Who said that there is no honor among thieves?

As part of the legal proceeding involving Virginia Giuffre’s charge that Prince Andrew was one of Jeffrey Epstein’s friends that she was pressured to have sex with as a minor, a federal judge yesterday released the sealed agreement that was reached about a decade ago between Epstein and Giuffre in settlement of her case against him.

The unsealed settlement states that upon receipt of the stipulated sum, Giuffre, referred to under her maiden name, agrees to “remise, release, acquit, satisfy and forever discharge the said second parties and any other person or entity who could have been included as a potential defendant … from all, and all manner of, action and actions of Virginia Roberts, including state or federal, cause and causes of action”.

It looks like Epstein was taking care of his friends to insulate them from legal actions by those they abused. Of course, I doubt that he did this purely out of a sense of friendship. More likely it was to prevent them from buckling under the threat of prosecution and revealing damaging information about him.

It is interesting that Andrew and Alan Dershowitz, neither of whom is specifically named, wanted this agreement to be released since they seem to feel that it will take the heat off them.
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Radiation paradoxes 9: The resolution?

(Previous posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8)

We saw in the previous post how Einstein’s Principle of Equivalence explained why two masses dropped from the same height in a gravitational field will fall at the same rate and hit the ground at the same time. It also seemed to resolve the paradox about whether an electric charge will fall more slowly than a neutral particle in a gravitational field. The answer arrived at was ‘no’ because since according to the PoE, the situation with the falling accelerating charge in the frame of the Earth E was equivalent to the charge being stationary in the inertial frame of space S, the charge would not radiate energy, contrary to naive expectations that any accelerating charge would radiate. On the surface, that seems to resolve the paradox that started this series of posts. The price we have paid is that we must abandon Postulate #2 and conclude that accelerating charges do not radiate when falling freely in a gravitational field.
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As the year 2022 begins, should it be followed by CE or AD?

When numbering years, the system using BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, which is Latin for “in the year of our Lord.”) is commonly used, especially in the Christianity-dominant part of the world. More recently, there has been a move to change BC to BCE (Before Common Era) and AD to CE (Common Era), a shift that I applaud. The actual numbering would not change since the switch from BCE to CE occurs at the same time as the switch from BC to AD, but the label would be more religiously and culturally neutral.

Miriamne Ara Krummel describes how the BC and AD system came about. She says that part of the motivation was to marginalize the competing Jewish calendaring system.
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Focus shifts to Prince Andrew sexual abuse case

Now that Ghislaine Maxwell has been convicted in the Jeffrey Epstein sexual abuse saga, the next case to follow will be that brought by one of the victims Virginia Giuffre against Prince Andrew. On Saturday, a federal judge blocked an effort by his lawyers to say that he did not have to turn over documents pertaining to the case since Giuffre did not have US jurisdiction. The judge rejected that claim.

Judge Lewis A Kaplan, in a written order, told the prince’s lawyers they must turn over documents on the schedule that has been set in the lawsuit brought by Guiffre who claims she was abused – aged 17 – by the prince on multiple occasions in 2001 while she was being sexually abused by financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Kaplan also rejected arguments by the prince’s lawyer, Andrew Brettler, on jurisdiction grounds after they argued last week that the lawsuit should be dismissed because Giuffre, a US citizen, no longer lives in the US. Brettler has called the lawsuit “baseless”.

The prince’s lawyers claimed evidence was so strong that Giuffre does not reside in the US that it was pointless to exchange evidence until that question is resolved because it could result in the lawsuit’s dismissal.

They argued that Giuffre has lived in Australia for all but two of the past 19 years, has an Australian driver’s licence and lives in a $1.9m (£1.4m) home in Perth, Western Australia, where she and her husband, an Australian national, live with their three children.
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Webb telescope successfully passes critical test

The Webb telescope team reported that a major step had been successfully completed on schedule. The telescope was launched on December 24th and all its components had to be folded into a small space to fit into the rocket nose cone and then opened up once it was in space, After seven days, the schedule called for the five-layered tennis court-sized silvery heat shield to be opened up and it did so.

The shiny silver shield measures 69.5 feet long by 46.5 feet wide (21.2 by 14.2 meters) when fully deployed — far too large to fit inside the protective payload fairing of any currently operational rocket. So it was designed to launch in a highly compact configuration and then unfold once Webb got to space.

That deployment is an elaborate, multistep process with many different potential failure points that could sink the entire mission.

“Webb’s sunshield assembly includes 140 release mechanisms, approximately 70 hinge assemblies, eight deployment motors, bearings, springs, gears, about 400 pulleys and 90 cables totaling 1,312 feet [400 m],” Webb spacecraft systems engineer Krystal Puga, who works at Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the mission, said in a video about Webb’s deployments that NASA posted in October.

Over the next six days, the rest of the telescope will get unfolded, starting in three days with the deployment of the secondary mirror support structure. And then it heads to its destination, the second Lagrange point which it should reach after 29 days.

You can see the sequence of steps in this short video.

It is a truly remarkable piece of engineering.

TV Review: Death to 2021

The year 2021 started out with some hope and optimism. The Democrats just barely won control of the US Senate and thus supposedly would be able to get some things done. Donald Trump would be out of office in three weeks. Vaccines were going to be available soon that would enable us to emerge from the pandemic.

But things did not work out that way. Trump has gone full bore bonkers with his claim that the election was stolen and enough of his cult believe him to cause problems. Two Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema seem determined to side with Republicans in opposing efforts to improve the lives of many people. And new covid-19 variants have emerged that, coupled with inexplicably stupid resistance to taking them and other pandemic resistance measures, has seen the number of cases rise sharply at the end of the year.

But the eternal optimist in me hopes that this year will surprise me by turning out better than the current signs indicate.

In general, I am not a fan of year-end retrospectives or lists of various things such as best books, best films, and the like. One exception is a list of well-known people who died during the year, many of whom did not get much press attention at the time of their death and so I missed it. For example, I learned from that article that the celebrated Indian sprinter Milkha Singh had died at the age of 91. I remember him because of a very silly joke that I heard at the time when he came to Sri Lanka to compete in a meet. The joke went that as he was sitting by the side of the track after a race, someone came up to him and asked, “Are you relaxing?” To which he replied, “No, I am Milkha Singh.” That shows the kind of juvenile humor that appeals to me and sticks in my mind.
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The coronavirus illustrates evolution on action

The pandemic has given us a crash course on evolution. Evolution deniers must be having a hard time explaining away the evolution-suffused news dealing with mutations, growth rates, and the like. But it also provides an opportunity to explain some of the mathematics of the phenomenon.

You would think that if a mutation had a slight advantage over its predecessor, then it would over time grow in size relative to the other but the older one would still be around. But that is not what happens. We see how some new variant, if it has some advantage over its competitors such as greater transmissibility, rapidly becomes dominant in the population, pushing the previously dominant ones into the background.

This graph shows the different peaks due to the different variants at the current time.


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Leftist easily wins presidency in Chile

In a recent election, a leftist has won the presidency in Chile.

Leftist candidate Gabriel Boric has won Chile’s presidential election to become the country’s youngest ever leader.

In what was expected to be a tight race, the 35-year-old former student protest leader defeated his far-right rival José Antonio Kast by 10 points.

Mr Boric told supporters he would look after democracy, promising curbs on Chile’s neoliberal free market economy.

He will lead a country that has been rocked in recent years by mass protests against inequality and corruption.

Mr Boric’s victory prompted celebrations on the streets of the capital Santiago, with his supporters waving flags and honking car horns.
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Radiation paradoxes 8: The Principle of Equivalence

(Previous posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7)

We have now acquired most of the background knowledge needed to start directly addressing the question that this series of posts started with, as to whether an electric charge and a neutral particle dropped from the ceiling will hit the ground at the same time. The first stage of that is what is known as the Principle of Equivalence.

Recall the Postulate #1 we started with that said that all objects falling freely in a gravitational field will fall at the same rate and hit the ground at the same time. We were able to explain this by saying that it followed from the fact that gravitational and inertial masses were equal. But we did not explain why they should be equal. The two masses were arrived at, after all, by distinct methods using different operational definitions. But by considering accelerating frames and the Principle of Equivalence, we have a simple explanation for it.

Consider two objects floating freely in space that are at rest with respect to each other and to an observer S, to signify space. No suppose we enclose the two objects in a closed room and accelerate the room ‘upwards’ (i.e., in the direction from the ‘floor’ to the ‘ceiling’) with a value g. We will call this frame E to signify an elevator or Earth. Then in the frame E, both objects will seem to be accelerated ‘downwards’ (i.e., towards the floor of the room) with a value g, just as if they were falling freely on Earth, and will both hit the floor at the same time. They will behave just as if they were falling down near the surface of the Earth and since they hit the floor at the same time, we can infer that their gravitational and inertial masses are equal, rather than tacitly assuming it to be the case as we did before.
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