Coda to the burial controversy

So Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body has been finally buried in a small private cemetery in Virginia, which I hope brings to an end a ridiculous chapter in the Boston bombing tragedy.

Martha Mullen, a woman in Virginia, hearing about the difficulty the family and funeral director were having in finding a cemetery willing to accept it, felt it was her Christian duty to help and so quickly organized a local interfaith group in her area to have him interred in a small burial ground. Her action has resulted in the predictable vituperation from local officials, neighbors, and the online community, as if she had committed a heinous crime. [Read more…]

Nancy Ghoul

elviraMy knowledge of TV talking heads is somewhat scattershot, largely dependent on the video clips that come my way when I am surfing the web, usually in relation to news stories. I was vaguely familiar with the name Nancy Grace as a former lawyer as a legal analyst on cable news, but that was about it. So when in response to a post commenter Crudely Wrott said of her that she “seems to thrive on, no, display an actual need for, human suffering and callous, horrific crime. Like a vampire’s dependence on blood”, I thought it was perhaps a tad harsh. [Read more…]

Internet addiction

Two years ago, I wrote about research that found that those people who tried to multitask (i.e., switch rapidly between different cognitive tasks) were highly inefficient in procession information when compared to those who did the same work sequentially. They suffered in all three major areas that would be necessary to multitask: the ability to filter (i.e., to detect irrelevancy so as to be able to quickly distinguish between those things that are important and those that are not), the rapidity with which they could switch from one task to the next, and the ability to sort and organize the information in the brain so as to keep track of the results of their different tasks. [Read more…]

Palin’s children

The Democratic and Republican political parties are quite similar in that they carefully shape their message to appeal to blocs of voters, trying to encompass as many segments as they can to cobble together a majority, while both remain staunchly pro-oligarchy. This strategy required them to pay at least lip-service to the needs of the non-oligarchic population. [Read more…]

Fun and games at CNN

A few days ago, I came across an amusing news item. Cable news teams had all rushed to Phoenix, Arizona to cover the impending verdict in the Jodi Arias murder trial which had inexplicably become a national obsession, when the sensational news from Cleveland about the dramatic rescue of the three kidnapped women and the child broke, and they found themselves having to cover both. [Read more…]

Who invented the average value?

All measurements of a continuously varying quantity (length, weight, mass, etc.) have some level of uncertainty (more commonly referred to as the ‘error’) associated with them, due to the limits of the measuring instrument or limitations of the measurer. In order to mitigate the effects of this, nowadays we take many measurements and calculate the average value of the quantity. [Read more…]

Picking sides in Syria’s civil war

This morning NPR had an extraordinary story about how Robert Ford, the US Ambassador to Syria who had left that country because of the deteriorating security situation there, had sneaked back into the rebel-held northern part of country to meet with and provide aid to one of the many factions that is fighting the Syrian government. So it looks like the US government has come down firmly on one side in the civil war that is raging in that country and causing immense hardship. [Read more…]

Misinterpreting the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment

We can sometimes forget that the First Amendment of the US Constitution actually imposes two restrictions on the government when it comes to religious matters. The amendment says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The ‘establishment’ part gets the most attention in church-state matters because of repeated attempts to force religion into public life but the ‘free exercise’ part is also important. [Read more…]