Mmm.. Starbucks makes me smile. Cute box/bag too!

I don't watch TV. I get my news from the radio and from reading stories online. So when the death of Anna Nicole Smith broke yesterday I only found out about it second-hand, from people griping the mainstream media coverage of the news. This Modern World pointed out there are other news stories more worthy of our attention, which is probably true, while the Fantagraphics Blog expressed disappointment that the news is bumping planned Love & Rockets illustration on the cover of a Seattle newspaper.

The latter post contained one particular remark that caught my attention:

"I'm trying to come up with some kind of clever joke comparing what a plastic fake she was compared to the fully-realized (and often similarly endowed) female characters in Love & Rockets, but I'm too annoyed."

Normally I wouldn't give another thought to any news involving Anna Nicole Smith, but this one snide comment kept nagging at me yesterday. Yes, she was an artificial celebrity who exploited her dubious fame in a way that epitomized the worst of popular culture. For most of her career she was a punchline. Yet the unfavorable comparison of her to fictional comic book characters reminded me that behind her public persona was a living, breathing person, with all the complexity that that entails. I find myself wondering what she may have felt before she died. Was she afraid? Did she think about her own life? Was she satisfied with what she had made of it?

For me, Anna Nicole Smith's passing lends her a humanity that she never displayed in her public image. Yet most people are probably viewing her death the way they viewed her life: with either apathy, a vague passing interest, or tabloid curiosity. But few people actually miss her or mourn her, and somehow that strikes me as very depressing.

Post-script: In the middle of writing this, I saw this post at God's Politics. I'm glad other people are thinking along the same lines.

Lene Hau, a physicist at Harvard, has made a career of doing impossible things with light. Everyone knows the speed of light is a constant, right? It can't be sped up or slowed down. Apparently, in 1998, Dr. Hau slowed light down to 38 miles per hour.

As if that weren't astonishing enough, she brought it to a complete halt two years later.

But all of that is child's play compared to what she's done now. Using extremely cold clouds of atoms, Dr. Hau converted a light beam into energy, transferred it from one point in space to another (through which no actual light passed), then changed it back into light. At least, that's the best I can understand it. Read for yourself:

Atoms at room temperature move in a random, chaotic way. But when chilled in a vacuum to about 460 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, under certain conditions millions of atoms lock together and behave as a single mass. When a laser beam enters such a condensate, the light leaves an imprint on a portion of the atoms. That imprint moves like a wave through the cloud and exits at a speed of about 700 feet per hour. This wave of matter will keep going and enter another nearby ultracold condensate. That's how light moves darkly from one cloud to another in Hau's laboratory.

This has amazing implications for computing:

Light carries information, so think of information being manipulated in ways that have never before been possible. That information can be stored - put on a shelf, so to speak - retrieved at will, and converted back to light. The retrieved light would contain the same information as the original light, without so much as a period being lost.

A weird thing happens to the light as it enters the cold atomic cloud, called a Bose-Einstein condensate. It becomes squeezed into a space 50 million times smaller. Imagine a light beam 3,200 feet (one kilometer) long, loaded with information, that now is only a hair width in length but still encodes as much information.

If you want to find out more, check out the article and video.

It has been a while since I last wrote. Kelly wrote though, about her chocolates. It has been good eating around here.

I wrote last time that I would share my list of New Year's Resolutions. Here you go:

1. Find a job. Anyone know an aerospace engineer?
2. Get back to being somewhat active. I was gung ho during knee rehab (I'll be done in 2 weeks), but I got confused over the holidays and ate for exercise.
3. Start a rockin band. Maybe named Stinal Pap. We'll be bigger than Oasis. And they're bigger than the Beatles. And they're more popular than Jesus. They'll make a Mt. Rockmore - Beatles, Oasis, Stinal Pap, and John Fogerty.
4. Don't ever fall hard enough to actually bounce off of the earth.
5. Donate fingernail and hair clippings to science.
6. Should we move, take an awesome driver's license photo.
7. Start a public feud with Rosie O'Donnell.
8. Don't jump the shark.

I will leave you will some book recommendations. For Christmas, I got Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. They are both fairly quick reads, and are quite interesting. Kelly got Ishmael and Me and The Story of B, both sequels to Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I haven't read the sequels but will - Ishmael was really thought provoking. I'm sure Kelly would recommend the other two as well.

At that, I am going to bed.