So as expected, president Obama released his budget proposals with his offer to make cuts in Social Security (via the chained CPI) in return for some tax hikes. And as equally expected, some leading Republicans are now saying that it is the Democrats who are trying to balance the budget on the backs of seniors by cutting benefits in social services and that they are going to defend it (see here and here). [Read more…]
Robert Ingersoll was a decade-long customer of Arlene’s Flowers & Gifts, a store in the town of Richland, WA who had often asked the proprietor Baronelle Stutzman to send flowers and other gifts to his partner Curt Freed. After the state passed a referendum last November legalizing same-sex marriage, Ingersoll and Freed decided to get married and Ingersoll naturally turned to Stutzman to provide flowers for his wedding. To his surprise, she refused saying that “I am sorry. I can’t do your wedding because of my relationship with Jesus Christ.” even though she had long known about his relationship. [Read more…]
A few years ago, my physician retired and I had to find a new one. One seemed good until I discovered that they had this tiered pricing scheme where the more you paid in the form of an annual subscription, the more services they offered. For example, with my previous physician, if I went for my annual check up, he would order the usual tests and then later his aide would call me and tell me what the results were (if they required no further action) or he himself would call me to tell discuss with me what I should do if the matter so warranted it. [Read more…]
You have to hand it to Richard Feynman. He had a way of not only making difficult physics concepts understandable, he could also make everyday phenomena interesting by posing and then answering questions that do not even occur to most of us or, if they do, to which we are likely to give a facile or wrong answer. [Read more…]
In defense of its program of targeted killings in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world using drones and other bombing methods, the Obama administration has repeatedly claimed that its targets have been carefully vetted to make sure that they are high-value al Qaeda operatives and that their program is so precise that few civilians are affected. [Read more…]
I had to eat alone at a restaurant on Monday and so took along something to read while waiting for my food. But as is the annoying custom these days, they had a TV on in a corner of the room, which can be a huge distraction. Fortunately the TV was far enough away that I could not hear it but I noticed that they seemed to be showing live coverage of a trial. I was puzzled because I follow the news fairly closely and could not recall reading about any major court case that would warrant gavel-to-gavel live coverage. [Read more…]
We have finally reached the stage where we can explain the Higgs mechanism.
In part 3 of this series, I said that the complete set of elementary particles consisted of six quarks, six leptons, six ‘gauge bosons’ (particles that are the agents of the four fundamental forces), and the Higgs particle. In part 7, I said that there were patterns among the 18 non-Higgs particles, apart from some anomalies. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]
President Obama has initiated a new program to map the human brain. He has initially allocated $100 million for it but that will clearly not be enough for such a mammoth project and will have to be considered a down payment that must be added to later. I think that this is a worthy project, since the brain defines so much of who were are. [Read more…]
What is becoming increasingly clear is that the government does not know what to do with the prisoners who are being held in Guantanamo. They are being held without charges, some for over a decade with no hope of a proper trial or being released. The prisoners themselves realize this, and we have some of them committing suicide (though there are darker suspicions of homicide) and others going on hunger strikes and having to be force-fed. [Read more…]