What’s old is new. Watch this video of water bouncing off a surface.

The pictures of this are interesting even if the explanation is probably somewhat off the mark. I guess it takes a physicist rather than a mathematician to explain the observation.

There is an article on softpedia.com Understanding Water Drop Back-Jet Physics that has a more physical explanation. They also completed a high-detail computer model of the phenomenon, one that comprises more than 30,000 frames per second.

Picture from above article

For even more physics there is the article Between bouncing and splashing: water drops on a solid surface.

My freshman adviser at MIT, Harold Edgerton, made a famous milk drop photograph in 1957.

Harold Edgerton was an electrical engineer and began to take photographs as scientific experiments. In his first, he tried to produce a perfect coronet from a single drop of milk falling into liquid. To do this he invented the stroboscope – a device to produce short bursts of light. This allowed him to take split-second pictures of objects in motion which could not be seen by the human eye, including bullets and hummingbirds in flight, light bulbs shattering, and athletes in action. Some of his photographs had an exposure time of less than 1/10,000 of a second.

Warning: This video has not been rated by the MPAA.

Follow this link to the article on Huffington Post.

I hope this article can help quell whatever misplaced anger there might be over the incident at Fort Hood.

Jon Stewart just loves Glenn Beck’s digestive and immune system so much, and he fears for it.

You probably had to have watched Glenn Beck to fully appreciate this video. I still found it funny even though I never have seen a Glenn Beck performance.

This two part video shows Former British Ambassador Craig Murray saying that the UK and the USA sent prisoners to Uzbek to be tortured.

I wonder how our staunchly anti-communist, anti-totalitarian wing nuts feel about this use of our former enemies.

I wonder why it is necessary to torture people into signing confessions and then killing them. Why not just forge the confession and kill them “humanely”?

Follow this link to the story in the Marine Corps Times about how Republican Senator Coburn places holds on several veteran’s benefits bills. Follow this link to sign VoteVets.org’s petition to Sen. Coburn.

For those who think President’s Obama’s efforts to get things through the Congress is just a walk in the park, remember this story next time you are tempted to complain about lack of progress.

I have made statements before about how Lyndon Johnson would never have tolerated such obstructionism.  I then think back to how campaign finance laws have been changed over the years.  The control that the Democratic Party has over its Senators and Representatives is much less now than it was in Johnson’s years.  That is why even a 60 vote majority is not enough to give Reid the power to stop such shenanigans.

I would hate to think that American style Democracy cannot work without such dictatorial powers wielded by a few of our leaders.

The proof must come from continued pressure from the electorate in making calls to members of Congress demanding action.  Whining about President Obama’s failures just won’t cut it anymore.

Even to me, my call to stop whining about Obama sounds a little like the usual Right Wingnut’s complaint.  How can you complain about Bush condoning torture, when the terrorists are so inhumane?  My answer is that I have some say in what my President does, but other than sending an army to Afghanistan, I don’t have much control over what the terrorists do.

In this case, I have as much say in what Congress does as I do about what President Obama does.  So my call to focus our energy where it will do the most good is justified in this case as opposed to such supposed calls in the case of torture.

Follow this link to the report in the Christian Science Monitor.

I know that most of the readers of this blog wouldn’t have too much trouble believing that Fool’s News lies.

However, living out here in the hinterlands of Massachusetts, I have been asked by people I socialize with, “what  Fool’s News has ever lied about?”  Never believing that I would ever be asked such a question, I had not been saving up any evidence.  I have now decided that I had better collect the evidence.

Just don’t ask me to actually watch Fool’s News to gather the evidence. I am afraid my brain would start to rot.  I see plenty of evidence of such rot in people who do admit to watching it.

Follow this link to the story of how the GOP tried to hold up the extension of unemployment benefits.  Fortunately there ended up being 97 Senators who could see how wrong it was to hold up benefits for political reasons.  Occasionally even Republicans can be convinced to stop fighting Obama.

Watch the video as President Obama thanks his supporters for their continuing efforts.

I have been telling people that President Obama has always said that his election was not the goal, it was only the beginning of our journey to the goal. In this video, President Obama confirms what I have been trying to tell people.

For those erstwhile supporters who are ready to abandon the President just as he is getting started, I ask you to contemplate the 300,000 phone calls he mentioned in the video. Continuing to work toward the goal is the opposite of abandoning the journey just as we get started.

There seems to be a general misunderstanding about whether or not the health insurers get to keep their anti-trust exemption.

To clear up this misunderstanding, I have pointed to Sec. 262. Restoring application of antitrust laws to health sector insurers. starting on page 150 of the Affordable Health Care for America Act.

People have read that section and still misunderstood it to mean the exact opposite of what it does mean.

Follow this link to a letter to the editor in the Worcester T & G, of all places, that helps explain. This is what the letter said:

The Constitution’s commerce clause establishes federal regulation of interstate commerce. The 1868 Supreme Court case Paul v. Virginia decided that insurance was not an interstate activity and should be state regulated. In 1944, the court decided in United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Association, that insurance was clearly interstate commerce and should be federally regulated. In 1945, Congress delegated this federal responsibility back to the states with the McCarran-Ferguson Act. Fast-forward to current times, when reports like the 2007 American Medical Association study of competition among health insurers show that in a majority of states the private health insurance market is dominated 60 to 90 percent by one or two companies.

How’s it possible that only one or two insurers write most of the policies in a given state or locality? Is it super-efficient management that other companies simply cannot match? Is it just that few insurers are big enough to compete everywhere? Do the large sums of re-election campaign money from insurance lobbies play a role?

Regardless of the explanation, state regulation of insurance has evolved a health insurance system of local monopolies that benefit insurance companies far more than you or I, and we know the profit motive makes insurers more focused on their bottom line than on the welfare of their customers. If that’s your idea of how it should be done, then you will probably see little reason for reform. If not, you should be insisting on and supporting major changes that make people the top priority.

RONALD KENT

To this letter, I added the following reply:

Ronald,

Thanks for adding this vital piece of information.

The latest version of the House of Representatives’ Affordable Health Care for America Act has Sec. 262. Restoring application of antitrust laws to health sector insurers. starting on page 150.

That section starts off, with (a) AMENDMENT TO MCCARRAN-FERGUSON ACT.- Section 3 of the Act of March 9, 1945 (15 U.S.C. 1013), commonly known as the McCarran-Ferguson Act, is amended by adding at the end the following:

Just to give a flavor of some of what that section says, on page 152 is Except as provided in paragraph (2), nothing contained in this Act shall modify, impair, or supersede the operation of any of the antitrust laws with respect to price fixing, market allocation, or monopolization (or attempting to monopolize)

I surmised the gist of what you wrote from reading the current bill. Your details make it much clearer as to why this section was written in the way it was.