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It had to happen: The Nexus One got knifed in the name of science, love, and pancakes. Because if a pancake could talk on a cellphone, it would use a Nexus One to call the maple syrup.

I know, I don’t even know where the pancake came from. For some reason this made me hungry. I just want breakfast. [iFixIt]

–Twilight, Sandra Bullock, and Johnny Depp were runaway winners at last night’s People’s Choice Awards…..

-Ronald Reagan’s grandson arrested…..

-Kanye for BAPE…..

-Former Destiny’s Child star Michelle Williams will replace Ashlee Simpson-Wentz as Roxie in Broadway’s Chicago…..

–Monsoon Wedding coming to Broadway….

-Mario Lopez has been tapped to co-host the 134th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, The USA Network said Wednesday…

-Alanis is writing a book….

-James Franco will star in Danny Boyle’s new movie, 127 Hours. The script is based on a true story about a man who is crushed by a boulder and has to saw off his own arm…..

-Lawyers representing Keanu Reeves are asking a judge to dismiss a lawsuit from a Canadian woman who claims the actor fathered her children…..

The Democratic Party of Japan is trying to play off Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii’s resignation as the peaceful retirement of an old man.

But Fujii’s ouster had more to do with his open criticism of party boss Ichiro Ozawa, according to The Japan Times.

Fujii had criticized the so-called shadow shogun, aka the puppet master of the Cabinet, for his involvement in a campaign finance scandal last summer.

The feud will damage the party’s image at a critical moment, when President Hatoyama is presenting his 2010 budget and an ambitious plan to revive the country’s long-suffering economy.

Read more at The Japan Times –>

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See Also:

• Japan’s New Kamikaze Finance Minister Is On A Mission To Blow Up The Yen, And Finally Let The Nikkei Surge
• Four Reasons Why Japan Could Be The Mother Of All Contrarian Bets In 2010
• Japan Finally Lets Its Sick Finance Minister Resign

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held on January 5, 2010, that Washington State’s felon disenfranchisement law violates the Voting Rights Act because it results in minorities being denied access to the polls on account of their race.

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Last month, we noted that Philip K. Dick’s daughter was quite upset about the fact (at the time, unconfirmed) that Google was going to call its new phone, the Nexus One — insisting that this was a ripoff of the Nexus-6 robots from Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It’s difficult to see any legal basis whatsoever for the claim, but we wondered if Google might just choose a different name anyway. Instead, it launched with the Nexus One name, and it took little time for the Dick Estate’s lawyers to send a cease & desist, claiming that it will sue Google for “trademark infringement.” There are a few problems with that, of course. The Dick Estate does not have a trademark on Nexus anything. Nor could it get one since it does not use the term in commerce. Oh, and since the phone is in a totally different business, it likely wouldn’t violate the trademark that the Dick Estate couldn’t get anyway. So how does Dick’s daughter respond?

“People don’t get it,” Isa Dick Hackett said. “It’s the principle of it.”

I’m trying to figure out just what “principle” that might be, because there doesn’t seem to be any legal principle. It’s hard to argue that there’s any moral principle either, since “nexus” is a word that’s been around since well before Philip K. Dick used it. In fact, the only matter of principle I can think of is the one where someone demands money for something where they clearly have no right to it and have done nothing to deserve it. Like demanding a big company pay up because it has a product named sorta similar to something your dad wrote decades ago.

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And here you thought the holidays were over. Silly you. Today is the greatest holiday of all: Book Release Day!

That’s right — From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time is out today. That means you could head over to Amazon.com and buy the book right now:

From Eternity to Here at Amazon

Don’t worry, we’ll wait. Of course you could also buy it later, but there are benefits to having a great first day, and we’re aiming to get as many Amazon purchases as we can. So you might want to take Lee Billings’s advice:

Just drafted a micro-review of @seanmcarroll’s “From Eternity to Here”. It’s really quite good–I suggest you all buy several copies.

I’m excited, anyway. You can find various goodies on the web page, including a reprint of the prologue, an annotated table of contents, a list of upcoming events, links to blurbs and reviews and other commentary, and a collection of related articles. Heck, I even went out and made a video:

I don’t think Spielberg is checking his rear-view mirror, but my budget was a bit lower.

Looking back through my old emails, I was first talking seriously about writing a book on the arrow of time in August, 2006. The contract with Dutton was agreed upon in May, 2007. Worked on it on and off, and finally started working in earnest in mid/late-2008. I emailed the manuscript to the publisher at 2:42 a.m. on Friday, May 8, 2009. And now it’s released to the world.

Writing the book was actually a lot of fun. If you write a very long blog post or medium-length magazine article, you’re talking 3,000 words. This book is 180,000 words, including footnotes. Room to stretch a bit and explain things the right way! Part of the fun was learning new things — I dug into the history a bit, reading papers by Boltzmann and his contemporaries, and also looked into interesting topics like complexity and information theory. But perhaps even more enjoyable was the challenge of explaining really deep ideas in an understandable way. I have a whole chapter that tries to work through the ideas of determinism and reversibility from the ground up — something that most physics books just zoom right past. There are a lot of places where I really took care to explain something basic in a fresh and accessible way — or tried to, anyway. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, so we’ll see what people think.

One thing I learned is that producing a book is very much a collaborative effort. I owe a lot to Stephen Morrow, Tala Oszkay, Katinka Matson, and John Brockman, who provided invaluable guidance and steered me in the right direction more than once. Jason Torchinsky contributed the charming illustrations. And of course to my wife Jennifer, for many reasons, but it doesn’t hurt to have an expert writer and editor right there in the house when you embark on a project like this. Many people were gracious enough to read through the book and point out where it could be improved — with embarrassing accuracy, I may add. (Special thanks to Scott Aaronson and George Musser, for their detailed and substantive critiques.) And I was fortunate enough get a dream team of physicist-writers to provide blurbs for the back of the book: Lisa Randall, Brian Greene, Kip Thorne, and Roger Penrose. I won’t reproduce them all here (that’s what the web page is for), but here’s Penrose:

Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here provides a wonderfully accessible account of some of the most profound mysteries of modern physics. While you may not agree with all his conclusions, you will find the discussion fascinating, and taken to much deeper levels than is normal in a work of popular science.

Of course everyone will agree with all my conclusions … eventually.

Enough of the folderol of writing and publishing the damn book — time to talk about the science! Next week I’ll post the schedule for a weekly book club right here at Cosmic Variance; the discussions will officially begin on January 19, and will continue every subsequent Tuesday. I’m going to try to participate as much as I can in the discussions — I want to hear how people react to the book, but I’m also expecting to learn a lot. Time and the origin of the universe — pretty big subjects, always room to understand more.

Vehicle remapping specialist Superchips launched a new ECU performance upgrade for the Peugeot 207 GTi THP 175. The upgrade is suitable to all model year 2007 onwards Peugeot 207 GTI THP 175 vehicles, and it can be purchased for £391 including VAT.

The 1598cc, 175bhp, twin scroll, turbocharged unit features an advanced MED17 engine management system, which required an extensive tuning of fueling, ignition and boost levels.

This has produced a performance remap for… (read more)

Cookie pans seem to be getting more and more popular as time goes by. The pans allow you to stamp cookies with different designs and bake cookie dough into different shapes without picking up a single cookie cutter or rolling in. They’re reminiscent of shallow cupcake pans, with designs in the bottom of each cup. Cookie dough is dropped into the molds and bakes in place, spreading to fill out the design.

Wilton’s Valentine Cookie Pan is a new seasonal release from Wilton. The cookie pan has some really adorable shapes, including puckered lips and a teddy bear, along with round cookies marked with Xs, Os and messages like “Be Mine.” The pan is nonstick and most cookies slide out easily. The pan will also work both with cakey cookies (might want to grease the pan a little for these, just in case) and crisp cookies, and because the Valentine’s designs aren’t quite so attached to a single holiday, these are cute enough to make all year round. No one is going to mind getting some heart-shaped cookies in summer or fall, as well as in the spring around V-day!

Getting hydrogen cars on the road in mass quantities has been no easy task. There have been many bumps in the road, so to speak, along the way and this trend will continue.

Even though hydrogen cars have been around for a couple hundred years now, preceding the gasoline engine, people and governments seem to be largely uneducated about how the gas should be handled. And when a government doesn’t know how to handle something “unusual.” like hydrogen they tend to throw out a safety net of “red tape” to surround it.

Mike Strizki got a taste of this when he was trying to build his hydrogen-solar home in New Jersey. The different state agencies had no building or safety codes for handling hydrogen, so they bogged him down in red tape until they could catch up. At one point, Mr. Strizki said about one of the agencies in frustration, “They’re worried about the deer running into the tanks” referring to the 200 psi hydrogen tanks in his backyard.

But, the U. S. isn’t the only place where red tape is holding back hydrogen. In the UK, Revolve Technologies is finding out that current British law blocks the use of “new fuel” vehicles on the road. One branch of the UK government, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has promoted hydrogen vehicles as a clean alternative to those burning fossil fuels.

But, not all of the UK’s government agencies have been brought up to speed. According to Revolve’s technical director, Paul Turner, “We didn’t realise when we began the hydrogen programme that we were pioneering not just a new technology but new legislation too. We have worked closely with a number of government departments to identify key issues and help them to develop a new series of regulations which can accommodate the safe storage, handling, dispensing and use of this exciting new carbon free fuel.”

Well, the “new carbon free fuel” part isn’t exactly accurate as it has been around a couple of centuries as previously pointed out. But, what is new is the renewed interest in this old fuel for powering vehicles and the new rules and regulations that must be created to modernize how we think about alternative fuels.

In some ways, breaking the bureaucratic red tape will be like breaking one of the many finish lines that hydrogen cars have to burst through on the way towards mass commercialization.

Flavio Briatore’s lawyer, Philippe Ouakrat stepped up today to state that in his opinion the FIA can’t win anything by appealing to the French court’s decision. Ouakrat argued the verdict was a disaster for the governing body, which should now accept it will have to make radical changes to its World Council structure.

"First of all we aim at having the verdict enforced. In any case, the FIA has zero chances if it decides to appeal," Philippe Ouakrat was quoted as saying … (read more)

All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism, right? Critics are still blasting the TSA for allowing an alleged Nigerian terrorist to board a plane headed to Detroit on Christmas day. Experts say screeners missed several suspicious behaviors, especially the fact that someone was willingly going to Detroit.

The big news yesterday, if there was any, were the minutes from the mid-December Fed meeting (with the usual 3 week lag). The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) still sees a modest recovery this year, e.g., one that will bring only a “slow improvement” in the nation’s severe unemployment problem. Although the FOMC’s role is not to provide jobs, employment is still a concern, and they expect unemployment to remain elevated for quite some time. But of most interest to mortgage lenders is the appearance that they are in no hurry to raise overnight Fed Funds which have been near 0% for over a year. In addition, a weak recovery could warrant expanding or extending the $1.25 trillion mortgage-backed securities purchase program, although there is no change now. Winding it down, the minutes stated, may hurt housing since the securitization markets are still “impaired”, and the commercial sector is still deteriorating. If you’re interested in the 12 pages of minutes check them out HERE.

In the meantime, ahead of tomorrow’s unemployment data we had yesterday’s ADP Employment Report (which showed that the private sector dropped 84,000 jobs in December, ADP’s 23^rd month in a row of declines – “employment losses are now rapidly diminishing”) and today’s weekly Jobless Claims data. Today’s number showed that the number of U.S. workers filing new applications for unemployment insurance rose less than expected last week (up only 1,000 to 434,000) and the 4-week moving average hit a 16-month low at 450,000. Yesterday’s jobs data, however, was enough to push rates higher during the day, resulting in several investors changing prices. (Mortgage prices did better than Treasury prices, presumably due to lack of supply versus the Fed buying.) Ahead of us we still have the supply announcement for next week’s auction of 3’s, 10’s, 30’s and 10yr TIPS, but for now the 10-yr yield is back up to 3.84% and mortgage prices are worse between .125 and .250.

more on Fed buying MBS, NAMB on FHA, Merrill courting smaller mortgage bankers, Suntrust, RESPA, what is herding?, and joke of the day … <<< CLICK HERE

Featuring an extremely paradoxical name, the HTC Smart is HTC’s first dumb phone, based on the Qualcomm BREW Mobile Platform with HTC’s Sense UI overlay.

HTC’s press release is below:

HTC Corporation, a global smartphone designer, today unveiled HTC Smart, a new type of smartphone that creates a new category of easy-to-use, connected smartphones that are accessible by people all over the world.  “HTC has always focused on listening to customers and setting the stage for new mobile categories and HTC Smart is the response to customer demand around the world for an easier-to-use, affordable smartphone,” said Peter Chou, chief executive officer, HTC Corporation. “Just adding a touch interface doesn’t mean a phone is a smartphone; The integration of HTC Sense brings an unparalleled smartphone experience for people looking to do more on their phone.”

Bringing HTC Sense To The Masses

HTC Smart begins with a friendly compact touch design and integrates an intuitive user experience that is centered around HTC Sense, an HTC design philosophy that puts people at the center by focusing on three core areas: Make It Mine, Stay Close and Discover the Unexpected.  HTC Smart enables personal customization of each person’s own phone experience.  It also provides a quick and easy way to see what friends are up to via various social networks as well as quickly communicating over the phone, through text messaging or email.

“HTC Smart breaks new ground in delivering the powerful, in-demand smartphone features that consumers want on a more accessible device for global markets,” said Paul Jacobs, chief executive officer, Qualcomm Incorporated.  “We are pleased to be supporting HTC as they utilize the capabilities of Qualcomm’s Brew Mobile Platform open operating system to offer high-end capabilities and a compelling mobile user experience at mass-market price points.”

Qualcomm Brew Mobile Platform (Brew MP)

HTC Smart utilizes Qualcomm’s Brew MP, a popular mobile operating system that enables smartphone devices to be offered at more aggressive price points, providing HTC with the flexibility to deliver smartphone features on devices across multiple tiers.

Availability

The HTC Smart will be available this spring across Europe and Asia.

The phone features a 300 Mhz processor, QVGA screen, 256 MB ROM and 256 MB RAM, European 3G, 3 megapixel camera and 3.5mm headphone jack.

Commentary

It is of note that even a free OS like Android was not cheap enough to allow HTC to access the pay as you go market. This is because a smartphone OS brings with it certain hardware requirements such as a powerful processor, RAM and extra sensor support. Having a free OS does not mean much when you need $200 worth of hardware to run it.

This of course further suggests a role for an OS optimised for less demanding hardware such as Windows Mobile 6.5.x to continue to exist while Windows Mobile 7 would cater to the higher end of the market.

Hopefully this move will be successful for HTC, but we do doubt HTC has enough brand recognition, or the phone enough features to compete in the feature or fashion and style market.

A suggestion to HTC however, your slogan of bringing Sense to the Masses could do with some tweaking – we don’t think the masses appreciate being called Senseless…

Ed Whitacre, General Motor Co’s chairman, said he is expecting around 100 GM dealerships to get restored due to the new arbitration federal law.

I think a large number will get reinstated, autonews.com quoted him as saying today. I think that’s a given. It’s in the hundreds.

The law, which was signed by President Obama, sets a period of six months in which dealers can demand neutral arbitration after they get closed down. Closed dealers have until January 25 to ann… (read more)

We had a chance to catch up for a minute with the man tasked with turning around Moto’s phone business, Mobile Devices CEO Sanjay Jha, just moments before he went on stage to introduce the Backflip this week at CES. With Android getting more attention than ever before, it’s never been a better time to sit down with a guy who’s gone all-in with the platform, right? He talks Nexus One, Google, firmware updates, Blur, and more, so don’t be shy — read on for the full transcript!

Continue reading A quick sitdown with Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha

A quick sitdown with Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Anyone who owns a dolphin trained to detect underwater mines might be interested in Matthieu Baele’s rechargeable stove idea. Anyone who’s got a retired dolphin trained to, etc, etc, might want to re-educate it to do the cooking at home.

The Stoov consists of an electromagnet with a heating element, all covered in heat-resistant rubber, and then, rather implausibly, finished with a multi-touch screen (that you can, I guess, watch cooking porn on or, maybe not.) And when you get bored with the Stoov, you can stick it on the bottom of a ship and wait for it to blow up.

[Yanko]

Spring Design’s Alex e-reader gets February 22 release date, $399 price originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apparently, today’s the day to release affordable mainstream laptops and Toshiba is joining the flood with seven new Satellites. Yes, Tosh’s got seven new models with every screen size from 13 inches on up to 18.4. We’re pretty interested in the higher end 16-inch Satellite A505 which will have choices of Intel Core i3-330M, Core i5-430M, Core i7-720QM as well as AMD Turion Ultra M620 processors. The starting at $749 rig will also be offered with Blu-ray and discrete graphics options. On the lower end, the 13.3 inch Satellite U505, isn’t as thin or light as the Toshiba T135, but the Core i3-330M and Core i5-430M powered system can be configured with a mulittouch display and WiMAX. The 14-inch E205, 15.6 inch L505, 17.3-inch L555, and 18.4 inch P505 all have Intel Core i3 and i5 options, but hit the break for the detailed specs.

Continue reading Toshiba unleashes seven Satellites with Core i3 and i5 processors

Toshiba unleashes seven Satellites with Core i3 and i5 processors originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As if it wasn’t enough to unleash seven new mainstream laptops, Toshiba’s updating its 18.4-inch Qosmio X505 desktop replacement with new Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors. The chassis is unchanged and continues to be a beast of a laptop with Harmon Kardon speakers and a wide 1920 x 1080-resolution display. The rest is all based on what configurtion you choose, but its safe to assume the starting at $1,199.99 model will have the lower end Intel Core i5-430M processor and a 320GB hard drive option. From there on up it will have options for NVIDIA GTS 360M graphics, an 64GB SSD and up to 6GB of RAM. Basically, the Qosmio just continues to be one mother of a rig. Hit the break for full specs.

Continue reading Toshiba Qosmio X505 gets Core i5′d

Toshiba Qosmio X505 gets Core i5′d originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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