CapitalistImperialistPig

Peter Woit: Discovery of a New Particle? Hints of a new particle. Except for the excitement surrounding first beams in the LHC, particle physics has been an all-too-quiet subject recently. It looks like that may be about to change, with a dramatic new result announced by the CDF experiment this evening, in a preprint entitled Study of multi-muon events produced in p-pbar collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV. See Peter's post and links therein for details.

Christopher Palin Hitchens is not a big fan of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin or of Republican anti-science: Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be "one of the refuge states in the Last Days." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the "End Times," that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being "anointed" by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in th...

In accord with the mores of the day, I am a believer in the benefit of cross cultural experiences. Speaking of Accords, I just bought one, and it came with a three month free subscription to XM radio. Now I probably haven't listened to much contemporary popular music for several decades now, so I figured that maybe I should try to catch up a bit. XM 20 plays top twenty songs (somebody's top twenty) all the time, so it was a perfect occasion. One slight problem is that they start their cycle every morning approximately at the time I leave for work, so by the time I get there, they have only reached number eleven or so, so I may be getting a biased sample. As it happens, it seems music may have evolved a bit in the last few decades, so I'm a bit vague on the precise genres involved. Most of it sounds to my untrained ear like a cross between rock and hip hop. I should mention one little problem that I have with music: it tends to get stuck in my head. This is not so bad i...

The recent discovery of x-ray scotch tape poses an interesting physics problem. It seems that the x-rays have an energy of up to 300 kev. This is a very large number compared to any binding energies encountered in ordinary atomic phenomena. Typical chemical bonds are hundreds of thousands of times smaller. Even an innermost electron of the highest Z atom has less than half that binding energy. So where does the energy come from? My best guess: somehow the act of pulling off the tape turns some of the polymers into some kind of particle accelerators, perhaps by piling up charge in a smaller and smaller region. Anybody have a better idea?

Nouriel Roubini is the prophet of the great meltdown of 2008. He saw it coming, but like Cassandras mythical and real past, was ignored or derided. He thinks that the worst is yet to come: In the Times (London) . While the economic sun was shining, most other economists scoffed at Roubini and his predictions of imminent disaster. They dismissed his warnings that the sub-prime mortgage disaster would trigger a financial meltdown. They could not quite believe his view that the US mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would collapse, and that the investment banks would be crushed as the world headed for a long recession. Yet all these predictions and more came true. Few are laughing now. What does Roubini think is going to happen next? Rather worryingly, in London last Thursday he predicted that hundreds of hedge funds will go bust and stock markets may soon have to shut – perhaps for as long as a week – in order to stem the panic selling now sweeping the world. But the fundamenta...

I was a big fan of his Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee mysteries set among the Navajo of the big reservation. The NYT obituary is: here .

American education has long been a fashion industry, usually with deplorable results. A currently surging notion is that of making algebra mandatory for all eighth grade students. A few good articles on the subject can be found here , here , here and here . Algebra is a critical gateway to all of higher mathematics and therefore to science, technical skills, engineering, economics and business. The essence of algebra is abstraction, the manipulation of symbols in place of numbers (we are talking elementary algebra here). In the age of the calculator, this ability is far more useful and general than the merely calculational skills of elementary arithmetic. Those arithmetic skills are not quite superfluous though. The algorithms learned there serve as models for their algebraic counterparts. Few can understand the abstract without being able to understand more concrete counterparts first. The objection to eighth grade algebra is that a lot of students enter eighth grade without masterin...