SFPD sergeant Peter Thoshinsky (helmet #2197) is recorded walking the police line, ordering his officers, “If they do not do what you tell them, strike them.”
Tagged OWS“As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life—so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.”
–Matt Cartmill
“Of course, you become an archbishop to meet boys.
–Doug Nelson
“Scientists don’t meet girls either”
–me
or why I love BoingBoing comments.
Look at me. Look at me. If you look away I will remove two stars.
—Yelping with Cormac, December 2011
Genius.
220 years. How are we doing?
[*] The third amendment is still in good shape. We quarter our soldiers in Asia now.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
Again, I’d like to believe that someone around here has a sense of humor, but it is sadly non-evident anywhere else.
Yes, that’s really a human figure engraved into the glass. Don’t ask me why. Looks remarkably like me.
Finally, returned to the second millennium. Charter finally fixed the connection after three truck rolls, 14 phone calls (I kid you not), and two weeks.
I suppose my reading-books percentage will go down as my keeping-up-with-the-blogs percentage goes up.
I’d like to believe that someone here has a sense of humor, but that would be truly remarkable.
Still waiting for Charter. And to think, they keep asking to be my phone company. Good thing I don’t depend on them for emergency communication services.
“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.”
— Paul Dirac
Not even working for Fox can save you:
I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.
When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.
It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.
My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage[…]
There’s more, about how the LAPD refused to accept bail after it was set and with cash in hand.
Tagged OWSPasadena 5 December 2011:
The demise of SSC caused the current financial crisis
The cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider was an idiot thing to do for any number of reasons. First, it still would have been the most powerful accelerator on earth, with the most luminosity. We would have found the Higgs in 1996, instead of not quite yet in 2011. We rarely get measurable quantities like this in history, but it’s easy to quantify this. Cancellation of the SSC set back particle physics by more than 15 years. That’s half my scientific lifetime (and a scientific career change) gone. And now that LISA has been cancelled…
It would have cost less to finish it than we had spent on it to that point. The fallacy of sunk costs, I know, but it’s a powerful fallacy.
But the most important reason is that canceling the SSC caused the financial meltdown of 2008. As I remember, there were about 2000 physicists working on building the SSC: the magnets, the detectors, the computers, triggers, cryogenics, etc. Back in the 90s, the US matriculated about 200 Ph.Ds per year in high energy particle physics (HEP). When the SSC was canceled, that dumped a ten-year supply of particle physicists on the market all at once. HEP is known to create self-serving bastards (cf. Rubbia, Ting, et al.); even the lesser ones get indoctrinated in the culture by their colleagues and advisors.
All those bastards had to get a job somewhere. Even those of us bastards who were unlucky enough to graduate at that time and had nothing to do with the SSC were affected. I surmise that a large number of HEP physicists, who are smart, amoral, self-serving, and really good with computers and algorithms, fell into the waiting arms of Wall Street. Some number would have done that in any case, but there just weren’t enough jobs at CERN, Brookhaven, SLAC, and TRIUMPH to absorb everyone. In some sense, I was lucky, because I was just starting my postdoc career, so I could start in at a low level, but if you were an established scientist, with a family and a mortgage, taking another postdoc probably wasn’t an option for you. Wall Street was.
Would the financial markets have melted anyway? Probably. The development of derivatives, CDOs, regulatory capture, the buying and selling of politicians and power, the increasing plutarchy would have happened anyway. The demise of the SSC simply accelerated it. Another quantifiable aspect.
I have no data other than anecdotal to back up this opinion. That’s for a social scientist to discover. Go nuts, guys. (Call it the BWare postulation. There’s already BWare’s law.) If so, it’s yet another reason to blame a short-sighted Congress for causing the long, slow recession we’re in. Aside for blaming them for HEP moving overseas, and the US no longer being a leader in that field.
[update 22 Feb 12] I talked to some people who might know about such things. One told me that in 1994, his entire graduating class of Ph.D Harvard physicists went to Wall Street. Another made the point that the banksters would have ruined the economy anyway, and that scientists couldn’t be held responsible for their employers machinations. To me this seems like the argument that it was the politicians who are responsible for nuclear weapons, not the scientists who actually built them. Or the commander, not the soldier who pulls the trigger.
Without the scientist, the soldier, weapons aren’t built, triggers not pulled. Each does things for their own reasons, which may not be the same as those who write the checks, but in the end, responsibility lies with each of us. Apportion responsibility as you will. I can only be responsible for my own actions, by the moral system I choose to live by.
Tagged HEPHigh Energy Physics
Rant
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