Language has always fascinated me. It really began when I took Latin in high-school (a love for which was recently rekindled by a “edutainment” program packaged with the KDE desktop manager: KLatin). The way that so much meaning could be hidden in a few words, a few well-chosen endings on […]
Politics
277 posts
An article appeared recently [CNNPhysics], written by Gregory Mone, a member of the writing staff at Popular Science. In the title of the article, he posed the question “Can this machine rescue physics?”. This article came to my attention when members of the BaBar collaboration began to comment on it. […]
Sometimes, life is more like Fox News than the Daily Show. Yesterday was a prime example of that, perhaps more evidence that my poor country is collectively going bat-shit crazy. What happened? A woman on a flight from London to Washington appears to have been unable to control her claustrophobia. […]
Symbols are important to nations, and often horribly abused in politics. Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, from the state that avoided teaching science by redefining it, gave a tedious presentation during the recent stem cell debates. In it, he made the following analogy: bald eagles come from eggs, and it […]
The President exercised the first veto of his two terms today, and chose to act against science while upholding what he called “America’s culture of life”. This is the same “culture of life” that leads to the state-sanctioned execution of criminals, that turns an eye wounded by moral cataracts toward […]
“Talk of the Nation: Science Friday”:http://www.sciencefriday.com is an excellent weekly national radio program that brings experts and callers together to discuss current science issues. This week, Ira Flatow discussed the politicization of science – the perceived increase in policy influencing science, rather than science influencing policy – with guests Chris […]
This weekend has been stressful. The worst part of it is that it was the *least* stressful part of the past week, and the coming weeks are forecast to be quite a bit worse (partly nutty with a chance of insanity). I can summarize why in one word: ICHEP. Well, […]
For twenty years, the United States has invested less and less in basic research in the physical sciences as a fraction of GDP. The U.S. spends about $8-$8.5 billion per year on basic research in the physical sciences (that represents the combined DOE science, NSF, and NIST budgets). Today, “it […]
Every year, once a year, scientists who conduct research at the “Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)”:http://www.slac.stanford.edu and the “Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL)”:http://www.fnal.gov travel to Washington DC to lobby on behalf of particle physics and the physical sciences. This is a banner year for this visit, because the “President has […]
The recent “139-page ruling by Judge Jones”:http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf in the case *Kitzmiller vs. the Dover School Board of Education* was remarkable. Not just broad, this was a deep ruling which every scientist and lawyer should read. The American Institute of Physics (“http://www.aip.org”:http://www.aip.org) has printed, in its most recent FYI bulletin, “a […]
I will say only this on the occasion of the President’s revelation that he routinely authorized wiretaps without court authorization: Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Attributed to Benjamin Franklin
In a recent entry, I summarized the sentiment’s of the Royal Society’s Lord May. In his valedictory anniversary speech to the Society, he commented on the chief U.S. climate change negotiator. He said this person was a lawyer, and that the only reason the U.S. would have a lawyer in […]