Tag Archives: levin

This Is the Sound of Two Black Holes Colliding

by FawnMXEYwxkz Posted on July 9, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

When black holes collide, they release a power greater than all the stars shining in the universe. They also make a really big sound. In September 2015, scientists detected the merger of two black holes, an event that took place more than a billion light years away. It produced a whooshing sound picked up by machines designed to detect the activity. You can hear that sound—the hum of gravitational waves produced by the collision—on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast.

On Inquiring Minds, Kishore Hari talks with Janna Levin, a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College and author of a book on this unlikely discovery of the black hole collision heard round the world.

The discovery was a project decades—and more than $1 billion—in the making. And it was truly groundbreaking. “I sometimes liken it to the first time Galileo pointed the telescope at the sky,” Levin said.

When Albert Einstein came up with his theory of relativity, he posited that gravitational waves ripple across space-time when hit with the force of moving objects such as black holes. The sound picked up by the machines proved Einstein was right.

As Levin pointed out, the remarkable discovery makes other revelations seem possible. When Galileo first set his eyes on the sky, she said, he was looking at Saturn, the moon, and the sun; he could never have predicted the discovery of remote galaxies or objects such as quasars. Centuries later, when a team of physicists went looking for neutron stars, they discovered colliding black holes.

“Who knows what else is out there?” Levin said.

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

View original:

This Is the Sound of Two Black Holes Colliding

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Is the Sound of Two Black Holes Colliding

Area Doctor Seeks SEO Boost

by SteffenWheen Posted on April 7, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Here’s one way to drum up some business.

The Times’ Letters Editor should talk to the Times’ sponsored content department. This could be a bold new revenue stream.

Source: 

Area Doctor Seeks SEO Boost

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Area Doctor Seeks SEO Boost

The War Over Austerity Is Over. Republicans Won.

by nowy24login12 Posted on December 11, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The main thing you need to know about today’s budget agreement is that it’s very modest. It repeals a little bit of the sequester cuts, and pays for it with a few small cuts in entitlements and some even smaller increases in user fees. Overall, the numbers are tiny enough that it’s hard to see how anyone can get either too excited or too outraged over it.

Needless to say, this hasn’t stopped the usual suspects (Heritage, Club for Growth, various tea party groups) from acting as though it represents the end of Western civilization. But they’ve overplayed their hands this time, and GOP leaders in the House have apparently had enough of these clowns. Both John Boehner and Eric Cantor essentially told them to piss off, and I suspect that this agreement is going to get a lot of Republican votes. I’ll predict at least 150 Republican votes in the House, maybe more. The tea party rump is truly going to be a rump this time.

That said, it was interesting reading the reaction of conservative wonk-star Yuval Levin to the deal:

This deal would amount to the Democrats accepting the implications of their misjudgment in abiding the Budget Control Act in 2011….It doesn’t much change the terms reached in the original Budget Control Act and sequester deal, and essentially cements the Democrats’ loss and miscalculation in that deal.

The Democrats’ hope, given that they control both the White House and the Senate, was to replace the sequester with some combination of tax increases and more palatable spending cuts….That the Democrats would accept a deal like this is a pretty striking indication of how the Republican House has changed the conversation on the spending front since 2010. Think of it this way: In their first budget after re-taking the majority—the FY 2012 Ryan budget, passed in 2011—the House Republicans wanted discretionary spending to be $1.039 trillion in 2014 and $1.047 trillion in 2015. These budgets were of course described by the Democrats and the political press (but I repeat myself) as some reversion to humanity’s barbaric past. Yet this proposed deal with the Democrats would put discretionary spending at $1.012 trillion in 2014 and $1.014 trillion in 2015—in both cases below that first House Republican budget.

To some extent, Levin is probably overstating his case in order to nudge conservatives on board a deal he thinks is palatable—and away from yet another round of government shutdowns, which he correctly views as disastrous for Republicans. Still, he’s basically right: Democrats originally believed the sequester would never happen. Either the supercommittee would replace it, or else Republicans would eventually cave in because they couldn’t tolerate the defense cuts. But that turned out not to be true. They aren’t happy with the defense cuts, but in the end, to the surprise of Democrats, they’ve decided they can live with them.

The ultimate result, as Levin says correctly, is a budget that’s below even the pipe-dream Ryan budget of 2011. I’d make a bit less of this than Levin, since Ryan’s budgets have always backloaded their cuts, but it’s still pretty remarkable. Two years ago, Ryan’s budget was basically at the outer limit of mainstream conservative wish lists. Today it looks tame.

Quibbles aside, Levin is right: Republicans have massively changed the spending conversation since 2010. Austerity has won.

Originally posted here: 

The War Over Austerity Is Over. Republicans Won.

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The War Over Austerity Is Over. Republicans Won.

Ohio fracking boom has not brought jobs

by 0c4g78x Posted on March 22, 2013

Ohio fracking boom has not brought jobs

By John Upton

Jason Shenk

Did you hear the joke about how fracking creates jobs?

We heard it, too. We heard it from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. We heard it from the fracking industry. We heard it from the press.

Well here comes a punchline that’s darker than a fracker’s heart: In northeastern Ohio, where a fracking boom kicked off 2011, there was no more jobs growth last year than there was in the state’s unfracked western and southern regions.

That’s the conclusion of a new report [PDF] published by Cleveland State University’s Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs. The report was not peer-reviewed.

The study found that overall spending in counties with the richest shale reserves increased by 21.1 percent in 2012, compared with a 6.4 percent increase in counties where no fracking is underway. The more shale buried beneath a county, the more money is likely to be spent there in the era of fracking, according to the study’s findings.

But that economic bounce did not translate to jobs growth. In shale-rich counties, employment grew by 1.4 percent between 2011 and 2012. In fracker-free counties, employment grew by 1.3 percent.

Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs

The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services says that employment in well drilling, pipeline construction, and similar work was up last year. So what’s going on? It’s impossible to tell from the report, but it has been speculated that fracking could be killing jobs in other sectors, such as tourism and farming. From a Midwest Energy News report published in January:

Tish O’Dell, co-founder of the group Mothers Against Drilling in Our Neighborhoods (MADION) in the Cleveland suburb of Broadview Heights, said the number of jobs created by fracking should be measured against the possible impacts on industries including farming, dairies and tourism.

“If you were going to do a really serious study you would look at these things,” she said. “If water is contaminated and fish die, what are the fishermen going to do? If you have parks where people go for peace and quiet, what happens when you turn it into an industrial landscape? If you have an organic dairy and the soil is polluted, what does that mean? These are all valid questions.”

Meanwhile, leaders in the state have started lamenting the lack of fracking jobs going to Ohioans. Gov. John Kasich (R) brought the issue up a few months ago, The Columbus Dispatch reported:

“You could have a situation where we are not getting the jobs, [the oil and gas companies are] taking the resources, and all their profits and they’re heading home,” Kasich said. “That is not acceptable to me. Now, we don’t have the conclusive evidence that this is happening yet, but I want you all to know, and I want the companies to know that this is an extremely serious matter, and we expect them to be responsive to the people of this state.”

Kasich made these remarks Wednesday during, of all things, a ceremony in his office honoring the 2012 Ohio State football team, with some of the Buckeyes’ players standing behind him. Perhaps as a result, little attention was paid to Kasich’s warning at the time. He has routinely said shale drilling should lead to jobs for Ohioans and not “foreigners,” meaning people from other states.

The lack of jobs growth for Ohioans living on fracked (and now polluted) land appears to be yet another sad case of communities getting sucker punched after selling out to fossil fuel companies. There’s your punchline.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

,

Politics

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

See original article:

Ohio fracking boom has not brought jobs

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, Northeastern, ONA, organic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ohio fracking boom has not brought jobs