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text:
Double dipping for success
By: Brooke Timpson
International business management student Adrienne Marshall will be working at the Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C. this summer. Marshall also has a degree in history and political science from Ottawa U.
It's that time of the year again and many students are dealing with the end of the semester crunch: projects, papers and employment are at the top of most to-do lists. But for one Algonquin student, college studies are a key part of her summer plans.
While international business management student Adrienne Marshall won't be in a classroom this summer, she will be using the skills and knowledge she acquired at Algonquin during her internship with the Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C.
"I was a history and poli sci major and that didn't really help me find a job," said Marshall, who completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Ottawa.
Marshall will be working on commercial policy and international business development with a focus of cyber security during her four-month internship.
She also gives her one-year program a lot of credit for her successful application.
"When I did my phone interview (the interviewers) were surprised because they had never seen someone with this type of experience who was just out of college."
"Most of the (other interns) are coming straight out of university," said Marshall,
"I think I am the only (intern) with university, college and a bit of relevant work experience that I was able to get from my program."
"My program here at Algonquin requires me to do projects that are almost like an equivalent to a thesis," said Marshall.
"We're doing a business plan for a real company and you have to contact them and present them something that a real employee in a paid position would do. It's a great practical experience."
This graduate certificate program is partly sponsored by and works closely with the Forum for International Trade Training, a Canadian not-for-profit organization that aims to promote international trade and industry related certification programs.
Ready for whatever the internship might throw at her, Marshall feels prepared and ready to dive into her budding career with her graduate certificate in hand.
"Our classroom (and course work) has been such a great experience. We're all able to share in experiences and it makes what I'm learning even better."
Algonquin Reads maps out
BHTM student lands big time job
New College ward rep Laine Johnson wants to tackle housing challenges
Jan 26, 2023 Anthony Peck
Students and professors question approach to course feedback
Jan 25, 2023 Arty Sarkisian
Community members have a role to play in learning to manage their data privacy
Jan 25, 2023 Brahim Ait Ouzineb

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Gladiator Championship Wrestling Champions Look Ahead To Nassau Event
Allen Sarven, Hernandez Rafael Shawn, Nick Cara and Travis Bagent.
As of Friday, June 5, 2015
By BRENT STUBBS
Senior Sports Reporter
bstubbs@tribunemedia.net
NICK Cara and three other world champions will be among a list of eight Gladiator Championship Wrestling (GCW) competitors who will be in New Providence to promote the Xtreme Gladiator Championship that will be held over the Independence holiday weekend at the Melia Nassau Beach Resort.
The GCW Gladiators will travel to South Andros, where they will make a special appearance at the regatta on Saturday, before they return to Nassau on Monday for a press conference at the Melia.
Cara, the GCW and ECW world champion, arrived in town ahead of the group to promote the event. He serves as the president and CEO of the GCW and executive producer.
The others, including Allen Sarven, former WWF Hardcore Champion; Rafael Shawn Hernandez, the TRA World champion and Travis Bagent, the Arm Wrestling World champion, will arrive on Friday with the others before heading to Andros on Saturday.
"We are here to promote the Xtreme Championships that we are taking to the world," Cara said. "We have an event that we put on in every state in the United States and we also go to Europe. But this is the first time that we are doing an event in the islands, so we decided to start the promotions now."
While in Andros, Cara said the Gladiators will provide an opportunity for the spectators to meet and greet the superstars and they will also put on an exhibition in their bid to encourage Bahamians to gear themselves up for the showdown in July.
"We are very pleased to be able to come to the Bahamas and put on this promotion," said Cara, who has visited the country a few times but never in his capacity with the GGW. "We are very excited because we are confident that we can find some competitors who can compete in the event."
On Monday, Cara said they will outline all of the criteria for those interested in competing in the sport.
As for their trip to Andros, Corey Ferguson, one of the local organisers, said they are looking forward to promoting the sport. Ferguson, who serves as the marketing and public relations officer for Solar Verde Bahamas Ltd, one of the sponsors of the GWC, said they have a series of events in which the superstars will participate when they get to Andros.
"We've never done anything like this before, so we are looking forward to taking them to Andros and working along with the regtta committee," Ferguson said. "We want to do whatever we can to help promote the sport and get the Bahamians ready to compete in the big event that we will be putting on in July."
Xtreme Gladiator Championship set for South Andros next month
Gladiator Championship Wrestling to make pro wrestling debut at Arawak Cay August 29
All-Andros Regatta gets $5,000 cash and new sponsor
Gladiator wrestlers all set for Arawak Cay debut
All-Andros Regatta puts Morgan's Bluff in spotlight
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text:
esiegel
Our great cosmic motion
By esiegel on June 28, 2013.
"It's a wonderful world. You can't go backwards. You're always moving forward. It's the wonderful part about life. And that's terrific." -Harvey Fierstein
Yes, it's true. As stationary and secure as it seems when you plant your feet firmly on the ground, the reality is we are always moving through the cosmos.
Image credit: H.A. Rey, via Samuel J. Wormley of http://www.edu-observatory.org/.
About its axis, the Earth spins around once per day. Unless you're at the exact north or south pole of the planet, that means that you are in motion, too! The fastest-moving among us are located at the equator, moving just over 1,000 miles-per-hour (1,600 km/hr), decreasing steadily as you move farther away in latitude. (Just north of the 45th parallel, where I am, I move at about 700 miles-per-hour, or just over 1,100 km/hr.)
But regardless of where you are on Earth, we're all moving faster than that.
Image credit: Larry McNish of RASC Calgary.
Orbiting around the Sun annually, we traverse a giant, nearly-circular ellipse some 584 million miles (942 million km) in circumference. (Or, for an ellipse, in perimeter.) That comes out to a speed of 67,000 miles-per-hour (107,000 km/hr). In fact, that's so fast that it makes more sense to talk about miles (or kilometers) per second rather than per hour: 18.5 miles-per-second or 30 km/s!
But it's not like the Sun is a stationary object, either.
Image credit: European Southern Observatory.
Located some 25,000 light-years from the galactic center, the Sun speeds through our gigantic Milky Way along with the vast majority of other stars in our vicinity, making an elliptical-shaped, wobbly orbit. The last time the Sun was in this location relative to the Milky Way, reptiles and primitive dinosaurs dominated the Earth; it was some 225 million years ago in the Triassic period. Since our Sun was formed, we've made about 20 trips around the Milky Way, moving at a mean speed of about 137 miles-per-second (220 km/s).
So you're moving along with the rotating surface of the Earth, flying through space around the Sun, all while the entire Solar System speeds around the galaxy. But is the galaxy itself moving?
Image credit: Moravian College Astronomy, via Star Watch at http://www.astronomy.org/.
More importantly, how would we know?
Image credit: Eugenio Bianchi, Carlo Rovelli & Rocky Kolb.
You might think to look at the galaxies all around us. After all, you know that the Universe is expanding, and that the galaxies farther away from us are moving away faster and faster from us, directly proportional to their distance. It's a great idea, and a fantastic thing to try.
Unfortunately, it won't work.
Image credit: A. Liddle, from "Introduction to Modern Cosmology."
You see, the expansion of the Universe is by far the dominant effect on how fast objects are moving away from us on large scales, but on smaller scales, gravity can be very important. The gravitational effects from a large galaxy cluster or supercluster can cause a galaxy to move by hundreds or even thousands of kilometers-per-second different from what Hubble's law predicts.
This is well understood and expected, and is known as an object's peculiar velocity. Since our Universe is very clumpy and clustered, we'd expect our galaxy to have a peculiar motion, too. But even if we were successfully able to map out the nearby Universe, that wouldn't tell us what our own peculiar motion is.
Image credit: Richard Powell of http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/.
But there is a way to measure this, and we owe a great debt of thanks to the Cosmic Microwave Background for allowing us to do this!
Image credit: © 2005 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Physics Division.
About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, neutral atoms formed in the Universe for the first time, making it transparent to all the radiation left over from the Big Bang. That radiation then travels in a straight line for all eternity, stretching in wavelength as the Universe expands, until it runs into something.
Well, we're something, and so when we look in any direction in space, we see this leftover radiation with the same exact energy spectrum and temperature: about 2.725 Kelvin.
Image credit: NASA / COBE DMR science team.
The thing is, this isn't exactly what the microwave sky looks like. Last week, I gave you five facts you probably don't know about the Cosmic Microwave Background, but here's one more. You've probably seen this now-famous picture of the microwave sky as seen by the Planck satellite.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration.
This shows you the fluctuations about the mean temperature that we observe in the Cosmic Microwave background. Of course, you have to take away the mean temperature to show this; these are fluctuations on the order of tens to hundreds of microKelvin, as compared with the background temperature that's tens of thousands of times greater in magnitude. But there's something else that needs to be subtracted out: a directional red-and-blueshift caused by our own motion relative to the background radiation itself!
Image credit: DMR, COBE, NASA, Four-Year Sky Map.
There's a direction in the sky that the background radiation is redshifted by a maximum of about 3.3 milliKelvin, and 180 degrees away from that in the opposite direction, the radiation is blueshifted by the exact same amount. There are only two explanations: either the entire Universe is moving with respect to our galaxy by this amount, or it's our galaxy that's moving relative to this radiation. Given everything we know about physics, relativity, and the observed relative motion of every other galaxy in the Universe, we can be pretty confident that it's the latter.
Image credit: J. Delabrouille et al., arXiv:1207.3675 [astro-ph.CO], 2012.
This corresponds to a speed of about 670 km/s, or 416 miles-per-second; just over 0.2% the speed of light. This is a totally typical and reasonable peculiar velocity, although it's fair to say that we are uncertain as to what gravitational structure is causing it. (About 20 years ago, people assumed it was a mass known as the great attractor; that appears now to be ruled out as the cause of our peculiar motion.)
You may also notice that this dipole -- in spherical harmonics, this is known as l = 1 -- is omitted from all graphs of the cosmic microwave background's temperature fluctuations.
Image credit: Planck Collaboration: P. A. R. Ade et al., 2013, A&A Preprint.
That's because it has to be subtracted out, and if it were on the graph, it'd be a factor of thousands larger than all other points here. This is a little frustrating, because there actually is a primordial dipole (l = 1) component to the cosmic microwave background's fluctuations, but we are unable to measure it because of our own peculiar motion. In fact, if we're at all imperfect in subtracting it out, it could artificially lower the quadrupole moment, something which was heatedly discussed in the community about a decade ago.
Thanks a lot, gravity!
Although it doesn't look like -- thanks to dark energy -- we'll ever merge with any other galaxies beyond our local group, the presence of these distant masses continues to effect us gravitationally, and alter our motions through the cosmos. How great it is that here we are to see it!
By Mike (not verified) on 28 Jun 2013 #permalink
@Ethan -- Thank you very much for this detailed discussion of the CMB dipole, our proper motion, and the fact that I completely failed the orders-of-magnitude seminar in my previous comment ;-/
On a side note, I have to ask -- do Rocky and Eugenio *really* think our Universe is expanding ellipsoidally, or was that just their art department's flub?
By Michael Kelsey (not verified) on 28 Jun 2013 #permalink
I have an important question for you, is it the case that most of galaxies out there have the shape of a disk, I mean stars are distributed in two dimensions? and if so; what determines the axis of a disc-shaped galaxy?
By Mina Kamel (not verified) on 29 Jun 2013 #permalink
I am fascinated with the idea that there is a cosmic rest frame, a privileged inertial frame. The CMB dipole is evidence of a cosmic-global property ... so is it just a statistical global property or is it a local property of space? Ie, does our galaxy considered in isolation have an absolute motion?
For instance, does composition of large (relative to c) velocities actually work according to special relativity? Is it really transitive and associative, or might there be distortion? Is there some way to tell?
By Marshall (not verified) on 29 Jun 2013 #permalink
@Mina Kamel #3: You may be interested in the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_morphological_classification. Not all galaxies are disk shaped: "elliptical galaxies" range from spherical to football (rugby ball)-shaped blobs of stars. The "spiral" (disklike) galaxies also have significant variations. When there is a disk, its formation is driven the same way that solar system's become planar: if an initial spherical distribution of matter is rotating, then as it collapses under gravity that rotation will increase, from conservation of angular momentum. A fast-rotating body is most stable with its mass flat in the plane perpendicular to the rotation.
@Marshall #4: The CMB rest frame is *not* "privileged" in the relativistic sense. It is merely the frame of reference at which all of the motion of stuff in the Universe averages out to zero (or equivalently, the frame of all the matter in the universe from before it clumped up and started developing local motions).
No object "considered in isolation" can have an absolute linear motion. Motion is measurable only relative to some baseline. The CMB frame provides a very nice baseline against which all observers can agree.
The composition of velocities in special relativity is easily measurable in the laboratory. In my field, particle physics, short-lived particles are produced in collisions travelling at very high velocities. When those particles decay, their daughters are also travelling at high velocities, and so on through sometimes three or four stages. Our ability to both measure and predict these processes is completely dependent upon relativistic kinematics, which is therefore extremely well tested.
It is merely the frame of reference at which all of the motion of stuff in the Universe averages out to zero (or equivalently, the frame of all the matter in the universe from before it clumped up and started developing local motions).
Can you break this down further in caveman language. I'm having a hard time understanding what that means.
By crd2 (not verified) on 29 Jun 2013 #permalink
@ Michael Kelsey #5 There was another part of @ Mina Kamel #3 question I believe that maybe you can still clarify, "what determines the axis of a disc-shaped galaxy." My search to understand this turned up wikipedia anisotropy stating: "Cosmic anisotropy has also been seen in the alignment of galaxies' rotation axes."
Perhaps you, or of course Ethan, can elaborate. Thank you.
By Roy (not verified) on 29 Jun 2013 #permalink
@crd2 #6: I presented two different ways to think about what the "CMB rest frame" (or the "CMB dipole") means physically.
The first model I described as, "the frame of reference in which all of the motion of stuff in the Universe averages out to zero." Suppose that you're omniscient. You pull out your perfect spectrographic telescope and you measure the full 3D motion of every big object (galaxy or larger) in the visible universe. You also measure their distances perfectly, so you can subtract away the Hubble motion (cosmological expansion) of all those objects. Now you have a long list of motion vectors relative to us. If you add up all those vectors, you have the _net_ motion "of the Universe relative to us," or equivalently, our motion relative to the whole rest of the Universe (on average). That's what the CMB dipole is telling us.
The second version, "the frame of all the matter in the Universe before it clumped up," is just describing the CMB directly. At the time of last scattering (when the CMB photons stopped being absorbed and scattered by ions) the Universe was extremely close to just being a uniform, isotropic gas. No galaxies, no giant black holes, no nothing. Just a whole mess of gas, with the atoms zipping around randomly at a temperature around 3000 K.
Without structure, that whole Universal volume of gas was (by definition) at rest with respect to itself. Since then, the matter in the Universe has clumped up to form galaxies, clusters, and whatnot; the gravity between those objects caused them to move around locally (galaxies orbit one another, clusters collide, etc.). In this model, the CMB dipole tells us how our particular clump happens to be moving with respect to the original featureless gas.
"There are only two explanations: either the entire Universe is moving with respect to our galaxy by this amount, or it's our galaxy that's moving relative to this radiation."
I feel as though these are equivalent statements. At least today, if not in the past (i.e. what led to the motion or which thing was accelerated). Michael Kelsey's explanation in #8 furthers this belief. Is there some way in which these aren't equivalent, now?
Similarly, this makes me wonder if we need to (or can) find something now that's "causing" this motion. It's motion, not acceleration, right? So something had to cause it, but that could have happened billions of years ago, and I imagine it'd be nearly impossible to wind the clock back with enough detail to figure it out now. I mean, I assume the CMB photons being red- and blue-shifted in opposite directions would tend to exert a net braking force on any object interacting with them, but I also assume that that effect is negligible, even when summed over billions of years. (Not to mention the net force drops as the relative velocity does, so it's never likely to reduce motion to zero.)
By BenHead (not verified) on 01 Jul 2013 #permalink
Not really, Ben. Thinking so is how you get the Twins Paradox with Special Relativity.
Given your quoting there, why, though, did you stop there? Did this bit:
"Given everything we know about physics, relativity, and the observed relative motion of every other galaxy in the Universe, we can be pretty confident that it's the latter."
Not make you think twice? Or did you genuinely not see it?
By Wow (not verified) on 01 Jul 2013 #permalink
@Roy #7 (my long reply #8 appears after your post because yours was still caught in moderation when I wrote mine, so I never saw it): What determines the axis of rotation of galaxies? Our best understanding (and Ethan can explicate the supporting evidence better than I possibly could) is that it's essentially random.
The "evidence" for a large scale alignment of CMB multipoles (the so-called "Axis of Evil" cited in your Wikipedia link) is basically that one data point (at l=2) at the far lower left of Ethan's final plot, above. The claim is that the axis of that quadrupole moment lines up with the axis of our own motion (the dipole), whereas it "shouldn't line up" if everything were random. This is, as you might expect, a rather extraordinary and contentious claim. "Random" most certainly doesn't force anything to be _not_ aligned (consider the constellations, which are explicitly human pareidolia imposed on a random distribution); having two multipoles out of hundreds happen to line up is certainly no evidence for non-randomness.
The followup sentence you quoted, regarding alignment of galaxies' rotation axes, is stated in the article without citation. The articles I have read on the subject have seemed rather fuzzy to me; the statistical evidence for large-scale alignments are marginal at best. Also, I would expect there to be a significant selection bias in terms of needing the axis of rotation to be "close-ish" to perpendicular to our line of sight just so we can get a decent handle on the Doppler broadening due to the rotation (a face-on galaxy would have no measurable rotational Doppler).
So what *does* determine a rotation axis? The environment in which the collapsing clump of matter finds itself. Once you start having local or regional clumping of matter, then on those scales things are no longer homogeneous or isotropic (you have a clump over here, but not over there; you have a big clump off this way, but just a little clump way yonder). So the blob you're considering experiences different gravitational pulls, and different tidal torques, from different directions. Those will, over a long enough time, induce some net rotation, and as the clump collapses further, that rotation will be amplified just from conservation of angular momentum.
If a larger, collapsing clump fragments into pieces (for example, the presolar nebula collapsing to a dusty disk and a protostar, followed by that dusty disk forming planets), then you would expect those _pieces_ to have somewhat correlated alignment axes. Since the larger system started with some angular momentum, as it fragments that momentum will be shared among the pieces. The energy cost for having one of those piece flip its axis is quite large, and so is unlikely unless some catastrophic interaction (collision, merger, etc.) provides the necessary energy input.
By Michael Kelsey (not verified) on 01 Jul 2013 #permalink
Another nice article, Ethan. Pity though that the expansion illustration features galaxies on the surface of a balloon rather than the raisins in the cake. That might have got us into something really interesting: does the universe have an edge? There's a howling non-sequitur that can be found on even very reputable websites, to the effect that space is flat hence the universe must be infinite. Phooey! One for another day perhaps.
By John Duffield (not verified) on 01 Jul 2013 #permalink
Okay, another question. According to Ned Wrights tutorial, the question was asked " How can the universe be infinite if it was concentrated into a single point at the Big Bang"? His answer " The entire universe was not concentrated into a single point, but the observable universe was concentrated into a single point. Huh? This doesn't make sense. Either the universe is the entirety or merely a part of a whole.
By Tony Rotz (not verified) on 02 Jul 2013 #permalink
Sorry, is this 20 questions, and what are we playing to win?
Why does the universe have to be infinite?
@John Duffield #12: I don't understand why you call that a non sequitur; can you provide a citation?
A truly _flat_ (identically zero curvature) spacetime is necessarily not closed (in order to close, some part must have positive curvature). Therefore, a truly flat spacetime is either bounded with an edge, or unbounded and therefore infinite. If all you're saying is that we don't have data to choose between those alternatives, then you're correct.
The original point of inflation was to provide a mechanism by which an actually closed, curved spacetime could _appear_ flat to us (as our own Universe seems to), because we occupied such a small piece of the whole. Obviously, we have discovered in the subsequent 40-ish years that inflation has much more going for it than just solving the flatness problem.
@Michael Kelsey #15, @John Duffield #12 is correct in saying that spacetime can be flat, finite and have no boundary. The simplest case is the three dimensional torus.
Intuitively these three criteria would seem to require curvature but that is only because our intuition tries to construct such a closed universe "floating" within our own flat space, in which case you need to twist it around to get all its edges joined up.
The 2D torus is easier to visualise. Consider a flat square such that if you move along the square and reach a side "edge" you just reappear on the opposite side and continue moving. This is a (2D) flat finite space with no boundary. If you curve it around and glue the "edges" together you get the more familiar shape of (the surface of) a doughnut, which is a torus *with* curvature.
By Ray Hinde (not verified) on 02 Jul 2013 #permalink
Well point of fact John Duffield didn't say spacetime can be flat, finite, and boundaryless. Rather they suggested that it can be flat, finite, and therefore have a boundary. Apparently because the raisin bread anology suggests it because bread has an edge. Which is a bit like saying that the baloon anology suggests the univese has a nozzle.
By CB (not verified) on 02 Jul 2013 #permalink
@ 13 Tony
Our observable universe is not the whole of the Universe. Not by a long shot. There is nothing strange or weird about that. We are limited by the speed of light and passage of time. There are stars and galaxies out there that we will never ever observe. If you want an analogy.. maybe think of a fish in a pond. It can never ever observe all of the planet earth. Some things are just outside of it's range of observation.
As for observable universe vs whole and single point, again correct. We know how big our observable region is.. you know.. 14BLy x 2 plus expansion.. think it's around 80or something billion lightyears.... turn the clock backwards..13 billion years and you get a point.. or some small scale.. like 10^-50 or something.... But you are still left with the rest of unobservable universe which again shrinks.. but in some other points.. all over.. we don't know how big that was, because we don't know how big the whole Universe is. I think it's safe to say we'll never know. On the other hand.. the space at the edges of our observable universe is moving away from our point faster than speed of light. Thus in effect, our observable universe is all there is for us. But it's not all of the Universe.
By Sinisa Lazarek (not verified) on 02 Jul 2013 #permalink
@Ray Hindle #16: I'm still confused, Ray. Probably because I'm an experimental physicist, and neither a theorist nor a mathematician.
It's not the "embedding" that confuses me, it's the object itself. If you want a space with a periodic coordinate, without some non-physical "teleportation" to get the periodicity, then I think you _have_ to have non-zero, positive curvature along that axis.
If you can point me to a (hopefully understandable!) citation that explains otherwise, I would really appreciate it.
"Which is a bit like saying that the baloon anology suggests the univese has a nozzle."
And will eventually be turned into a humorous rubber Giraffe later on...
@Michael Kinsey #19:Trying to visualise non-Euclidean spaces *is* difficult :) A Wikipedia entry for the 2D flat torus is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus#Flat_torus
and the principle applies exactly the same as for a 3D flat torus (but with less mind bending).
I think you still need to consider the problem of trying to mentally embed the flat finite no-boundary space into a visualisation within our 3D flat space because that is the cause of the confusion. The flat torus simply can't be visualised that way.
I put "edges" in quotation marks because they aren't really edges (and there is no teleportation). The "edges" are actually joined to opposite "edges", but this join can't be represented in flat 3D space, so they just represent a way of trying to conveniently visualise the torus.
Consider a chess board with squares numbered by the usual a1 to h8 system. For example e5 is adjacent to d4,e4,f4,d5,f5,d6,e6 and f6 so a king on e5 can move to any of these 8 squares. Now suppose we use the chessboard as if it were a 2D torus. Then the squares adjacent to a1 for example are (in the same order) h8,a8,b8,h1,b1,h2, a2,b2. If you were a king and you lived in this universe to could move to any of these 8 squares. And you would see your universe as flat finite and without boundary.
It's like the problem of visualising the shape of space near a black hole or when walking into the TARDIS. One can't, or at least I can't.
I think the problem you might be having is that the term "curvature" doesn't necessarily mean what it does in vernacular terms. It has a very precise mathematical definition, more akin to something like "noneuclidean-ness", if that makes any sense. For instance, consider the earth's surface (assuming it's a sphere for simplicity). Just as one example, you can draw a triangle on the earth's surface which has the sum of its angles greater than 180 degrees. (consider two points on the equator and the north pole, for instance). That shows that this surface is mathematically curved.
Now, surfaces such as a torus or a cylinder appear to us to be curved surfaces in vernacular terms. However, in mathematical terms cylinders and tori are flat surfaces. This can be seen simply from topological considerations. You can take a cylinder, cut along a line parallel to its axis, and unwrap it to form a flat plane, all without tearing the surface. (Think of it in reverse, take a sheet of paper and roll it up to form a cylinder. You can do so without tearing the paper.) Simiarly for a torus, cut through the torus and unwrap it to make a cylinder. We already saw that the cylinder is flat. (Again with the paper analogy, roll it to form a cylinder, then join the two ends to make your torus.)
These surfaces are manifestly Euclidean, since you can "unroll" them into a flat plane. We simply define lines, etc. as we do in Euclidean geometry, but transformed by the "rolling up" process. Thus, a triangle on a plane gets transformed into a triangle on a cylinder. The "rolling up" process preserves the angles between the lines, so we still have a Euclidean triangle with a sum of angles of 180 degrees.
By Sean T (not verified) on 02 Jul 2013 #permalink
so... Reddit is also discussing this.. my old-man attitude is that the universe is bounded and finite. but people are always pointing out to me that Lambda equals one and that means the universe is flat and if it is flat it is infinite.
Is there anyway that it is flat locally but curved on really huge scales?
or can a flat universe be bounded and therefor finite? (or does it work the other way? finite first and then bounded..?)
By Kevin Dowd (not verified) on 03 Jul 2013 #permalink
nasa re WMAP: "We now know (as of 2013) that the universe is flat with only a 0.4% margin of error. This suggests that the Universe is infinite in extent; however, since the Universe has a finite age, we can only observe a finite volume of the Universe"
"Is there anyway that it is flat locally but curved on really huge scales? "
Absolutely. We can only know the universe is flat by measuring, and our measurements have error bars. I recall Ethan had an article on that very subject. Oh hey google found it:
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2012/07/18/how-big-is-the-entir…
@Michael Kelsey #15, re "I don't understand why you call that a non sequitur; can you provide a citation?" There's plenty of websites such as http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_shape.html which say things like "We now know (as of 2013) that the universe is flat with only a 0.4% margin of error. This suggests that the Universe is infinite in extent". Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_Universe#Global_geometry . Or see http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#RB which says "So we know empirically that the volume of the Universe is more than 20 times bigger than volume of the observable Universe". Or see http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Is_the_Universe_finite_… where you can read "So you have two possibilities for a flat Universe: one infinite, like a plane, and one finite, like a torus, which is also flat". See CB's link and note what Ethan said: "we know that the entire Universe extends for at least 14 trillion light years in diameter".
I can't give you a citation for the non-sequitur however. That's me saying that. On a very large scale energy density is uniform and space is homogeneous. So expansion apart, light doesn't curve, there's no overall gravity, no overall curvature, and the universe is flat. Not nearly flat, flat. But it is expanding, and it can't be expanding if the "pressure" is counterbalanced at all locations. So it can't be infinite. So it has to be something like a ball. For an analogy think of a droplet of water. Waves within the droplet undergo total internal reflection. This option simply doesn't feature in the given alternatives. And from what I know of fundamental physics and relativity and Einstein's greatest blunder, it's the right option.
@Ray Hinde #16: as CB said, I meant a flat finite universe with no instrinsic curvature. See http://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.5086v1.pdf where the Planck collaboration reported no evidence for a torus.
@Sinisa, In other words the entire universe did not spring from the same Big Bang inflaton model?
No, the entire universe is more than our visible universe. It came from the same Big Bang event and nothing SL said implies it didn't.
"Is there anyway that it is flat locally but curved on really huge scales?"
The earth.
Looks flat to me, well, if I'm on a river plain or on a large body of water it does.
But people know the earth in its entirety is spherical.
No, all of the Universe underwent inflation. But it already had "some" size. Then, every single quanta of that space inflated to sizes that far surpass what our observable universe is.
Singularity universe, which what you imagine as starting from a single point just can't work. That's why inflation was invented in the first place.
Kevin Dowd,
See my post above. A flat universe can indeed be bounded. A torus for instance, despite how it appears to us, is a flat surface that is obviously bounded. To really understand this, consider a 2-torus, ie. a typical donut in our familiar 3 spatial dimensions. Now, intrinsic curvature is mathematically the deviation from our Euclidean geometry that we learned in school. Imagine a 2-D creature living on a piece of paper. His world is obviously flat. Now, unbeknownst to our 2-D critter, who can't perceive a third spatial dimension, we roll that piece of paper into a cylinder. Assume that our critter is the 2D version of Euclid; he's developed a geometry relevant to his flat universe. How would this geometry change after we roll up the paper? Remeber, he can't perceive the third dimension, so his geometry does not change. Now, to complete the analogy, roll up the cylinder so that the open ends are joined together, and you get a 2-torus, which again would not appear any different in terms of the geometry to our 2D Euclid. Therefore, the 2-torus is a flat surface.
Ethan -thanks for your posts - I enjoy them greatly - and the comments are an education unto themselves. Also enjoy your avatars - are you a Burner? If not, you should go - you'd be a hit!
By ed federoff (not verified) on 05 Jul 2013 #permalink
What better way to say farewell than with a slew of costume pictures from this year's (coming) Halloween? Happy Halloween 2017! From Ethan Siegel and Starts With A Bang. Keep looking to the Universe. And we'll have a lifetime of wonderful things to still explore. Goodbye, Scienceblogs,…
Ask Ethan: Why Did Light Arrive 1.7 Seconds After Gravitational Waves In The Neutron Star Merger?
"Delay is the deadliest form of denial." -C. Northcote Parkinson Every massless particle and wave travels at the speed of light when it moves through a vacuum. Over a distance of 130 million light years, the gamma rays and gravitational waves emitted by merging neutron stars arrived offset by a…
Five Discoveries In Fundamental Physics That Came As Total Surprises
"On what can we now place our hopes of solving the many riddles which still exist as to the origin and composition of cosmic rays?" –Victor Francis Hess It's often said that advanced in physics aren't met with "eureka!" but rather with "that's funny," but the truth is even stranger sometimes.…
Even while the world suffers, investing in science is non-negotiable
"I am looking at the future with concern, but with good hope." –Albert Schweitzer Every so often, the argument comes up that science is expendable. That we're simply investing too much of our resources — too much public money — into an endeavor with no short-term benefits. Meanwhile, there's…
Merging Neutron Stars Deliver Deathblow To Dark Matter And Dark Energy Alternatives
"Dark matter is interesting. Basically, the Universe is heavier than it should be. There's whole swathes of stuff we can't account for." -Talulah Riley One of the most puzzling facts about the Universe is that 95% of the energy in it, in the forms of dark matter and dark energy, are completely…


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text:
NBC Orders 'Revolution' To Series
Posted May 8th, 2012 by Janice Kay
Before the "upfronts" are scheduled to occur, NBC has already announced that they have given a series order to the show 'Revolution.'
If there was ever a show that screamed "this has to be a sci-fi series," it has to be 'Revolution.' Written by Eric Kripke (creator of 'Supernatural'), directed by Jon Favreau (who directed the 'Iron Man' movies and 'Cowboys and Aliens') and produced by J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot (do I really need to list their accomplishments?), the series is described as an epic adventure thriller of a family who attempts to reunite with each other in a "world of empty cities, local militias and heroic freedom fighters, where every single piece of technology (computers, planes, cars, phones and lights) has mysteriously blackened out forever."
The cast is pretty impressive with many of them already having played other characters in the sci-fi/fantasy genre. Here's who will be starring in the pilot:
Billy Burke ('The Twilight Saga' franchise, 'Fringe') in the lead role of Miles Matheson, "an amazingly resourceful man with a dark and dangerous side.
Giancarlo Esposito ('Once Upon a Time', 'Breaking Bad') as Captain Neville who happens to be a cunning hunter with a good heart.
Tracy Spiridakos ('Being Human') who plays Charlie Matheson.
Anna Lise Phillips ('Terra Nova') who plays unarmed doctor Maggie.
David Lyons ('The Cape') as the charismatic Marine named Bass.
Maria Howell who will be a regal and fiercely intelligent obstetrician named Grace.
Andrea Roth ('Ringer', 'Rescue Me') as Rachael Matheson, the mother of two young kids.
JD Pardo ('The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2', 'Cinderella Story') as Nate, an expert archer.
Zak Orth will play Aaron, a brilliant scientist left in a world where physics no longer follows the same rules.
Tim Guinee ('Iron Man', 'Iron Man 2') as Ben Matheson.
Since nothing was said otherwise, the series sounds like it will be starting in the fall as opposed to being a mid-season replacement show. Seeing that 'Grimm' has already been renewed for a second season, 'Revolution' can easily be aired as a lead in or be shown after making NBC's Friday nights worth staying home for.
So are you impressed with the pedigree of 'Revolution?'
Anna Lise Phillips
Bad Robot
Davi Lyons
Eric Kripke
Maria Howell
Tim Guinee
Tracy Spiridakos
Zak Orth
Janice Kay
Janice's first memories of the genre were of watching the original 'Star Trek' and classic 'Doctor Who' episodes (Tom Baker, aka the Fourth Doctor, was her first). Soon, she was introduced to 'Godzilla' and her addiction then spread to books, magazines, movies and comics. Janice continued as a closet geek as her thirst and love for sci-fi grew and was only second to her love of baking. Then one night, on a whim, she answered a tweet to be a writer for ScienceFiction.com and the geek girl insider her was soon set free. Within 3 years she became the Senior Editor for the site. When not writing or editing for ScienceFiction.com, Janice is scouring the internet to feed her sci-fi cravings while defending conspiracy theories, protecting scientific theorems and loving all things science fiction.... and baking cookies.
Help Track The Lizard In The 'Amazing Spider-Man' Viral Campaign
What's On Comic Book Stands – May 9th
Shocking Return: Netflix Reveals Another Character Will Return In 'The Defenders'
Masking The Pain: Netflix Releases New Clip of Billy Russo In Therapy From 'The Punisher' Season 2
TV Review: 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: S.O.S'
Creator Salim Akil Explains Why 'Black Lightning' Starts With A Retired Superhero


At the MOU signing between NYP and JA Singapore: (from left) senior manager of FedEx, Derrick Teng; SBM senior lecturer, Alan Fong; SBM deputy director Esther Ho; SBM director Loh Chuu Yi; chairman of JA Dr Patrick Liew; executive director of JA, Ng Hau Yee; and SBM senior lecturer Tan Teck Chuan.
SBM students can now enjoy a variety of free customised courses thanks to a new MOU with Junior Achievement (JA) Singapore. JA Worldwide is one of the world's largest non-profit organisation dedicated to inspiring and preparing young people to succeed in a global economy. The customised courses from JA aim to help our students to be future ready for their careers. Through the JA Career JumpStart program - which includes topics on Career Success, Personal Finance, Interview Skills, Job Shadow and Be Entrepreneurial - our students may make a smooth transition into the workforce. The MOU also affirms the good working relationship that has been developed over the years.


text:
Woman in Passage
by Helen E. Nebeker
Jean Rhys died May 14, 1979, at the age of 89, acclaimed after years of obscurity as perhaps the major literary discovery of the 20th century. Born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams in 1890, West Indian by birth, Welsh and Creole by heritage, English by tradition and experience, artist to the very core of her being, this tiny ultra-feminine woman (whose dying request was reportedly "Please, my eyeshadow") has left an indelible imprint on the literature of the 20th century, achieving even greater importance as her work is assessed by a new and growing readership in the 21st century. Fifty years ahead of her time intellectually and perceptually, Rhys evokes in the body of her five brief novels the stifling ghosts of an almost malignant Victorian heritage.
In this second edition of what is acknowledged to have been the first complete study of the novels of Jean Rhys by a woman—not a feminist—scholar, Professor Nebeker discusses each novel in careful detail, substantively facing basic and unanswered vritical questions concerning Rhys's undeniable power. In analyzing Rhys's body of work as an oeuvre, Nebeker uncovers levels of complexity, technical and thematic, which lead into shadowy mazes of Freudian symbols and Jungian archetype. These complexities of symbol and archetype culminate in the final genius of Rhys's last and most acclaimed novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, where as Nebeker demonstrates, Rhys herself emerges as Myth-maker, revealing the archetypal female consciousness.
In this second edition, Nebeker makes no pretense of undertaking analysis of the growing body of critical comment. The work accomplished in the original study leaves her content with what she has striven to do: assess the living art of a woman prodigy in her personal "voyage in the dark," into the abyss of life.


Started my ham radio career relatively early, age 12, at my home town club station LZ2KWR. The first contest followed a year later, but at that time I was mostly interested in ARDF and DXing. Got really serious about contesting in the 90's during my college years. Together with LZ3SM, LZ3FN (my WRTC teammate), and LZ5VK (then a high school student, now WRTC referee) we made a lot of noise on the bands and on the roofs from LZ1KBB, the Sofia University club station. Later, at the end of 90's, with LZ1ZD and others, I got involved in starting LZ9W, which has now become one of the largest M/M stations in Europe. Somewhere along the way dropped first the ARDF, then the DXing.
In 2001 I moved to the U.S. to attend grad school at Penn State. Here I got the unique chance to operate the very impressive contest station that WA3FET and NW3Z had built at K3CR. Since then I have piloted K3CR in more than 100 contests. Won a few, lost many more. Recently obsessed with the idea of getting 10 top 3 finishes in the US SOABHP category in each of CQ WW CW, CQ WPX CW and ARRL DX CW. Not very far away, but not there yet.
Undoubtedly, the WRTC is the most important event in Amateur Radio contesting. Not only because it is the contest of all contests. It is also a gathering point for many top-notch contesters among competitors, referees and visitors. I already had the privilege to compete in WRTC 2006 in Brazil and I'm very excited to have the opportunity to do it again – this time in Boston.


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Peter Schwartzstein on 'The explosive secrets of Egypt's deserts' – the recovery of military maps, aerial photographs, personal journals and sketchbooks from the Second World War to plot the vast minefields that continue to haunt 'one of the most hotly contested killing fields of the twentieth century'. You can find more in Aldino Bondesan's 'Between history and geography: The El Alamein Project', in Jill Edwards (ed) El Alamein and the struggle for North Africa (Oxford, 2012).
I discussed those minefields in 'The natures of war' (DOWNLOADS tab), and that essay intersects in all sorts of ways with my good friend Gastòn Gordillo's project on terrain, so here is a short reflection from him entitled Terrain, forthcoming in Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen.
Not the 'war on drugs' but the war through drugs: Mike Jay's sharp review essay ('Don't fight sober') on Łukasz Kamieński's brilliantly titled Shooting Up: a short history of drugs and war and Norman Ohler's over-the-top Blitzed: drugs in Nazi Germany (for another, equally critical take on Ohler, see Richard J Evans's splenetic review here; more – and more appreciative – from Rachel Cooke's interview with Ohler here).
In Shooting Up, a historical survey of drugs in warfare that grew out of his research into future military applications of biotechnology, Łukasz Kamieński lists some of the obstacles to getting the facts straight. State authorities tend to cloak drug use in secrecy, for tactical advantage and because it frequently conflicts with civilian norms and laws. Conversely it can be exaggerated to strike fear into the enemy, or the enemy's success and morale can be imputed to it. When drugs are illegal, as they often are in modern irregular warfare, trafficking or consumption is routinely denied. The negative consequences of drug use are covered up or explained away as the result of injury or trauma, and longer-term sequels are buried within the complex of post-traumatic disorders. Soldiers aren't fully informed of the properties and potency of the drugs they're consuming. Different perceptions of their role circulate even among participants fighting side by side.
Kamieński confines the use of alcohol in war to his prologue and wisely so, or the rest of the book would risk becoming a footnote to it. A historical sweep from the Battle of Hastings to Waterloo or ancient Greece to Vietnam suggests that war has rarely been fought sober. This is unsurprising in view of the many different functions alcohol performs. It has always been an indispensable battlefield medicine and is still pressed into service today as antiseptic, analgesic, anaesthetic and post-trauma stimulant. It has a central role in boosting morale and small-group bonding; it can facilitate the private management of stress and injury; and it makes sleep possible where noise, discomfort or stress would otherwise prevent it. After the fighting is done, it becomes an aid to relaxation and recovery.
All these functions are subsidiary to its combat role and Kamieński's particular interest, the extent to which drugs can transform soldiers into superhuman fighting machines. 'Dutch courage' – originally the genever drunk by British soldiers during the Thirty Years' War – has many components. With alcohol, soldiers can tolerate higher levels of pain and hardship, conquer fear and perform acts of selfless daring they would never attempt without it. It promotes disinhibition, loosens cultural taboos and makes troops more easily capable of acts that in civilian life would be deemed criminal or insane. The distribution of alcohol and other drugs by medics or superior officers has an important symbolic function, giving soldiers permission to perform such acts and to distance themselves from what they become when they're intoxicated.
Opium, cannabis and coca all played supporting roles on the premodern battlefield but it was only with the industrialisation of pharmaceutical production that other drugs emerged fully from alcohol's shadow. Morphine was widely used for the first time in the American Civil War and the 19th-century cocaine boom began with research into its military application. Freud was first alerted to it by the work of the army surgeon Theodor Aschenbrandt, who in 1883 secretly added it to the drinking water of Bavarian recruits and found that it made them better able to endure hunger, strain and fatigue. During the First World War cocaine produced in Java by the neutral Dutch was exported in large quantities to both sides. British forces could get it over the counter in products such as Burroughs Wellcome's 'Forced March' tablets, until alarms about mass addiction among the troops led to a ban on open sales under the Defence of the Realm Act in 1916.
During the 1930s a new class of stimulants emerged from the laboratory, cheap to produce, longer-acting and allegedly less addictive. Amphetamine was first brought to market in the US by Smith, Kline and French in 1934 in the form of a bronchial inhaler, Benzedrine, but its stimulant properties were soon recognised and it was made available in tablet form as a remedy for narcolepsy and a tonic against depression. As with cocaine, one of its first applications was as a performance booster in sport. Its use by American athletes during the Munich Olympic Games in 1936 brought it to the attention of the German Reich and by the end of the following year the Temmler pharmaceutical factory in Berlin had synthesised a more powerful variant, methamphetamine, and trademarked it under the name Pervitin. As Norman Ohler relates in Blitzed, research into its military applications began almost immediately; it was used in combat for the first time in the early stages of the Second World War. Ohler's hyperkinetic, immersive prose evokes its subjective effects on the German Wehrmacht far more vividly than any previous account, but it also blurs the line between myth and reality.
When I deployed to Iraq as an infantry soldier in 2008 I never imagined I would become a pseudo-expert in concrete, but that is what happened—from small concrete barriers used for traffic control points to giant ones to protect against deadly threats like improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and indirect fire from rockets and mortars. Miniature concrete barriers were given out by senior leaders as gifts to represent entire tours. By the end my deployment, I could tell you how much each concrete barrier weighed. How much each barrier cost. What crane was needed to lift different types. How many could be emplaced in a single night. How many could be moved with a military vehicle before its hydraulics failed.
Baghdad was strewn with concrete—barriers, walls, and guard towers. Each type was named for a state, denoting their relative sizes and weights. There were small barriers like the Jersey (three feet tall; two tons), medium ones like the Colorado (six feet tall; 3.5 tons) and Texas (six feet, eight inches tall; six tons), and large ones like the Alaska (12 feet tall; seven tons). And there were T-walls (12 feet tall; six tons), and actual structures such as bunkers (six feet tall; eight tons) and guard towers (15 to 28 feet tall).
Concrete also gave soldiers freedom to maneuver in urban environments. In the early years of the war, US forces searched for suitable spaces in which to live. Commanders looked for abandoned factories, government buildings, and in some situations, schools. Existing structures surrounded by walled compounds of some type were selected because there was little in the environment to use for protection—such as dirt to fill sandbags, earthworks, or existing obstacles. As their skills in employing concrete advanced, soldiers could occupy any open ground and within weeks have a large walled compound with hardened guard towers.
Now up into the air. My posts on the US Air Force's Bombing Encyclopedia (here and here) continue to attract lots of traffic; I now realise that the project – a targeting gazetteer for Strategic Air Command – needs to be understood in relation to a considerable number of other texts. Elliott Child has alerted me to the prisoner/defector interrogations that provided vital intelligence for the identification of targets – more soon, I hope – while those targets also wound their way into the President's Daily Brief (this was an era when most Presidents read the briefs and took them seriously, though Nixon evidently shared Trump's disdain for the CIA: see here.) James David has now prepared a National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book (No 574) which provides many more details based on redacted releases of Briefs for the period 1961-77.
Two of the most critical intelligence targets throughout the Cold War were Soviet missile and space programs. U.S. intelligence agencies devoted a huge amount of resources to acquiring timely and accurate data on them. Photoreconnaissance satellites located launch complexes and provided data on the number and type of launchers, buildings, ground support equipment, and other key features. They located R&D centers, manufacturing plants, shipyards, naval bases, radars, and other facilities and obtained technical details on them. The satellites also occasionally imaged missiles and rockets on launch pads. There were four successful photoreconnaissance satellite programs during the four administrations in question. CORONA, a broad area search system, operated from August 1960 until May 1972. The first successful high resolution system, GAMBIT-1, flew from 1963-1967. The improved GAMBIT-3 high resolution satellite was launched from 1966-1984. HEXAGON, the broad area search successor to CORONA, operated from 1971-1984. High-resolution ground photography of missiles and rockets displayed at Moscow parades and other events also proved valuable at times.
Signals intelligence platforms [above] also contributed greatly to understanding Soviet missile and space programs. Satellites such as GRAB (1960-1962), POPPY (1962-1971), and AFTRACK payloads (1960-1967) located and intercepted air defense, anti-ballistic missile, and other radars and added significantly to U.S. knowledge of Soviet defensive systems and to the development of countermeasures. Other still-classified signals intelligence satellites launched beginning around 1970 reportedly intercepted telemetry and other data downlinked from missiles, rockets, and satellites to Soviet ground stations, and commands uplinked from the stations to these vehicles. Antennas at intercept sites also recorded this downlinked data. During the latter stages of missile and rocket tests to the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Pacific, ships and aircraft also intercepted telemetry and acquired optical data of the vehicles. Analysis of the telemetry and other data enabled the intelligence agencies to determine the performance characteristics of missiles, rockets, and satellites and helped establish their specific missions. Radars at ground stations detected launches, helped determine missile trajectories, observed the reentry of vehicles, and assisted in estimating the configuration and dimensions of missiles and satellites. Space Surveillance Network radars and optical sensors detected satellites and established their orbital elements. The optical sensors apparently also photographed satellites.
An illuminating study tracing the evolution of drone technology and counterterrorism policy from the Reagan to the Obama administrations.
This eye-opening study uncovers the history of the most important instrument of U.S. counterterrorism today: the armed drone. It reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the CIA's covert drone program is not a product of 9/11. Rather, it is the result of U.S. counterterrorism practices extending back to an influential group of policy makers in the Reagan administration.
Tracing the evolution of counterterrorism policy and drone technology from the fallout of Iran-Contra and the CIA's "Eagle Program" prototype in the mid-1980s to the emergence of al-Qaeda, Fuller shows how George W. Bush and Obama built upon or discarded strategies from the Reagan and Clinton eras as they responded to changes in the partisan environment, the perceived level of threat, and technological advances. Examining a range of counterterrorism strategies, he reveals why the CIA's drones became the United States' preferred tool for pursuing the decades-old goal of preemptively targeting anti-American terrorists around the world.
You can get a preview of the argument in his 'The Eagle Comes Home to Roost: The Historical Origins of the CIA's Lethal Drone Program' in Intelligence & National Security 30 (6) (2015) 769-92; you can access a version of that essay, with some of his early essays on the US as what he now calls a 'post-territorial empire', via Academia here.
For residents of the twenty-first century, a vision of a future without warfare is almost inconceivable. Though wars are terrible and destructive, they also seem unavoidable. In this original and deeply considered book, A. C. Grayling examines, tests, and challenges the concept of war. He proposes that a deeper, more accurate understanding of war may enable us to reduce its frequency, mitigate its horrors, and lessen the burden of its consequences.
Grayling explores the long, tragic history of war and how warfare has changed in response to technological advances. He probes much-debated theories concerning the causes of war and considers positive changes that may result from war. How might these results be achieved without violence? In a profoundly wise conclusion, the author envisions "just war theory" in new moral terms, taking into account the lessons of World War II and the Holocaust and laying down ethical principles for going to war and for conduct during war.
British photographer Edmund Clark and counterterrorism investigator Crofton Black have assembled photographs and documents that confront the nature of contemporary warfare and the invisible mechanisms of state control. From George W. Bush's 2001 declaration of the "war on terror" until 2008, an unknown number of people disappeared into a network of secret prisons organized by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency—transfers without legal process known as extraordinary renditions. No public records were kept as detainees were shuttled all over the globe. Some were eventually sent to Guantánamo Bay or released without charge, while others remain unaccounted for.
The paper trail assembled in this volume shows these activities via the weak points of business accountability: invoices, documents of incorporation, and billing reconciliations produced by the small-town American businesses enlisted in detainee transportation. Clark has traveled worldwide to photograph former detention sites, detainees' homes, and government locations. He and Black recreate the network that links CIA "black sites," and evoke ideas of opacity, surface, and testimony in relation to this process—a system hidden in plain sight. Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition, copublished with the Magnum Foundation, its creation supported by Magnum Foundation's Emergency Fund, raises fundamental questions about the accountability and complicity of our governments, and the erosion of our most basic civil rights.
However, the images start to bear a chilling significance when coupled with the paper trail and extracts of interview patiently compiled by Crofton Black, an investigative journalist whose research focuses on extraordinary rendition and black site cases. Over the course of his inquiry, Black has amassed incriminating documents that range from satellite maps to landing records, from border guard patrol logs to testimonies of people tortured in CIA 'black sites', from invoices to CIA documents released after freedom of information act litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union. He managed to give them meaning by organizing them into engrossing episodes that give a glimpse of the building and unraveling of the extraordinary rendition network.
Edmund Clark: In 2011, while I was working on a body of work on Guantanamo Bay, I was in contact with Clive Stafford Smith at Reprieve and found out that they were doing work on extraordinary rendition. I met Crofton and discovered that was what he was also researching. I became interested in doing something on extraordinary rendition as a progression of my work on Guantanamo Bay.
Crofton Black: When he first came to me I'd been out in Lithuania, looking at this weird site—a warehouse that had been built in the woods in the middle of nowhere, on the site of a former riding school. I was building a court case around it, so when [Clark] got in touch I said, 'Oh, you should go to Lithuania and take some photos of this strange, peculiar place.' Which he did. After that we started formulating a more complex and ambitious scheme of trying to document the black-site network through documents, images, and prose. We spent a long time working out how to fit it all together.
I was aware that I had all this material, that there were remarkable stories and images and documents that were bizarre, and spoke beyond what was immediately visible in them. I knew I wanted to do something with it that was less dry than legal cases, which are quite dull. There was an opportunity to do something that spoke to a different, and bigger, audience.
Black: Obviously, post-Hannah Arendt, "the banality of evil" has become a standardized phrase. For me, one of the places you see it most strongly is in bureaucracy: in these documents, in the way they are written, the way certain forms of interrogation are described, or flight routes are detailed. I wanted to make that point. None of these things would be possible without a complex bureaucratic system enabling them. In theory, the idea of a bureaucracy is that everything has its place and gets done by the right person. But in practice it often means that no one is responsible for anything. And that's what we found in Eastern Europe—no one was responsible. There's no one in Poland or Lithuania who is responsible for any of this stuff!
Clark: That's something we wanted to bring out: the ordinariness, the banality of it all. When she spoke of the banality of evil, Hannah Arendt was talking about the bureaucracy of National Socialism. Here, we are talking about a mosaic of small companies—small to medium enterprises—earning a buck.
Note the glorious correction above.
Black: Most of the paperwork in the book is from other entities or other countries [than the US]. If they wanted to have an entirely secret prison system, they shouldn't have invented one that involved flying prisoners all over the world. You simply can't fly a plane from A to B without leaving a gigantic paper trail. You just can't, otherwise planes would be bumping into each other. They could have just held their 119 prisoners in Afghanistan and we would probably have found it an awful lot more difficult to find out about it. But the peculiarities of how they wanted—or, at times, were forced to—use different locations… that made it detectable.
All of this, of course, parallels Trevor Paglen's work in interesting and complementary ways: see my post here, which connects Trevor's project to Crofton's work on 'the boom and bust of the CIA's torture sites' and his involvement in the Rendition Project.
There have been several attempts to reconstruct the geography of the CIA's program of extraordinary rendition. I've long admired the work of my good friend Trevor Paglen, described in his book with A.C. Thompson, Torture Taxi: on the trail of the CIA's rendition flights, available in interactive map form through Trevor's collaboration with the Institute for Applied Autonomy as Terminal Air. (I've commented on the project before, here and especially here).
Terminal Air is an installation that examines the mechanics of extraordinary rendition, a current practice of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in which suspected terrorists detained in Western countries are transported to so-called "black sites" for interrogation and torture. Based on extensive research, the installation imagines the CIA office through which the program is administered as a sort of travel agency coordinating complex networks of private contractors, leased equipment, and shell companies. Wall-mounted displays track the movements of aircraft involved in extraordinary rendition, while promotional posters identify the private contractors that supply equipment and personnel. Booking agents' desks feature computers offering interactive animations that enable visitors to monitor air traffic and airport data from around the world, while office telephones provide real-time updates as new flight plans are registered with international aviation authorities. Seemingly-discarded receipts, notes attached to computer monitors, and other ephemera provide additional detail including names of detainees and suspected CIA agents, dates of known renditions, and images of rendition aircraft. Terminal Air was inspired through conversations with researcher and author Trevor Paglen (Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights – Melville House Publishing). Data on the movements of the planes was compiled by Paglen, author Stephen Grey (Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program – St. Martin's Press) and an anonymous army of plane-spotting enthusiasts.
Although Trevor subsequently explained why he tried to 'stay away from cartography and "mapping" as much as possible' in his work, preferring instead the 'view from the ground', the cartography of all of this matters in so many ways – from the covert complicity of many governments around the world in a global geopolitics of torture through to the toll exerted on the bodies and minds of prisoners as they were endlessly shuffled in hoods and chains over long distances from one black site to another.
In spring 2003 an unnamed official at CIA headquarters in Langley sat down to compose a memo. It was 18 months after George W Bush had declared war on terror. "We cannot have enough blacksite hosts," the official wrote. The reference was to one of the most closely guarded secrets of that war – the countries that had agreed to host the CIA's covert prison sites.
Between 2002 and 2008, at least 119 people disappeared into a worldwide detention network run by the CIA and facilitated by its foreign partners.
Lawyers, journalists and human rights organisations spent the next decade trying to figure out whom the CIA had snatched and where it had put them. A mammoth investigation by the US Senate's intelligence committee finally named 119 of the prisoners in December 2014. It also offered new insights into how the black site network functioned – and gruesome, graphic accounts of abuses perpetrated within it.
Many of those 119 had never been named before.
The report's 500-page summary, which contained the CIA official's 2003 remarks, was only published after months of argument between the Senate committee, the CIA and the White House. It was heavily censored, while the full 6,000-page study it was based on remains secret. All names of countries collaborating with the CIA in its detention and interrogation operations were removed, along with key dates, numbers, names and much other material.
In nine months of research, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Rendition Project have unpicked these redactions to piece together the hidden history of the CIA's secret sites. This account unveils many of the censored passages in the report summary, drawing on public data sources such as flight records, aviation contracts, court cases, prisoner testimonies, declassified government documents and media and NGO reporting.
Although many published accounts of individual journeys through the black site network exist, this is the first comprehensive portrayal of the system's inner dynamics from beginning to end.
At present the mapping is rudimentary (see the screenshot above), but the database matching prisoners to black sites means that it ought to be possible to construct a more fine-grained representation of the cascade of individual movements. The Rendition Project has already identified more than 40 rendition circuits involving more than 60 renditions of CIA prisoners: see here and the interactive maps here.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Rendition Project have just published their first quarterly report on 119 people secretly detained and tortured by the CIA as part of the 'war on/of terror'.
You can download the brief report as a pdf here, but the infographic below summarises the key findings (and don't let its stark simplicity fool anyone about the detailed research that went into its production: this is difficult work).
Many commentators have noted that the Obama administration's determination to end the CIA's rendition program coincided with a decision to ramp up its covert program of targeted killing. The preference for 'kill' over 'capture' is complicated by the living death suffered by many of those who were imprisoned in the carceral archipelago of black sites and prisons – and we should surely welcome the determination to widen the focus beyond Guantanamo to include, notably, Bagram.
(On the Times' decision to name names, see Jack Goldsmith's interview with Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of the Times).
'The confidence [Senator Dianne] Feinstein and other Democrats express about the drone program, which by most accounts has been effective in killing hundreds of Qaeda operatives and members of other militant groups over the years, stands in sharp contrast to the criticism among lawmakers of the now defunct C.I.A. program to capture and interrogate Qaeda suspects in secret prisons.
'When Ms. Feinstein was asked in a meeting with reporters in 2013 why she was so sure she was getting the truth about the drone program while she accused the C.I.A. of lying to her about torture, she seemed surprised.
I had a wonderful time at the Balsillie School at Waterloo last week – good company, constructive conversations and endless hospitality – and I'm truly grateful to Simon Dalby, Jasmin Habib and all the graduate students who made my visit so enjoyable. I finished by giving one of the Centre for Global Governance Innovation (CIGI)'s Signature Lectures.
This was the latest (and near-final) version of "Dirty dancing: drones and death in the borderlands". The argument has developed considerably since my first presentations; I'll upload the written version once it's finished, but CIGI has posted the lecture and Q&A online here. I've also embedded the YouTube version below, but if that doesn't work try here.
My thanks to the AV technicians who made this possible: their help with the production followed by their assured and rapid-fire editing beats anything I've encountered anywhere.
In this version, I begin with two CIA-directed drone strikes in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, one on Baitullah Mehsud (the leader of Tehrik-i-Taliban) and the other on 'Mamana' Bibi, an innocent grandmother and midwife, and ask what it is that makes strikes like these – which is to say strikes as unlike these – possible. My answer turns on the kinds of space the FATA been made out to be: in particular, a space of exception in which people are knowingly and deliberately exposed to death, and a territory conceived as a political technology through which power lays claim to bodies-in-space.
Unlike Giorgio Agamben's original formulation, though, my discussion of the space of exception focuses not on violence authorised through the suspension of the law but rather violence that operates inside the law: so I look at the legal regimes, both international and national, that affect military and paramilitary violence in the FATA. A further difference is that this exceptional state of affairs is provoked not by an event but by a margin: by the construction of the FATA as a liminal zone, borderlands that are outside 'Pakistan proper' or 'mainland Pakistan'. Many commentators (including me) trace the origin of aerial violence to the British Raj, its Frontier Crimes Regulations and its 'policing' of the North-West Frontier. This is important, but the line of descent to today's air strikes is not direct. In particular, it is important to bring into view the cross-border incursions made by Soviet and Afghan aircraft during the occupation of Afghanistan. Thousands of people were killed and injured during these attacks, and this constitutes an important horizon of memory, but no less important is the response of the Pakistan Air Force: their US-supplied jets intercepted incoming aircraft and either escorted them out of Pakistani air space or, towards the end of the 1980s, engaged them in combat. This begs an obvious question: if Pakistan objects to the US strikes – carried out by drones that are slow, noisy and sluggish – why does its Air Force not shoot them down? Since today's drones cannot be used in contested air space – bluntly, they can only be used against defenceless people – why does Pakistan elect to render the people of FATA defenceless? This immediately brings into view the other source of aerial violence in the borderlands: the ongoing offensives in the FATA launched by the Pakistan Air Force (in concert with large-scale ground operations). Even though the Pakistan Air Force has its own reconnaissance drones, some of which are now armed, these are not attempts to put 'warheads on foreheads', as the US Air Force would have it, but wide-area assaults conducted by conventional strike aircraft and attack helicopters – as I show in the case of Mir Ali and Miran Shah during Operation Zarb-i-Azb (see here and here and here).
To complete the sequence and add the US drone strikes, I trace the intimate collaboration between both the CIA and the US Air Force and between Washington and Islamabad. The diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks show time and time again that many of the negotiations about access to 'flight boxes' over North and South Waziristan were conducted by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commander of US Central Command. I show, too, how the collaboration between Washington and Islamabad continued until at least 2013.
In order for the CIA-directed strikes to be possible, however, the FATA must also be turned into a territory in something like the sense proposed by Stuart Elden. So I describe the multiple ways in which data is harvested by the NSA and other agencies to produce what Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge call code/space: the algorithmic combination of sensors, traces and intercepts to summon into being a body-as-target (for more, see here: scroll down), and to produce the space of the target where fleshy bodies disappear and are replaced by codes, co-ordinates and cross-hairs. This is another version of what Ian Hacking calls 'making up people': there is an important sense, then, in which the supposed 'individuation' of later modern war depends on the selective and active production (and destruction) of an 'individual'.
The questions and comments after the lecture were immensely helpful, and as I turn this into its final, written version I'd be grateful for any further comments if you watch the video.
Melanie Richter-Montpetit has an essay at The disorder of things, 'Why Torture When Torture Does Not Work? Orientalism, Anti-Blackness and the Persistence of White Terror', which repays careful reading.
The immediate provocation for her essay, which is rooted in her recent York PhD thesis Beyond the Erotics of Orientalism: Homeland Security, Liberal War and the Pacification of the Global Frontier, was the Senate Torture Report (see my earlier post on 'Tortured geographies' here).
And speaking of violence and torture in the global war prison, Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantanamo Diary, which is being serialised in the Guardian and was published in book form earlier this week, provides more evidence of its routinised, banalised practice.
Slahi's manuscript was subjected to more than 2,500 redactions before declassification, ostensibly to protect classified information, but with the effect of preventing readers from learning the full story of his ordeal. The book is being published with all the censor's marks in place, and the publishers – Canongate in the UK and Little, Brown in the US – hope they will be able to publish an uncensored edition when Slahi is eventually released.
No, actually, we're not. There's something bizarre about responding to a 600-page document detailing systematic U.S. government torture by declaring that the real America—the one with good values—does not torture. It's exoneration masquerading as outrage. Imagine someone beating you up and then, when confronted with the evidence, declaring that "I'm not really like that" or "that wasn't the real me." Your response is likely to be some variant of: "It sure as hell seemed like you when your fist was slamming into my nose." A country, like a person, is what it does.
It's tempting to compare this to Latin American–style police impunity, but that would be unfair to the societies that have punished at least some of the abuses of their past dictatorships. In the same week that the SSCI released its report, Brazil published its own investigation into state torture of political dissidents under its long dictatorship. Indeed, one of that torture regime's victims, Dilma Rousseff, is now the head of state. Latin American nations have been chipping away at, or simply ignoring, the amnesty deals made with the authoritarian rulers of the '70s and '80s and have brought many of their torturers to justice.
Keep the language crisp and pungent; prefer the forthright to the pompous and ornate.
Do not stray from the subject; omit the extraneous, no matter how brilliant it may seem or even be.
Favor the active voice and shun streams of polysyllables and prepositional phrases.
Keep sentences and paragraphs short, and vary the structure of both.
Be frugal in the use of adjectives and adverbs; let nouns and verbs show their own power.
They are taken from the CIA's detailed Style Manual & Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications issued in 2011; you can find Michael Silverberg's commentary at Quartz here.
Do not uppercase the w in Korean war, which was "undeclared"; the same logic applies to Vietnam war and Falklands war, and a similar convention (if not logic) to the Iran-Iraq war.
Hidden in plain sight here is the remarkable fact that the United States has not formally declared war since 1941. You may think that not much depends on a formal declaration, and you would be right, except that this reluctance says much about executive authority and, crucially, what Larry Hancock and Stuart Wexler call, in their excellent Shadow Warfare (Counterpoint, 2014), 'the history of America's undeclared wars'.
Contrary to their contemporary image, deniable covert operations are not something new. Such activities have been ordered by every president and every administration since World War II. Clandestine operations have often relied on surrogates, with American personnel involved only at a distance, insulated by layers of deniability.
Shadow Warfare traces the evolution of these covert operations, detailing the tactics and tools used from the Truman era through those of the contemporary Obama administration. It also explores the personalities and careers of many of the most noted shadow warriors of the past sixty years, tracing the decades-long relationship between the CIA and the military.
Shadow Warfare offers a balanced, non-polemic exploration of American concealed warfare, detailing its patterns, consequences, and collateral damage, and presenting its successes as well as its failures. Hancock and Wexler explore why every president, from Franklin Roosevelt on, felt compelled to turn to secret, deniable military action. It also delves into the political dynamic of the president's relationship with Congress, and the fact that despite decades of warfare, Congress has chosen not to exercise its responsibility to declare a single state of war—even for extended and highly visible combat.


Added another 5 micro-certs and hit number 30!
Just earned my 25th micro cert!
Completed the Entry Level Cyber Security Analyst!!!!
Currently working on my Entry Level Cyber Security Analyst. I just have two certs left to go.
Defending the Network and finding the bad guys.