There are two reasons that the Republicans “won” the house and took more senate seats. One of them was made clear last night at dinner. Our waitress was funny. She started out a little funny-strange, then went to funny-ha ha, and I left the restaurant liking her and wishing more people were mostly like her. The funny-strange bit derived from her thoughtful pauses following certain questions like “do you have vegetables” and “you are out of my favorite beer, what should I drink” and so on. It turns out that we were pretty nearly her first customers ever, and she was hiding her nervousness very well but something (strange) was seeping through. She also heard and began to engage in our conversation, and was probably unsure how appropriate that might be (a good question, indeed). When we proved friendly the banter amongst us evolved into an all-out Michele Bachmann bash-fest, funny-strange had evolved into funny-ha ha and I was glad to be giving this person a tip instead of some Michele Bachmann supporter.
Continue reading Truths and Consequences
Monthly Archives: November 2010
Minnesotans: Help Wadena recover
You may recall me mentioning a tornado last year in Wadena.
“The town’s been flattened. I’m on my way there for a high school reunion. It looks more like it’s going to be a high school clean-up.”
If you are in the region, I just wanted you to know about a fund raiser to help get the people of Wadena back on their feet.
Months after a devastating tornado struck Wadena, a benefit will be held this weekend to help the still-recovering Minnesota town.
The Wadena Relief Benefit will be held Sunday from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Medina Entertainment Center in Medina.
George Bush’s Book is Out
Decision Points
Heavy Ion Collision at LHC
After extracting the final proton beam of 2010 on 4 November, commissioning the lead-ion beam was underway by early afternoon. First collisions were recorded at 00:30 CET on 7 November, and stable running conditions marked the start of physics with heavy ions at 11:20 CET today.
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Operating the LHC with lead ions – lead atoms stripped of electrons – is completely different from operating the machine with protons. From the source to collisions, operational parameters have to be re-established for the new type of beam. For lead-ions, as for protons before them, the procedure started with threading a single beam round the ring in one direction and steadily increasing the number of laps before repeating the process for the other beam. Once circulating beams had been established they could be accelerated to the full energy of 287 TeV per beam. This energy is much higher than for proton beams because lead ions contain 82 protons. Another period of careful adjustment was needed before lining the beams up for collision, and then finally declaring that nominal data taking conditions, known at CERN as stable beams, had been established. The three experiments recording data with lead ions, ALICE, ATLAS and CMS can now look forward to continuous lead-ion running until CERN’s winter technical stop begins on 6 December.
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“The ALICE detector has been optimised to record the large number of tracks that emerge from ion collisions and has handled the first collisions very well, so we are all set to explore this new opportunity at LHC.”
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“The ATLAS detector has recorded first spectacular heavy-ion events, and we are eager to study them in detail.”
“We designed CMS as a multi-purpose detector,” said Guido Tonelli, the collaboration’s spokesperson, “and it’s very rewarding to see how well it’s adapting to this new kind of collision. Having data collected by the same detector in proton-proton and heavy-ion modes is a powerful tool to look for unambiguous signatures of new states of matter.”
Lead-ion running opens up an entirely new avenue of exploration for the LHC programme, probing matter as it would have been in the first instants of the Universe’s existence. One of the main objectives for lead-ion running is to produce tiny quantities of such matter, which is known as quark-gluon plasma, and to study its evolution into the kind of matter that makes up the Universe today. This exploration will shed further light on the properties of the strong interaction, which binds the particles called quarks, into bigger objects, such as protons and neutrons.
Following the winter technical stop, operation of the collider will start again with protons in February and physics runs will continue through 2011.
Atheist’s Christmas Cards!
Version A:
Version B:
Continue reading Atheist’s Christmas Cards!
How to get a touchdown in football
This trick will only work once:
Continue reading How to get a touchdown in football
Ellen Lutz
Ellen Lutz, former Executive Director for the Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution and for the last six years or so Executive Director of Cultural Survival, has died. I received this rom Cultural Survival:
Canadian Palaeontologists
Here’s their blog. Give it a look, you hoser!
More scary news: Rejection of Iowa judges over gay marriage raises fears of political influence
Iowa’s rejection of three state supreme court justices who ruled in favor of same-sex marriage underscored the growing electoral vulnerability of state judges as more and more are targeted by special interest groups, legal scholars and jurists said Thursday.
“It just illustrated something that has been troubling many of us for many, many years,” California Chief Justice Ronald M. George said. “The election of judges is not necessarily the best way to select them.”
Palin Bachmann 2012
They’re serious. Are you serious? If not, time to get serious.
Continue reading Palin Bachmann 2012
Djagechyer Deer?
This weekend was Deer Opener in Minnesota. So the traffic going up to the cabin resembled Fishing Opener, and the entire experience was like Fishing Opener, but with more blasting and less splashing. Also, we didn’t see a single deer all weekend, and other critters were acting strangely. Something spent part of the weekend living under the porch and driving the dogs nuts, for instance.
We heard when we arrived late Friday Night that a hunter saw a timber wolf (and the timber wolf saw him) while the hunter tried out his deer stand earlier this week. The folks who own the hardware store spotted two wolves by the road just around the curve from our cabin. Plus … and this is very exciting for Kenzie and Baily (the dogs) … I hear tell there was some wolf poop over by the boat house yesterday. But they eated it. I’ll look around in the morning to see if they left any for me. (To look at.)
The Keith Olbermann Affair
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) shamed the cable station MSNBC for indefinitely suspending its liberal host Keith Olbermann for making political donations.
Sanders, an independent who aligns himself with Democrats, called MSNBC’s decision to suspend Olbermann, who admitted to making donations to several Democratic candidates this cycle, “outrageous.”
Olberman had been suspended after Politico, the blog, narked on him for making three donations to Democratic candidates. My source on that is politico but it is the policy of this blog to not link to other blogs that being with the letter “p.”
Olbermann made campaign contributions to two Arizona members of Congress and failed Kentucky Senate candidate Jack Conway ahead of Tuesday’s election.
Olbermann, who acknowledged the contributions in a statement to POLITICO, made the maximum legal donations of $2,400 apiece to Conway and to Arizona Reps. Raul Grijalva and Gabrielle Giffords. He donated to the Arizona pair on Oct. 28 — the same day that Grijalva appeared as a guest on Olbermann’s “Countdown” show.
Apparently NBC has a rule against this sort of thing, which is common but not ubiquitous in news organizations. It is considered a breach of journalist ethics. It might give the appearance of a bias.
OK, I’ll let you laugh for a while …
Shall we continue?
It turns out that this is not so much Olbermann breaking a rule as politics inside MSNBC, most likely, with centrist or conservative forces trying to reign in liberal attitudes.
Insiders were stunned that Griffin moved so swiftly to yank one of the network’s true stars off the air, and some suspected that the recent tensions with NBC News, which has grown increasingly uneasy with its sister network’s more ideological stance, contributed to the swift decision. Some have even speculated that Comcast’s coming merger with NBC Universal has heightened sensitivities about MSNBC’s ideological profile.
Just as I thought.
Bernie Sanders made the following statement regarding this affair:
Tomas is a hurricane
Tomas, once expected to spin up to a fairly strong hurricane, then weakened and not expected to do so, has done so. Tomas is now a serious hurricane with winds of up to 75 knots and sustained winds of 70 knots, and is expected to become stronger.
Tomas is bearing down on Haiti, but the eye is passing as smoothly as possible between Cuba and Hispaniola.
“A spiritual plane where everything is invisible but … somehow pink.”
The answer to the eternal question turns out to be:
Continue reading “A spiritual plane where everything is invisible but … somehow pink.”
Tomas = fan.
If a storm like Tomas was as close to Panama City as it is to Port-au-Prince Haiti, there would be storm studs standing along the beach in what must be rain and some wind talking about how we’re all gonna die and stuff.
As it is, I have no idea what is going on there. Anybody know?
The serious part of the storm should be affecting land areas in Haiti some time tonight, and continue to do so through the day Friday into the evening. The winds will not be strong but if you live under a sheet of corrugated metal (meaning you’re one of the lucky ones in this earthquake-rattled region) a 55 knot wind will still blow away your house. So, given the context, even if Tomas never regains hurricane strength, it will still be destructive.
But, as you know, the rain is the real threat, as flooding and slope wash in the deforested, hilly region can be deadly.
Also, it is possible that the hurricane will spin up. There is one model which shows Tomas going from about 45 knots to 70+ knots in a very short amount of time. Other factors seem to mitigate against this actually happening however, and it is not too likely.
Jamaica is also going to get some stormy weather, as are the Bahamas. The public advisory is here.
The death toll in Haiti stands at 442 from the current cholera outbreak.
Health authorities are concerned that the situation may worsen as Tropical Storm Tomas approaches the impoverished nation, still recovering from a devastating January earthquake that killed 250,000 people and left 1 million homeless. Tomas is projected to pass over Haiti on Friday.