At The Big Picture:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer (17 mile) long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September - and the first planned particle collisions before the end of the year. The final step before starting is the chilling of the entire collider to -271.25 C (-456.25 F). Here is a collection of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over seven stories tall), over the past several years.

See also:

With the Large Hadron Collider almost ready to turn on, it’s time to prepare ourselves for what it might find.

From the archive:

Colliding with nature's best-kept secrets

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

See also:

Scientists Ask Congress To Fund $50 Billion Science Thing

Large Hadron Collider nearly ready

A key Congressional Committee is initiating an inquiry into the privacy concerns raised by the data collection practices of Internet network operators who tailor Internet advertising based on a consumer’s Web surfing activity. Leaders of the Committee on Energy and Commerce wrote today to top cable, phone and Internet companies asking that the companies provide information about their data collection practices.

The letter was signed by Reps. John D. Dingell (D-MI) and Joe Barton (R-TX), the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Reps. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Cliff Stearns (R-FL), the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee.

Earlier this month, Dingell and Markey wrote to Embarq Corporation regarding a test the company had performed to tailor advertising to consumers’ web browsing habits. On July 17, the Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee held a hearing on deep packet inspection and the privacy issues implicated by the technology.

From the archive:

Congressman Markey,

While I'm not one of your constituents, your statements and actions often have an impact that reaches beyond your district. Yesterday you were quoted in several news media outlets as having called for the arrest of Christopher Soghoian, a PHD candidate at the University of Indiana Bloomington, because he created a web page that generates phoney airline boarding passes. As you are likely aware, your call was answered by the FBI who reportedly broke into Soghoian's house last night and seized all of his computer equipment.

...

I strongly urge you to reconsider your position on this matter. The current course of action is not in the best interests of this country.

Energy and Commerce Committee Questions Data Practices of Network Operators

As dancing explodes in popularity on TV, it's harder to find at bars and the average party. What's popular on these shows and clips isn't dancing -- it's second-hand dancing. These people are dancing so we don't have to.

From the archive:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”. He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself. But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

Dance Dance Revolution is firmly entrenched as a college craze.

During the nineteenth century, attempts were made to amalgamate alchemy with the religious and occult philosophies then growing in popularity; and in the twentieth century psychologists--principally Carl Jung--perceived in alchemy a powerful vehicle for aspects of their theories about human nature. At the same time, laboratory scientists continued to experiment in ways very similar to those of their medieval and early modern forebears.

And the beat goes off

Or, how to cultivate a computational state of mind.

Many professions require some form of computer programming. Accountants program spreadsheets and word processors; photographers program photo editors; musicians program synthesizers; and professional programmers instruct plain computers. Programming has become a required skill.

Yet programming is more than just a vocational skill. Indeed, good programming is a fun activity, a creative outlet, and a way to express abstract ideas in a tangible form. And designing programs teaches a variety of skills that are important in all kinds of professions: critical reading, analytical thinking, creative synthesis, and attention to detail.

We therefore believe that the study of program design deserves the same central role in general education as mathematics and English. Or, put more succinctly,

everyone should learn how to design programs.

This book is the first book on programming as the core subject of a liberal arts education. Its main focus is the design process that leads from problem statements to well-organized solutions; it deemphasizes the study of programming language details, algorithmic minutiae, and specific application domains.

From the archive:

Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, says the author, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. In this thought-provoking book, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.

The Craftsman engages the many dimensions of skill—from the technical demands to the obsessive energy required to do good work. Craftsmanship leads Sennett across time and space, from ancient Roman brickmakers to Renaissance goldsmiths to the printing presses of Enlightenment Paris and the factories of industrial London; in the modern world he explores what experiences of good work are shared by computer programmers, nurses and doctors, musicians, glassblowers, and cooks. Unique in the scope of his thinking, Sennett expands previous notions of crafts and craftsmen and apprises us of the surprising extent to which we can learn about ourselves through the labor of making physical things.

How to Design Programs

Nathan Myhrvold:

Iceland is a modern technological society which retains a frontier attitude. Greenland, on the other hand, really is a frontier — in several senses of the word.

Dubner and Levitt:

This is our third and final guest post from the very polymathic Nathan Myhrvold. The first two were Icelandic travelogues; this one takes us to Greenland. It includes some of the most stunning photographs we have ever seen.

From the archive:

I was describing this to a friend over lunch in Palo Alto. As I was describing this the waiter came up behind me to take our order. I was in the middle of saying "it's very hard to enter the rectum, but once you do things move much faster", only to hear the waiter gasp. Whoops. I tried to explain saying "well, this is about" but with a horrified look he said "I do NOT want to know what this is about! Some people are just not interested in natural history, I guess.

Light Pollution Ends Abruptly -- Iceland is missing

The mother of Icelandic pop singer Bjork is 11 days into a hunger strike in protest at plans to develop part of Iceland's wilderness.

Eating Polar Bears Is Okay in Greenland

Stewart Brand:

Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year Clock in its Nevada mountain.

Photographic prints, especially color prints, degrade badly over time. Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution.

Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone’s living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock’s mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years.

A typical Burtynsky photograph showed a huge open pit copper mine. A tiny, barely discernible black line on one of the levels was pointed out: “That’s a whole railroad train.” Alberta tar sands excavation tearing up miles of boreal forest. China’s Three Gorges Dam. Mine tailing ponds beautiful and terrible. Expired oil fields stretching to the horizon. Michelangelo’s marble quarry at Carrera, still working.

“This is the sublime of our time, shown straight on, for contemplation.”

Indeed worth studying for centuries.

From the archive:

Edward Burtynsky is internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry. Manufactured Landscapes – a stunning documentary by award winning director Jennifer Baichwal – follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. This remarkable film leads us to meditate on human endeavour and its impact on the planet.

Fun history essay about Richard Feynman's computer science contributions and involvement with the origin of Thinking Machines.

A recording of a conversation between Clay Shirky and Brian Eno, musician, artist and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation.

Freeman Dyson:

I'm working on a project, The Long Now Foundation, to encourage long-term responsibility. Esther's on that board, too. We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed? For instance, if you want to see humanity move gracefully into space, you have to accept it's going to take a while.

It won't be long now until the telcos start trying to pass on the cost of wiretapping to the major content providers.

Hold your breath for a long time?

The 10,000-Year Gallery

If you liked this ...

The New York Times offers a very cool interactive info-graphic.

Summer blockbusters and holiday hits make up the bulk of box office revenue each year, while contenders for the top Oscar awards tend to attract smaller audiences that build over time. Here's a look at how movies have fared at the box office, after adjusting for inflation.

... then you'll also like this up-to-the-minute version. Scroll to the right to see how The Dark Knight lords over the rest of the industry.

From the archive:

The Rise and Fall of the Blockbuster

Blockbuster Culture's Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity

Were these works of art, or were they commodities? The distinction had become blurry.

The industry does care; the people who make movies need to be able to take themselves more seriously than the people who make popcorn do.

Some of the explanation for what happened to the movies has to do with the movies and the people who make them, but some of it has to do with the audience. "It's not so much that movies are dead, as that history has already passed them by."

In 1946, weekly movie attendance was a hundred million. That was out of a population of a hundred and forty-one million, who had nineteen thousand movie screens available to them. Today, there are thirty-six thousand screens in the United States and two hundred and ninety-five million people, and weekly attendance is twenty-five million.

In 1975, the average cost of marketing for a movie distributed by a major studio was two million dollars. In 2003, it was thirty-nine million dollars.

The primary target for the blockbuster is people with an underdeveloped capacity for deferred gratification; that is, kids.

2008 US Movie Box Office

Paulo Coelho certainly has nothing against selling books. He has sold an astounding 100m copies of his novels. But he also believes in giving them away. He is a pirate.

For Coelho, digital is about relationships. The internet always is - and he is revelling in the new connections it gives him with his readers. He loves to meet them face-to-face. He mentioned on his blog that he'd like to invite a few readers to a party in a remote town in Spain and he was shocked that they were willing to fly in from as far away as Japan. Now he regularly invites readers to his parties.

From the archive:

Our reporter brought a 3 liter jug of "White Ace" cider back to the states, which is 7% alcohol per volume and only about $3.50 US for the whole 3 liter jug. When the test subject drank the whole bottle of "White Ace," in Las Vegas, the effects were severe. He got kicked out of 4 Queens casino for washing his hands in a urinal, then fell asleep for 3 hours and woke up soaked in his own urine. He woke up and got into a 6 year old's pirate costume, ran around slapping gamblers in the gut, got kicked out of The Imperial Palace, and became so obnoxious that his friends put him on a plane and sent him home early.

If scientists have been able to create glowing green hair by merging jellyfish DNA with that of the mice, would it be possible for a "Real Genius" such as nanochick to create Warez, the Glowing Pumpkin?

The perfect alchemy of print and digital

Axel Peemoeller:

In Melbourne I developed a way-finding-system for the Eureka Tower Carpark. The distored letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position. This project won several international design awards.

From the archive:

Julian Beever is an English artist who is famous for his art on the pavements of England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium. Beever's images are drawn in such a way which gives them three dimensionality when viewing from the correct angle.

These unbelievable photos are chalk drawings done by Julian Beever and Kurt Wenner. Both Julian and Kurt have different styles to create an amazing 3D illusion.

Scroll down slowly and stop at each new frame. Julian Beever is an English artist who’s famous for his art on the pavement of England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium.

Most of his artwork it is impossible to tell whats real from what’s an illusion. Very cool stuff.

Eureka Carpark Melbourne

A security researcher who was set to speak at Black Hat next week on a previously undiscovered flaw in FileVault has canceled his talk, citing confidentiality agreements.

Charles Edge had been slated to discuss his research on a weakness that could be used to defeat FileVault. But sometime last week, Black Hat organizers pulled his name and presentation listing from its schedule of talks.

... Update: Looks like yet another talk about Apple security will be canceled at Black Hat this year. Apple has pulled its security engineering team out of a planned public discussion on the company's security practices.

See also: Leave Steve Jobs Alone!!! (pnsfw audio)

From the archive:

Border searches of laptops; seizure

Unlocking FileVault

Laptop border searches OK'd

Faster PwninG Assured: Cracking Crypto with FPGAs

Circumventing Automated JavaScript Analysis Tools

DOMinatrix - The JavaScript SQL Injector

Richard Clarke leveled the harshest language on the Bush administration. "The Bush administration has systematically reduced the work to secure cyberspace."

Hacker Pranks at Defcon and Black Hat in Las Vegas Emphasize Computer Security, Abaddon causing a ruckus at Black Hat, and Mike Lynn's Glorious Escapades

HID Global statement on IOActive withdrawing their Black Hat presentation

Crime is sport in the US. All the way back to the black hat wearing cowboy to OJ and Scott Peterson, we have a love affair with criminals, and are addicted to punishment. It makes us feel tough and reinforces other false ideals in our culture (morality, justice for all, bravery, etc.).

Black Hat Talk on Apple Encryption Flaw Pulled