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Physicists Offer Mundane Explanations for Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos | Wired: Science • Adam Mann
Faster-than-light neutrinos mean Einstein is wrong! At least, that’s what some popular press articles have suggested since researchers with the OPERA experiment in Italy presented evidence of neutrinos arriving 60 nanoseconds earlier than thought possible.But scientists, quite intrigued by the anomalous results, have since been busy generating more measured responses. In the three weeks after the announcement, more than 80 explanations have been posted to the preprint server arxiv. While some suggest the possibility of new physics, such as neutrinos that are traveling through extra dimensions or neutrinos at particular energies traveling faster than light, many offer less revolutionary explanations for the OPERA experiment.One of the earliest objections to the faster-than-light interpretation came from an astrophysical observation. In 1987, a powerful supernova showered Earth with light and neutrinos. …
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cosmogony: Dictionary.com Word of the Day
a theory or story of the origin and development of the universe.
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Rare Images from the Golden Age of Circus, 1870-1950 | Brain Pickings • Maria Popova
What made the circus extraordinary isn’t merely that it was the birth of American pop culture, the Super Bowl, Macy’s Parade, and the Olympics all rolled up into one, it’s that it created a place for outsiders to become the superheroes of their day, for women to showcase their physical strength in ways that would be socially unacceptable elsewhere, and for audiences to experience cultures from around the world long before the age of global citizenship.
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Patterns Of Misconduct – NYTimes.com – Paul Krugman
My sense, after 11 years of punditizing, is that people are complicated, but gangs of people less so. Individuals are often mixed in their behavior: incorruptible politicians may cheat on their spouses, political scoundrels may have impeccable personal lives. But groups, like a politician’s inner circle or the management team of a media empire, tend to behave similarly on multiple fronts. If they lie and cheat routinely in one domain, they tend to do it in others as well.
In fact, that’s how I knew early on that the Bush gang was cooking up a fake case for invading Iraq. I knew that they routinely cooked up fake cases for their preferred economic policies; I could verify that by doing the math. And the way they were making the case for war sounded just the same as the way they made the case for cutting taxes on the rich, with an ever-changing rationale for an unvarying goal.
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Infographic of the Day | Shakesville • Melissa McEwan
…a map showing the locations of more than 200 Occupy Wall Street solidarity protests across Canada and in every US state, plus DC and Puerto Rico.
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Grandmaster Maurice Ashley Promotes Chess for Children | The Root
International grandmaster Maurice Ashley engaged in a 30-board simultaneous chess match with students to promote and benefit the U.S. Chess Center’s work with D.C. public schools.
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Harry Belafonte: A New Book, My Song
The Root Recommends: Hollywood icon Harry Belafonte’s new memoir, which goes beyond his life as an actor and musician to reveal a more tumultuous history.
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Drug Testing: States Making It a Requirement to Receive Aid
Lawmakers in three dozen states this year have proposed drug testing for people receiving benefits like welfare, unemployment assistance, job training, food stamps and public housing…
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It seems inconceivable that Michelle Obama recently walked through Target undetected. …
Is it just me or is recent “news” that the president’s wife, the closest thing Americans have to a royal highness, traipses about unnoticed a bit unsettling? Shouldn’t most people with working eyes know what she looks like?
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Daily Kos: Announcing Occupy Long Beach, CA
Heeding OWS’s call for a global day of action on October 15, our General Assembly will begin occupation in downtown Long Beach, California, starting with an 11 a.m. rally. We have been in touch with the city managers and the police, and we intend to comply with any requests which are compatible with our continued exercise of our free speech rights.
We will be joined by many Occupy Los Angeles protesters who live in Long Beach or wish to express support for our occupation.
Here is our official press release in English and Spanish. Below it is background information about our town and our occupation site.
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Daily Kos: Occupy Wall Street: Arrests in New York, Denver, San Diego
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Occupy Wall Street’s ‘Political Disobedience’ – NYTimes.com
Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.
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Lech Walesa, former Polish president, to visit New York in support of Occupy Wall Street
“How could I not respond,” Walesa told a Polish newspaper Wednesday. “The thousands of people gathered near Wall Street are worried about the fate of their future, the fate of their country. This is something I understand.” …
A former shipyard worker who led Poland’s successful revolt against Soviet communism, Walesa said “capitalism is in crisis” and not just in America.
A staunch anti-communist and former Polish president who helped steer his country to a free market economy, Walesa was invited to join the three-week-old protest… -
Help, I’m getting arrested! | Android Atlas – CNET Reviews
…lets you quickly notify your family, friends, and crack legal team (if you have one) of your situation with a single tap of your finger. Just initially enter a custom message and some SMS-ready numbers to contact in the event of your arrest. Then, as you’re about to be corralled into the back of a squad car, fire the app up and long-press the bull’s-eye for 2 seconds.
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Daily Kos: Occupy Wall Street roundup, Day 27
[linking to this for the picture at the top]
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Daily Kos: The further collapse of campaign finance regulation
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Daily Kos: The Most Important Economic Theorem You’ve Never Heard Of
In layman’s terms this means is that if one condition can’t be attained than an optimum situation can only be achieved by departing from the other optimum conditions.
In other words, if you can’t have a completely frictionless world, trying to get as close as possible will do more harm than good.
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Daily Kos: If We Want ‘Great Teachers,’ Don’t We Need To Give Them Jobs?
…just as lawmakers in the White House and Congress were hard at work crafting new legislation mandating strict new “accountabilities” to, supposedly, ensure “great teachers,” there is an equally determined effort afoot in Capital Hill to scuttle any attempt whatsoever to ensure many of our nation’s teachers get to keep their jobs.
In the meantime, this dysfunctional DC dialogue is playing out in stark contrast to a very different narrative portrayed in a new report detailing the real crisis befalling our nation’s public schools.
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Daily Kos: What are your thoughts on the ‘Enemy Expatriation Act?’
A few days ago, Joe Lieberman, Scott Brown, Charlie Dent, and Jason Altmire took a step in a direction, by introducing the Enemy Expatriation Act which would revoke citizenship for Americans who engage in terrorist activities.
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Daily Kos: Oct. 14, 1943: Jewish Rebellion at Sobibor Death Camp
I think we all need to know in our gut that two Death Camps received fatal blows from Jewish rebels.
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Daily Kos: Free market fail: why the insurance industry won’t save us from climate change
A myth floats around among those seeking free-market solutions to climate change that insurers will be a positive force. Insurers are worried about the impact of climate on their business model. …
There’s only one problem: this market-driven solution won’t work.
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7:19 am – As crowds still celebrate and mill in Zuccotti Park, some have already started marching with brooms to Wall Street.
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Rabbit-Hole Economics – NYTimes.com – Paul Krugman
Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all. …
But that’s history. What do the Republicans want to do now? In particular, what do they want to do about unemployment?Well, they want to fire Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve — not for doing too little, which is a case one can make, but for doing too much. So they’re obviously not proposing any job-creation action via monetary policy.
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Daily Kos: BREAKING: Bo Diddley Jr. Arrested Occupying Bo Diddley Plaza (Florida)
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ABC news is now reporting that the cleaning has been cancelled.
Bloomberg has backed down.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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