Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them →

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again...

And now we're learning to listen to the universe.

UK politicians green-light plans to record every citizen's internet history →

Surveillance legislation proposed by the UK last November has been examined in detail by the country's politicians, with a new report recommending 86 alterations, but broadly approving the powers requested by the government. The parliamentary committee scrutinizing the draft Investigatory Powers Bill said that companies like Apple and Facebook should not be required to decrypt messages sent on their services, but approved plans to record every UK citizen's browsing history for 12 months. The committee also gave a thumbs up to the bulk retention of data, and the targeted hacking of individuals' computers, known as "equipment interference."
...The Bill has been attacked by ISPs, privacy advocates, the UN, and the world's largest tech companies, with critics agreeing that the Bill is being rushed into law and that its wording is confusing. Critics point to portions of the law like the statement that "data includes any information that is not data." The UK's home secretary and the Bill's principal architect, Theresa May, later explainedthat this was supposed to refer to things like paper.

Whether or not the language is clarified, we're slowly moving to a world where everything we do may be known by everyone else. Governments will only be the first to afford mass surveillance technology.

President Obama's budget calls for a new wage insurance program. Here's what that means. →

The basic theory of wage insurance is that this could be a natural expansion of the existing social insurance state, which currently helps people out in the case of illness, disability, retirement, or temporary unemployment. But what the current system doesn't do much is help people or communities hit by the inevitable ups and downs of structural economic change.

The current unemployment insurance system implicitly imagines a world of generic workers, generic companies, and generic skills. You're minding your business, and then — bam — unexpectedly the company you work for shuts down. Now you're out of a job for a bit, and you need some money to help keep you afloat while you look for new work. Soon enough, you get a new position at a new company doing similar work for similar money.

Of course, that does happen, which is why unemployment insurance exists in the first place, but there are lots of people who lose their jobs and then can't find similar work at similar pay.

My mother, for example, was an analog-era page designer for magazines, and when the world shifted to digital desktop publishing software her years of skills and experience were substantially devalued. Factories leave a town and never come back. Often, workers left behind by these kinds of changes turn to lower-paid, lower-skilled jobs.

NSA Reorganizing →

An interesting and ongoing debate, in the middle of this reorganization:

I think this will make it even harder to trust the NSA. In my book Data and Goliath, I recommended separating the attack and defense missions of the NSA even further, breaking up the agency. (I also wrote about that idea here.)
And missing in their reorg is how US CyberCommmand's offensive and defensive capabilities relate to the NSA's. That seems pretty important, too.

Clearing the Body's Retired Cells Slows Aging and Extends Life →

I'm looking at a picture of two mice. The one on the right looks healthy. The one on the left has graying fur, a hunched back, and an eye that's been whitened by cataracts. “People ask: What the hell did you do to the mouse on the left?” says Nathaniel David. “We didn't do anything.” Time did that. The left mouse is just old. The one on the right was born at the same time and is genetically identical. It looks spry because scientists have been subjecting it to an unusual treatment: For several months, they cleared retired cells from its body.
Throughout our lives, our cells accumulate damage in their DNA, which could potentially turn them into tumors. Some successfully fix the damage, while others self-destruct. The third option is to retire—to stop growing or dividing, and enter a state called senescence. These senescent cells accumulate as we get older, and they have been implicated in the health problems that accompany the aging process.
By clearing these senescent cells from mice, Darren Baker and Jan van Deursen at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine managed to slow the deterioration of kidneys, hearts, and fat tissue. The animals lived healthier and, in some cases, they lived longer.

Obama to seek new tax on oil in budget proposal →

Congress has failed to raise taxes and tax allocations in line with increased costs of maintaining our roads, bridges, etc. Our transportation infrastructure is a mess. It makes a lot of political sense for President Obama to make a push for increased taxes now, when gasoline prices are low and falling, and a slight rise may be ignored.

The Rent-Seeking Is Too Damn High →

On Tuesday, a Senate subcommittee held a hearing on “occupational licensing” laws, which require government-issued licenses to perform certain types of work. Such laws have long existed for doctors, lawyers and others in highly skilled professions, but they are increasingly spreading to low- and mid-skill jobs as well. A White House report last summer found that occupational licensing requirements have increased fivefold since the 1950s, covering more than a quarter of all workers in 2008. Cosmetologists, tree trimmers and even interior designers need licenses in some states.
Defenders of occupational licensing typically argue that the rules help protect consumers and workers, and that’s undoubtedly true in some cases. I want the people filling my cavities to know what they’re doing. But it’s hard not to suspect that in many cases, these rules serve another purpose: to make it harder for new competitors to enter the marketplace. In Nevada, according to Politico, barbers need more than two years of training to qualify for a license; that’s a high bar to anyone looking to break into the business.
Economists call this kind of behavior “rent-seeking,” which is another way of saying “gaming the system to make more money than you’ve earned.” (A company that wins a no-bid contract through political connections is a rent-seeker. So is a CEO who gets a raise by stacking the board of directors with friends.) Occupational licenses are good for existing businesses, which face less competition, and for workers who already have licenses, who according to one study earn roughly 15 percent more than they would in a free market. But they’re bad for everyone else. Research has found that occupational licenses inhibit entrepreneurship, especially among low-income workers. They also raise prices, lower productivity and limit workers’ ability to change careers or cities. One recent study estimated that licensing laws cost the U.S. as many as 2.85 million jobs.