Farewell to May, 2009

Workout notes 6 mile trail walk at the Forrest Park Nature Center; 57:08 for the outer loop; 49:12 for the out and back.

Social One of our department members is getting married, so we are going to his wedding. When he told me that he was getting married I asked “oh, so you are tired of sex?” But he is going ahead with it anyway….

Science

One early result evidently was due to error (see here)

Last week came word of something of a setback in the quest for understanding the nature of dark matter, the mysterious substance that is far more abundant in the universe than the ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets, and people. An instrument on NASA’s Fermi spacecraft failed to detect a surge of electrons and positrons at high energies that was seen last year by a balloon-borne instrument. That peak had been thought to be the signature of the annihilation of weakly interacting massive particles (better known by their acronym, which is, yes, WIMP), a theoretical particle posited by some astrophysicists as the composition of dark matter. But with Fermi providing more and better data than the earlier experiment, that discovery may have been only a false alarm.

(hat tip: 3 quarks daily)

There is a lesson here: often the initial, spectacular sounding results ARE false alarms. That is why we need peer review and why we need to be, ahem, conservative on announcing “new results”.

Reaction times in people who are not physically fit (note: we are not talking about “reflexes”, such as those needed to, say, box or play tennis)

Did you know that one study suggests that wimpy people react quicker to danger signals?

“Responses to looming sounds are scaled to the motor system’s ability to react,” said Neuhoff, and that is directly related to how physically fit an individual is.

The difference is less than a second. Nevertheless, “this systematic perceptual error might provide a selective advantage,” said Neuhoff. “Perceptual bias might be a behavioral adaptation shaped by evolution.”

Women typically responded sooner than men, who on average are physically stronger. Plus comparative studies in Rhesus monkeys showed the same biases, suggesting a biological basis for the results. But the research is still in its infancy.

“It makes some ecological sense that there is this particular bias, but there are a lot of variables,” commented Norbert Copco, a researcher at the Department of Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence at the Technical University of Kosice in Slovakia, who also presented a paper at the meeting.

He noted that if this is effect is real, then older people, whose ability to defend themselves is lower, should also react sooner to approaching sounds.

Neuhoff agreed that more research is needed. “We still need longitudinal studies, looking at physical fitness over time.”

I’d be interested in knowing how this works in the case where someone is born with the genes to be strong but then becomes a couch potato.

World Events
Israel continues to struggle with the immoralities in its past:

Negating the truth about the Nakbah — the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from what became Israel in 1948 — has been a staple of Jewish-nationalist propaganda as long as I can remember: As a youngster in Habonim, I was told bubbemeis tales about foolish Arabs marching off into the wilderness like zombies after being hypnotized by radio broadcasts urging them to leave; a “miracle” on a par with the parting of the Red Sea that ostensibly gave the Zionist movement the “land without a people” about which it had fantasized. It should have been painfully obvious that this was a preposterous self-serving myth (which even then didn’t account for the fact that the ethnic cleansing was sealed by Israel in one of its founding laws that denied the right of any Arab absent from their property on the day of Israel’s creation to return to that property). But to suggest anything less than a miraculous conception and bloodless birth for the state of Israel was to deny its “legitimacy”, we were told. As international pressure grows for an historic reckoning between Israelis and Palestinians, the frenzy of denial and negation has intensified. [...]

There are other Israelis, of course, who don’t deny the Nakba, but strive to reveal its history to their fellow citizens, precisely because the pathological denial of their own country’s own history as perpetrators of dispossession and ethnic cleansing, there can be no true healing between Israelis and Palestinians. One such brave and visionary Israeli is Eitan Bronstein, whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year. He graciously agreed to allow Rootless Cosmopolitan to republish an English translation of his article published in Yediot Ahoronot today article challenging the proposed Nakba law.

A Response to the Proposal to Ban Commemoration of the Nakba on Independence Day

By Eitan Bronstein [...]

Follow the above link to read the response.

Hat tip: 3 quarks daily.

Politics

On a lighter note:

Obama supporters: Obama stuff is on sale, cheap! Hmm, perhaps my conservative friends might get a few goodies in their Christmas stockings this year?

On more serious notes

Torture Photos

U. S. General denies reports that the photos that President Obama is holding shows rapes. Here is the issue: there are many sets of photos out there and the ones that President Obama is talking about constitute only a tiny fraction of those.

Stupid Republicans

Many of the critics of the Sotomayor nomination are unaware that he full speeches ARE available in the public domain.

Glen Beck: urges Republicans to not pay their taxes. Sure, he is phrasing it as “what if” or “Imagine” . The interesting this is that the majority of the imbeciles that listen to him get their taxes taken out of their paychecks and would probably get at least a bit of a refund if they filed.

But don’t you find it interesting that, in the eyes of the wingnuts, “loving America” means “hating the majority of it”???

Some Republicans are a bit like spoiled little kids. They say “love your country” until, well, the majority of the country ceases to agree with them. When they lose, they pout, throw tantrums and threaten to take their toys and “go home” (e. g., secession threats, not paying one’s taxes, etc.)