Q.83. Are all sins equally evil?

A. In the eyes of God, some sins in themselves are more evil than others, and some are more evil because of the harm that results from them.

There’s lots of news in the world of nano-technology.

Computer chips get hot. Our staff computer hardware consultant at mj has confirmed this. When using a laptop, he places a pillow between his lap and the laptop because the chips in the laptop heat up the case so much. But as computer chips improve in speed and shrink in size, the problems of dissipating the heat becomes even greater.

Now researchers at Purdue University have come up with a new potential solution. Nano-lightning storms.

Mechanical engineers at Purdue have filed patents for technologies that eventually could be used to create a device that would cool computer chips by generating lightning and wind on a microscopic level using carbon nanotubes….

The researchers have only demonstrated the idea conceptually, but they assert that it could help future computer builders tackle the growing problem of chip generated heat in a more reliable way than they could through liquid cooling.

In the Purdue device, an array of carbon nanotubes–long, thin strands of specialized carbon molecules–would be placed near a chip. A negative charge would be applied to some of the nanotubes, which would cause electrons to be emitted. When the electrons mix with the surrounding air, the air becomes ionized. The microscopic cloud of ionized air then leads to an imbalance of charge in the micro-atmosphere, and lightning results. It’s microscopic lightning, but the principle is the same as in an electrical storm.

Meanwhile, the cloud of electrons would be alternatively attracted to and repelled by adjacent electrodes. Alternating the voltages on the electrodes creates a cooling breeze because the moving cloud stirs the air.

“To create lightning, you need tens of kilovolts, but we do it with 100 volts or less,” said a statement from Suresh Garimella, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue who is working on the device. “In simple terms, we are generating a kind of lightning on a nano-scale here.”

But, is it wise to mix high tech electronics and lightning storms? Even nano-lightening storms? Yes, that might be a small problem.

Several technical problems will also likely have to be resolved before these types of devices, even if made, can be put into computers. Semiconductors, for instance, are wrapped with spark arresters. Static electricity can blow a hole through a chip, and the Purdue device is essentially creating static.

If you think that cooling your computer chips with a nano-lightening storm is a wild idea, a chemist has created a nano-elevator.

In an elegant bit of nanoscale engineering, chemists at the University of California, Los Angeles have designed and built what must be the world’s tiniest elevator, a molecular platform on three legs that can be raised or lowered on command.

The device, created by Dr. J. Fraser Stoddart, a professor of organic chemistry, and colleagues, is about two-and-a-half nanometers high, and the platform moves less than a nanometer up and down. A nanometer is about a billionth of a meter….

The key to the platform’s ability to move up or down is in the legs, molecules called rotaxanes that have two sites along their length where the ringlike platform molecules can bind. Normally, the platform molecules are bound near the tops of the legs, but acid-base reactions can cause them to move. Add a base, and they travel to the lower sites. Add an acid, and they return to the top.

The movement is repeatable, Stoddart said, but all that acid and base eventually cause problems. Far better would be a device that operates with a tiny electrical charge or by shining light on it.

With all these nano-advancements, perhaps soon you can ride a nano-elevator up to the nano-roof to watch a nano-lightening storm.

Wired reports on a book "At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War" by former secretary of the Air Force and special assistant to President Reagan, Thomas C. Reed. Reed claims that the Reagan White House was involved in planting a Trojan Horse in software they knew the Soviets were going to steal, with spectacular results.

According to Reed, the Reagan administration faced a choice in 1981 when it "gained access to a KGB agent in their technical intelligence directorate" and discovered that Soviet theft of American technology had been "massive."

"In essence, the Pentagon had been in an arms race with itself," Reed said in a phone interview.

Rather than arrest everyone they could to try to close the operation down and halt further espionage, CIA director William Casey and National Security Council staffer Gus Weiss cooked up a better plan: They turned into hackers.

"(Soviet agents) stole stuff, and we knew what they were going to steal," Reed said. "Every microchip they stole would run fine for 10 million cycles, and then it would go into some other mode. It wouldn’t break down, it would start delivering false signals and go to a different logic."

The most spectacular result of this hacking, according to Reed, was a massive explosion during the summer of 1982 in the controversial pipeline delivering Siberian natural gas to Western Europe.

Soviet spies stole software needed to operate the pipeline, not knowing that "it had a few lines of software added that constituted a Trojan horse," said Reed. "They checked it out, it looked fine, and ran just fine for a few months. But the Trojan horse was programmed to let it run for four or five months and then the pumps and compressors are told, ‘Today is the day we are going to run a pressure test at some significantly increased pressure.’"

He continued: "We expected that the pipeline would spring leaks all the way from Siberia to Germany, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead the welds all blew apart. It was a huge explosion. The Air Force thought it was a 3-kiloton blast."

The report quotes a former KGB agent who disputes Reed’s claim and calls the whole thing "rubbish", but Reed sticks by the story.

They could do all that by hacking some software. Imagine what could have happened if the Soviets had tried to steal our Big Mouth Billy Bass? The Cold War could have ended years earlier.

Headline AP: High Gas Prices Not Stopping Motorists

Reuters Photo:

Caption: “U.S. Presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry speaks about U.S. taxes and jobs to a crowd of invited guests and students during a campaign stop at Wayne State University March 26, 2004 in Detroit, Michigan. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook US ELECTION

When Howard Dean went after the Bible Belt vote, he told us that Job was his favorite New Testament book. Is John Kerry trying to get the Bible Belt Dean vote?

Reuters Photo:

Caption: “The black X-43A rides on the front of a modified Pegasus booster rocket hung from the special pylon under the wing of NASA’s B-52B mother ship during a captive carry flight January 26, 2004 to verify systems before an upcoming launch in this file photograph. NASA has set March 27, 2004 for another test flight of its experimental X-43A hypersonic research aircraft. The unmanned 12-foot-long vehicle, part aircraft and part spacecraft, will be dropped from the wing of a modified B-52 aircraft, boosted to nearly 100,000 feet altitude by a booster rocket and released over the Pacific Ocean to briefly fly under its own power at seven times the speed of sound, almost 5,000 mph. NO SALES NASA/Carla Thomas/Handout “

The Big Ugly Fellow has been doing this for almost 50 years now. Crews come and go. But the B-52 keeps on flying.

Guess who the National Review is describing?

[T]he man who has done more to frustrate conservative goals over the years than perhaps any other member of his caucus. [He] may not be the most unreliable GOP senator — he faces strong competition in that category from Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island — but he is almost certainly the most harmful, because he is smart, ruthless, and influential….

[He] votes like a Democrat until late in his term, when he remembers that he will need at least some conservatives on his side if he’s going to win another six years. “[He] is not a team player, but we’re getting a little more cooperation out of him this year,” says one GOP senator.

…[He is] one of the Senate’s best-known but least-liked members….

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have much better reasons for disliking him: They regard [him] as one of the prickliest pols in Congress — a humorless man who is cold to colleagues and cruel to staff….”There are two kinds of senators: Republicans who don’t like [him] and Democrats who don’t like [him],” says a former leadership aide. In a Washingtonian magazine survey, Hill staffers rated him the Senate’s meanest member….

Yes, you guessed it. It’s Pennsylvania’s own Senator Snarlin’ Arlen Specter. He’s back in the conservative fold, asking for your support for his reelection, so that for the next six years he can legislate as a liberal. It isn’t a very flattering article for our dear Arlen, and it warns of the dangers of reelecting him.

There you are. Soaking in the tub, while writing the great American novel on your laptop. Naturally, for safety reasons, you have not plugged in your laptop. But suddenly, your wireless connection goes down, and the low battery alarm on the laptop goes off. You know you have about a minute to save your great American novel before losing everything. But your hard drive is full. Catastrophe looms.

Back in the dark ages before electronic bath gadgets, you would have lost the great American novel. Just think of all the great works of literature down through history that were lost. Think of all the great writings by Bill Shakespeare, Ed Poe, Ernie Hemingway, or Al Franken lost because of this common problem.

But, thanks to modern bathing technology, you no longer have to lose all your work when you run into this problem. Simply grab your i-Duck, a rubber duck with 256 megabytes of USB storage.

What will they think of next? I’m hoping for a bath toy Tupperware boat that has a DVD burner built in….

John Samples at National Review writes:

George W. Bush is the best Democratic president of my lifetime.

Samples’ point is that although he runs as a Republican and espouses conservative principles, Bush governs like a Democrat. The one notable exception is that Bush has lowered taxes, but one of his stated reasons for lowering taxes was a very Democratic one: to influence the economy. It is a principle of the Democratic party that the government should control the economy. The more basic conservative reason for cutting taxes is to limit the size and scope of the government.

But in other areas, from education, to campaign finance reform, to prescription drug benefits for the elderly, to creating a new executive department, Bush has increased the size of the government and the amount of control it exerts on our lives.

I’m sure most Democrats would take exception to Mr. Samples and would be appalled that someone would say George W. Bush is a good Democrat, but despite the R after his name, our current President has taken us quite a ways down the road the they want us to travel.

We couldn’t decide on the best headline for this picture, so we’ll leave it up to you, with a few of our own (unsatisfactory) suggestions.

1. Good ice cream. Bad theology II

2. Ethnic food (to compete with Italian ice?)

3. Frozen chicken soup (for the soul)