Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
I just realized that, other than a few jokes, I haven’t said anything about Occupy Wall Street.  Well, I’ll just say that they have started a conversation that we need to have, a long-awaited leftward motion of the pendulum.  So, while I don’t claim to agree with every sign waved by every person, I [...]

By Thoreau
It ain’t over till it’s over, but I will be happy to eat some crow, marinaded in champagne, at 12:01am on January 1, 2012.  Right before the Mayan prophecies are fulfilled, alas.

By Thoreau
A single blogger controls 99% of the posts.  This is not acceptable.  I demand that Jim occupy this blog AT ONCE.

This blog has been doing its thing for ten years today. I’d feel more strongly that congratulations are in order, except, we lost. While my politics have shifted substantially leftward over the decade, in important ways the country we have today is the country I started Unqualified Offerings hoping to prevent.
On the bright side, I [...]

By Thoreau
I think I understand better what I was trying to express before:  If you start off assuming two charged particles, interacting via a 1/r potential, and then you start looking at this from different reference frames, if you get to a frame where both are moving you get something with an electric force as [...]

By Thoreau

By Thoreau
Which means that I have plenty of time to grade them still, right?
I want to procrastinate by pondering relativity.  I’m not the sort of theorist who has much background in relativistic field theory; I wandered in from experimental physics and started pondering (and answering) questions in optics and biophysics (and a tiny bit of [...]

By Thoreau
Today I spent the afternoon playing with my little nephews.  I have often said that to do creative research you need a bit of a childlike mind, partly to have some naivete and fresh perspective, and partly because kids learn so much faster than adults.  Anyway, while fighting with plastic swords, I started thinking [...]

By Thoreau
The  2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner is entering yet another foreign conflict by sending military advisors to Uganda to assist in the fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army.  As we know, sending military advisors to a foreign conflict is the best way to ensure minimal entanglement and swift resolution.
What fascinates me about military advisors [...]

By Thoreau
I don’t have time to offer all of my thoughts on this, but the Dean Dad raises a good point:  Say what you will about the (real or alleged) differences in employability for various majors, but students seem to be interested in showing up to study those subjects.  Academia is nowhere near The Free [...]