If you have two pairs of entangled photons, taking one photon from each pair and entangling them disengages the two original pairs, and creates a second, fresh entanglement between the two, left out photons. Eisenberg's team used the swap to entangle a photon with one that no longer existed.More details in the article.
What his tax practices show is not illegal or unethical behavior, but rather the unfairness of a tax system that provides its most outlandish benefits only for the very, very rich and savvy. What is worse is that Mr. Romney has proposed making this profoundly dysfunctional system even more unfair.After detailing ways Mitt has avoided gift taxes, the article ends on a note that I think really hones in on the point that he not only wants to maintain benefits that only the rich use, but make the tax changes to benefit the rich even further:
Like most Republicans, Mr. Romney wants to eliminate the estate tax entirely, even though it currently applies only to estates of more than $10 million for a married couple. That would cost the treasury more than $1 trillion over a decade, but it would be a huge benefit for Mr. Romney’s heirs and for the other 0.3 percent of estates rich enough to qualify for the tax. Getting rid of the estate tax would subvert the gift tax (it was established as a backstop, to keep estates from being passed on before death) and would spare the rich all this complicated “estate planning,” which is just a euphemism for avoiding the tax.
As Warren Buffett has said, the estate tax increases equality of opportunity and curbs the movement toward a plutocracy. Mr. Romney’s plan to get rid of it, helping his family but few others, is one of the sharpest illustrations of his distance from ordinary Americans.
Waldman: I'm interested in the way the show portrays people stressed to the breaking point. Everyone has an idiosyncratic coping strategy. Quinn and Batista knock back doubles at the bar. Deb runs alone on her treadmill. Dexter murders people. Do you think the show is trying to normalize Dexter's kills? By showing us all these dysfunctional outlets for stress in other characters?
Bosch: I've always thought that this is less about normalizing serial killing—when the show debuted, many critics were disgusted at being asked to empathize with a murderer—than about trauma. How Dexter might have been a normal person had he not been subjected to the unthinkable trauma of witnessing his mother being murdered, then sitting in her blood for days. Really, the show tackles PTSD—and its lesser forms—in a spectacular way.
Waldman: Yes. I think you’ve nailed the show’s philosophy. But in its throwaway details, I sometimes feel we’re asked to believe that Dex isn’t that bad. And then there’s the question of whether he could be a vigilante hero.
Twitchell, 31, was found guilty by a jury last April 12 in the October 2008 slaying of Johnny Altinger. He is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.Here's the article in the Fairfax weekend magazine that fills in more detail the highly imitative aspects of this gruesome murder. It's a really horrifying read.
Altinger, 38, was lured to a southeast Edmonton garage by an ad on an internet dating site. He was bludgeoned and dismembered.
Twitchell's fondness for the television show Dexter was well documented during the trial, and he had a Facebook profile under the name of protagonist Dexter Morgan, a vigilante serial killer who masters the perfect crime.
In a profanity-laced note in which she described in grisly detail how she killed a 22-year-old Marine wife, one of the three people now charged with murder says she patterned the killing after the television show "Dexter," about a serial killer.Yet has this effect of the show received the attention that it deserves? No.
In the note to police, Jessica Lopez describes strangling Brittany Dawn Killgore "as if my idol Dexter had spoken directly to me."
Lopez, 25, wrote that she then decided to dismember Killgore's body: "I made a few attempts to chop her up like Dexter with Masters power tools but I was afraid it was too loud and it sucked at cutting flesh."
Killing Killgore was not as easy as the television show, Lopez wrote: "I thought I was defending the family and it would be simple like Dexter."
It is also a drama of space. What audiences feel about characters on the screen is probably affected more than most of us realize by the way the space surrounding the people is carved up and re-combined. In John Ford, the geographical sense is very strong—the poetic awareness of sky and landscape and moving horses, but also the attention to such things as how people are arrayed at a long table as an indication of social caste (the prostitute at one end, the fine lady at the other). The best use of space is not just an effective disposition of activity on the screen, it is the emotional meaning of activity on the screen.Any regular reader will know what I am likely to say next: this is one reason why Spielberg remains an awesome director - he gives the audience an excellent sense of space; his action sequences are rarely too quickly edited and you can understand what's going on perfectly. And, to concur with Denby, Spielberg's most artificial film of all, last year's Adventures of Tin Tin, was a failure because of the technology taking away the same sense of spatial and kinetic realism that his best films have.
Directors used to take great care with such things: spatial integrity was another part of the unspoken contract with audiences, a codicil to the narrative doctrine of the scriptorium. It allowed viewers to understand, say, how much danger a man was facing when he stuck his head above a rock in a gunfight, or where two secret lovers at a dinner party were sitting in relation to their jealous enemies. Space could be analyzed and broken into close-ups and reaction shots and the like, but then it had to be re-unified in a way that brought the experience together in a viewer’s head—so that, in Jezebel, one felt physically what Bette Davis suffered as scandalized couples backed away from her in the ballroom. If the audience didn’t experience that emotion, the movie wouldn’t have cast its spell.
This seems like plain common sense. Who could possibly argue with it? Yet spatial integrity is just about gone from big movies. What Wyler and his editors did—matching body movement from one shot to the next—is rarely attempted now. Hardly anyone thinks it important. The most common method of editing in big movies now is to lay one furiously active shot on top of another, and often with only a general relation in space or body movement between the two. The continuous whirl of movement distracts us from noticing the uncertain or slovenly fit between shots. The camera moves, the actors move: in Moulin Rouge, the camera swings wildly over masses of men in the nightclub, Nicole Kidman flings herself around her boudoir like a rag doll. The digital fight at the end of The Avengers takes place in a completely artificial environment, a vacuum in which gravity has been abandoned; continuity is not even an issue. If the constant buffoonishness of action in all sorts of big movies leaves one both over-stimulated and unsatisfied—cheated without knowing why—then part of the reason is that the terrain hasn’t been sewn together. You have been deprived of that loving inner possession of the movie that causes you to play it over and over in your head.
In the 1930s, roughly eighty million people went to the movies every week, with weekly attendance peaking at ninety million in 1930 and again in the mid-1940s. Now about thirty million people go, in a population two and a half times the size of the population of the 1930s.I am not entirely sure about this next selection, but from my own childhood, there is a certain element of truth in it:
My friends’ attitudes are defined so completely by the current movie market that they do not wish to hear that movies, for the first eighty years of their existence, were essentially made for adults. Sure, there were always films for families and children, but, for the most part, ten-year-olds and teens were dragged by their parents to what the parents wanted to see, and this was true well after television reduced the size of the adult audience. The kids saw, and half understood, a satire such as Dr. Strangelove, an earnest social drama such as To Kill a Mockingbird, a cheesy disaster movie such as Airport, and that process of half understanding, half not, may have been part of growing up; it also laid the soil for their own enjoyment of grown-up movies years later. They were not expected to remain in a state of goofy euphoria until they were thirty-five. My friends think that our current situation is normal. They believe that critics are naïve blowhards, but it is they who are naïve.I remember sitting in the back seat at the drive in being bored by The Graduate, and falling asleep. But certainly, I think that the moderation in the depiction of sex and swearing in pre-1960's cinema certainly meant that children could be exposed to what was still "adult" cinema and influenced their feel for the medium in a positive way.
So, how much data does this really represent in something we can understand?:Japan's incumbent telecommunications carrier, NTT, is claiming a telecommunications speed record, demonstrating a fibre technology able to carry 1 Petabit-per-second - a million gigabits - over a distance of 50 kilometers, using a single fibre.The technology - at this stage a research demonstration not ready for commercialization - would serve not end users, but the "trunk" links between exchanges. The carrier selected the 50 km distance as reflecting the typical distance between medium-haul telecommunications exchanges in Japan.
NTT's report states that it used a specially-designed optical fibre in which one fibre strand contained 12 "cores" - light paths within the fibre that don't interact with each other. Each of those fibres carried an 84.5 Terabit-per-second signal to achieve the total 1 Pbps throughput.
The 1 Pb/s capacity of the NTT-demonstrated link would carry the equivalent of 5,000 two-hour HDTV movies each second, the company says.
Why won’t Romney, an intelligent man, fluent in economics, explain his economic policy? Because any sensible answer would cause a firestorm in his party.And it ends:
It is obvious that, with a deficit at 8 percent of gross domestic product, any solution to our budgetary problems has to involve both spending cuts and tax increases. Ronald Reagan agreed to tax increases when the deficit hit 4 percent of GDP; George H.W. Bush did so when the deficit was 3 percent of GDP. But today’s Republican Party is organized around the proposition that, no matter the circumstances, there must never be a tax increase of any kind. The Simpson-Bowles proposal calls for $1 of tax increases for every $3 of spending cuts. But every Republican presidential candidate — including Romney — pledged during the primaries that he or she would not accept $10 of spending cuts if that meant a dollar of tax increases.
So Romney could present a serious economic plan with numbers that make sense — and then face a revolt within his own party. His solution: to be utterly vague about how he would deal with the deficit.
The Republican Party has imposed a new kind of political correctness on its leaders. They cannot speak certain words (taxes) or speculate about certain ideas (immigration amnesty) because these are forbidden. Romney has tried to run a campaign while not running afoul of his party’s strictures. As a result, he has twisted himself into a pretzel, speaking vacuously, avoiding specifics and refusing to provide any serious plans for the most important issues of the day.All sounds about right to me.
