Weekend Links

• An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All – Thanks to Jay Lake.
• H1N1: Yes, You Should Vaccinate Your Kids
• Is the swine flu vaccine safe?
• Six diseases you never knew you could catch
• Antidepressants and depression may both harm a fetus
• Stop giving antipsychotics to people with dementia
• Light All Night Not Alright
• Woman's Rape Called “Pre-Existing Condition” by Insurance Companies
• Human Spaceflight Ball in Obama’s Court
• NASA iPhone Application
• Apollo-Era Crawler Carries Test Rocket to Launch Pad – Well, of course, but the crawlers deserve whatever publicity they can get.
• Risk and ingenuity cross paths on Ares 1-X test flight
• Static electricity rule threatens on-time liftoff
• Augustine panel submits final report on spaceflight options
• Bolden Directs MSFC Special Team to evaluate HLV alternatives
• Fudged titanium could threaten next Mars rover – "Everybody thought we were buying a (military) standard titanium that was properly treated for use. It turns out it wasn't worked properly."
• Astronomers find organic molecules around gas planet
• Found: first 'skylight' on the moon – The caverns of the moon.
• $500,000 treasure dug up in lunar soil – NASA's "Regolith Excavation Challenge" has a winner.
• Laser microscope aims to uncover alien life
• Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock?
• Modeling a black hole with a 300 GigaWatt laser
• Huge CCD Could Give Real-Time View of Dark Energy Hunt
• LHC reaches operational temps, collisions start in 5 weeks
• World’s Biggest Digital Brains Think in Teraflops, Model the Universe
• Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint?
• Seven questions that keep physicists up at night
• Fatal frog fungal disease figured out
• How City Noise Is Reshaping Birdsong
• The year's best wildlife photos – Wonderful wolf photo.
• Shoot new angles with kite photography
• How much are coral ecosystems worth? Try $172 billion--A year
• Counting the hidden ($120 billion) cost of US energy economy
• Does Economics Violate the Laws of Physics?
• Stealthy wind turbines aim to disappear from radar screens
• Hurricane Forcing: Can Tropical Cyclones Be Stopped?
• House Considers Limiting Patriot Act Spy Powers – Thank you, John.
• Judge Refuses to Lift 5-Year-Old Patriot Act Gag Order
• Editing Scientists: Science and Policy at the White House
• Sequoia e-voting code reveals possible FEC rule violations – And if no problems had been detected in the Sequoia code, how would anyone know that the clean code (and no other code) was actually executing in the voting machines, and their support infrastructure? If election integrity matters – if democracy matters – electronic voting machines must go.
• Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released – No matter how well-intentioned and executed, open-sourcing software—and I say this an author of open-source projects—does not have the magic power to turn bad ideas into good ones. Electronic voting is, and will remain, a bad idea.
• California Investigating Problems With Voting-Machine Audit Logs
• Apple shuts down ZFS open source project – If the author is correct that Apple is abandoning ZFS, that's a bad move on Apple's part. Forget ZFS' ability to pool disk drives, or take snapshots, or its many other great features – the fact that it did error detection and correction to prevent files from being corrupted was something everyone would have benefited from, just as those of us with Mac Pros benefit from error correcting memory. These errors do happen, but most systems can't even detect them, let alone correct them, so they don't receive the attention they deserve. Dear Apple: Do better than this, you're long overdue.
• Time Warner Cable Exposes 65,000 Customer Routers to Remote Hacks
• Super-Sized Memory Could Fit Into Tiny Chips – A 1 terabyte RAM chip, potentially.
• Super Concrete in the U.S. Military, Iran … and the Pyramids?
• Can Google Earth save an indigenous tribe with maps?