5 November 2010 PM

Workout notes 5 mile walk (3.5 with Lynn) then rotator cuff stuff on my own. It was chilly and crisp.

Politics I understand the outrage: people in the finance industry and/or big businesses take big risks for a big profit. But when they fail, they get a bail out because their failure would mean massive damage to others (in terms of lost jobs, inability to get loans, etc.).

But to me, the answer is stronger regulation and not the stuff that the Republicans are offering. And the answer isn’t to listen to Republican economists who have been mostly wrong.

So what about the 2012 election? President Obama is in better shape than his critics might realize. Remember that his approval, while under 50 percent, is much higher than that of Congress and that of the Republicans in Congress.

Speaking of politics: which polls were most accurate? Clearly, Rasmussen was the worst.

Science
In a way, I am glad that advanced mathematics isn’t that popular. I don’t have many people trying to get me to pay attention to crazy ideas such as those who think that the Large Hadron Collider will somehow create a dangerous new particle:

A group called Heavy Ion Alert claims that the LHC could create a dangerous breed of strangelet — that is, a never-before-seen combination of quarks that includes some with a strange flavor. In this case, “strange” is a technical term, representing one of the six flavors of quarks. (The others are up, down, charm, bottom and top.) The claim is that just the wrong kind of strangelet could turn nearby atoms into strangelets as well, setting off a catastrophic chain reaction.

The case for killer strangelets is similar to the case for globe-gobbling microscopic black holes. If there’s any chance at all that the LHC could produce an Earth-killer, the experiment should not be done. “For Earth, one [chance] in 1,000, or one in 100,000 is still something you don’t want to do,” James Blodgett, a member of the group, told me this week.

The reassurances from particle physicists follow a similar format as well. The most recent LHC safety report says theory as well as observations would rule out such a catastrophe. If such strangelets could arise, they would have been observed beyond Earth, where there are cosmic-ray collisions far more powerful than anything the LHC can dish out. The report’s authors say it’s theoretically harder to create the dangerous kind of strangelets at higher energies — which means that if anything bad could happen, it would have happened at RHIC.

We also don’t have major science magazines trying to set new paradigms for mathematics they way that they try to do for evolution.

Advertisement