Last Friday morning when I heard news that Tamalan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two brothers thought to be responsible for the Boston bombing, had been killed and that his 19-year old younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was being looked for, I thought that the story was pretty much over, bar the predictable ending. [Read more…]
Last week the New Zealand parliament passed a law legalizing same sex marriage. The vote was 77-44 in favor. The bill has to be signed by the country’s governor general to become law but that is a formality since his role is largely ceremonial and does not have executive powers. [Read more…]
Magnetism is weird but in a fun way. Who as a child has not played with magnets and wondered how they worked? And for many a scientist it was what first attracted them to their field. Magnets are our first introduction to the idea of invisible forces that seem to permeate all space and can act to move objects without being in contact with them. Gravity is also such a force but it is too ubiquitous and outside our control for us to notice its peculiarity. We grow up so used to the idea that released objects fall to the ground that we do not give a second thought as to why they behave that way. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]
He died yesterday of a heart attack at his home. He was 72. Who can forget his performance at the 1969 Woodstock festival? [Read more…]
I was intrigued following my review of Skyfall when commenter Enkidum said that the implausibilties in this film pale “in comparison to the final poker hand in Casino Royale, which has never occurred in history and likely never would, even if people kept playing poker until the heat death of the universe.” [Read more…]
When sophisticated theologians talk about god, one quickly finds oneself wandering around in a rhetorical fog in which god becomes a constantly shape-shifting entity described by metaphors whose meanings are always just beyond one’s grasp. One has to struggle to understand what they are talking about because what these sophisticated thinkers imagine to be god is so far removed what any ordinary person thinks that I have long suspected that they are actually atheists struggling to find a way to salvage belief in something transcendental that would not be seen as manifestly anti-science or otherwise ridiculous in the circle of intellectuals amongst whom they move. [Read more…]
It seems like each passing day we hear worse news from Guantanamo where flagrant violations of simple decency, let alone legal rights, are practiced routinely. Waterboarding may have ended but prisoner abuse continues unabated. Now the New York Times has published on its op-ed pages on April 15, 2013 a heart-wrenching piece by Guantanamo detainee Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel titled Gitmo is killing me. Moqbel has been held there for over eleven years without charges or trial and is now on a hunger strike and is being force-fed by guards. His description of his treatment (delivered verbally and transcribed) is horrific. [Read more…]
Skyfall is the latest in the James Bond saga. It starts out with the obligatory very long chase sequence using multiple modes of transport and has the usual large quota of action scenes, but it also tries to make the characters of Bond and his boss M more complicated and develop her character and their relationship. At times Bond looks old and weary, more like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. [Read more…]
[UPDATE: According to the transcript of the questioning of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on April 22 by the authorities (see page 4), he actually was read his Miranda rights. So it looks like there was a change in policy on this and that is a good thing.]
What is it about acts like the Boston bombing that make people become so unhinged and overthrow all due processes? Already we have calls for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be tortured, denied Miranda rights, and treated as an enemy combatant. [Read more…]