Sub-space radio?

Scientists have set a record in sending information using the revolutionary technology of quantum teleportation - although Mr Spock may have to wait a little longer for a Scotty to beam him up with it.

A team of physicists have teleported data 143km from the Canary Island of La Palma to the neighbouring island of Tenerife, which is 10 times further than the previous attempt at teleportation through free space.

The scientists did it by exploiting the "spooky" and virtually unfathomable field of quantum entanglement - when the state of matter rather than the matter itself is sent from one place to another.

Tiny packets or particles of light called photons were used to teleport information between telescopes on the two islands.

The photons did it by quantum entanglement and scientists hope that it will form the basis of a new way of sending encrypted data.

All this confuses me. I understand the spooky action at a distance thing in a basic way when I concentrate on it (and make my head hurt). But I keep reading you can't "break the light-speed limit" even by moving information faster than the speed of light, rather than matter, and yet... they seem to be saying they're transmitting "information."

Can any physicists clue me in? Can you oro can you not exploit this phenomenon to engineer an end-run around the prohibition against sending information at speeds faster than the speed of light?

Thanks to cutaway.

Spooky Action At A Distance For Dummies: This is probably not the best explanation, but it is, I think, close enough.

Particles can become "entangled" such that their quantum states are linked, and must be linked. I think because of some principle like the conservation of spin. Let's say (I'm kinda making this up) a particle with zero spin ejects or degrades into two smaller particles with spin. The smaller particles must have a combined spin equal to zero, as spin, like matter or energy, cannot be created or destroyed. So if one particle spins one way, the other must spin the other, in order to keep the universe's balance-sheet of spins equal. The event that gave birth to them began with zero spin; at the end of the day, they have to have zero spin too, at least when added together. The + spin of one cancels out the - spin of the other and keeps the universe's Chief Financial Officer satisfied.

Futher, the whole Shroedinger's Cat thing applies. At this scale, the actual spin of a particle isa blend of its possible spins (both particles have a fudged spin of kinda positive, kinda negative, kinda inbetween) until it is actually determined which has what spin through testing. Only when actually forced to, by someone peeking, does the universe get around to determining which spin each particle has.

But you can separate these particles by any distance you like. When you determine the spin in one, you simultaneously determine the spin in the other -- even though they could, in principle, be at opposite ends of the universe, so far it could take light itself tens of thousands of years to move from one to the other. The "spooky action at a distance" is a shorthand for this apparent ability of entagled particles to "transmit" information about their own quantum state (and therefore the quantum state the other should, must have) instantanously, blowing the speed of light out the window.

How this is transmitted -- apparently without any sort of carrier wave or other physical vector -- is what makes it "spooky." Nothing moves out to "tell" the other particle what its spin should be; it just happens.

How this could be used for communications I'm not clear on, but I guess it may be possible to one day change the spin in one of the entagled particles, thereby changing the spin in its opposite-spin-twin, and from there you have the basic workings of a binary (+ or - equalling 1 or 0) truly instantaneous communications system.

But then I read that the speed of light also applies to information, so I don't know if this is possible.

An Age of Miracles and Wonders: Trey doesn't sweat the speed of light, figuring that physical law, like some others, is right out the window since 2001:

all i know in the Age of Bush, in which fire can melt friggin' steel, this is totally possible.

Posted by: Ace at 12:45 PM | Comments (77)
Post contains 755 words, total size 5 kb.

New York Time editor admits he tanked the JFK bomb-plot story because he "questioned the timing" of it.

As Allah asks -- and as we always ask of these morons -- what precisely was Bush attempting to distract away from? From... nothing?

Can anyone explain what scary-important political event needed some "distracting" from? Oh yeah-- the Democratic political debate. As these are happening pretty much every other week, can we assume the NYT has decided that there can be no prominent reportage on terror busts until after Hillary! or Obamessiah has been safely sworn into office as President?

Do they imagine Bush can order up a massive bust on a particular involving the NYPD, FBI, and other law enforcement investigations to suit his political needs without a single person leaking the fact he ordered it? And ordered all LEO's to lie about it? And ordered it all to take place on a certain day or at least within a certain time period?

These are the people who assert you should trust their very professional, finely-honed sense of "news judgment." People who believe that large-scale arrests are ordered to occur on a specific day in order to "distract from" biweekly trivialities.

Posted by: Ace at 12:38 PM | Comments (19)
Post contains 204 words, total size 1 kb.

The end of an era: Jackie Mackey Paisley Passey is engaged to be married.

I'm just noting this for the sake of closure. I wish the couple well.

I hear that together they have a combined rating of 17.8 on Hot or Not, putting them in the upper 13% of hottitude, and also have a combined credit rating of 1588, putting them in the upper 5% of credit worthiness, so they should be pretty happy together (in fact, they're projected to be in in the 97th percentile on the Briggs-Myers Marital Satifaction Index).

Am I bummed? Sure, a little. Sigh. But I wish her well anyway; if I can't be The Happiest Guy In The World, at least I can pass my congratulations to the man who won the lottery.

Via Protein Wisdom.

Posted by: Ace at 02:07 PM | Comments (85)
Post contains 153 words, total size 1 kb.

I challenge a single fucking liberal to tell me with a straight face that if a conservative campaign blogger, former or current, engaged in this insane conspiracy theorizing that the media would not be very interested indeed.

Come on, weasels: Dare to say that with a straight face. Tell me. Make the claim.

Posted by: Ace at 01:46 PM | Comments (58)
Post contains 75 words, total size 1 kb.

Tucked below the fold for strong language warning. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:13 PM | Comments (102)
Post contains 811 words, total size 5 kb.

Out on my porch I just heard a couple of kids exchanging Yo Mama jokes. They're all lame, but here are two that stand out:

"Your mama's ass is so fat she got a job at a movie theater as a projector."

This, um, doesn't even make sense. She got a job as the screen, idiot. And even that wouldn't be funny.

And this gem:

"The wig shop just called yo mama, and they said they want their wig back."

Wow. They're not even doing that ironic-joke thing where you invert the joke by deliberately making it stupid and obvious and literal ("Yo mama is such a whore she takes money from men to have sex.")

Trust me, these jokers haven't the craft.

The kid who offered up these rib-ticklers even had the temerity to question his interlocutor's Dozens credentials, asking, "Are you even doing jokes? Oh yeah, you did one, I guess."

Dude, are you even doing jokes?

What has become of the youth of today?

Posted by: Ace at 11:34 AM | Comments (119)
Post contains 183 words, total size 1 kb.

That plotter: Lee Harvey Oswald.

Pardon the misleading headline. I learned that from the MSM.

Vincent Bugliosi has written another this-finally-proves-Oswald-killed-Kennedy book which is supposed to shut the nutters up, but of course it won't. It can't. This isn't about fact; it's about satisfying a deep and dark psychological need. Part rampant egotism (the need to feel as though one is possessed of special knowledge unavailbable to the sheep), part intellectual insecurity (the need to simplify, simplify complex world events to a few bad actors or, alternately, to complicate, complicate rather simple events so that they "explain" other complex events), and part low-grade schizophrenic dementia. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:20 AM | Comments (96)
Post contains 1593 words, total size 10 kb.

Maria Sharapova plus a dog who speaks with a funny accent. The script writes itself (though I wish it had written itself to include more nudity).

Posted by: Ace at 10:16 AM | Comments (9)
Post contains 30 words, total size 1 kb.

Silliness.

Skateboarding could make its Olympic debut at London 2012, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced.

The IOC has been holding talks with skateboarding officials in Switzerland to agree a timetable for the sport's inclusion, though it will first need to be formally recognised as a sport.

They go on to ask for readers' suggestions about other sports they'd like to see considered in the future.

Hey, it's been a while since we've had a top ten around here.

Top Ten Sports I'd Like To See Considered For The Olympics:

10. Freestyle Bond-Trading

9. Parallel Gay Bars

8. Heavy Water Polo

7. Russian Biathlon (Vodka Shots, Contracting Hepatitis)

6. 100 Meter Unplanned Pregnancy

5. MILF Hunting

4. Running Down Manatees With Powerboats

3. Synchronized Mail Fraud

2. Two-Man Doggystyle Canadian Luge

And the Number One Sport I'd like to see?

1. Muff Diving

That last one feels stolen, but my meager Google skillz aren't coming up with anything, so it stays.

Also, did you know that live pigeon shooting was an event one year?

And:

Related. Thanks to Dave in Texas for that one.

Posted by: AndrewR at 06:25 AM | Comments (54)
Post contains 195 words, total size 2 kb.

Simple. The prosecutor argued, at trial, Plame's status was irrelevant, because introducing the sketchy nature of her putative "covert" status would undermine his case.

Having forbidden Libby himself from arguing that at trial (as being irrelevant to the charges), Fitzgerald then asserted the claimed fact of her covert status as being highly relevant for sentencing.

[W]hile outing a CIA agent can be illegal, neither Libby nor anyone else was actually charged with doing that to Plame. In fact, pre-trial maneuvering found the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, insisting that this was not a case about a leak and fighting defense requests for documents about whether Plame was ever a covert agent, a status that could have made intentionally leaking her identity a crime.

But when the issue of sentencing came around, Fitzgerald changed his tune, arguing that the underlying (and uncharged) crime was so serious as to warrant a sentence twice as long as what the federal probation office recommended; notably, his brief included the revelation that the CIA did consider Plame's identity classified, at least for 18 months. And Tuesday, Walton apparently bought it, declaring before he announced the sentence that Libby could be considered an accessory to the underlying crime because, at least in part, his obstruction of justice made it all but impossible for the government to make the case for that crime.

So how is it that an offense that may never have happened — and that at one point the prosecutor argued was largely irrelevant to the case — has now increased Libby's criminal sentence?

...

To get a sense of the absurdity of this, think of someone found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt — the highest level of proof — of dealing 20 grams of cocaine, and the judge saying, hey, there's evidence that you dealt 10 times that amount, so you get an extra eight years.

The federal rules dictating these strange penalties were already deemed unconstitutional, and are now regarded as mere discretionary guidelines (otherwise, they'd violate a defendant's right to be sentenced only for what he's actually convicted of in a court of law).

But that doesn't mean a judge is free to sentence a defendant for a crime never proven in court just because he feels like it. The sentence must be "reasonable" -- a vague notion to be sure, but perhaps Scooter Libby has some legal life left in him.

Posted by: Ace at 10:39 PM | Comments (344)
Post contains 409 words, total size 3 kb.