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View 696 Saturday, October 15, 2011

The Occupy Wall Street movement grows and spreads. No wonder. Billions in taxes went to bail out Wall Street whose minions then rewarded themselves for their brilliant moves in creating this mess but fixing things with public money. That, at least, is how much of the general public sees the situation.

But the popular view looks for people to blame and punish, not for remedies and underlying causes. It should be no surprise that greed infects the system.

Of course we also have the radio commentators including supposed conservatives who talk of torches and pitchforks.

Of course it isn’t envy and greed to say that we’re entitled to something that others shall be forced to pay for. That’s just natural rights, and covetousness has nothing to do with my right to a free education…

It is that time of the year: KUSC is having its pledge drive. I time mine to coincide with theirs, so be prepared to be bombarded for a week with exhortations. I operate this place on the Public Radio Model – it is free, but if not enough donate, it will go away. So far it is healthy. It needs subscriptions and renewals to keep it that way. SUBSCRIBE NOW! RENEW NOW! Thanks!

I suppose this is one way to deal with the CERN neutrinos Boo! Hiss! Dutch Scientist Rains on Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Parade but it’s not the way I’d do it. There seems to be a general buzz about that the CERN people didn’t pay enough attention to General Relativity and the GPS system, and it was their appalling ignorance that led them to believe they saw faster than light transmission of neutrinos.

Whatever the final outcome here, it was not due to simple ignorance. The CERN people well understood the complexities of determining what is simultaneous in events happening close to the speed of light. GPS satellites move fast enough that determining what are simultaneous events on moving clocks significantly affects the answers you get. There are two ways to compensate for this, one involving relativity, which is the official calculation, and some speculations that apparently get the same results with simpler math.

It may be that the CERN people didn’t do the math right; relativity calculations are notoriously complex and difficult, and that may well be the explanation. I will be astonished if it turns out that they made elementary errors by not thinking about how their GPS clocks are synchronized. That would be the first thing I’d think of given the results. Are these events simultaneous? How do we know? I am sure the CERN boffins thought of that one before they went public. And it may just be they didn’t think it through. http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.2685

Of course I really want the results to be real, but the universe doesn’t seem to pay much attention to what I want. Maybe if enough of us want it? If enough Wu Li Masters dance fast enough?

For one view of how SSX became DC/X and what happened to reusable rocket technology, there is a semi-official NASA account http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x-33/nasm.htm. It is incomplete, but then it would be. It’s a reasonable account of much of what went on.

This would be a really great time to renew your subscription.