The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

April 27, 2005


transf rmati ns

transf rmati ns  f br  klyn sky acc rding t  universal laws
as manifest in visi nary w rld algebras

http://www.as ndheim. rg/c vect r.jpg
http://www.as ndheim. rg/ncs.jpg
http://www.as ndheim. rg/bklynmetric.jpg

y u must guess the missing letter and y u will see the w rld
hint the missing letter is the s und  f the w rld
when y u are m aning the w rld when the pige ns c  ing


,,,

the jewish mistress of modigliani

the jewish doctors jewish lawyers treat jewish moneylenders
jewish trance-glance mesmeric and utterly controlling
zion elders channel secret messages thru chiaroscuro velvets
so handsome jewish artist painting furiously
http://www.asondheim.org/modig1.jpg
http://www.asondheim.org/modig2.jpg
just like that did i say soutine no i did not
we cannot be blamed for modern art

_

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 13:13:08 -0400
From: physnews@aip.org
To: sondheim@PANIX.COM
Subject: Physics News Update 729

PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News
Number 729 April 27, 2005  by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein

PYROFUSION: A ROOM-TEMPERATURE, PALM-SIZED NUCLEAR FUSION DEVICE has
been reported by a UCLA collaboration, potentially leading to new
kinds of fusion devices and other novel applications such as
microthrusters for MEMS spaceships.  The key component of the UCLA
device is a pyroelectric crystal, a class of materials that includes
lithium niobate, an inexpensive solid that is used to filter signals
in cell phones.  When heated a pyroelectric crystal polarizes
charge, segregating a significant amount of electric charge near a
surface, leading to a very large electric field there.  In turn,
this effect can accelerate electrons to relatively high (keV)
energies (see Update 564,
http://www.aip.org/pnu/2001/split/564-2.html).
The UCLA researchers (Seth Putterman, 310-825-2269) take this idea
and add a few other elements to it.  In a vacuum chamber containing
deuterium gas, they place a lithium tantalate (LiTaO3) pyroelectric
crystal so that one of its faces touches a copper disc which itself
is surmounted by a tungsten probe.  They cool and then heat the
crystal, which creates an electric potential energy  of about 120
kilovolts at its surface.  The electric field at the end of the
tungsten probe tip is so high (25 V/nm) that it strips electrons
from nearby deuterium atoms. Repelled by the negatively charged tip,
and crystal field, the resulting deuterium ions then accelerate
towards a solid target of erbium deuteride (ErD2), slamming into it
so hard that some of the deuterium ions fuse with deuterium in the
target.  Each deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction creates a helium-3
nucleus and a 2.45 MeV neutron, the latter being collected as
evidence for nuclear fusion.  In a typical heating cycle, the
researchers measure a peak of about 900 neutrons per second, about
400 times the "background" of naturally occurring neutrons.   During
a heating cycle, which could last from 5 minutes to 8 hours
depending on how fast they heat the crystal, the researchers
estimate that they create approximately 10^-8 joules of fusion
energy.  (To provide some perspective, it takes about 1,000 joules
to heat an 8-oz (237 ml) cup of coffee one degree Celsius.)  By
using a larger tungsten tip, cooling the crystal to cryogenic
temperatures, and constructing a target containing tritium, the
researchers believe they can scale up the observed neutron
production 1000 times, to more than 10^6 neutrons per second.
(Naranjo, Gimzewski, Putterman, Nature, 28 April 2005).  The
experimental setup is strikingly simple: "We can build a tiny
self-contained handheld object which when plunged into ice water
creates fusion," Putterman says.
(http://rodan.physics.ucla.edu/pyrofusion )


NICKEL-78, THE MOST NEUTRON-RICH OF THE DOUBLY-MAGIC NUCLEI, has had
its lifetime measured for the first time, which will help us better
understand how heavy elements are made.  Indeed, where do gold atoms
come from?  Physicists believe gold and other heavy elements (beyond
iron) were built from lighter atoms inside star explosions billions
of years ago.  In the "r-process" (r standing for rapid) unfolding
inside the explosion, a succession of nuclei bulk up on the many
available neutrons.  This evolutionary buildup is nicely captured in
a movie simulation showing all the species in the chart of the
nuclides being made one after the other
(http://www.jinaweb.org/html/movies.html).  In some models the
buildup can slow down at certain strategic bottlenecks.   Nickel-78
is one such roadblock.  This is because Ni-78 is a "doubly magic"
nucleus.  It has both closed neutron and proton shells; it is
"noble" in a nuclear sense in the way that a noble gas atom is noble
in the chemical sense owing to its completely filled electron
shell.   Knowing more about this crucial nuclide is made difficult
by the fact that it is, in our modern era, very rare, and hard to
make artificially.  Nevertheless, scientists at the National
Superconducting Cyclotron (NCSL) at Michigan State University have
now culled 11 specimens of Ni-78 from among billions of high-energy
collision events recorded.  In effect, the NCSL is a factory for
reproducing supernova conditions here on Earth.  Hendrik Schatz
(schatz@ncsl.msu.edu, 517-333-6397), speaking at last week's
American Physical Society meeting in Tampa, reported that from the
available Ni-78 decays recorded, a lifetime of 110 milliseconds
could be deduced.  This is some 4 times shorter than previous
theoretical estimates, meaning that the bottleneck nucleus lived
shorter than was thought, which in turn means that the obstacle to
making heavier elements was that much less.  So far the exact
conditions and site for the r-process are still unknown. With the
new measurement model conditions have to be readjusted to produce
the observed amounts of precious metals in the universe. This will
provide a better idea of what to look for  when searching for the
site of the r-process.   (See also Hosmer et al., Physical Review
Letters, 25 March 2005)

***********
PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE is a digest of physics news items arising
from physics meetings, physics journals, newspapers and
magazines, and other news sources.  It is provided free of charge
as a way of broadly disseminating information about physics and
physicists. For that reason, you are free to post it, if you like,
where others can read it, providing only that you credit AIP.
Physics News Update appears approximately once a week.

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 15:40:36 -0700
From: NAGA <join@guqin.org>
To: sondheim@panix.com
Subject: Distinguished qin scholar Wang Di passes away

    Untitled Document	Dear Qin Friends,
NAGA reports with great sadness that distinguished qin scholar Wang Di passed away on April 26th 2005 at 19:58 pm Beijing time at the age of 78. She co-edited the 2 volume Guqin Quji (Collected Guqin Scores), the 8 CD set of historical guqin recordings and the score book Qinge (Qin Songs). Wang Di was a student of Guan Pinghu, and was chief editor of the double CD of his recordings.

North American Guqin Association
http://www.guqin.org


................................................................
This email should only be sent to those who have asked to receive it. To unsubscribe, return to the web form at http://www.chineseculture.net/guqin/joinus.html click the "unsubscribe" button.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 16:54:22 -0700
From: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory <info@jpl.nasa.gov>
To: "sondheim@panix.com" <sondheim@panix.com>
Subject: NASA's Deep Impact Spacecraft Spots its Quarry


MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

D.C. Agle  (818) 393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Dolores Beasley/Erica Hupp (202) 358-1753/1237
NASA Headquarters, Washington

News Release: 2005-065                              April 27, 2005

NASA's Deep Impact Spacecraft Spots its Quarry

Sixty-nine days before it gets up-close-and-personal with a comet,
NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft successfully photographed its quarry,
comet Tempel 1, from a distance of 64 million kilometers (39.7
million miles).

The image, the first of many comet portraits it will take over the
next 10 weeks, will aid Deep Impact's navigators, engineers and
scientists as they plot their final trajectory toward an
Independence Day encounter.

"It is great to get a first glimpse at the comet from our
spacecraft," said Deep Impact Principal Investigator Dr. Michael
A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, College Park, Md. "With daily
observations beginning in May, Tempel 1 will become noticeably more
impressive as we continue to close the gap between spacecraft and
comet. What is now little more than a few pixels across will evolve
by July 4 into the best, most detailed images of a comet ever
taken."

The ball of dirty ice and rock was detected on April 25 by Deep
Impact's medium resolution instrument on the very first attempt.
While making the detection, the spacecraft's camera saw stars as dim
as 11th visual magnitude, more than 100 times dimmer than a human
can see on a clear night.

"This is the first of literally thousands of images we will take of
Tempel 1 for both science and navigational purposes," said Deputy
Program Manager Keyur Patel at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif. "Our goal is to impact a one-meter long (39-inch)
spacecraft into about a 6.5-kilometer wide (4-mile) comet that is
bearing down on it at 10.2 kilometers per second (6.3 miles per
second), while both are 133.6 million kilometers (83 million miles)
away from Earth. By finding the comet as early and as far away as we
did is a definite aid to our navigation."

To view the comet image on the Internet, visit
http://www.nasa.gov/deepimpact or http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/ .

Deep Impact is comprised of two parts, a "flyby" spacecraft and a
smaller "impactor." The impactor will be released into the comet's
path for a planned high-speed collision on July 4. The crater
produced by the impact could range in size from the width of a large
house up to the size of a football stadium and from 2 to 14 stories
deep. Ice and dust debris will be ejected from the crater, revealing
the material beneath.

The Deep Impact spacecraft has four data collectors to observe the
effects of the collision - a camera and infrared spectrometer
comprise the high resolution instrument, a medium resolution
instrument, and a duplicate of that camera on the impactor (called
the impactor targeting sensor) that will record the vehicle's final
moments before it is run over by comet Tempel 1 at a speed of about
37,000 kilometers per hour (23,000 miles per hour).

The overall Deep Impact mission management for this Discovery class
program is conducted by the University of Maryland. Deep Impact
project management is handled by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The
spacecraft was built for NASA by Ball Aerospace & Technologies
Corporation, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about Deep Impact on the Internet, visit
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/  .

For more information about NASA on the Internet, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov .


                                 -end-





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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 12:49:36 -0400 (EDT)
From: moderator@portside.org
Reply-To: portside@portside.org
To: portside@lists.portside.org
Subject: Anti-War Resolution Passes California Democratic Party Convention

Anti-War Resolution Passes California Democratic Party
Convention

Global Appeal/Iraq project
Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace
http://www.icujp.org/cgi-bin/datacgi/database.cgi?file=Issues&report=SingleArticle&ArticleID=0410

April 18, 2005

LOS ANGELES. April 17. Two thousand California
Democrats passed a resolution calling for termination
of the Iraq war and occupation, including a US troop
withdrawal 'at the earliest possible time', at their
annual convention in Los Angeles this weekend.

The resolution was devised by grass-roots Democratic
peace activists, including the newly-formed Progressive
Democrats of America (PDA), who fought an intense
three-day battle before the party platform committee
and on the floor. They faced severe pressures to water
down or derail the resolution by more hawkish
Democrats, including delegates associated with the
American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who
tried to 'pull' the resolution from the party platform
report, according to PDA executive-director Tim
Carpenter. Delegates representing former presidential
candidate Gen. Wesley Clark also tried unsuccessfully
to weaken the resolution, Carpenter said.

The California resolution represents a far stronger
position than that taken by the national Democratic
Party during the 2004 presidential campaign. In
addition, the struggle for its passage is a potential
model for parties in other states as the national party
seeks to contain anti-war forces among its rank-and-
file. Carpenter, who began as a grass roots California
party volunteer almost thirty years ago, has become a
respected practioners of 'outside/inside' strategies
and tactics to pressure politicians.

In a significant development, the same progressive
forces passed a resolution denouncing the Central
American Free Trade Agreement, revealing growing and
effective links between anti-war and anti-NAFTA-CAFTA-
FTAA forces in the party.

Party chair Howard Dean, whose rise as a national
candidate was based on his opposition to the invasion
of Iraq, avoided any mention of the war and occupation
in several appearances during the convention, though
delegates from the Dean campaign supported the anti-war
platform overwhelmingly. At the national level, leading
Democrats have failed to unify in opposition to the
war, leaving senators like Edward Kennedy and
representatives like Lynn Woolsey, author of a
resolution favoring withdrawal, on the margins.

Carpenter, PDA national chair Mimi Kennedy and local
chair Marcy Winnograd predicted the success would
inspire local peace and Democratic activists to
increase the pressure at local levels to influence
Congressional behavior. Not far off are the 2006
Congressional elections and the 2008 presidential
primaries.

'Democrats can't hide and wish the war will go away',
commented former state senator Tom Hayden, who spoke
before a PDA gathering at the convention. 'Rumsfeld has
recently bragged that the US doesn't have an exit
strategy, only a victory strategy. That should worry a
majority of Americans who are seeing one billion of
their tax dollars wasted every week in Iraq, who have
seen 2000 Americans killed and unknown numbers of
Iraqis, and who are ashamed of policies that have
permitted rampant torture at Abu Graib, Afghanistan and
Guantanamo. The Bush Administration still plans a
permanent occupation and permanent bases in Iraq, and
will have to be forced to leave by domestic public
opinion, anger over budget priorities, unrest among
military families, and the continuing collapse of the
so-called "coalition of the willing'.

http://www.icujp.org/cgi-bin/datacgi/database.cgi?file=Issues&report=SingleArticle&ArticleID=0410
_______________________________________________________

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 12:48:38 -0400 (EDT)
From: moderator@portside.org
Reply-To: portside@portside.org
To: portside@lists.portside.org
Subject: Bush-Whack For Amtrak

Bush-Whack For Amtrak

By Kevin Murphy

The Slatin Report
Wednesday Apr 27, 2005
http://www.theslatinreport.com/top_story.jsp?StoryName=0420Amtrak.txt

It's never been a secret that President Bush has little
use for Amtrak. He has now officially proposed to end
federal funding for the national rail service and
replace it with regional, intercity rail lines run by
the states. As a result, Amtrak may face its toughest
challenge in 34 years.

But pulling the plug on Amtrak shows a wrongheaded
commitment to roads over rails, an approach that
promises to continue the problems that the car culture
has brought us.

In purporting to explain the proposed defunding of
Amtrak, Bush's transportation secretary, Norman Mineta,
has said: "After 34 years of Amtrak operating losses
and $29 billion in taxpayer subsidies, it is clear that
the current model of passenger rail service is flawed
and unsustainable."

It's true that Amtrak is flawed-the current disruptions
in its Acela high-speed service in the Northeast, due
to brake problems, is an example. But at the same time,
the president's budget proposes $284 billion in funding
for highway construction over the next six years. How
did it come to pass that Amtrak's operations, and
ability to correct problems, must be financed by ticket
revenue while the national highway system is subsidized
through taxes?

Which system, railroad or highway transportation, is
unworkable? The current Amtrak model doesn't work, but
the problem is the inadequacy of the funding. The Bush
administration's response, to deny further funding, is
counterintuitive.

The administration should give Amtrak more funding to
improve infrastructure and extend service. This, after
all, is the model that European countries have used
successfully for decades. Having zipped recently from
Paris to Avignon in southern France on the French
national railroad's TGV in a matter of hours, it's hard
to imagine how the European model could be considered
dysfunctional.

On the other hand, it would be difficult to construct a
less functional model than the one that has guided
transportation policy and real estate development in
the United States since World War II. The policies and
programs that favored highway transportation and helped
to bring about widespread suburbanization are headed
toward eventual failure.

In an era of rising gasoline prices and the eventual
exhaustion of the world's petroleum supplies, reliance
on auto transportation is not only reckless, it could
also be a recipe for economic crisis.

Nor is obtaining the fuel to run cars the only problem
that comes with dependence on them. As residents of any
metropolitan area can attest, traffic congestion around
most cities is so extreme that commuters spend untold
hours getting to and from work, time that could
certainly be better used.

The specter of increasing traffic also presents the
image of yet more American countryside marred by lanes
of speeding cars, trucks, and buses, and ever more
outlying areas carved up into exurban house lots. The
environmental and economic costs of sprawl have been
well documented. At the same time, the social,
economic, political, and environmental consequences of
global warming-due in substantial part to auto
pollution-have also been projected. So why infuse
billions and billions more into highway construction?

It is unfortunate that the car is associated with ideas
like "freedom" and "liberty," words that George Bush
uses liberally in every speech. But bringing Americans
back to public transportation involves convincing them
that it does not limit their options but frees them
from the increasingly unpleasant prospect of car trips.

The much-abused Amtrak system offers extremely pleasant
transportation, especially on the Northeast Corridor.
Just the other day I rode from Richmond, Virginia to
Washington, D.C., a trip that by car can take at least
two and a half hours. When I think of that trip, I
remember doing it with my four-year-old daughter in the
back seat on a one-hundred-degree-plus day last summer.
We sat in the car, stopped, in the broiling sun for at
least an hour with nothing but Jersey barriers to look
at while my daughter fidgeted. By contrast, the train
traverses woods and fields and passed through historic
towns. In Fredericksburg, the end of the line to
Washington, there are not enough parking spots to
accommodate the commuters wishing to take the train
into D.C.

The Bush administration can't see over the steering
wheel. By pouring money into highway construction, it
pursues the very failed model it purports to want to
avoid. At the same time, it turns its back on a model
of sustainable development that has proved its
viability over the course of centuries: city living,
made possible by robust public transportation and
offering an alternative to car culture.

Kevin Murphy is an associate professor of art history
at the City University of New York Graduate Center and
at Brooklyn College.

All material �2004, The Slatin Report

_______________________________________________________

portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news,
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