Readers will recall the post about the Orthodox Jew of the ‘kohen’ variety who wrapped himself up in a thick plastic bag in order to prevent himself from becoming ‘ritually impure’ by flying over cemeteries. There were many questions raised by me and in the comments about how this was supposed to work. [Read more…]
In the search for the Higgs particle, we had to overcome two problems: producing it and detecting it. Both those things are difficult and I will first look at the detection part.
The Higgs particle is unstable, in that left to itself it lasts for a very short time. We know this since its mass is much greater than that of other elementary particles and so it should decay into them. As such, in order to detect it, one has to first set up the conditions to produce it and then find ways to detect it either before it decays or, if that is not possible, to find ways to infer that it had existed for a short time. The production and detection of unstable particles like the Higgs stretched the limits of what we can do with current technology (and budgets) and provides a window into the world of particle physics. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]
I must say that this film was a huge disappointment. It had Philip Seymour Hoffman as one of its stars, and he usually does quality work. I had also heard that the story was based on L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology, and how that modern-day weird religion came to be and operates surely had the makings of an interesting film. [Read more…]
Whenever I give a talk, as I did recently, on the fight over the teaching of evolution in schools, I am almost always asked why these take place mostly in the US. That is not exactly true but in many other countries, there is no equivalent of the Establishment Clause that people can appeal to to keep religion out of the affairs of the state and so there is little recourse to the courts. In other countries, religion is either so deeply entrenched that the dominance of religious views are taken for granted or religion is so weak (in most of the developed world) that it is not a serious issue or gets resolved in the political arena. [Read more…]
As some of you know, the US Congress actually passed a law that was signed by president Obama named the Magnitsky Act requiring the administration to impose sanctions on those people deemed to be responsible for the death of Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. Not surprisingly, the Russian government deemed this to be interference in its internal affairs and responded by banning adoption of Russian babies by Americans. [Read more…]
I came across this photograph from the Gothamist of a man flying on a plane while completely wrapped in thick plastic.
It is no secret that there is considerable friction between the extreme fiscal wing of the GOP and its extreme social/religious one. The former occupy the top levels of the national party leadership and care mainly about helping the wealthy get wealthier at the expense of the rest of us, and have for long used conservative social issues mainly as a way to fire up their base and get them to vote for them. They managed to keep the nutters out of leadership positions in the party and tossed the crazies a few rhetorical crumbs now and then to keep them happy. [Read more…]
The Steubenville rape case highlighted the disgusting phenomenon of men who seem to think that they can do anything to women who are unconscious due to having drunk too much, and of communities who seem to condone such behavior if the perpetrators of such rapes are prominent athletes. It seems as if people think that when a woman is unconscious, she has no rights or dignity. [Read more…]
As I have said before, when religions are in the minority, they tend to emphasize tolerance and acceptance of diverse views. It is only when they get political power or influence that they reveal their true intolerant natures. Even if they do not become a state religion, as long as political leaders feel they are important enough to pander to, they start to suppress anyone or anything that opposes them. [Read more…]
The trials taking place at Guantanamo are pretty much a sham, a mockery, designed to produce guilty verdicts at all costs. Scott Horton describes them as a theater of the absurd and thinks that they may on the verge of collapse.
He describes what has happened, including that conversations that defense lawyers were having with their clients were being monitored. He also says that the Obama administration and its military spokespeople have been consistently lying about what was going on, retreating only when their lies were exposed. [Read more…]
