Total Recall: YouTube May 3, 2007
Posted by gordonwatts in politics.2 comments
I think a lot of people have seen the YouTube spoof on the Gonzales hearing: someone spliced together every time he said I don’t recall. 72 or 74 times. I wonder how many people now VTR CSPAN looking for moments like this so they can post political satire?
I bring this up because we, here in the US, are entering the next round of presidential elections. First debate amongst the democratic candidates has already taken place. And bloggers and video cameras are everywhere. There is is just no way the campaigns are going to be able to control the message they way they used to — especially to the younger crowd. And if they get a good pot-shot onto YouTube then all the mainstream news programs will pick it up: there is no way they can ignore it.
At first (this whole campaign) this means that all the candidates are going to have to be “on” all the time. It is going to be horrible. They will never be able to relax and I doubt we’ll be able to tell much about what they are thinking. This is not a new argument. We are already in a place where candidates have to be careful what they say because the microphone might be “left” on. It will be worse now. Even one-on-one conversations can be easily recorded.
I expect this campaign to be horrible. Hopefully we and the candidates will eventually learn that everyone is human and we have to laugh at ourselves. I don’t have high hopes for this election, however. Maybe if more people watch the Daily Show…
This is Particle Physics? May 2, 2007
Posted by gordonwatts in physics, physics life, science.6 comments
The Wikipedia entry for particle physics does a passable job:
Particle physics is a branch of physics that studies the elementary constituents of matter and radiation, and the interactions between them. It is also called “high energy physics“, because many elementary particles do not occur under normal circumstances in nature, but can be created and detected during energetic collisions of other particles, as is done in particle accelerators.
They talk about finding physics beyond the standard model and the LHC… Nice. But then they have that picture (that I’ve reproduced here). This is the picture of a gold-gold collision at the STAR detector on RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider). RHIC is definitely doing physics, though I think it is a stretch to call it particle physics. A gold atom is very complex — many different parton interactions. In particle physics we study mostly two partons interacting. Very different. Indeed, RHIC is often called a nuclear physics experiment for that reason: the whole atom interacts, not just a couple of quarks inside the atom.
I wonder how that picture ended up in Wikipedia?
