The Chinese president on a visit to the United States told a group of people that he met on the street that they needed to challenge their government and change the status quo, and that people’s privacy must be respected if they are to breathe free. [Read more…]
A new paper has looked into the question of whether the masses of particles change with time. That this may be an issue may have not occurred to people (at least it had not occurred to me) but when you think about it, it is a valid concern: Are the masses of particles the same now as they were at the beginning of the universe? [Read more…]
Remember that case where a high school in Ohio grudgingly decided to remove a Jesus portrait that was in the hallway under threat of a federal lawsuit that it violated the Establishment Clause? [Read more…]
Scientist Ed Stone of CalTech and formerly of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains the significance of the Voyager mission that was blasted off in 1977 for what was hoped to be at least a four year mission that would be able to photograph two out the outer planets (Jupiter and Saturn) but is still going strong nearly four decades later, passing Neptune and Uranus and has just almost left the solar system and entered interstellar space, and is still sending back information. [Read more…]
Nelson Mandela died today. There is not much that I can add to all the words that will be written about him. But I thought that this old TV interview from 1961, when he was in hiding and before he was captured by the apartheid South African government and put in prison for 27 years before being released in 1990, was interesting. [Read more…]
Jesus and Mo have figured it out.
I wrote earlier about the puzzling insistence of the Republican party pursuing policies on birth control that are guaranteed to alienate women. Jonathan Capehart describes how they seem to be deliberately pursuing policies that alienate African Americans and Latinos as well. [Read more…]
Physics tends to be highly under-represented when it comes to women, with them comprising only 13% of faculty in degree-granting institutions. There are many suggested reasons for this but one heartening sign is that physics department faculty and professional organizations have recognized that this deficit does not reflect well on us and have made concerted efforts to increase interest in physics among young girls and to encourage more women to major in the subject and to pursue it as a career. [Read more…]
In a shrewd marketing move just before the Thanksgiving shopping madness, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos managed to grab headlines for his company by telling an awestruck and gullible Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes that it may not be long before his company was delivering packages to customers in 30 minutes using drones. [Read more…]
It is quite amazing how casually some Americans can talk about using nuclear weapons against Iran, given what we know about the long-term, drastic, and indiscriminate effects of such weapons. Usually they shy away from saying so directly and couch it in terms of saying that “all options are on the table” or “no options are off the table”. [Read more…]