I find this bothers me. What makes the government so special that they should get this information but I shouldn't be able to access it?
Make the information available, or not. But making it available just to the government and "critical infractructure providers" Because They're Somehow Special is silly. My infrastructure is crucial to me. How come I don't rate access to the information? Who gets to decide whose infrastructure is "crucial"?
(to the tune, naturally, of the Sex Pistols)
The BBC reports that new British Deputy PM Nick Clegg promises "the biggest political reforms since 1832". The reforms promised by the Convervative/Liberal Democrat coalition would include, but not be limited to, making the House of Lords an elected body with proportional representation (brilliant move!), giving voters the power to recall an unsatisfactory MP, imposing a fixed five-year limit on the tenure of any government (but keeping the ability of Parliament to force early dissolution of a government by a vote of no confidence), scrapping the "contact point" database that currently registers over 11 million minors, scrapping the national ID card and biometric passports, "properly regulating" CCTV use (well, it's a start, I suppose), repealing many of the control-freak laws enacted by the last two Labour governments, and introducing a mechanism to block the creation of "pointless new criminal offenses". In perhaps the most dramatic move of all, Clegg even proposes giving the public the power to go through the statute books and nominate excessive or unfair laws to be repealed.
Two hundred and thirty four years. I guess it's about time for another bold experiment in democracy. This just could be it. There would be an amusing irony if it turned out to be the turn of the British to tire of their shackles and throw off an oppressive government.
An interesting new result from the DZero experiment at Fermilab has found relatively massive asymmetry between creation of normal matter particles and antiparticles resulting from proton-antiproton collisions in the Tevatron.
Previous asymmetries were already known in matter-antimatter creation. Known as charge-parity violation, the effect is fully consistent with the Standard Model that underlies all of our current theoretical background on the structure of matter. However, CP violation is far too small an effect to account for the overwhelming abundance of normal matter present in the Universe. Put another way, the total amount of mass-energy believed present in the Universe is not large enough — by a very large margin — for CP violation alone to yield the observed quantity of normal matter.
The new Tevatron result shows an asymmetry on the order of 1% — which is to say, a high-energy event such as matter-antimatter annihilation is 1% more likely to produce normal matter than antimatter. That doesn't sound like a lot, but in particle physics, it's huge, and in fact the result agrees very well with the observed amount of normal matter present in the Universe. However, such a large asymmetry cannot be explained by the Standard Model.
Combine this with the fact that the Large Hadron Collider now gives us the capability to search the entire range of mass-energies within which, according to the Standard Model as it stands, it is believed possible for the Higgs boson to be found (although that exhaustive search has not yet been done), and it looks as though things could be about to get interesting again in high-energy physics, because if the Standard Model is shown to be wrong, we will have to rethink an awful lot of theory. Either that, or someone is going to have to come up with a way to reconcile this DZero data with the Standard Model as it now exists.
First, of course, this result will have to be confirmed and replicated. But now we have at least two other tools able to do that — the Collider Detector at Fermilab, and the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.