Radiation

First of all, Happy New Year!  Just think, a year ago, the earth was in the same relative position to the sun as it is today.  (Of course, we could say that any day of the year and be completely accurate; there's nothing remarkable about 1 Jan astronomically speaking, though 22 Dec is pretty neat).
Today I wanted to talk about radiation.  There was a bit of an outcry during the Fukushima disaster, which triggered a lot of conversation and somewhat less thought on the topic, but what prompts this writing is something slightly more personal.  I have a friend who is considering taking a job at Holloman AFB, which is in Alamogordo, NM, and also happens to be the site of multiple atomic and nuclear weapons tests.  He has a child, and the idea of being raised near a potentially hot radioactive site is understandably problematic.
The first thing we should remember about radiation damage is that it's cumulative- it "metabolizes" very, very slowly, and can quickly build to toxic levels (Rads in the Fallout series are fairly accurate, if only in this respect.  In fact, I think I'll use the term).  Being exposed to 100 Rads all at once is only slightly more dangerous than being exposed to 10 Rads a day for 10 days.  And by Rads, I actually mean milli-Sieverts, or mSv.  Rads just sounds more... rad.
At Alamogordo, at the Trinity site, the radiation level at ground zero pings at about 10 times the background rate.  At first, that sounds threatening, but I wasn't sure what the background rate was- and it turns out, on average, the yearly consumption of Rads for anyone just living in our society is about 2.  So, if you camped out on ground zero at Alamogordo for a full year, you'd receive a cumulative dose of 20 Rads.
Still, this doesn't put things in perspective, and for that I came across a handy reference from the World Nuclear Association.  I won't reproduce it here, but there's also a good table here, down towards the bottom.
What I'd like to highlight are specifically the thresholds- after 100 Rads, over the course of a year, there's some increased chance of cancer.  It says it's about 5%.  To get this from Alamogordo, you'd have to camp out at ground zero for an entire year running chest x-rays twice a day, and even then you'd have a 95% chance of walking away with no ill effects (well, besides law enforcement constantly trying to stop you from trespassing, and the owner of the x-ray machine convinced you're trying to void his warranty).
50 Rads per year, for techs that work in the industry, is the legal limit for professional exposure, and there are no discernible effects on health at this level (they are as likely to be beneficial as not).
But that's just at ground zero.  Alamogordo is a healthy distance south, and the interesting thing is the fallout never reached it- the explosion carried north and west.
 
It's almost entirely certain to be safe to live in; as for being a place you'd want to live, well, you'll have to make up your own mind.  It is New Mexico, after all, and it's a small town, not unlike Altus, OK.
Finally, I'd like to end with a quote from the WNA linked to above.  Radiation is dangerous, but even more dangerous is the misunderstanding of radiation.  "In 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear accident caused a few (preventable) deaths from thyroid cancer and massive psycho-social impact due to relocation of over 100,000 people, mostly unnecessarily. (It also caused 28 to 47 deaths among clean-up workers who received high radiation exposure.) For members of the public, fear of radiation was much more devastating than radiation itself."

Overpasses are bad, m'kay?

We are all susceptible to wrong thinking- one could say it’s fundamental to what makes us human- and I’m no exception.  I do pride myself on generally knowing whether an idea is coherent or not (something I’ve worked very hard at), but I make occasional (read: lots of) mistakes.  Last night could have killed me, so I guess it was more than your usual misinformation (whether I believe in Bigfoot is seldom life threatening) or even the more practical knowledge (knowing when a so-called “business deal” is a scam).

The double rainbow I saw.

I suppose I should set the scene.  I live in Altus, a small town in southwestern Oklahoma, and I frequently have medical appointments that the local area can’t field, so I have to drive for about an hour to get to Lawton, a slightly larger small town that manages to pass as a city (no offense, well, not too much offense to my Okie friends).  Yesterday afternoon, there was a warning that there might be hail in the area, and when I looked at the weather radar, there was a heavy storm coming right for us.  I figured if I left immediately, I should be able to stay just ahead of the storm.  On the way, my supervisor called to tell me that a tornado had touched down, just outside of a small town and the highway I was on.  I had literally passed the town 4 or 5 minutes before, but besides the ominously dark clouds behind me, it was clear in front so I pushed on.  I heard one of my favorite songs, Avenged Sevenfold’s Nightmare, on the radio and saw a perfect 180 degree double rainbow (the second in my life!) and escaped the downpour with only a few miles of rain, which would last most of the day for home- it was a great ride.

I arrived at my destination unhindered at about 3:30 PM, but I still knew I’d dodged a bullet earlier.  I don’t believe the tornado did cross the highway, but it could have.  By the time my appointment was over, the weather had passed over, but was still all along the route back home.  So I decided to hang out in town until things looked better outside.  By the time I left, it was 9 o’clock at night.  I felt 5 hours would be plenty of time for the storm to get out of the way, and never bothered checking my weather app.  For those keeping score, this was my third mistake that day.

I am usually a fan of night driving, but this time, it would prove to be a bad idea.  Daylight Savings Time had just ended, making it much darker than I’d planned, such that I can’t tell what the clouds look like.  There’s no rain and very little lightning visible.  So I start the 50 mile drive.  After 10 miles or so, the lightning has steadily been increasing, but I can’t see any bolts or hear thunder, which means it’s far off, and mostly to the North.  As it’s not too threatening, I press on.  I get about 15 miles in, and the clouds start to drizzle- nothing that I even need to put my wipers for, but the lightning continues increasing in frequency, and the wind picks up, still blowing from the south southwest.  It’s perfectly normal to be driving along in Oklahoma and the wind just decides to blow you off the road, so that wasn’t alarming in the slightest.  Then at what had to be about 20 miles in, a wall of water hits my car from the South.  My wipers are on full bore and I still only get glimpses of clarity before they’re filled in by more water.  I slow down, which I almost never do for rain, but I felt myself hydroplaning, and the water on the road looked deep- we’re prone to flash floods, and this could turn into one, though probably not enough to float my car, enough to push it off the road.

So, driving along at 35 Mph, I make it another 5 miles or so.  It could only have been about 10 minutes before the rain abruptly stopped, but in that time the wind changed direction twice, blowing straight back toward me (East), and then switching to blowing towards the south.  That was when I started getting nervous.   Then, lightning bolts, now clearly visible, were in front of me.  For a split second, I see what could have been a funnel cloud highlighted to the northeast- and I start watching the skies.  At least in the day, you have a clear view of what the clouds are doing, and I just have to wait for an opportune lightning bolt to strike behind it.  It didn’t take long- and sadly, I wasn’t disappointed.  It wasn’t a full funnel yet, but it definitely appeared like a semi-triangular cloud formation, pointing down in a horizon that was otherwise featureless.

Now I’m very nervous.  My instinct says to find shelter, to put something between me and it besides my car.  I know the route (and by route, I mean 50 miles of straight, mostly featureless road), and I know that just a few miles on, near the town the tornado touched down, there’s an overpass where another state highway crosses.  I figure if I can just push toward that, I can ride it out.  This is mistake number 4, maybe 5 if you count not turning around when it started getting worse; 6 if you count trying to come back that night at all.  I’ll go with 6.

So, I make it to the overpass uneventfully, but I keep watching that-spot-in-the-sky-where-I-saw-what-might’ve-been-a-funnel-cloud-forming.

And then I just wait.  The rain had returned, the wind had changed directions a few more times, and it was moving fast enough to blow the rain sideways.

I remember thinking, wouldn’t this bridge make a sort of funnel?  I knew tornados were often very wide- larger than the bridge in every dimension- but I figured, at least with cover, I’d have a better shot.  After all, the vacuum is above you, so you should get pulled up, mostly, right?  I waited, hoping things would get better.  They got worse, but I just kept alternately listening to the radio and listening for the sound a tornado makes.  I’ve been told it sounds like a train blasting by, a high pitched roar.  I figured, if I heard it, I’d get out and hide under the car.  I spent some time in the back seat, belted in as well.  I had no idea what to do, and was mostly trying to occupy myself by thinking I was doing something useful.  The bridge was number 7, the bit about the vacuum, while not entirely wrong, was 8.

After an hour, things weren’t getting better, and I was going to risk it.  I wasn’t going to spend all night in the car.  Press on, like I’ve been trained.  So I did.  I was a little more than halfway home, and made it without further incident.

I found out this morning not only is what I did a bad idea, it may well be the worst.  Well, OK, not worst- standing atop the bridge holding a metal golf club aloft after attaching my entire zipper collection to my metal suit while soaking in a vat of lighter fluid and smoking crystal meth would be worse, but a car is a deathtrap in a tornado, and the overpass only makes it worse.  As far as tornado safety goes though, es no bueno.  The Storm Prediction Center of Oklahoma has posted a detailed and fairly complicated analysis of “Tornado Vs Overpass” behavior here, but I’ll simplify it (it’s about 25 pages long, so what follows really is a simplification).

As I mentioned earlier, the instinctive thought is “tornados suck you up”.  This is true- except that it does not only do that.  The funnel cloud, if one is even present, represents the center of a vortex, a low-pressure area, which is causing wind to swirl around it.  The general direction is up, but there is a huge sideways component that can extend “a considerable distance” (when they talk about half mile wide tornados, for instance) from the visible tornado!  The winds may be at their fastest at the edges, in fact.  Think about swinging a rope around in a circle- the tip is moving much faster than the base where you’re holding it.  This isn’t exactly the same of course, as there is no solid lever involved, but the principle is similar.

Second, the debris from a tornado (one might argue the most dangerous component) is likely to get snagged by the bridge, dumping cars or trees or pieces of buildings or rabid prairie dogs on you.

Most overpasses don’t have anything to hang onto if you are getting pulled by the wind, and the one I was under was no exception.

The best response in my case was to stay away from the tornado, of course- I should have driven at right angles away from the thunderstorm.  In my case, that would have meant turning around, and probably sleeping in my car, or a hotel room, in Lawton that night, but it would have been the safest course of action.  Since I insisted in driving into the storm, the next best course of action would have been, assuming I saw a tornado, to stop the car, get out, and run for a ditch somewhere a good distance from my car, and lie face down protecting my head until the tornado passed.  The reason this (very counter-intuitive) option is safer is because tornados lose wind speed as they get closer to the ground- and at the ground level, the wind speeds are zero.  The further you get from the ground, though, the faster the relative speed rises.  This is the reason to stay out of the car- they’re high enough to guarantee they’ll be hit with very high wind speeds, making you even more likely to suffer injury by getting rolled over (by which I mean tumbled like a child’s toy, possibly being picked completely up and slammed into something), showered by broken glass or trapped inside.   Lying face-down in a ditch is safer because debris is less likely to get dropped on you and you aren’t likely to get blown around, but is still a “last ditch stand” that should be your final, desperate option.

I made it home safe, largely because the storm didn’t generate a tornado at that time (as I said, it had earlier, almost at that very spot), but I did make a couple of decent decisions along the way.  Pushing through the storm slowly, until visibility improved, and increasing my speed to something high but safe (the speed limit) until I’d gotten out from under the storm.

Tornados are one of those instances where your “gut” will lead you wrong, and the only remedy is research- at least enough to understand your risks.  I have now (not too late, luckily), and hopefully this helps you if your ever find yourself in one of these situations.

2012

For the first time, I'm watching the movie 2012. A friend asked me to and to tell him what I thought. So I thought, I'll tell everyone instead, and then send him the link.
Very quickly, for those who don't know, the gist of 2012 is that neutrinos from the sun heat the core of the Earth which results in extreme tectonic activity. Then the planets line up and electromagnetic fields go crazy and everything explodes. It looks great, but is the science even close to reality? No.
Neutrinos, at least many, do come from the sun. They are weakly interacting, neutrally charged particles. They don't do much, if anything, for us to be concerned about- though they are very interesting to particle physicists for reasons I won't pretend to fully understand. As far as heating up the Earth's core, that's about as laughable as saying that doing push-ups will knock Earth out of its orbit, though at least the push-ups hypothesis is somewhat realistic.
Neutrinos simply don't have the energy necessary to do so, and even if they did, since only about 1 in a 100 million actually collide with some atom in the planet, never mind in the core, it would take a truly astronomical amount to actually heat the planet. Let's explain the terms before we go on, though.
First, lets start with what "weakly interacting" means. There are 4 forces, gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces. Gravity affects objects with mass, electromagnetism affects those with a charge, and the strong forces interact with particles such as protons and neutrons. The Weak Force only interacts with leptons, which includes neutrinos (and a handful of others), but it's extremely weak- it's quite a bit stronger than gravity, but with such tiny range it has been described as contact only.
Contact isn't as common as you might think, though- when we touch solid objects, we are really interacting with the electromagnetic force. Solid to us is actually almost entirely empty space. We "feel" solidity because both we and the objects we're touching are electrically charged- either positive or negative. Because neutrinos are neutrally charged, they can't interact with the electromagnetic force, so they pass right through.
Here goes- tedious (but fascinating, if you're into that sort of thing!) math ahead.
If they do interact, they've got a minuscule amount of energy anyway- between 2.2 eV and 15 or so MeV (Electron Volts and Mega Electron Volts, at 1 million each). An eV is an incredibly small amount of energy- 1 eV is equal to about 3.83 × 10^-20 calories. Even 15 MeV is only enough to make 0.0000000000006 calories. So, if the most energetic neutrinos were to hit the core, it would take 1.7 Trillion of them to raise the temperature 1 degree per cubic cm. However, since only 1 in 100000 actually interact with anything (contact only), we would need 17000 Trillion per cubic cm for 1 degree. To put that number in perspective, if it were in dollars, we could pay a half billion dollars to every US citizen (Man, woman and child) and still have money left over- 20000 Trillion dollars (which is still enough to pay for the country to run for the next 5000 years or more!). And that is just to raise 1 milliliter of the Earth 1 degree Celsius.
We must also realize that the Earth is cooling at the rate of 4.42 * 10^13 W, or about 10 Trillion Calories. Per Second. Which means, that, for the neutrinos just to equal our rate of heat loss, we would need 17 Trillion Trillion. Right- enough to pay every person on earth 200 times our entire national budget and run our country for 3 and a half billion millennia!
So, just to break even we need about 10^24 neutrinos coming at us.
Let's look at planetary alignment, supposed to worsen the neutrinos (already dispatched as an even likely form of trouble). The trouble with planetary alignment is gravity- all the planets line up, somehow magnifying their gravitational pull. While in the room with you (well outside your territorial bubble, at about 1 meter) I have about 0.2 % the gravitational pull of the moon on you. Not much, granted, but the moon is very massive. Jupiter, though, only has 5 times as much pull as me (about 1 percent of the moon)! And besides Venus (at 3 times my pull), none of the other planets can match my gravitational effect on you. And my pull is eclipsed by your car or your office! The point here is that gravity is a very weak force- and that distance matters ALOT. So, Earth and the moon are much closer to the sun than any of the other planets (except for Venus and Mercury), and their pull is negligible in comparison. Regardless of that fact, there's no reason for a planetary alignment to do anything more than cause a high tide on earth (it probably wouldn't, but at best that's all it'd do) and do absolutely nothing to the Sun- much less cause a solar flare, because solar flares are electromagnetic emissions- not gravitic ones!
The only thing in the movie even remotely possible was the solar ejections/flares becoming worse. This is problematic. Potentially, electrical grids could collapse as a massive electromagnetic field induces a current in every wire on Earth. We'd live through the initial hit, but without electricity (and without the possibility to restore it for years) we'd be devastated. That's scary- because it could actually happen. But we could recover. However, that would require an enormous solar flare (which has happened before) and a weakened magnetosphere on Earth's part. Possible, but not too likely.
There was one realistic point: Yellowstone is the site of the worlds largest inactive volcano. A very serious problem, and one we can do nothing about. A meteor coming for us, we can shoot down (or more likely, move out of the way). A gamma ray burst, we'll never see and will fry everything on the planet before we can scream. Besides, I'm handy with a handgun and a baseball bat if my kids or I get hungry (ain't nobody taking my food first), if we get to fight back to survive.
Yellowstone. The volcano- that will be an inevitable experience, worsened by being dragged out. We'll know it's coming and can't stop it. If we get a chance to escape, we'll die in the coming winter, or feast on the misfortune of our fellow men. It will be a terrifying and tormented death, which scares the piss out of me. But what can I do? It would obliterate everything from the Dakotas to the Mississippi river and beyond, crush the Rockies to dust and throw them into the Pacific, taking a chunk out of much of Canada and Mexico as well. The ashes would cover the planet, blocking the sun (and mitigating global warming!) and devastating all life. Cows (hell, cockroaches) would be lucky if they made it, and they'd be luckier than us. There's no way of preparing for such destruction on a global level- we're going to die or dramatically reduce global population, and we're talking 1 in 1000 if they're lucky. It's over, if Yellowstone blows. There's no way to prepare. All terrestrial life could end.
2012 was, as far as the science is concerned, a joke at best, and exploiting the conspiratorial among us at worst, taking advantage of the ones who don't understand the science. It reminds me of the Core, a movie from a few years back which boasted some of the most awful science in all of Hollywood history, actually provoking nightmares in yours truly (which I was still able to logic my way out of). Whenever you watch a movie that makes you question the future of the planet, grab a science geek and ask them what they think. We're usually thinking about the death of human society, when we aren't worried about getting laid (or leveling our D&D characters). My favorite (by which I mean "think most likely") is without a doubt the Yellowstone volcano.
Anyway, if only I had a nickel for every neutrino...

Metaphorical invisibility sucks. What about literal invisibility?

Twitter got me thinking. It has a terrible habit of doing that. Specifically, this time we were talking about being invisible and abusing the advantages. One of my tweeps mentioned being invisible in the Caribbean- and I began to wonder about it. I asked if tanning/skin cancer would be a concern, and she said it would be, since UV light is also invisible.
At this point, I was intrigued. Invisibility is great, but how could it work? I came up with a few scenarios.
First, UV light is the primary source of tanning. But, how do we gather heat from the sun? It has been demonstrated that the most energetic wavelengths of light, on Earth at any rate, also correspond nicely with the visible spectrum (particularly green, hence chlorophyll). The sun "just happens" to emit light most strongly in this spectrum. But what does that mean for the Invisibles? Heat is a byproduct of kinetic movement, in that molecules, and especially their electrons, get agitated to the point that they move around faster, jostling back and forth. In a normal, visible human, light rays bombard our skin and clothing and smack into millions of molecules on our skins, speeding things up and warming us.
So, would the invisibles be cold all the time, unable to draw heat from the light that was hitting them, only able to get warmth via ambient heat? Or would we be too hot, since ultraviolet rays could somehow pierce through our skin and shine directly on, well, everything inside, agitating a lot more than our surface area? Neither of these answers has implications that pass muster. Being opaque to UV radiation seems absurd if we're going to be transparent to everything else, since right now we're opaque to most everything else as well. If they were cold all the time, that makes (very slightly) more sense. X-Rays pass through us, and we don't notice any significant heat difference because they are passing through us, not colliding with our skin or, since we'd be completely transparent, organs (well, at least not colliding with us in any significant number- I'm sure the occasional atom will absorb a random photon here and there, but not on the scale that something opaque does at every minute of every day).
But then we have the problem of what would we be made out of? There are lots of reasons that we aren't invisible (for one thing, materials that are simply aren't conducive to life), but how could we be? Water makes up most of our cells, but it's not invisible, either. For something to be invisible, it would need to refract the light in precisely the same way as the ambient air. And water simply can't do that. So the rest of our materials would have to optically correct for the failure of our water. For one thing, we do tan, and melanin would have to go. Sorry, bones, calcium is no good- perhaps we can restructure the molecules so that they are largely silicon and oxygen, (out with you, calcium!) and never mind the pesky hemoglobin (a very complicated molecule in its own right) that is bright red and performs the minor task of transporting oxygen to the rest of our bodies... and I think you can see how this explanation rapidly degenerates into one more extravagant excuse than the last.
Well, maybe one way, but I don't particularly buy this one either: the Invisible Man tackled this issue by simply putting the protagonist into another dimension, at least partially, which neatly sidesteps all of the aforementioned problems (and puts the explanation, and any bothersome details, neatly out of the grasp of most non-physicists, including myself).
So, screw all that. There's no way, without some kind of cloaking device, we'd be invisible, and that's not particularly tenable either, for many of the same reasons, including one more that applies to all three.
Everything else aside, I don't buy it simply because our eyes function by capturing light, and if they can't because light goes through them, then I'm invisible(Yay!) and blind(Crap!). In the case of the alternate dimension approach, I would think that our ability to see would be based in whatever dimension our eyes were in, for the same reason. Of course, on that front, I could be completely uninformed. About all I know about multiple dimensions is that, mathematically, they have been proven to exist. And if something is mathematically proven, that's about as certain as we can be of anything at all.
In that case, though, good news. I am invisible- to anyone not in the room with me right now. At least, dimensionally distant.
Verdict? Metaphorical invisibility sucks, but at least you still have 5 senses going for you.

Something from Nothing

An argument I hear a lot is that the Big Bang is the process of something coming from nothing, and therefore can't be correct. There are several problems with this view, not the least of which is exactly what the nothing actually consists of.

First of all, whatever existed "before" the first few seconds of our universe, let me warn you that prepositions don't apply. Before, after, during, below, behind, etc., because whatever it was, it didn't have space or time to describe it. To the best of my admittedly shallow knowledge on the topic, we don't know what it was. It wasn't nothing, that's fairly certain, but at the same time, nothing exists now that even comes close- everything we know exists in our universe, but we are talking about the origin of that universe. Everything that ever has or will exist, at least in a rudimentary sense, existed in the singularity*. What it exists "in" is likely unfathomable by even our greatest minds. This is because the terms we must use to describe it don't apply- it is simply our language, or our minds, failing us. How can we assign a time to a time when time was irrelevant and a location where places didn't exist?

How do we know about the big bang? Well, there's a lot to that question. One of the best forms of evidence we have is the red shift of the rest of the universe. There are literally billions of galaxies all around us- and they are all moving away from us. Think about ripples in an infinite pond- if we watch them long enough, we can deduce where the pebble initially hit. It's the same thing with galaxies- and they all point to the same place. If you want to know more about how we know this, google the Doppler Effect. I could ramble about it for hours.

Consider the degree of evidence, here- billions of galaxies to measure, and every one checked fits into a neat little one inch formula. And they all point back to a single instant in time, a single point in space, a single event in space-time.

Space-time is another fascinating topic, and important to understanding the difference between "something from nothing" and "something from nothing you can even imagine". Consider this. You and I are walking along an old train track. I see something shiny off in the grass and run off, let's say 50 meters into the grass. You're standing on the tracks waiting to see what I procure, facing me. Then something happens. Two lightning bolts strike. One strikes 25 meters behind you (A), and one strikes 25 meters between you and I (B). You see A and B, and hear them, simultaneously. But I see B as happening a fraction of a second before A. Which of us is right? Well, both.
Simultaneity, in other words, the times of events that occur relative to each other, is also relative to the observer.
Another example that may be easier to grasp is this: open a new document in a word processor. Now, copy this blog and paste it into the document. OK, consider this your singularity. Now, in MS Word**, open the find and replace dialog, type ? in the find box and in the replace box type "^&^l", without the quotes. Check use wildcards underneath and then hit replace all. This is the equivalent of typing return after every character in the document. You can keep hitting replace all, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger (after 1 time, I was up to about 70 pages- twice and it went to 200+). The striking thing about this is that the information stays the same, but space expands to match it. This is what the universe did, kick-started by dark energy. Consider the replace all button dark energy.

To quote J. B. S. Haldane, "Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

*It's entirely possible that there wasn't so much a singularity as there was the observable portion of our universe compressed (or unexpanded) into a tiny size. We do know the universe is much larger than we can see, we just don't know how much.
**I'm sure a similar method exists in OpenOffice or Word Perfect, I just don't have them installed on my computer.
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Now playing: Disturbed - "Another Way To Die" Lyric Video

Speed of light constant? Hardly.

The speed of light is about 300 million meters per second, or 186,000 miles per second. That's insanely fast, and yet the unit of measurement for our galaxy is the light year- about 6 trillion miles (yes, the light year, like the parsec, is a measure of distance, not time). Our closest star, besides the sun, is Alpha Centauri, and it's about 4 light years away from us. Potentially habitable planets may be hundreds or even thousands of light years away. Which means, if it's possible to break the speed of light, we definitely should. Unfortunately, science says right now that the speed of light is an interstellar speed limit, and if we were to break it, there would be severe fallout (like mass becoming infinite, which could instantly collapse the universe). Scientists and science fiction authors have worked on ways of subverting the rules for years, but with little hope for success. So when I heard about scientists already doing it, and ten years ago to boot, I was excited, but skeptical- this is the sort of thing that would revolutionize text books, and I hadn't heard anything about it.
Unfortunately, it's a matter of conflating two distinct but important principles in physics. The speed of light that I mentioned above is actually the speed of light in a vacuum- in other words, if there is nothing to impede lights' travel, that is how fast it will go. As soon as it hits a substance, such as our atmosphere, or water, it slows down. This is nothing new. Any kid with a clear drinking glass can demonstrate this phenomenon by sticking his finger into the water- it appears to bend in an unusual way. The light is traveling at different speeds through the different mediums.
So, what am I saying, the speed of light isn't constant? You bet. It slows down all the time. Then, what does c stand for in the famous equation E=mc^2? The speed of light in vacuum. This refers to a particular behavior of light, and while we can make objects without mass that can momentarily exceed it through quantum tunneling or particularly odd patterns of bending, c has yet to be exceeded in any meaningful way. The occasions when we have been able to get light to exceed c are either done through technicalities, such as by sending random bits of light forward and some backwards, or only occur over a few feet.
This article refers to one of these technicalities. To help get your head around exactly what's happening, consider this: two ice skaters doing laps side by side around an oval track. At the far end of the track, the inside skater grabs her team mate and pivots, flinging her partner forward much faster than either of them could do on their own. When light hits certain mediums, the waves get squished together, some will slow or even go backwards and others will be flung forward. The effect is short-lived, and doesn't hold much promise yet for any practical purposes, but who knows what the future will hold?
So the take away is this: when you refer to the speed of light, remember that you're usually referring to the speed of light in a perfect vacuum.