waved, wept and then walked across the dock accompanied by her mother, father, sister and grandparents, who had greeted her at sea earlier.

Dekker arrived in St. Maarten after struggling against high seas and heavy winds on a final leg from Cape Town, South Africa,

Dekker claims she is the youngest sailor to complete a round-the-world voyage, but Guinness World Records and the World Sailing Speed Record Council did not verify the claim, saying they no longer recognize records for youngest sailors to discourage dangerous attempts.

Dutch authorities tried to block Dekker's trip, arguing she was too young to risk her life, while school officials complained she should be in a classroom.

Dekker said she was born aboard a yacht off the coast of New Zealand and said she first sailed solo at 6 years old. At 10, she said, she began dreaming about crossing the globe. She celebrated her 16th birthday during the trip, eating doughnuts for breakfast after spending time at port with her father and friends the night before.

The teenager covered more than 27,000 nautical miles on a trip with stops that sound like a skim through a travel magazine: the Canary Islands, Panama, the Galapagos Islands, Tonga, Fiji, Bora Bora, Australia, South Africa and now, St. Maarten, from which she set out on Jan. 20, 2011.

"Her story is just amazing," said one of Dekker's fans, 10-year-old Jody Bell of Connecticut. "I can't imagine someone her age going out on sea all by herself."

Bell was in St. Maarten on a work trip with her mother, Deena Merlen, an attorney in Manhattan, who wanted to see Dekker complete her journey. The two wore T-shirts that read: "Guppy rocks my world."

"My daughter and I have been following Laura's story, and we think it's amazing and inspiring," Merlen said.

Unlike other young sailors who recently crossed the globe, Dekker repeatedly anchored at ports along the way to sleep, study and repair her 38-foot (11.5-meter) sailboat.

During her trip, she went surfing, scuba diving, cliff diving and discovered a new hobby: playing the flute, which she said in her weblog was easier to play than a guitar in bad weather.

Dekker also complained about custom clearings, boat inspections, ripped sails, heavy squalls, a wet and salty bed, a near-collision with two cargo ships and the presence of some persistent stowaways: cockroaches.

Highlights of her trip include 47 days of sailing the Indian Ocean, which left her with unsteady legs when she docked in Durban, South Africa, where she walked up and down the pier several times for practice.

Dekker launched her trip two months after Abby Sunderland, a 16-year-old U.S. sailor, was rescued in the middle of the Indian Ocean during a similar attempt. Jessica Watson of Australia completed a 210-day solo voyage at age 16, a few months older than Dekker.

Dekker has said she plans to move there after her voyage, but it is unclear is she still plans to do so.

The auspicious voyage has begun--Laura Dekker has set sail

Laura Dekker update

Laura Dekker...why not?

Deceased--Robert Nelson

2012-01-22T04:36:00.001-08:00

Robert Nelson
March 1st, 1930 to January 9th, 2012

"Robert Nelson, Experimental Filmmaker, Dies at 81"

by

Bruce Weber

January 21st, 2012

The New York Times

Robert Nelson, whose sprightly, arch experimental films brought spontaneity, teasing and wit to the often deadly serious arena of avant-garde moviemaking, died on Jan. 9 at his home in Laytonville, Calif. He was 81.

The cause was cancer, Mark Toscano, a film historian and a friend of Mr. Nelson’s, said.

Mr. Nelson, who was trained as a painter and was active in the teeming San Francisco arts scene in the late 1950s and early ’60s, began making movies with other artists, including the painters William T. Wiley and William Allan, the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the composer Steve Reich.

Confoundingly plotless but cleverly and energetically edited to render images in often poignant, often uproarious juxtaposition, Mr. Nelson’s movies are varied in tone and subject matter, but they all exhibit the subversive relish of a renegade, quirky wit.

“Plastic Haircut” (1963) is a 15-minute film built around a mesmerizing, rapid-fire series of kooky visual images involving an actor in a wizard’s cap, brief clips of a nude woman, geometric shapes and several constructed objects, including a pyramid and a swinging eye.

“Oh Dem Watermelons” (1965), Mr. Nelson’s most widely seen work, is a brazenly sardonic evisceration of racism that exploits its stereotypical symbol. Beginning with a long, silent shot of a watermelon lying in a field, atilt like a teed-up football, it goes on for nearly 11 minutes, showing watermelons being put to strange uses (including sporting and sexual ones), being gutted like a slain animal, and being splattered or otherwise destroyed in various ways, set to a repetitive Steve Reich score that made vivid use of the antebellum songwriting of Stephen Foster.

Originally intended to be shown at the intermission of “A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel,” a notorious production by the San Francisco Mime Troupe that exploded racial stereotypes by exaggerating them, the film became popular on its own as a stalwart entry at underground film festivals.

“The Awful Backlash” (1967) was far more meditative. A 14-minute single-shot film, it depicts the hands of Mr. Allan, the painter and an avid fisherman, unsnarling a vexingly snarled fishing reel, evoking the virtue of patience.

Other early work included “Grateful Dead” (1967 or 1968), a dizzying collage of imagery and music featuring the titular rock band, and “The Great Blondino” (1967), a dreamlike, imagistic film suggesting a narrative about Blondin, a 19th-century tightrope walker.

“They were among the most popular underground films of the 1960s,” Mr. Toscano said. “They’re known for their humor, but they’re very well constructed. Bob built houses, he worked in construction, and he knew how to build films as well, yet he still managed to keep a feeling of spontaneity in his work.”

Mr. Nelson was born in San Francisco in 1930 and studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute (then known as the California School of Fine Arts) and Mills College. He had had a couple of local shows of his work by the time he turned to film, in which he was completely untrained; when he and his comrades began making movies, it was almost as a lark. “Plastic Haircut” was shot with a borrowed camera, and Mr. Nelson essentially taught himself how to make a film while making it.

“I had 2,000 feet of film after we shot it, and it looked very poor — only because it was repetitious and long,” he said in “A Critical Cinema,” a series of interviews with independent filmmakers by Scott MacDonald. “I struggled with the footage for weeks. No matter what I did, it seemed boring. In desperation I started cutting the shots shorter and shorter, and when I saw the energy that put into the film, I had my first real revelation about cutting.”

Mr. Nelson was married and divorced four times. His survivors include two sons, Steve and Miles, and a daughter, Oona.

For many years Mr. Nelson taught filmmaking at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His later films included “Bleu Shut” (1970), organized around what seems to be a bizarre game show in which contestants try to guess the name of a boat simply by looking at its picture, and the two-part “Suite California Stops and Passes” (1976 and 1978), a kaleidoscopic portrait of California.

“The artists I knew at that time felt pretty genuinely that if the process got too heavy or ponderous or worried, if you weren’t having a good time at least part of the time, something was wrong,” Mr. Nelson said about the groupthink that spawned his approach to filmmaking. “We were bent on having a good time.”

Partial filmography...

Special Warning [1998]
Limitations [1988]
Hamlet Act [1982]
Deep Westurn [1974]
Bleu Shut [1971]
War is Hell [1968]
The Awful Backlash [1967]
Grateful Dead [1967]
The Great Blondino [1967]
Hot Leatherette [1967]
The Off Handed Jape [1967]
Penny Bright and Jimmy Witherspoon [1967]
Confessions of a Black Mother Succuba [1965]
Oh Dem Watermelons [1965]
Plastic Haircut [1963]
King Ubu [1963]

Oh Dem Watermelons

1965

Bleu Shut

1971

Part 1

Bleu Shut

1971

Part 2

Bleu Shut

1971

Part 3

Bleu Shut

1971

Part 4

Culpability in the lab

2012-01-21T16:58:00.001-08:00

Who is culpable here? Looks like a "he said, she said" situation.

"Report faults professor, UCLA in death of lab assistant"

Cal/OSHA says Sheri Sangji was not properly trained to handle the chemicals that killed her. The university criticizes the findings.

by

Kim Christensen

January 21st, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Ever since Sheri Sangji was fatally burned in a December 2008 lab fire, UCLA officials have cast it as a tragic accident, saying the 23-year-old staff research assistant was a seasoned chemist who was trained in the experiment that went awry.

But Sangji was neither experienced nor well trained — if trained at all — in the safe handling of air-sensitive chemicals that burst into flame, ignited her clothing and spread severe burns over nearly half her body, according to a report on a Cal/OSHA criminal investigation obtained by The Times.

The 95-page report adds new detail to the circumstances surrounding Sangji's death and provides insight into the basis for felony charges filed last month against UCLA chemistry professor Patrick Harran and the UC Board of Regents. Based on labor code violations, the charges are thought to be the first stemming from an academic lab accident in the United States.

University officials have blasted the charges as "unwarranted," "outrageous" and "appalling" and say they contradict an earlier Cal/OSHA investigation that resulted in nearly $32,000 in Cal/OSHA fines but no findings of intentional, or "willful," violations.

The findings of the subsequent criminal probe, conducted by a different investigator, were far harsher.

The report states that UCLA, by repeatedly failing to address previous safety lapses, had "wholly neglected its legal obligations" to provide a safe environment in campus labs and that Harran was personally responsible.

"Dr. Harran simply disregarded the open and obvious dangers presented in this case and permitted Victim Sangji to work in a manner that knowingly caused her to be exposed to a serious and foreseeable risk of serious injury or death," the report by senior special investigator Brian Baudendistel states.

If Harran had trained his research assistant properly and assured that she wore clothing appropriate for the work, "Sangji's death would have been prevented," it said.

Harran's attorney, Thomas O'Brien, disputed those conclusions.

"Dr. Harran remains devastated by this tragic accident," he said. "There are numerous misstatements in that report, but I will refer you to the UC regents for any comments."

Harran and the Board of Regents are to be arraigned Feb. 2 in Los Angeles Superior Court on three counts each of willfully violating occupational health and safety standards. Harran faces up to 41/2 years in prison if convicted; the regents could be fined up to $4.5 million.

Kevin Reed, UCLA vice chancellor for legal affairs, said he "vehemently" disagreed with the findings. He said Sangji was well trained, had previously performed the experiment safely and successfully and chose not to use available protective gear.

"It was not as if UCLA found a newbie who didn't know what she was doing and put her in a lab with no regard to the consequences; there is just no evidence to support that," he said. "We didn't just pluck her off the streets and put her in a chemistry lab. She was a trained chemist."

Sangji, who graduated in 2008 from Pomona College in Claremont with a bachelor's degree in chemistry, had worked in Harran's organic chemistry lab for less than three months when the accident occurred.

She was transferring about 1.8 ounces of t-butyl lithium from one sealed container to another when a plastic syringe came apart in her hands, spewing a chemical compound that ignites when exposed to air. The synthetic sweater she wore caught fire and melted onto her skin. She died 18 days later.

Sangji had not used pyrophorics in her undergraduate work or during a brief stint at an Azusa pharmaceutical company just before she took the UCLA job, according to the Cal/OSHA investigative report, which was completed in December 2009 but not previously made public. Nor had she been properly trained in their handling by a senior researcher, as Harran said, according to the report.

When interviewed by Cal/OSHA, the researcher said he might have given Sangji some "general guidance" on the procedure but could not recall any formal training. The report also said the researcher's own methods were "contrary" to the chemical manufacturer's instructions and generally accepted lab standards.

"Despite Dr. Harran's assertions to the contrary, it is clear that Victim Sangji was not properly trained, if at all, in the procedures necessary for the safe handling and transfer of t-Butyllithium," the report noted.

Since Sangji's death, UCLA has instituted more rigorous lab inspections, issued more fire-resistant lab coats, enhanced training in the use of air-sensitive chemicals and established a Center for Lab Safety.

UCLA chem prof to plead "not guilty"

Peruvian Indians and good ole POPCORN

2012-01-19T17:08:00.001-08:00

"Study suggests ancient Peruvians 'ate popcorn'"

January 18th, 2012

BBC NEWS

A new study suggests that people living along the coast of northern Peru were eating popcorn 1,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Researchers say corncobs found at an ancient site in Peru suggest that the inhabitants used them for making flour and popcorn.

Scientists from Washington's Natural History Museum say the oldest corncobs they found dated from 4700BC.

They are the earliest ever discovered in South America.

Ancient food

The curator of New World archaeology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, Dolores Piperno, says maize was first domesticated in Mexico nearly 9,000 years ago from a wild grass.

Ms Piperno says that her team's research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that only a few thousand years later maize arrived in South America, where it evolved into different varieties now common in the Andean regions.

Her team discovered the maize in the archaeological sites of Paredones and Huaca Prieta.

"This evidence further indicated that in many areas corn arrived before pots did, and that early experimentation with corn as a food was not dependent on the presence of pottery," Ms Piperno explained.

She says that at the time, though, maize was not yet an important part of their diet.

Eastman Kodak...not dead and will reorganize

2012-01-19T16:56:00.001-08:00

"Photography pioneer Kodak files for bankruptcy"

by

Jonathan Stempel and Liana B. Baker

January 19th, 2012

REUTERS

Eastman Kodak Co, the photography icon that invented the hand-held camera, has filed for bankruptcy protection and plans to shrink significantly, capping a prolonged plunge for one of America's best-known companies.

The Chapter 11 filing makes Kodak one of the biggest corporate casualties of the digital age, after it failed to quickly embrace more modern technologies such as the digital camera -- ironically, a product it invented.

Kodak once dominated its industry, and its film was the subject of a popular 1973 song, "Kodachrome," by Paul Simon.

The bankruptcy may give Kodak, which traces its roots to 1880, the ability to find buyers for some of its 1,100 digital patents, a major portion of its value. Kodak now employs 17,000 people worldwide, down from 63,900 just nine years ago.

"It is a very sad day even though we had anticipated it," said Shannon Cross, an analyst at Cross Research who has had a "sell" rating on the company since 2001. "If it emerges, it will be a much smaller entity."

According to papers filed with the U.S. bankruptcy court in Manhattan, Kodak had about $5.1 billion of assets and $6.75 billion of liabilities at the end of September.

In court documents, Chief Financial Officer Antoinette McCorvey said, without elaborating, that Kodak plans to sell "significant assets" during the bankruptcy. Non-U.S. units are not part of the Chapter 11 case.

Kodak also said it obtained a $950 million, 18-month credit line from Citigroup Inc so it can keep operating and avoid having to liquidate. It said it expects to complete the bankruptcy process in 2013.

"This is a necessary step and the right thing to do for the future of Kodak," Chairman and Chief Executive Antonio Perez said in a statement on Thursday.

Kodak's market value has sunk well below $200 million from $31 billion 15 years ago, when its share price topped $94.

The shares began trading on Thursday on the Pink Sheets. By the end of the day they were down 6 cents at 30 cents each.

WAY BEHIND

In recent years, Perez has steered Kodak toward consumer and commercial printers.

But that failed to restore annual profitability, something Kodak has not seen since 2007, and did not arrest a cash drain.

Kodak has struggled to meet its pension and other obligations to more than 65,000 workers, retirees and others who participate in its employee benefit programs.

McCorvey said Kodak ultimately suffered from a "liquidity shortfall" as some vendors stopped shipping and providing services, and demanded shorter payment terms.

Kodak said in court papers it has about $820 million of cash and equivalents, but was down to just $56.7 million of cash in the United States.

"They got behind the curve on the analog-to-digital shift, and they were way behind for a long time," said Ananda Baruah, an analyst at Brean Murray who covers Kodak.

The company's downfall has also hit its Rust Belt hometown of Rochester, New York, with its workforce there falling to about 7,000 from more than 60,000 in Kodak's heyday.

Andrew Cuomo, New York's governor, on Thursday called the bankruptcy "difficult and disappointing news" for the city, whose population was about 211,000 in the last census.

Kodak named Dominic DiNapoli, a vice chairman at business turnaround specialist FTI Consulting Inc, as its chief restructuring officer.

The investment bank Lazard is also providing advice and has been helping Kodak look for a buyer for its digital patents. Kodak's law firm is Sullivan & Cromwell.

Last week, Kodak reorganized its business operations, creating a commercial unit and a consumer unit. It previously had units for consumer digital imaging; film, photofinishing and entertainment; and graphic communications.

Mark Zupan, dean of the University of Rochester's business school, said "there's still too much value" at Kodak for the company to be forced to liquidate. "Segments will be profitable enough to survive as a leader, as a smaller company."

LITIGATION STRATEGY

Perez, who has been chief executive since 2005, said the bankruptcy would help Kodak maximize the value of patents related to digital imaging, which Kodak said are used in virtually every modern digital camera, smartphone and tablet.

"I've talked to companies who will buy assets who said they were waiting for Kodak to go bankrupt to pay a better price," said Baruah, the Brean Murray analyst.

In the last few years, Kodak has used extensive litigation with rivals such as Apple Inc, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd, South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co and Taiwan's HTC Corp over those patents as a means to try to generate revenue.

Among Kodak's many creditors are retailers including Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Target Corp, and movie companies Sony Corp and Walt Disney Co.

Bank of New York Mellon Corp is the largest unsecured creditor, in its capacity as trustee for creditors, with more than $670 million of claims.

APOLLO 11

According to Kodak, George Eastman, a high-school dropout from upstate New York, founded the company in 1880 and began making photographic plates. To get his business going, he splurged on a second-hand engine to make the plates for $125.

Within eight years, the Kodak name had been trademarked, and the company had introduced the hand-held camera as well as roll-up film, where it became the dominant producer.

Eastman also introduced the "Wage Dividend" in which the company would pay bonuses to employees based on results.

Kodak went on to create famous cameras such as the Brownie, launched in 1900 and sold for $1, and the Instamatic in 1963.

The company on its website said a Kodak camera was used on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. A Kodak camera was used by the astronauts to film the lunar soil from only inches away, according to NASA.

Kodak film has been used on 80 movies that have won Best Picture Oscars, according to the company.

Six years after Apollo 11, and not long after songwriter Simon told his mama not to take his Kodachrome away, Kodak invented the digital camera.

The size of a toaster, it was too big for the pockets of amateur photographers, whose pockets now are stuffed with digital offerings from the likes of Canon, Casio and Nikon.

But rather than develop the digital camera, Kodak put it on the back burner and spent years watching rivals take market share that it would never reclaim.

In 1994, Kodak spun off a chemicals business, Eastman Chemical Co, which proved to be more successful.

Kodak's final downfall in the eyes of investors began in September when it unexpectedly withdrew $160 million from a credit line, raising worries of a cash shortage.

PENSIONS IN FOCUS

It remained unclear how Kodak will address its pension obligations, many of which were built up decades ago when U.S. manufacturers offered more generous retirement and medical benefits.

Many retirees hail from Britain, where Kodak has been manufacturing since 1891. The company had promised to inject $800 million over the next decade into its British pension plan.

McCorvey, the chief financial officer, said in court papers on Thursday that she expects the trustee for the British pension plan to have a "significant" general unsecured claim against the company.

The case is In re: Eastman Kodak Co et al, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, No. 12-10202.

"Kodak files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy"

by Steve Sink

January 19th, 2012

Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

Eastman Kodak Co., running short of cash and unable to sell 1,100 digital imaging patents that could have rescued it, filed Thursday for protection from its creditors under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.

The iconic Rochester company, whose history dates to the late 19th century and the technical and marketing genius of founder George Eastman, has been besieged for the past three months by rumors that it would make a bankruptcy filing. Those rumors had intensified in the past two weeks.

"After considering the advantages of Chapter 11 at this time, the board of directors and the entire senior management team unanimously believe that this is a necessary step and the right thing to do for the future of Kodak," CEO Antonio M. Perez said in announcing the decision.

The filing listed assets of $5.1 billion and debts of $6.75 billion.

Perez assured employees that it will be business as usual under Chapter 11. "Kodak expects to pay employee wages and benefits," the company said.

As of a year ago, Kodak had 7,100 employees in the Rochester area and 18,800 companywide. The worldwide figure is now 17,000, the company said in its bankruptcy papers, about 8,000 of them in the U.S. It did not give a new Rochester-area figure.

At its peak in the early 1980s, the company employed 62,000 people in Rochester and 130,000 worldwide.

Kodak has about 25,000 retirees in the region, so the company's legacy is a powerful one in Rochester.

The filing was made in the Southern District of New York, a common location for major bankruptcy cases because the New York City metropolitan area has the infrastructure of banks, law firms and other institutions needed to handle complex legal matters.

Citigroup Inc.. one of the largest banks in the U.S., has committed to providing Kodak with a $950 million credit line to help sustain the company's operations while it reorganizes its finances.

Kodak said it expects to continue operating its businesses while in Chapter 11, "and to continue the flow of goods and services to its customers."

Perez said in a video statement on Kodak's website that the company has four objectives while in Chapter 11 -- obtaining the financing to reassure its employees, customers and other stakeholders that the company will stay in business; enabling it to pursue patent infringement claims against major companies including Apple Inc.; adjusting its "legacy costs" to a fairer level; and driving growth in the printing businesses Perez has declared are its future.

The filing wasn't a surprise, though no one outside the company knew precisely when it would come. Kodak was scheduled to report its 2011 fourth-quarter and full-year financial results on Jan. 26, and it may have become apparent to company officials that the news would be bad, leading to a pre-emptive move into Chapter 11.

Kodak had said in November that it was in danger of being unable to pay its bills at some point in 2012 unless it received a substantial infusion of cash. What seemed like the best potential source of cash was the sale of its digital patent portfolio, which analysts said could fetch up to $3 billion.

Kodak had said in November that it was in danger of being unable to pay its bills at some point in 2012 unless it received a substantial infusion of cash. What seemed like the best potential source of cash was the sale of its digital patent portfolio, which analysts said could fetch up to $3 billion.

But judging from the company's statement today, it now thinks it will have a better chance of selling the patents under court supervision.

"The business reorganization is intended to bolster liquidity in the U.S. and abroad, monetize non-strategic intellectual property, fairly resolve legacy liabilities, and enable the company to focus on its most valuable business lines," Kodak said in the release.

Perez has insisted that Kodak would return to profitability this year as it pursues a strategy of building several key business lines -- digital printing presses, package printing, commercial and home inkjet printers and workflow software. The company's traditional film business, though still generating substantial revenue, continues to shrink and just last week lost its status as a standalone operating division within the company.

Under Chapter 11, a company continues to operate while seeking to reorganize its finances. Many companies emerge successfully from Chapter 11.

However, some stakeholders in Kodak figure to be hurt by bankruptcy — especially retirees whose health benefits could be reduced, although such a step can only be done under the supervision of a bankruptcy court judge.

Other Eastman Kodak items...

A giant may be dying...Eastman Kodak Company

KODACHROME--gone

KODACHROME film...died in Parsons, Kansas

Kodak and the Palomar telescope advertisement

Soooooo, did the black out work?

2012-01-19T16:31:00.001-08:00

"The Internet flexes its muscles with blackout"

Thousands of websites go dark to marshal opposition to federal anti-piracy bills.

by

Andrea Chang and Jim Puzzanghera

January 18th, 2012

The Los Angeles Times

In cutting off access to thousands of websites for a day, the tech industry flexed its political muscle with a don't-mess-with-the-Web campaign that highlighted its vast reach and how indispensable the Internet has become.

The sweeping blackout to protest federal anti-piracy bills sparked frustration and confusion Wednesday but had its intended effect — disrupting the usual flow of the Internet while mobilizing opposition among online users and lawmakers.

More than 10,000 websites participated in the strike against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, bills that opponents say could lead to censorship online and force some websites out of business. Some, including Wikipedia, Reddit and Boing Boing, shut down for the day, while others such as Craigslist and Google protested by blacking out parts of their sites and urging users to sign online petitions and contact members of Congress.

Shortly after midday, Google said 4.5 million people had signed its petition. Meanwhile, Wikipedia said 5.5 million people had clicked through the blackout message on its home page for information on how to contact their local lawmakers.

"We're pretty staggered by that number," said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation. He said the site was advising users to call lawmakers instead of emailing them after getting reports that congressional inboxes were flooded and servers were facing capacity issues.

The impact of Wednesday's action raised the possibility of a bigger and broader Internet strike that could lead to a virtual information blackout. The biggest Internet companies such as Google and Facebook did not shut down — they could have lost millions of dollars in advertising revenue — but expressed their support online.

"Technology has grown as a part of our lives and the companies now have something of value that they can withhold in terms of services, which is a shift in the overall political landscape," said Colin Gillis, a technology analyst at BGC Financial. "Is this spawning a new level of activism? I'd say absolutely yes."

Despite unprecedented publicity ahead of the strike, many Internet users were caught off guard.

"I support what they're doing, but to be honest, I would have preferred to see more what Google did: Leave the service available but make a point," said Burbank resident Robert Rose, 45, who was irritated when he couldn't access some of his favorite websites. The marketing consultant vented on Twitter, writing "BlackoutWorking."

With millions flooding Capitol Hill with emails and calls, some supporters of the legislation publicly backed away.

Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) withdrew as co-sponsors of the Senate bill. Meanwhile, Reps. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) and Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) said they were pulling their names from the companion House bill. Some other lawmakers also said they would not support the bills, endangering the push to quickly pass the legislation early this year.

Backed by Hollywood and media activists, the two bills aim to crack down on foreign websites that traffic in pirated movies, music and counterfeit goods. But Web companies argue that the proposed legislation is about more than piracy and digital copyright protection. They say the broad language of the bills would thwart free speech online and could stifle the Internet economy, hurt the creative process and drive up legal costs.

"Given the legitimate vocal concerns, it is imperative that we take a step back to allow everyone to come together and find a reasonable solution," said Hatch, who had been a strong early supporter before the backlash. He called for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to back off plans to hold a key procedural vote on the bill Tuesday.

Some senators' websites were inaccessible at times Wednesday. And the House saw double its normal Web traffic, said Dan Weiser, a spokesman for the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer of the House.

In the offices of Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Gold River), the phones were chirping every couple of minutes Wednesday afternoon.

"Every time the phone rings, it's SOPA," Lungren spokesman Brian Kaveney said. One staffer answered about 50 calls alone on the issue Wednesday, dutifully writing down each person's name, ZIP Code and viewpoint, with a promise to forward the information to Lungren.

The office received about 100 calls by midafternoon on SOPA, five times the number of the previous day. Almost all callers opposed the bill, but a few simply sought Lungren's position. He supports the goals of cracking down on foreign piracy websites but has problems with the legislation and wants to slow down the process.

Internet users also flooded social media sites to urge one another to take action. The protest spread offline too, with hundreds of people joining rallies in San Francisco, New York, Washington and other major cities to voice opposition to the bills.

Supporters of the legislation say the Internet companies are misconstruing the bills and drumming up hysteria that is ill-founded.

"I realize some people are nervous because of misinformation about this bill, but I am confident that ultimately the facts will overcome fears," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who has been working to address concerns about the bill. "Contrary to critics' claims, SOPA does not censor the Internet."

Last week, the Internet companies and online activists persuaded the White House to wade into the dispute. While calling for consensus legislation to stop online piracy by foreign websites, Obama administration officials said they would not support the most controversial provision of the two bills — allowing Internet service providers to block access from the U.S. to foreign piracy sites.

Now President Obama could face backlash from some of his traditional backers in Hollywood over his administration's stance. Two senior entertainment executives and Obama donors, who declined to speak on the record, said Wednesday that they would not give the president's reelection effort further financial support because of his position.

Most sites that were blacked out Wednesday contained links to pages with dire warnings, such as Reddit's: "There are powerful forces trying to censor the Internet."

Erik Martin, general manager of Reddit, said there were about 30,000 viewers on the social news community at any given time during the site's 12-hour shutdown.

That was "far less than we usually get," he said. "But 30,000 people looking at one single page with links to take action is pretty impressive."

"Google says 4.5 million people signed anti-SOPA petition today"

January 18th, 2012

by

Deborah Netburn

The Los Angeles Times

When Google speaks, the world listens.

And today, when Google asked its users to sign a petition protesting two anti-piracy laws circulating in Congress, millions responded.

A spokeswoman for Google confirmed that 4.5 million people added their names to the company's anti-SOPA petition today.

Not too shabby.

The petition, which was available via a link from Google's homepage, states that although fighting online piracy is important, the plan of attack described in the SOPA and PIPA bills would be ineffective.

"There’s no need to make American social networks, blogs and search engines censor the Internet or undermine the existing laws that have enabled the Web to thrive, creating millions of U.S. jobs," the petition reads. "Too much is at stake -– please vote NO on PIPA and SOPA."

The search engine frequently delights users by toying with its homepage logo, but on Wednesday it did something it had never done before: it blocked out its logo completely.

A link below the blackout read "Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web!" and lead to a page with the petition.

Of course, Google's anti-SOPA and PIPA petition is not the only one out there on this day of mass online protest. As of this writing 1.458 million people signed a similar petition at the activist website Avaaz.org, and Fight for the Future said that between its two sites, Sopastrike.com and AmericanCensorship.org, at least 350,000 people have sent emails to representatives in the House and Senate.

A graphic put out by Google shows that before today's coordinated protests, 3 million Americans had signed various petitions against the two bills.

In other SOPA number news, a spokeswoman from the popular blogging platform WordPress, said that at last count, 25,000 WordPress blogs had joined the SOPA and PIPA protest by blacking out their blogs entirely, and another 12,500 used the "Stop Censorship" ribbon.

Today, the White House Blog reports that 103,785 people signed petitions through the We The People website asking the president to protect a free and open Internet.

"SOPA and PIPA bills: old answers to 21st-century problems, critics say"

The SOPA and PIPA bills are an attempt by the music and movie industries to hold on to outdated business models, critics say. But finding compromise on anti-piracy laws could be tough.

by

Gloria Goodale

January 18th, 2012

The Christian Science Monitor

In the face of an Internet rebellion, both senators and members of the House of Representatives are backing away from two anti-piracy bills now making their way through Congress.

But the protests of Internet giants such as Google and Wikipedia, with some essentially shutting down for a day, go beyond the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), consumer activists and academics say. The protests are a call for Congress to reconsider the way it fights digital thievery.

In short, critics say, Congress is looking for a 20th-century answer to a 21st-century challenge.

The intent of the SOPA and PIPA bills is to cut off access to sites that distribute copyrighted material illegally. But critics say it is a heavy-handed solution that won't solve the problem and could quash the sharing and collaboration that fuel innovation on the Internet.

The deeper problem, they suggest, is that the music and film industries simply haven't adapted quickly enough to the new realities of the online world, and are instead trying to use Congress to prop up outdated practices.

“Consumers want easy access to content and many are willing to pay for it – so the onus is on businesses to meet these demands,” says Anjelika Petrochenko, general manager at LiveJournal.com, a site that hosts online bloggers, journals, and discussion threads.

While there are exceptions, she says, “SOPA/PIPA legislation is a poorly written excuse for intellectual-property owners to hide their own inability to adapt.”

Industry leaders disagree. In a statement Wednesday, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said that sites participating in the blackout are "irresponsible" and "resorting to stunts that punish their users." Chief Executive Chris Dodd, a former US senator, said the blackouts are an "abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace.”

The concern among critics of the legislation is that broad-brush strokes by Congress could damage web ventures that seek to find innovative ways of distributing content in the digital realm.

“SOPA will prevent innovation in order to prevent piracy," says Vince Leung, cofounder of the social media site, MentorMob.com.

Napster was shut down for free file-sharing, he points out, “but Apple/iTunes was an innovative and inexpensive way for consumers to purchase music.”

Rather than shutting down services which provide jobs, efficiency, and value to their users, he adds, “the SOPA supporters should think how the business model needs to change with the times.”

Faced with the protests, supporters of the bills have begun to respond. Sens. Marco Rubio (R) of Florida, Jon Cornyn (R) of Texas, and Roy Blunt (R) of Missouri have distanced themselves from the Senate bill, PIPA.

While Senator Rubio says he remains committed to fighting piracy, he wrote on his Facebook page that he has "heard legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet and about a potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government's power to impact the Internet."

The statement from the MPAA suggests that finding common ground could be difficult, if not nearly impossible, says Deborah Sweeney, CEO of MyCorporation.com, a business services firm that helps startups launch.

Nevertheless, the reality is that neither party may be wrong, she adds via e-mail. “They just have to work together (a nearly impossible feat)…. No one likes piracy, but the potential impact of SOPA is far more broad than the legislators likely anticipated.“

The biggest challenge, she notes, is that “the two sides are not speaking the same language.”

"SOPA: Shouting in the Dark"

by

Amy Davidson

January 18th, 2012

The New Yorker

Sometimes it can be easier to think in the dark, or easier to yell. The blackout today of the English-language Wikipedia pages, and Boing Boing and a string of others, had that effect. Even Google averted its eyes, or at least its icon, covering it with a black strip. The action was a protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and the Protect I.P. Act; Nicholas Thompson explained this morning why both are very bad ideas—masses of restraint that, in the name of protecting intellectual property, would cause an entire marketplace of ideas to seize up and then fall apart. The protest itself was an act of faith in politics as it is meant to be practiced. Until now, as Thompson points out, whether a legislator supported the bills or not tended to have little to do with ideology and very much to do with campaign donations. By shutting down the sites, the tech companies weren’t exerting economic pressure on anyone; they were setting up a black backdrop for a placard that said, in short, read more, and then write to your legislator. There was some information Wikipedia freely gave out today, in the conviction that it would be put to use: if you entered a zip code, you go to the names, contact information, and Twitter handles for your congressman and senators. That is all good to know.

So did it work? So far, so good: three Senators, Marco Rubio, John Cornyn, and Orrin Hatch, and a clutch of congressmen have changed their positions. Hatch said that the bill had turned out to be “not ready for prime time”—in a few years, will anyone know what hours, and what medium, that expression originally referred to? It has the markings of a future lexicological trivia question; for now, though, it is simply a reminder that many conflicting eras and interests are represented in this fight.

Some darkness on the Internet

Some darkness on the Internet

2012-01-18T04:31:00.001-08:00

"Websites going black to protest anti-piracy bills in Congress"

In the first strike of its kind, hundreds of popular Internet sites such as Wikipedia are to temporarily shut down Wednesday to protest anti-piracy bills they say essentially amount to censorship.

by

Andrea Chang and Tiffany Hsu

January 17th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

What would the world be like without the Internet? Fire up your browser and see what you can't do.

In the first strike of its kind, hundreds of popular sites such as Wikipedia, Reddit and Boing Boing were scheduled to temporarily shut down Wednesday to protest a pair of anti-piracy bills that they say essentially amount to censorship of the Internet.

The prospect of a day without the websites set off a frenzy in the hours leading up to the strike, which was slated to begin Tuesday night, with parents urging their children to do their homework early and tech-savvy users posting instructions for how to access cached Wikipedia pages during the blackout.

"If Wikipedia is going down, I'm going down with it," wrote Twitter user Mariellesmind, who was among thousands that filled the microblogging site with panicked, profanity-filled tweets.

"Terrified about the Wikipedia outage," tweeted Los Angeles resident Chandra Moore. "I was told to use an encyclopedia if I have a question, but I won't even be able to Wiki what one is."

The Internet's biggest power players, including Google, Facebook and YouTube, were planning to stay up and running, but the shutdown of the other sites and the ensuing anxiety underscored the breadth and influence of the world's Internet companies, as well as Americans' dependence on them.

Strike organizers say the online grass-roots campaign is intended to inform the public about the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, which aim to crack down on foreign websites that traffic in pirated movies, music and counterfeit goods.

Internet companies have broadened the debate, recasting it from one about piracy and digital copyright protection to one about Internet freedom. Calling the bills well intentioned but seriously flawed, they say SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate are threats to free speech that could stifle the Internet economy, drive up legal costs and lead to censorship or the shutdown of some websites.

The proposed legislation "creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world," said a statement on Boing Boing, a group blogging site.

"Boing Boing could never coexist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site," the company said.

Erik Martin, general manager at Reddit, a social news community that was scheduled to shut down for 12 hours Wednesday, said the bills were "an existential threat to our company and the industry we work in."

"We try to be pretty agnostic when it comes to content, news, politics," Martin said. "This is the first time we've really stepped out and made a strong statement as a company. We feel we don't have a choice."

Calling the move "unprecedented," Wikipedia editors said they would black out the English-language version of the online encyclopedia for 24 hours starting at midnight Eastern time. In a statement posted on the site, the company said that it believed the bills, if passed, "would be devastating to the free and open Web."

"In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position. That's a real, legitimate issue. We want people to trust Wikipedia, not worry that it is trying to propagandize them," said Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "But although Wikipedia's articles are neutral, its existence is not."

But supporters of the legislation say the online campaign is misguided. In a statement Tuesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), lead sponsor of SOPA, called the Wikipedia blackout a publicity stunt "that does a disservice to its users by promoting fear instead of facts."

"It is ironic that a website dedicated to providing information is spreading misinformation about the Stop Online Piracy Act," Smith said. "Perhaps during the blackout, Internet users can look elsewhere for an accurate definition of online piracy."

But the Internet sites aren't backing down.

Other companies, including Scribd and the Cheezburger family of websites, were planning to put up "roadblocks" on their sites that provide information on the bills and links for users to contact their local lawmakers. Users can bypass the roadblocks and access the sites as usual.

"The intended effect either way is to shock and awe the public into recognizing that there's still a big threat to their 1st Amendment rights," said Ben Huh, chief executive and founder of Cheezburger, a network of user-generated humor websites that includes Fail Blog and I Can Has Cheezburger.

Search engine giant Google, meanwhile, said it would use its home page to highlight its opposition to the bills. And Craigslist got an early start to the protest, placing a red, white and blue message on its home page telling users to "help put a stop to this madness before it's too late."

The backlash against SOPA and PIPA and the companies that support them has been mounting for months. Microblogging site Tumblr in November redirected users to a page that asked them to contact legislators to oppose the bill, and Scribd did its own self-censorship last month in protest. After users boycotted GoDaddy.com late last year, the domain registrar said it saw a spike in domain transfers and subsequently withdrew its support of SOPA.

The swell of online opposition persuaded the White House to call for lawmakers to remove the most controversial provision from the legislation, which would have let Internet service providers block access from the United States to foreign websites focused on pirated materials. Both bills, which had been expected to sail through Congress, are now facing major changes amid the uproar.

Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative, said the bills set "a horrendous precedent globally" and that much of the content users put online — such as open publishing, crowd-sourced information gathering or comments sections — could all become "incredibly dangerous" if the bills passed.

"We would end up in a situation where we're trying to do needlepoint with harpoons," he said. "You can't target only pirated information, content or media without getting tons of collateral damage that removes entirely legal content."

As a screenwriter, East Hollywood resident Steven Darancette, 40, uses Wikipedia often for background information. But he isn't too concerned about the website going dark Wednesday, saying he supports the protest.

"If I need to get research, I'll just Google," he said. "There are also these things called books."

24 hour shutdown for Wikipedia

Squirreled away...Darwin's fossils

2012-01-18T04:24:00.001-08:00

"U.K. scientists find 'lost' Darwin fossils"

January 17th, 2012

USA TODAY

British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years.

Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said Tuesday that he stumbled upon the glass slides containing the fossils in an old wooden cabinet that had been shoved in a "gloomy corner" of the massive, drafty British Geological Survey.

Using a flashlight to peer into the drawers and hold up a slide, Falcon-Lang saw one of the first specimens he had picked up was labeled 'C. Darwin Esq."

"It took me a while just to convince myself that it was Darwin's signature on the slide," the paleontologist said, adding he soon realized it was a "quite important and overlooked" specimen.

He described the feeling of seeing that famous signature as "a heart in your mouth situation," saying he wondering "Goodness, what have I discovered!"

Falcon-Lang's find was a collection of 314 slides of specimens collected by Darwin and other members of his inner circle, including John Hooker— a botanist and dear friend of Darwin — and the Rev. John Henslow, Darwin's mentor at Cambridge, whose daughter later married Hooker.

The first slide pulled out of the dusty corner at the British Geological Survey turned out to be one of the specimens collected by Darwin during his famous expedition on the HMS Beagle, which changed the young Cambridge graduate's career and laid the foundation for his subsequent work on evolution.

Falcon-Lang said the unearthed fossils — lost for 165 years — show there is more to learn from a period of history scientists thought they knew well.

"To find a treasure trove of lost Darwin specimens from the Beagle voyage is just extraordinary," Falcon-Lang added. "We can see there's more to learn. There are a lot of very, very significant fossils in there that we didn't know existed."

He said one of the most "bizarre" slides came from Hooker's collection — a specimen of prototaxites, a 400 million-year-old tree-sized fungus.

Hooker had assembled the collection of slides while briefly working for the British Geological Survey in 1846, according to Royal Holloway, University of London.

The slides — "stunning works of art," according to Falcon-Lang — contain bits of fossil wood and plants ground into thin sheets and affixed to glass in order to be studied under microscopes. Some of the slides are half a foot long (15 centimeters), "great big chunks of glass," Falcon-Lang said.

"How these things got overlooked for so long is a bit of a mystery itself," he mused, speculating that perhaps it was because Darwin was not widely known in 1846 so the collection might not have been given "the proper curatorial care."

Royal Holloway, University of London said the fossils were 'lost' because Hooker failed to number them in the formal "specimen register" before setting out on an expedition to the Himalayas. In 1851, the "unregistered" fossils were moved to the Museum of Practical Geology in Piccadilly before being transferred to the South Kensington's Geological Museum in 1935 and then to the British Geological Survey's headquarters near Nottingham 50 years later, the university said.

The discovery was made in April, but it has taken "a long time" to figure out the provenance of the slides and photograph all of them, Falcon-Lang said. The slides have now been photographed and will be made available to the public through a new online museum exhibit opening Tuesday.

Falcon-Lang expects great scientific papers to emerge from the discovery.

"There are some real gems in this collection that are going to contribute to ongoing science."

Dr. John Ludden, executive director of the Geological Survey, called the find a "remarkable" discovery.

"It really makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections," he said.

$22,500 an ounce for a Mars rock?

2012-01-18T04:11:00.001-08:00

This handout photo provided by Darryl Pitt of the Macovich Collection shows an external view of a Martian meteorite recovered in December 2011 near Foumzgit, Morocco following a meteorite shower believed to have occurred in July 2011.

"The rarest things on Earth ... worth 10 times more than gold"

January 18th, 2012

The Sidney Morning Herald

Scientists are confirming a recent and rare invasion from Mars: meteorite chunks from the red planet that fell in Morocco last July.

This is only the fifth time scientists have confirmed chemically Martian meteorites that people witnessed falling.

The small rock refugees were seen in a fireball in the sky six months ago, but they were not discovered on the ground in North Africa until the end of December.
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Scientists and collectors of meteorites are ecstatic, and already the rocks are fetching big money because they are among the rarest things on Earth.

A special committee of meteorite experts, which includes some NASA scientists, confirmed the test results on Tuesday. They certified that seven kilograms of meteorite recently collected came from Mars. The biggest rock weighs over one kilogram.

Astronomers think millions of years ago something big smashed into Mars and sent rocks hurtling through the solar system.

After a long journey through space, one of those rocks eventually landed on Earth.

It plunged into Earth's atmosphere, splitting into smaller pieces, and one chunk shattered into shards when it hit the ground.

This is an important and unique hands-on look at Mars for scientists trying to learn about the planet's potential for life.

So far, no NASA or Russian spacecraft has returned bits of Mars, so the only Martian samples scientists can examine are those that come here in a meteorite shower.

Most other samples had been on Earth for millions of years, or at the very least for decades, which makes them tainted with Earth materials and life.

These new rocks, while still likely contaminated because they have been on Earth for months, still are purer and better to study.

The last time a Martian meteorite fell and was found fresh was in 1962. All the Martian rocks on Earth add up to under 110 kilograms.

The new samples were scooped up by dealers from those who found them. Even before the official certification, scientists at NASA, museums and universities scrambled to buy or trade these meteorites.

"It's a free sample from Mars, that's what these are, except you have to pay the dealers for it," said University of Alberta meteorite expert Chris Herd, who heads the committee that certified the discovery.

He already has bought a chunk of meteorite and said he was thrilled just to hold it, calling the rock "really spectacular."

One of the principal decisions the scientists made on Tuesday was to connect these rocks officially to the July fiery plunge witnessed by people and captured on video. The announcement and naming of these meteorites - called Tissint - came from the International Society for Meteoritics and Planetary Science, which is the official group of 950 scientists that confirms and names meteorites.

Meteorite dealer Darryl Pitt, who sold a chunk to Herd, said he charges from $US11,000 ($A10,697.79) to $22,500 an ounce, and he has sold most of his already. At that price, the new Martian rock costs about 10 times more per ounce than gold.

Nehmes Bastet and the "Crypt Kicker Five"?

2012-01-17T11:55:00.001-08:00

"Egyptian tomb holds singer Nehmes Bastet's remains"

January 16TH, 2012

BBC NEWS

Archaeologists working in Egypt have discovered the tomb of a female singer in the Valley of the Kings.

The tomb was found by a team from the University of Basel in Switzerland who came across it by chance.

The woman, Nehmes Bastet, was a temple singer during Egypt's 22nd Dynasty (approximately 945 - 712BC), according to an inscription in the tomb.

The coffin found in the tomb contains an intact mummy from almost 3,000 years ago.

Professor Susanne Bickel of the University of Basel told the BBC that the coffin was opened on Monday and she was able to see the "nicely wrapped" mummy of the woman who was buried in the tomb.

The opening of the coffin was carried out by Prof Bickel and her Basel colleague, field director Elina Paulin-Grothe, together with the Chief Inspector of Antiquities of Upper Egypt, Dr Mohammed el-Bialy and inspector Ali Reda.

Prof Bickel said that the upper edge of the tomb was found on the first day of Egypt's revolution, on 25 January 2011. The opening was sealed with an iron cover and the discovery was kept quiet.

Last week, after the start of this year's field season, the feature was identified as a tomb - and one of the very few tombs in the Valley of the Kings which have not been looted.

Elina Paulin-Grothe said that the tomb was not built for the female singer, but was re-used for her 400 years after the original burial, according to AP.

There are other non-royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, Prof Bickel said, which mostly date from the 18th Dynasty (1500 - 1400BC).

The woman in the coffin was the daughter of the high priest of Amon, Egypt's Antiquities Minister Mohammed Ibrahim told AFP.

The discovery was important because "it shows that the Valley of the Kings was also used for the burial of ordinary individuals and priests of the 22nd Dynasty", he added.

Contrary to the tune below she never worked with Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.

Wooly Bully

24 hour shutdown for Wikipedia

2012-01-16T14:24:00.001-08:00

"Wikipedia to shut for 24 hours to stop anti-piracy act"

by

Yinka Adegoke

January 16th, 2012

REUTERS

Wikipedia, the popular community-edited online encyclopedia, will black out its English-language site for 24 hours to seek support against proposed U.S. anti-piracy legislation that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said threatens the future of the Internet.

The service will be the highest profile name to join a growing campaign starting at midnight Eastern Time on Wednesday that will see it black out its page so that visitors will only see information about the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

The information will urge Wikipedia readers to contact their local congressman to vote against the bills. Other smaller sites leading the campaign include Reddit.com and Cheezeburger.

"This is a quite clumsily drafted legislation which is dangerous for an open Internet," said Wales in an interview.

The decision to black out the site was decided by voting within the Wikipedia community of writers and editors who manage the free service, Wales said. The English language Wikipedia receives more than 25 million average daily visitors from around the world, according to comScore data.

The bills pit technology companies like Google Inc and Facebook against the bill's supporters, including Hollywood studios and music labels, which say the legislation is needed to protect intellectual property and jobs.

The SOPA legislation under consideration in the House of Representatives aims to crack down on online sales of pirated American movies, music or other goods by forcing Internet companies to block access to foreign sites offering material that violates U.S. copyright laws. Supporters argue the bill is unlikely to have an impact on U.S.-based websites.

U.S. advertising networks could also be required to stop online ads, and search engines would be barred from directly linking to websites found to be distributing pirated goods.

Google has repeatedly said the bill goes too far and could hurt investment. Along with other Internet companies such as Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and eBay, it has run advertisements in major newspapers urging Washington lawmakers to rethink their approach.

White House officials raised concerns on Saturday about SOPA saying they believe it could make businesses on the Internet vulnerable to litigation and harm legal activity and free speech.

"We're happy to see opposition is building and that the White House has started to pay attention," said Wales.

News of the White House's comments prompted a prominent supporter of the bill News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch to slam the Obama administration.

"So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery," he posted on his personal Twitter account Saturday. News Corp owns a vast array of media properties from Fox TV, the Wall Street Journal to Twentieth Century Fox studios.

Wales said the bill in its current form was too broad and could make it difficult for a site like Wikipedia, which he said relies on open exchange of information. He said the bill also places the burden of proof on the distributor of content in the case of any dispute over copyright ownership.

"I do think copyright holders have legitimate issues, but there are ways of approaching the issue that don't involve censorship," Wales said.