Those wacky MIT guys

From the Guardian:

One of the strongest arguments against time travel is that we are not overrun with curious tourists from the future. A university student in Boston plans to change that, by inviting budding Doctor Whos to the world's first time traveller convention this weekend.
The organiser, Amal Dorai - a masters student in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - aims to test the theory of time travel by inviting people from the future to the event.

Dorai says: "Of course, no time travellers doesn't rule out the possibility of time travel, they could have just decided not to come to our convention." Hmm - yeah. But it gets better.

Physicists believe some kind of time travel is theoretically possible, but it will take hundreds or even thousands of years to work out the technical details.
Concerned that people will have forgotten his convention by then, Mr Dorai is urging volunteers to publicise the event to future generations by carving the details into clay tablets and burying notices in time capsules. He has slipped invitations on long-lasting paper inside dozens of obscure books in the MIT and Harvard University libraries.

The Uncertainty Principle

From City Pages (Twin Cities weekly serious tabloid) Can Theoretical Physics Save an Iron Range Town? Local Minnesota interest and extremely high geek factor.

An angry star?

Am I the only person weird enough to see this connection? (Yeah, probably.) One story in the news is about the Voyager One which has just reached the outer edge of the solar system. (Opinions vary as to whether it has actually "crossed" a boundary or not, but in any case it is in the zone.) Another major story concerns the ever-increasing intensity of a phenomenal bout of solar storms. These are surpassing records for intensity every day. As one scientist said: "This is an R-5 extreme event; they dont get much bigger than this."
Well, look, you have an object crossing a boundary of the Sun's own system - something that has not happened before. It's possible that natural space junk of some kind "passes through" the solar system, but after reading this. . .
"One team reported Wednesday that the craft apparently crossed a turbulent boundary near the edge of the solar system, where supersonic "winds" of charged particles from the sun collide with matter from interstellar space. No spacecraft has ever come close to the boundary, known as the termination shock" . . . I sort of think that an object would have to be propelled somehow to get through the boundary. And then at the same time, you have activity on the surface of the sun, that, while admittedly cyclical, is exceeding all previously recorded activity.
So, it makes me think that Sol is angry and throwing a little hissie fit. Of course, it (or should I say he?) probably doesn't know that Voyager is anything to do with Earth and indeed the solar storms shower everything in their path with the same magnetic bombardment; as the sunspots where these originate "turn away" from Earth, we will be spared their effects for a couple of weeks. But it could be back with the rotation of the sun, and scientists don't know how long it will last or how intense it can get.
It's just a thought.

Solar Storms

Been having trouble communicating, blogging, or watching TV? This might be why. From New Scientist.