Radiation paradoxes 1: Do electric charges and neutral particles fall at the same rate?

I have recently fallen down a rabbit hole in physics trying to resolve some paradoxes that I stumbled upon. In spending a lot of time and mental effort trying to understand what is going on, I realized that although I have spent my life studying and teaching physics, I did not fully understand some very fundamental aspects of space and motion and the way that the laws of physics operate. That is part of the fascination that physics provides, that it can always surprise you, leading you to learn new things.

In an occasional series of posts, I will share with readers my journey through this maze, trying to make things as clear as possible to the non-physicists out there. This will not be easy because an important prerequisite to explaining something to someone else is for you to understand it first. I cannot claim to understand completely what I am going to be writing about, for which I apologize in advance. But it is well known among teachers that it is in trying to explain something to someone else that one starts more deeply understanding what one is trying to say. Like many teachers I have used students as sounding boards for tentative ideas.
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Cable news is the tail that wags the political news dog

I do not watch TV. That statement requires some explication these days when there are so many ways in which one is surrounded by mass media. What I mean is that I live in too remote an area to receive any over-the-air broadcast network TV channels and I do not subscribe to any cable TV system that gives me access to those channels or to cable channels. I do have a TV that I use to watch streaming videos from various sources, some of which include TV shows that have been broadcast previously on network TV.

So what I mean by saying I do not watch TV is that I do not watch any of the nightly news programs on network TV or the 24/7 cable news channels like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. And yet, in my surfing of the web, I find myself bombarded by stories that have their origins in cable news. These channels seem to be less about unearthing and reporting actual news and more about generating news about themselves. My impression is not misguided. Jack Shafer says that these cable news networks have a very small audience and yet have an outlandishly disproportionate effect on public discourse and that it is time to cut the cord.
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The flawed US parole system

There is so much that is wrong with the US (in)justice system that one does not know where to start with trying to reform it. From overly-aggressive police departments, over-zealous prosecutors more interested in gaining convictions than justice, and a legal system where one needs good lawyers to get even a shot at justice but many people simply do not have access to them and the public defenders offices, while often endeavoring mightily on behalf of their indigent clients, simply are overwhelmed. And all that is soaked in a deep-rooted racist mentality. Changing all those things requires money and political will to go against the punitive mindset that seems to prevail

But if one were to start with something significant but feasible, it might be with the parole system that in theory enables prisoners to obtain release before completing their sentence provided they have given evidence of good behavior and the promise of not returning to crime. There is one aspect of it, however, that is a problem and that is the requirement that one must admit guilt for the crime before one is eligible for parole at all. This puts those who have been wrongfully convicted because of all the problems listed in the first paragraph, in a bind. If they admit to a crime that they did not do, they may get an early release. But they are forever barred from trying to establish their innocence and also they and their families have to live with the stigma of having committed a crime.
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Don’t they carefully vet the White House physician?

The White House physician is an important job, since he is supposed to supervise the health of the US president. So it is surprising that Ronny Jackson, who held that post under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, is a proponent of wild conspiracies, the most recent of which concerns the Omicron variant.

Roughly 24 hours after most people in America first heard about the Omicron variant of Covid-19, Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson (R) offered a conspiracy theory to explain what was happening.

“Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant,” tweeted Jackson, who, not for nothing, is also a physician. “They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election – but we’re not going to let them!”

And then there was this from Fox News personality Pete Hegseth: “Count on a variant about every October, every two years.”

The idea here is clear: The emergence of Omicron is a political gambit by Democrats designed to aid them at the ballot box.

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The strange case of the Michigan school shooter

In many ways, the tragedy of the high school student who shot and killed four students and injured seven others follows a pattern we have become drearily familiar with in this gun-soaked and violent country.

What makes this different is the strange role played by the parents. Usually parents express shock and disbelief at what their child did and try to find reasons that might at least partly exculpate them. But in this case, the parents seem to have played a different role, almost as if they were aiding him. Apparently they had purchased the gun just four days before and seemed to have left it in a location that was easily accessible to their 15-year old son. Furthermore, there had been warning signs on the very day of the shooting that the boy was disturbed and had violent fantasies.
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The bear and the atheist

At my bridge club, on one of the days of the week, there is a tradition of someone, who is I think the oldest person in the group, starting the session with a joke before we start playing. Her jokes are usually raunchy and pretty funny, and she tells them well. But on days when she is absent, someone else will tell a joke and this week the person told one about an atheist and a bear. It is an old joke, the kind that gets circulated that you can read here. I had heard this same joke about ten years earlier and wrote about it then.

It struck me this time that although the atheist is supposed to be the butt of the joke whom we are supposed to laugh at, Christianity comes off worse, with their God being portrayed as vengeful and vindictive with a cruel sense of humor, hardly the loving and forgiving deity that is advertised nowadays. The atheist, on the other hand, comes across as a reasonable, honest, and principled person, not pretending to have a religious conversion even as he faces death. I wonder if the Christians who like to relate this joke realize this.

I was also amused because I do not think that the people in my bridge club (other than my bridge partner) know that I am an atheist. In general, I do not make a point of talking about my beliefs unless it comes up naturally in conversation. I know and like the woman who told the joke. I wonder if she would have made the joke if she knew about my lack of belief in gods.

Dropping the term ‘alien’ when describing immigrants

One of the offensive ways in which immigrants are treated in the US is using the term ‘alien’ to describe them, sometimes in the form of ‘illegal aliens’. So it is a welcome sign that some states are recognizing it as dehumanizing and moving to drop the term altogether and replace it with words like ‘noncitizen’ or ‘migrant’.

Immigrants and immigrant-rights groups say the term, especially when combined with “illegal,” is dehumanizing and can have a harmful effect on immigration policy.

The word became a focal point of debate in several states earlier this year as the number of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border swelled and led to fierce backlash against Biden administration policies by Republican governors and lawmakers.

Lawmakers in at least seven states considered eliminating use of “alien” and “illegal” in state statutes this year and replacing them with descriptions such as “undocumented” and “noncitizen,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Only two states, California and Colorado, actually made the change.
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The covid-19 variant naming system

As with any virus, the Covid-19 virus will mutate over time and this requires scientists to give each variant labels to distinguish among them. Since they want to keep track of even the smallest changes, they require a system that can identify the nature of the changes and their location on the virus. But that technical name is hard for the general public to keep track of and so the WHO has adopted the Greek alphabet sequentially to label as they appear just those variants that they think most likely to affect the public and that we need to keep track of, that they call ‘variants of concern’. There are now seven of them. So the variant with the scientific name B.1.617.2 is called Delta and the latest variant B.1.1.529 is called Omicron. The earlier Alpha has the scientific label B.1.1.7 and Beta has the label B.1.352.
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