Random Thoughts

I spent the day with the family at the zoo, idly thinking about physics, but not enough to blog about it yet.  Since it is Memorial Day, a day when one should think about those who gave their lives for our liberty, I considered a war story from my family. This is a story of my father's father, Arthur Sweetser, who I just found out made it to wikipedia posthumously.  He had gone to Harvard University, the class of 1911, working as the business manager for the Harvard Crimson, a good place to start for a reporter.  According to wikipedia, he "travelled the world after graduating…

There is one thing men know about women; they are willing to believe anything about you if you just put forth the effort to fool them a little. A tuxedo in the eyes of a woman, for example, adds $10,000 to your income and knocks 10 lbs. off your weight. Now, it doesn't really do any of those things, even social psychologists would not believe something so silly, but women are willing to give you credit for trying; namely spending 50 bucks on an ill-fitting suit and enduring patent leather shoes for an evening. And while women are vaguely suspicious of men who own cats(1) , they love men who…

After reading this article "Sociologists' research study finds everyday tax talk is 'morally charged'", I was somewhat stunned that in 2012, it would still be a topic of research to consider what the American taxpayer is upset about. "We propose that everyday tax talk among the middle class is not simply about economics or free markets," NIU sociologist Jeffrey Kidder said. "Tax talk is morally charged. OK, perhaps I shouldn't be so cynical and critical, but DUH!!!! Are politicians and social scientists truly so naive?  Does anyone truly believe that the dislike of taxes and economic…

I have recently created a blog-site called Life-Dialogues that covers the latest topics in neuroscience, stem cell biology, cancer and molecular biology. So- if you were wondering where all my contents went- you can find my recent contents at life-dialogues.weebly.com. To hear about my recent articles, you can also join the lifedialogues group on Facebook or follow me at twitter@lifedialogues. Science2.0 is after-all the place where I published my earlier blogs, so I would still like to share my contents with the community here. I have decided to post a few of my most-read contents here…

In life, all good things come hard, but wisdom is the hardest to come by.Lucille Ball It's been coming, sure and steady. Dad's been promising for the last several years that at any time he could retire--next year was it, for sure. But next year would come and he would stay. He wasn't ready to quit teaching, to let it go, to say goodbye to that part of his life. I was honored and lucky enough to get on as an adjunct 7 years ago this fall at the college my dad had taught at since the 1970s, that my mother spent a decade teaching at. We came back home after Rick retired, and we moved in next…

As you may already know from the Science meets Society “interview” with me (from SMS’s published German version), Sascha Vongehr has finally left the postdoctoral limbo and entered some different limbo at one of the best universities of the new international leader in science and technology, moreover a leader in my field of nanotechnology: Nanjing University (same workplace as before). Tenure track is what I am told this effectively is, and such it is for Chinese. However, foreigners have of course zero stability here and can never hope to really enjoy retirement for example - does not matter…

To the couple of positions I posted yesterday from the Chess Tournament I played this weekend, let me add one I played on round II, when I was white against Fausto Scali, the blind player. The position arose from the Advance variation of the French defense (1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.e5), which however we reached with a transposed move-order (1.e4 c5 2.c3 d5 3.e5). In the position below, black has just played an inaccuracy in an already slightly worse queenless middlegame: Here with 34.Nc6 white got a won endgame: in fact after 34....Re6 35.Nxa5 Rxe5 white has the nice shot 36.Rxd5! and black is…

Chess is a game, a sport, and a very radical way to test one's concentration and discipline in pure thought. Besides liking it as a game (a precondition to enjoy the other benefits), I also enjoy immensely the demands that a chess game puts on your brain's functioning; and this is brought to the extreme during a chess tournament, where you are also subject to pressure from competition factors extraneous to the 64 squares where the battles develop. Because of the above, you may well imagine that I was thrilled to spend four days playing chess at a tournament in Mogliano Veneto -an event that…

April 30. The last day of Autism Awareness Month. The last hurrah, although let's be honest, the wider world didn't really notice all that much and probably didn't learn all that much, either. The truth is that autism awareness happens at the individual level every time we, as parents, take our autistic children out and have them interact with the world. For autistic people, it happens every time they are out in public and self-disclose, but also when they don't, when the people they interact with don't know they have autism, or as they get to be known by others, when that label fades into…

Gregory Miller, a former JRC employee, has set up a petition on Change.org, and given permission to repost his petition letter: Hi, my name is Gregory Miller. I used to work at a school in Massachusetts named The Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) where we used powerfully painful electric shock devices (45 – 91 milliamps, at 66 volts) on students to control their behaviors. These devices are much stronger than police stun guns (1-4 milliamps). Unlike stun guns, the electrodes most commonly used at school are spaced 3 – 4 inches apart so that the electrical volts passing through the flesh create the…