Monthly Archives: September 2012

Every time a child has a birthday, a Higgs Boson dies

Helium is rare. It is not produced in factories, and the places where it is found in the wild are unusual. When it gets lose, it tends to drift out into space. Simply put, it is a hard to find commodity with a limited availability. Helium is important in science. Big Science Projects like the Large Hadron Collider use Helium to cool magnets down to near absolute zero. Helium is also used in MRI machines, which have become an important part of medial research and diagnosis. Without a supply of Helium, a lot of important science projects would be in trouble.

From the BBC:

Prof Welton told BBC … “We’re not going to run out of helium tomorrow – but on the 30 to 50 year timescale we will have serious problems of having to shut things down if we don’t do something in the mean time.”

… “The reason that we can do MRI is we have very large, very cold magnets – and the reason we can have those is we have helium cooling them down.

“You’re not going into an MRI scanner because you’ve got a sore toe – this is important stuff.

“When you see that we’re literally just letting it float into the air, and then out into space inside those helium balloons, it’s just hugely frustrating. It is absolutely the wrong use of helium.”

For this reason, Welton and others as asking the question, should we be using Helium for uses such as making children’s balloons float?

The balloon industry counters, noting that “Balloon Gas,” which is what they call their product, is made of Helium recycled from medical uses and mixed with air, and that very little research grade Helium, if any, is lost to the process of engineering children’s birthday parties. I suppose, though, that they could use hydrogen for the parties. It would make Chuckie Cheese a more…interesting…place.

Who says science doesn’t have enough controversy!

Romney-Ryan Space Plan: Do What Obama Has Been Doing

But at the same time say that Obama is doing it wrong:

The campaign’s plan cited four priorities – giving NASA focus, working with the international community, increasing the nation’s capacity to defend its assets in space and easing trade limits on foreign sales of American “space goods.” Romney did not suggest increased space spending — his budget plan would force cuts in domestic programs, including space — but on increased reliance on commercial firms to get Americans and their goods into space. That mirrors the Obama administration’s plan.

Romney on Health Care

First, if you don’t have health insurance, that’s OK. Just wait until you are catastrophically ill and then they’ll pick you up in an ambulance and bring you to an emergency room. He does not discuss what happens later when they come to collect the payments. Also, according to Romney, an Obamacare like plan was a great way to manage health insurance for Massachusetts at the time he was governor, but this does not apply to other people.


Is Bachmann Sticking With Her Muslim Brotherhood Story?

A GOP PAC has produced a ridiculous ad supporting Michele Bachmann for re-election to Congress representing Minnesota’s 6th District. You’ll remember that Bachmann made national news when she declared that a senior aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Minnesota 5th District Congressman Keith Ellison were plants inserted into high places in the United States Government by the shady organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood. At that time, Democratic Party (DFL) 6th District candidate, Jim Graves, joined the chorus of sensible voices pointing out that Bachmann’s comments were incorrect and inappropriate. The ad clearly states that not only was Bachmann not wrong, but that the same organization that planted these Muslim Manchurian Candidates into the US political system was responsible for the unrest in the Middle East. Ironically, while the cause of this unrest is complicated, that unrest appears to be in part due to the irresponsible prodding of extremist Islamic groups in the Middle East with anti-Muslim rhetoric, that prodding seemingly intended to create an ant-Obama “October Surprise” (in September). Here is the ad:

This ad comes at a time when Jim Graves has been shown in polls to be statistically even with (but a couple of points by count behind) Bachmann. So far, Bachmann has been relatively silent, which was probably a good move for her because she seems to have a hard time not spewing Crazy Talk when she doesn’t remain silent. This move by the GOP PAC, to underscore Bachmann’s crazy, is probably a good thing for the Graves campaign.

Notice that in the ad, they try very hard to get a picture of Graves, who is a calm, mild mannered, reasonable, thoughtful person, to have a crazy Bachmann-like look in his eyes, while at the same time making Bachmann not look so crazy. Unfortunately for the Bachmann campaign, it is a little late for that.

Interesting new book on the Obama Stimulus

First this, from a blogpost by David Firestone:

On the most basic level, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is responsible for saving and creating 2.5 million jobs. The majority of economists agree that it helped the economy grow by as much as 3.8 percent, and kept the unemployment rate from reaching 12 percent.

The stimulus is the reason, in fact, that most Americans are better off than they were four years ago, when the economy was in serious danger of shutting down.

But the stimulus did far more than stimulate: it protected the most vulnerable from the recession’s heavy winds. Of the act’s $840 billion final cost, $1.5 billion went to rent subsidies and emergency housing that kept 1.2 million people under roofs. (That’s why the recession didn’t produce rampant homelessness.) It increased spending on food stamps, unemployment benefits and Medicaid, keeping at least seven million Americans from falling below the poverty line.

The book is The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, by Michael Grunwald.

Science Cinema

Skeptically Speaking #182 Science Cinema

Sunday, September 23rd, Skeptically Speaking will record “before a life UStream audience” as per usual:

This week, we’re looking at film and video as an exciting, engaging way to communicate science to the public. Guest host Marie-Claire Shanahan spends the hour with independent film-maker and former BBC video journalist Brady Haran, and artist and filmmaker Henry Reich, creator of the Minute Physics YouTube series. They’ll discuss the promise and pitfalls of telling science stories in moving pictures.

We record live with Brady Haran and Henry Reich on Sunday, September 23 at 6 pm MT. The podcast will be available to download at 9 pm MT on Friday, September 28.

Click here for links and details.

My Sister Died Yesterday

Elizabeth J. Laden, a few years ago.
Some of my earliest memories are of my sister, BJ, who later preferred to be called Elizabeth. Each of my three siblings, all older than me, had a measurable influence on my life, influences that happened when I was little when they, much older, were mostly ignoring me (I’m not saying that is a bad thing). In the case of Elizabeth, the influence was mainly socio-political. She was the girl that the Catholic school probably regretted admitting because she was trouble, or at least, that’s the sense I got. She was a hippie when being a hippie was the rough equivalent of being gay or black or whatever, in that if you walked down certain streets people would look at you hard, say bad things to you, and occasionally physically attack you. (No illusions here… one could terminate one’s hippie status more easily than one’s status as a black person or a gay person.) She was a principle organizer of Refer and Equinox, organizations designed to help at risk youth, and she organized the famous demonstration against the attack on Attica. And no, she had nothing to do with the bomb that went off on that day in the state office building. Anyway, BJ, er, Elizabeth, was an active and a radical and I came to admire that and became my own sort of activist and radical in my own time. Continue reading My Sister Died Yesterday