Sometimes, I worry that our work on Modified Gravity exists in a vacuum (pun intended.) A blog I came across just convinced me otherwise. It is good to see that people actually read and appreciate our recent results!
Oct 302010
vttoth
Oct 282010
For many years, I felt that despite their “anti-communist” political rhetoric and right-of-center stand on many issues, it is Hungary’s Fidesz party that carries the true legacy of the communist era. The party’s leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, seems hell-bent on governing in the style of one-party regimes, and now that he enjoys a two thirds parliamentary majority, he has the mandate to do so.
Even so, I did not expect that they will show their true nature this boldly and this rapidly, causing concern even among international investors, as they expressed their intent to curb the jurisdiction of the country’s constitutional court, which happened to declare one of their recent measures unconstitutional.
Oct 242010
It’s never a good idea for a car to sport three wheels up front, two of them on one side:
Yes, I do occasionally like to watch Formula 1 races.
Oct 192010
Is this really the new Republican vision for America? A country surrounded by barbed wire, attack dogs, and border guards with machine guns? Apparently so, according to Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller. And they wonder why some conservative-leaning people, like myself, root for the Democrats these days.
Oh, and one more thing about East Germany… they could NOT do it. The Wall eventually failed, and the country itself went down the drain with it.
Oct 172010
This is what the German news magazine thinks of the city of my birth, Budapest: they call it Europe’s Capital of Anti-Semitism.
I wish I could fully disagree.
Oct 142010
Caught on a Web cam, two very worried kitties in my wife’s room, listening intently as workmen were demolishing an old furnace in the basement:
The other three cats were in hiding.
Oct 122010
It is rare to read anything these days from Canada’s unofficial copyright critic, Michael Geist, that is even mildly optimistic. Not so today… Geist appears to welcome the near-final version of ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, notably its relatively flexible approach to copy protection and digital access controls. It seems that sanity may prevail, despite earlier concerns about secretly negotiated Draconian restrictions. Let us hope that this does not go unnoticed by Canada’s Parliament as it considers revisions to our proposed new copyright law.
Oct 072010
In an editorial today, the Ottawa Citizen praises the decision of Harper’s government to cancel a planned speech by a prominent imam.
To be clear, I think it is entirely appropriate to give the cold shoulder to an organization according to which Israelis over the age of 18 are fair game for killing. No argument there on my part.
But… the article goes on to discuss the practice of taqiyya, or “holy deception”, yet I think they’re guilty of a little bit of holy deception of their own, when they list the traits which they associate with Islamist extremism: denouncing Israeli policies as racist, or calling for the removal of Hezbollah and Hamas from the list of terrorist organizations.
Being a devoted atheist, I don’t think I qualify as an Islamist extremist, and having voted with my feet against the “workers’ paradise” I don’t think I qualify as a good left-wing extremist either. But… I tend to believe that some of the policies of Israel indeed qualify as racist, and I tend to believe that, in the interest of realpolitik if nothing else, legitimizing Hezbollah and Hamas may be the right thing to do.
Years ago, I argued that it should be possible to be critical of the actions of the government of Israel without being labeled an anti-Semite. The same way, it is wrong to denounce Muslim critics of the Israeli government as Islamist extremists. If we wish to live in a world that is free of Sharia law and of prohibitions against defaming a religion, we must realize that it also has to be a world in which one is free to denounce a government or be critical of an inflexible policy towards a popular political organization.
Oct 042010
Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of German reunificiation. Having grown up in a world in which the separate existences of West and East Germany were taken for granted, I am still digesting this fact, just as I am still digesting the collapse of the USSR, even as these events slowly migrate from the pages of geopolitics to the pages of history.
Sep 282010
So, how come atheists and agnostics know more about religion than true believers?
Sep 262010
I once built my own not-so-micro processor as a hobby project of sorts. It was loads of fun.
There is another way of having loads of fun: how about visually simulating an old 8-bit microprocessor as it executes instructions? What can I say… it’s neat. Brings back lots of memories from the days when I was earning a living writing code for the Commodore-64.
Sep 252010
Watching CNN tonight, I was about to swear that if I hear talking heads on TV complaining one more time about Obama not being angry enough, I’d do something angry myself. But then I realized that it’s pointless… they’re going to do it anyway. I do wonder though what these so-called journalists see when they look in the mirror after a broadcast.
Sep 132010
So here I am, posting to my blog from my new smartphone. Neat. I suppose it was time for me to join others and acquire my very own 21st century toy… I have to confess though, the touch screen is nice but it’s much easier to type on a real keyboard…
Sep 122010
As of today, our marriage with Ildiko can legally drink and vote. Well, at least in some jurisdictions, insofar as the drinking part is concerned. Here in Ontario, our marriage could now be employed in a liquor store, but it’d have to wait another year before it is actually allowed to buy the products sold there.
Sep 122010
John Moffat and I now have a bet.
Perhaps in the not too distant future, quantum entanglement will be testable over greater distances, possibly involving spacecraft. Good.
Now John believes that these tests will eventually show that entanglement will be attenuated at greater distances. This would mean, in my mind, that entanglement involves the transmission of a real, physical (albeit superluminal) signal from one of the entangled particles to the other.
I disagreed rather strongly; if such attenuation were observed, it’d certainly turn whatever little I think I understand about quantum theory upside down.
Just to be clear, it’s not something John feels too strongly about, so we didn’t bet a great deal of money. John recently bet a great deal more on the non-existence of the Higgs boson. No, not with me… on that subject, we are in complete agreement, as I also do not believe that the Higgs boson exists.
Sep 092010
Just for the record, I may be a godless atheist but that doesn’t mean I think it’s a good idea to piss off a billion Muslims and, for no particular reason other than to offend them, burn their holy book.
Should this idiot of a pastor go ahead with his Koran burning, however, I would advise Muslims to shut up and move on. After all, “our” righteous idiots, acting in the name of Jesus, only burn the Koran in front of the world’s television cameras, whereas the Muslim world’s righteous idiots end up sawing heads off innocent screaming people, all in the name of Allah. I strongly disapprove of book burning, yet even so, I find the burning of some bound sheets of paper with printing on them a far less uncivilized form of protest than the use of a rusty knife to severe a person’s carotid artery, windpipe, vertebrae, and whatever other body parts there are that connect a human being’s head to his or her body.
If only I could make a similarly favorable comparison between the act of flying passenger planes into crowded buildings vs. bombing a country into submission (remember “shock and awe?”) using a well trained, highly disciplined, high-tech equipped, professional military.
Sep 092010
Going to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro, I suspect the one thing no journalist expects is to hear is words from the Leader of the Revolution that would put many ordinary Cuban citizens in jail. Words like, “Cuban Model Doesn’t Even Work For Us Anymore”. Yet, apparently, it was precisely this that Castro told Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent of The Atlantic.
I think I’ll listen to some Buena Vista Social Club music this morning. Ah, there’s Ibrahim Ferrer’s CD, I haven’t listened to it in years, and I just ripped its contents the other day. Time to check those MP3s…
Sep 032010
Electroweak theory has several coupling constants: there is g, there is g‘, there is e, and then there is the Weinberg angle θW and its sine and cosine, and I am always worried about making mistakes.
Well, here’s a neat way to remember: the three constants and the Weinberg angle have a nice geometrical relationship (as it should be evident from the fact that the Weinberg angle is just a measure of the abstract rotation that is used to break the symmetry of a massless theory).
This diagram also makes it clear that so long as you keep the triangle a right triangle, all it takes is two numbers (e.g., e and θW) and the triangle is fully determined. This is true even when the coupling constants are running.
Sep 022010
Our monster Living Review about the Pioneer anomaly is now officially published. There were times when I thought we’d never get to this point.
Aug 312010
