A new bipartisan commission reports on what many of us knew for a long time but some in the media chose to ignore, that the US was systematically and massively practicing torture at the same time that top government officials from president Bush on down were denying that they were doing so and claiming high moral reasons, that it went against our values and so on. [Read more…]
It is time to turn to the issue of how to produce the Higgs particle. Particles that are too short-lived to be found in nature have to be produced in the laboratory. What one does is to use Einstein’s famous relation E=mc2. If one has energy large enough, one can in principle produce any particle in the lab. The larger the mass of the desired particle, the larger the energy required. The way the particle is produced is by accelerating easily obtainable stable particles (i.e., those that do not decay quickly into other particles) like protons and electrons (and their anti-particles) and then colliding them with each other so that their energy of motion is converted into mass energy of the new particle. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]
I was always curious as to how people are selected to be in the police line up of suspects. Apart from the person of interest, who are the other people? Police officers in plain clothes was my guess. But this clip from a new comedy series The Lineup on YouTube suggests that I may be wrong. (Via Bluegal) [Read more…]
Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, who is one of the many Republicans with presidential ambitions, made a splash earlier this year by saying that the Republican party had to stop being the ‘stupid party’, saying things that made them look hateful and ridiculous in the eyes of the electorate. He was referring to the statements about rape made by Republican senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock in 2012 that transformed likely wins into defeats. [Read more…]
Yesterday CNN had a terrible news day, first reporting that a suspect had been arrested in connection with the Boston marathon bombings and then having to retract the story. You can see the time sequence of the CNN debacle here. [Read more…]
Debt cutting frenzy has been rampant across North America and Europe, with ‘everyone’ (i.e., politicians, elite media, and the oligarchs) arguing that if the deficits are not reduced by cutting spending on social services, countries risk ruin. This phony consensus has been driven by pseudo-grassroots campaigns like ‘Fix the Debt’ and the Simpson-Bowles ‘Catfood Commission’, while standing in the shadows and pushing this agenda is billionaire Pete Peterson who has poured half a billion dollars into trying to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social programs. [Read more…]
I posted about Pat Robertson’s idiotic response to a question as to why nowadays miracles seem to happen only in places like Africa and not in the US. Why was god not showing the US any love, given that we are his chosen people and all? According to Pat, it is because we have become a nation of skeptical smartypants [Read more…]
It is always interesting to see those things on which Congress moves with lightning speed. It usually is with respect to things that benefit themselves or their financial supporters and at those times they reveal an astonishing level of bipartisan cooperation. [Read more…]
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…]