17 February 2010

Notes: work up feeling 100 percent better than yesterday, though I am not completely well. I am skipping workouts today and tomorrow. I’ll go in to work early and hopefully get caught up a bit.

One quick science note You’ve heard the sensationalist headlines about physicists doing experiments which violated the laws of physics. Well, that is untrue. What has happened is this:

This latest result has to do with a violation of parity — the symmetry you get by reflecting around one axis, like when you view something in a mirror. (Unfortunately there is a completely different transformation known as mirror symmetry, which this new result has nothing to do with, despite potentially confusing titles.) Quarks and gluons interact in interesting ways, and in the many fluctuations that happen in these high-temperature collisions we can get “bubbles” that pick out a direction in space. In the presence of these bubbles, quarks treat left and right differently, even though they treat both directions exactly the same when they’re in empty space. The phenomenon is known as the chiral magnetic effect — “chiral” means “distinguishing left from right,” and it happens when you put the quark-gluon plasma in a magnetic field.

It’s worth mentioning that, while this result is interesting and very helpful to our quest to better understand the strong interactions, it does not represent the overthrow of any cherished laws of physics. On the contrary, it was predicted by the laws of physics as we currently understand them — and by human beings such as Dimitri Kharzeev and others. Parity is an important idea in physics, but it’s broken all the time — very famously by the weak interactions. Heck, even biologists know how to break parity — most naturally occurring amino acids are left-handed, not right-handed. (I think the reasons why are still mysterious, but can be traced to accidents of history — hopefully someone will correct me if that’s off base.)

The interesting thing is that the strong interactions don’t seem to violate parity under ordinary circumstances; it would be very easy for them to do so, but they seem not to in Nature. When things could happen but don’t, physicists are puzzled; this particular puzzle is known as the Strong CP Problem. (”CP” because the strong interactions could easily violate not only parity, but the combined operation of parity and charge conjugation, which switches particles with antiparticles.) This new result from RHIC doesn’t change that state of affairs, but shows how quarks and gluons can violate parity spontaneously if they are in the right environment — namely, a hot plasma with a magnetic field.

Surf to the link to read about the actual experiment.

16 February 2010

Workout notes I took a big turn for the worse last night; when I woke up it almost felt as if I had a case of food poisoning layered over my departing cold. I am feeling better now, but I felt like absolute death this morning (aches, fever, general yuckiness; nausea). I wonder if it is from the fried chicken I ate last night at the Democrats President’s Day dinner: I felt great going into that and had declared myself healed (and noted I was past the “5 days since the onset” of being contagious).

Perhaps in my depleted state, I picked up another bug?

I did like Lisa Madigan though: she was the speaker and did a good job.

Posts

Peoria Pundit: gets money from Rachel Maddow!

I liked this; the only thing I’d say is that all humans have some prejudice and all of us have to actively work to overcome it. Yes, that includes me.

Republicans They are rejoicing in anticipating picking up seats in the House and Senate. We’ll see; upsets like the one in Massachusetts go both ways. It will be interesting to see how Mr. Morris’ predictions pan out.

Political fail: if you can’t make fun of bad signs, what can you make fun of?

One reason why acadmeics have such a rotten reputation

There isn’t an incident so bad that some misguided academic won’t attempt to enable it:

With reports of Bishop’s quirky demeanor and social awkwardness, it would be all too easy to dismiss this violent episode as just some “nut” who couldn’t handle the pressure of publish or perish. Indeed, that seems to be the prevailing view of the hundreds who have posted online comments in the days since the shooting. But to define this tragedy as just a case of psychopathology would discourage a closer look at contributing forces.

Rather than dismiss the killings as just another act of insanity or treating it as fodder for escalating the debate over concealed weapons on campuses or for justifying tighter security measures, let it serve as a vehicle for evaluating the antiquated tenure process of modern-day academe. I am not suggesting a referendum on the role and purpose of tenure but consideration of how the process could be enhanced to reduce the risk of violence and other less extreme but still undesirable responses to negative outcomes. That should include appropriate support systems and mentor programs during the uniquely awkward terminal contract year following tenure denial.

Exacerbating the problem, of course, is that with today’s economic climate, in which academic budgets are shrinking and tenure lines evaporating, tenure denial—for good reason or bad—can indeed be catastrophic. For highly trained scholars of tenure-track misfortune, the alternative opportunities can be rather slim. As Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, told The Huntsville Times, “The most likely result of being denied tenure in this nonexistent job market is that you will not be able to continue teaching. … You probably can’t get another job.”

Of course, it isn’t as if this person hasn’t killed or attempted to kill before.

eyeroll….

15 February 2010

Workout notes I am feeling significantly better than I did yesterday, but will take today off from working out as well. IF my current trend of improvement continues, I might do an easy 1000 yards of swimming tomorrow (20-30 minutes of easy exercise).

Posts
Teach the controversy:

What do evolutionists disagree on anyway? Well, lots. One of the more public debates is over the role of “natural selection” in evolution. Of course, no one doubts that it is a major factor. But how major? Not all evolution has to do with adapting to an environment; for example there is “genetic drift”: this is the case in which a neutral mutation gets passed along due to chance.

So the debate is on how much of a role does natural selection and adaptation (natural selection is a subset of adaptation) play in evolution? How much of a role do other factors (e. g., genetic drift) play? Enjoy some of the argument.

Science fun
Yes, even nerds have fun on Valentines day.

Roses are red.
Violets are approximately blue.
A paracompact manifold with a Lorentzian metric,
can be a spacetime, if it has dimension greater than or equal to two.

Other topics
Too fat to fly?

Kevin Smith says he’s “way fat,” but that shouldn’t stop him from flying.

The director and actor says a pilot ejected him from a Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland to Burbank, Calif., saying he didn’t fit properly in a single seat. [...]

Both Smith and the airline acknowledged that he had bought two seats for his original flight from Oakland, where he had spoken at the Macworld Expo conference.

But he was flying standby in order to catch an earlier flight, and only one was available.

Smith insisted that he was still able to put both armrests down and buckle his seat belt, which is Southwest’s standard.

Texas and Education Right now, Texas is going through a battle to adopt text books and teaching standards. The problem is that a bunch of sincere but “too ignorant to know that they are ignorant” people are writing the standards:

Over all, the TEKS guidelines make for impressive reading. They are thoughtful and deep; you can almost feel the effort at achieving balance. Poring down the long columns and knowing that the 1998 version of these guidelines served as the basis for textbooks in most U.S. states, you even begin to feel some hope for the future.

What is wrong with the Texas process, according to many observers, is illustrated by the fate of Bill Martin Jr. The board has the power to accept, reject or rewrite the TEKS, and over the past few years, in language arts, science and now social studies, the members have done all of the above. Yet few of these elected overseers are trained in the fields they are reviewing. “In general, the board members don’t know anything at all about content,” Tom Barber, the textbook executive, says. Kathy Miller, the watchdog, who has been monitoring the board for 15 years, says, referring to Don McLeroy and another board member: “It is the most crazy-making thing to sit there and watch a dentist and an insurance salesman rewrite curriculum standards in science and history. Last year, Don McLeroy believed he was smarter than the National Academy of Sciences, and he now believes he’s smarter than professors of American history.” In this case, one board member sent an e-mail message with a reference to “Ethical Marxism,” by Bill Martin, to another board member, who suggested that anyone who wrote a book with such a title did not belong in the TEKS. As it turned out, Bill Martin and Bill Martin Jr. are two different people. But by that time, the author of “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” was out. “That’s a perfect example of these people’s lack of knowledge,” Miller says. “They’re coming forward with hundreds of amendments at the last minute. Don McLeroy had a four-inch stack of amendments, and they all just voted on them, whether or not they actually knew the content. What we witnessed in January was a textbook example of how not to develop textbook standards.”

Alabama Professor: Really Nuts?

This story gets even more bizarre. She had killed her brother (shot him to death). Now, it turns out that she was a suspect in a mail-bomb attempt?

The professor who is accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama on Friday was a suspect in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor in 1993, a law enforcement official said today.

Amy Bishop and her husband, James Anderson, were questioned after a package containing two bombs was sent to the Newton home of Dr. Paul Rosenberg, a professor and doctor at Boston’s Children’s Hospital.

It was the second startling revelation in two days about the past of Bishop, who is accused of fatally shooting three colleagues and wounding three others Friday afternoon at a faculty meeting on the University of Alabama’s Huntsville, Ala. campus.

A Massachusetts police chief revealed Saturday that Bishop had fatally shot her brother in 1986.

Rosenberg was opening mail, which had been set aside by a cat-sitter, when he returned from a Caribbean vacation on Dec. 19, 1993, according to Globe reports at the time.

Opening a long, thin package addressed to “Mr. Paul Rosenberg M.D.,” he saw wires and a cylinder inside. He and his wife ran from the house and called police.

The package contained two 6-inch pipe bombs connected to two nine-volt batteries.

In March 1994, the Globe reported that federal investigators had identified a prime suspect in the case. But the article did not name the suspect.

A law enforcement official said today that the investigation by the US Postal Service and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms focused on Bishop, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow who was working in the human biochemstry lab at Children’s Hospital at the time, and her husband, Anderson.

Bishop surfaced as a suspect because she was allegedly concerned that she was going to receive a negative evaluation from Rosenberg on her doctorate work, the official said. The official said investigators believed she had a motive to target Rosenberg and were concerned that she had a history of violence, given that she had shot her brother to death in 1986.

Leonard Pitts Nails it

He wants Sarah Palin to run and win the Republican nomination. Here is why:

Dear Sarah Palin:

I hear you’re pondering a run for the White House in 2012. Last week, you told Fox news it would be “absurd” to rule it out.

I’m writing to ask that you rule it in. I very badly want you to run for — and win — the Republican nomination for the presidency.

I know you’re waiting for the punch line. Maybe you figure I think you’d be a weak candidate who would pave the way for President Obama’s easy re-election.

That’s not it. No, I want you to run because I believe a Palin candidacy would force upon this country a desperately needed moment of truth. It would require us to finally decide what kind of America we want to be.

Mrs. Palin, you are an avatar of the shameless hypocrisy and cognitive disconnection that have driven our politics for the last decade, a process of stupidification creeping like kudzu over our national life. [...]

No, you represent the latest iteration of an anti-intellectualism that periodically rises in the American character. There is, historically and persistently, a belief in us that y’all just can’t trust nobody who acts too smart or talks too good — in other words, somebody whose “general persona” indicates they may have once cracked a book or had a thought. Americans tend to believe common sense the exclusive province of humble folks without sheepskins on the wall or big words in their vocabularies.

I don’t mock those people. They are my parents, my family elders, members of my childhood church. I honor their native good sense, what mom called “mother wit.” But if it is insulting to condescend to them, it is equally insulting to mythologize them.

More to the point, something is wrong when we celebrate mental mediocrity like yours under the misapprehension that competence or, God forbid, intelligence, makes a person one of those “elites” — that’s a curse word now — lacking authenticity, compassion and common sense.

So no, this is not a clash of ideologies, but a clash between intelligence and its opposite. And I am tired of being asked to pretend stupid is a virtue. That’s why I’d welcome the moment of truth your campaign would bring. It would force us to decide once and for all whether we are permanently committed to the path of ignorance, of birthers, truthers and tea party incoherence you represent, or whether we will at last turn back from the cliff toward which we race.

Frankly, I look forward to the Republicans offering someone like a Dwight Eisenhower or a Teddy Roosevelt or even an honest/ethical version of Richard Nixon. I’d love to have a genuine choice at the polls in November. This is why the 2008 Democratic primary was so exciting to me; it was the first time that I had a real choice of candidates.

msnbc.com: Roundtable on the Obama agenda, health care, Aaron Schock

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Note: I live in IL-18 (Aaron Schock’s home district); he is telegenic and good in front of crowds. He is also a right wing Republican and, yes, is popular in his district.

Later snippet:

Hat tip: Peoria Pundit.

Science and Religion

Just read what Professor Moran has to say (yes, that is his real name, and he is NO “moran”).

Of course religion has come up with useful tools (meditation, yoga, for example) that help people in the here and now, but that isn’t what is being talked about here.

I am getting wimper with age…

Workout notes Nothing; my cold is in full bloom (and the symptoms: gradual onset of a productive cough followed by some “almost fever”) and I need to rest so I can teach tomorrow.

But it seems to me that years ago, I could have just shaken this off. But even though I am not really in pain per se, I just have a vague “feeling bad” feeling.

Funny, but I’ve felt worse during ultras and pushed through it, but I just have the desire to whine up a storm for no good reason. Where did this whinyness come from?

Speaking of whiny: I got to see some morning talk shows and yes, that meant listening to Dick Cheney “lie while remaining factual”. (pssst: much of the change that Dick Cheney complains about happened under the second Bush administration).

Part one

Part two

You can find individual snippets on selected topics here.

msnbc.com: Biden: Cheney ‘is trying to rewrite history’

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