2014 — 1 August: Friday — rabbits!

Busy chap, me.1 But that doesn't mean no time to enjoy the intermezzo (what the hell is an 'intermezzo'?) from the Karelia Suite, does it? It should help stop my head from spinning after too much late-night reading of a couple of recent issues of "Scientific American". Measuring yet more accurately the precise radius of a proton? (And thereby discovering a potential flaw in QED theory.) Gimme a break, here. Who can possibly need to know2 that?

Does that knowledge alter my meter readings? Bring me my morning cuppa in bed with a smile? Stop people killing one another? Cut taxes? Inspire homo sapiens into displaying a bit more sapiens? Make me live longer? I take leave to doubt any and all of that.

A delightful song of Scots midges (Stephen Montague's Three fables, #3 — Midges) has just made me laugh. My normal bonhomie is restored.

Credit where credit isn't due

Student loans are a severe and ever-growing economic pinch point for our cousins across the pond, it seems.

Unpaid debt from student loans today exceeds credit card debt. The national total is more than a trillion dollars...
The Higher Education Act of 1965 laid the groundwork for Pell Grants and other loan programs, but the following decades saw a weakening of the belief that the federal government should subsidize intellectual curiosity. Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, led the withdrawal of support by the states for higher education; and many other states gradually cut back the appropriations with which they once helped universities to function well. The difference was passed on to students in the form of rising tuition costs; and tuition had to be paid for by reliance on loans in ever-enlarging quantities. The federal government will make $184 billion in profits from student loan debt over the next decade.

David Bromwich in NYRB


Why am I not surprised? It must be tricky to outspend the next 25 countries put together militarily (even if they are all nominally your allies!) and still have a bit left in the kitty for college kids. The Federal Budget epitomises smoke and mirrors. And the corrupting power of the lobby.

Kleptoparasitism

Simon Blackburn seems to have coined the coolest new word of the day, ever. Until the next one. (Link.)

Quantum weirdness

I don't make this stuff up, you know. I just read it with varying degrees of be/a/musement:

Consider the Higgs boson, which in the Standard Model gives elementary particles mass. If you had a Higgs boson but also had some superheavy particles, they would talk to one another via virtual quantum interactions. The Higgs would itself become superheavy. And the instant after that, everything in the universe would transform into superheavy particles. You and I would collapse into black holes. The best explanation for why we do not is supersymmetry.

Date: Scientific American, May 2014


That doesn't strike me as much of an explanation. And people say I'm odd.

Today's second trip...

... will again be to scour Mr Postie's lair for another parcel "too big to deliver".

[Pause]

I must say, a single DVD scarcely strikes me as being too big to deliver:

3rd Woody Allen DVD

Again, it replaces a DVD I cut from a Laser(rotting)Disc a decade or so ago.

  

Footnotes

1  Just this morning, for example, I've already supplied gas and electricity meter readings :-)
2  And to think I briefly considered a career in physics, on the ludicrous grounds that it was my 'best' subject at A-level in the summer of 1969. I must have been mad.