I have not written anything about the bombings at the Boston marathon. My experience is that in the immediate aftermath of such events the ratio of uninformed, unfounded, and even dangerous speculation to actual fact is extremely high so why add to it? My impulse is to try and ignore as much of the chatter as possible until we actually know something. [Read more…]
In the previous post, we had arrived at the seeming impasse concerning the detection of the Higgs particle in that the particles that we can detect (because they live long enough to reach the detectors) are either those that the Higgs does not directly decay into (photons) or have very small probabilities of doing so (electrons and muons). This is because the strength of the interaction between the Higgs particle and any other particle depends upon the other particle’s mass and the photon is massless while the electron and muon are extremely light. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]
A Ukrainian engineer Oleg Berg has found a way to change the key of a song from major to minor and vice versa, thus transforming its effect on the listener by completely altering the mood.
Here is an example that uses one of the Beatles classics Hey Jude switched from the original major to a minor key. [Read more…]
As readers pointed out, I was too sanguine in my assumption that corporal punishment was not that prevalent these days in the US, and that the practice is still widespread. Another area in which I may have underestimated the level of progress is in the elimination of formal segregation between races. [Read more…]
I have written before how the tax exemption given to churches creates opportunities for all manner of abuse. The practice of granting churches tax exemptions is long-standing, dating to before American independence but its constitutionality was not tested until 1970 when the US Supreme Court ruled that while it would not be permissible for the state to actually give churches money, granting tax exemptions was a passive form of state support that passed muster because the state had an interest in promoting organizations that improved the general welfare and the Establishment Clause discouraged entangling religion with the state, and having the state tax churches would lead to more entanglement than exempting them from taxation. [Read more…]
Acts of violence against individuals are deplorable. But there seems to be something especially despicable about attacking someone purely because of that person’s ethnicity or gender or sexuality. This type of violence seems to be driven by hate for what people are as opposed to violence committed for gain (say as part of a robbery) or that is random and can be blamed on the pathological mental state of the perpetrator. [Read more…]
Rand Paul clearly has ambitions of running for the presidency, if not in 2016 then later. He got a lot of press for going to Howard University to talk about GOP outreach to the African-American community. It was not a big success, unless he was trying to get a negative reaction from the students there in order to improve his standing with the GOP base, which sees all minorities as moochers. [Read more…]
While Pope Francis has received great press for his symbolic gestures of openness and warmth and humility, the real test of how different he would be from his predecessors was when he was confronted with decisions that had significant consequences.
One of the first was how he would deal with the ‘problem’ of the ornery US Catholic nuns who were more focused on helping the poor and sick and homeless, and not pulling their weight when it came to enforcing Catholic dogma against gays and contraception and abortion. Francis’s predecessor Ratzi set in motion a process (run by a male archbishop of course) to overhaul the Leadership Conference of the Women Religious, the organization tat represents the majority of US nuns. The nuns were none too pleased with how that process was being conducted. [Read more…]
Readers will recall the post about the Orthodox Jew of the ‘kohen’ variety who wrapped himself up in a thick plastic bag in order to prevent himself from becoming ‘ritually impure’ by flying over cemeteries. There were many questions raised by me and in the comments about how this was supposed to work. [Read more…]
In the search for the Higgs particle, we had to overcome two problems: producing it and detecting it. Both those things are difficult and I will first look at the detection part.
The Higgs particle is unstable, in that left to itself it lasts for a very short time. We know this since its mass is much greater than that of other elementary particles and so it should decay into them. As such, in order to detect it, one has to first set up the conditions to produce it and then find ways to detect it either before it decays or, if that is not possible, to find ways to infer that it had existed for a short time. The production and detection of unstable particles like the Higgs stretched the limits of what we can do with current technology (and budgets) and provides a window into the world of particle physics. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]