The Financial Times was recently caught purveying a new kind of advertisement on its web site — invisible ads! (New York Times, Alternate Link) The ads consisted of links to other commercial sites, printed in white on a white background. Harmless you might think, but think again. The ads aren’t for human visitors to the sites, but for web search engine programs like Google that travel the web and rank some pages by (among other …

Mike Griffin, the new administrator of NASA, recently made a candid admission of one of the most important unspoken purposes of NASA and other government agencies that fund science and technology research. That is, testing technologies, techniques, and theories risk free before they are given to corporations to make a profit.

(I work for a NASA-funded lab at Caltech, so technically Griffin is like the CEO of the company that employs me. I didn’t go to his …

It may not be as frightening as the militarization of space that the US government is working on (see Under the Same Sun for commentary), but the new plan to equip commercial passenger jets with “directed energy weapons” (lasers) certainly won’t make me feel safer in the air.

Aerospace giants BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman received about $120 million to test an “advanced laser-based missile protection system” similar to Grumman’s Guardian system (pictured below) for use in …

A recent Asia Times commentary by Bhaskar Dasgupta rightly claims that the Nuclear Nonproliferation treaty is a “crock” that “has proven to be spectacularly ineffective in the past decade.” What he doesn’t say is that the treaty was largely meaningless from the beginning since it never called for the nuclear-armed powers to destroy their arsenals, only for other countries not to get nuclear weapons. In other words, the word “nonproliferation” only applies to our adversaries. …

March 2003

An online search using “Google” for the two words “Iraq” and “scientist” will result in many pages of links to news articles telling how an Iraqi scientist agreed to a private interview with United Nations officials on February 6th. Most of the links point to the same Associated Press article, which was picked up by hundreds of American news bureaus. So many links to the same article might be said to show the importance of the story. (It also …

by Jim Ingalls with members of the Caltech Progressive Coalition on 24th January 2000

“…From now on institutions for learning and research will more and more have to be supported by grants from the state… Is it at all reasonable that the distribution of the funds… should be entrusted to the military? To this question every prudent person will answer: ‘No!’ ” -Albert Einstein, 1947

Last Friday President Bill Clinton visited our campus to announce the fiscal year (FY) 2001 …

Presented at the 1999 Independent Commission on War Crimes during the Bombing of Yugoslavia

The issue of depleted uranium (DU) has been a source of intense debate since it’s first major use in the Gulf War in 1991. While the governments of the United States and other “Allied Powers” steadfastly maintain that DU is safe enough to eat in small quantities, the public and especially those likely to have been exposed to DU such as Gulf War veterans and Iraqi civilians …