In the article Fermilab is Building a ‘Holometer’ to Determine Once and For All Whether Reality Is Just an Illusion in Popular Science, the authors state:

Researchers at Fermilab are building a “holometer” so they can disprove everything you thought you knew about the universe. More specifically, they are trying to either prove or disprove the somewhat mind-bending notion that the third dimension doesn’t exist at all, and that the 3-D universe we think we live in is nothing more than a hologram.

Now before you start wondering whether today is April first, they do provide a link to the Fermi Lab web site section devoted to presentations about the holometer.

There you can read the 2009 Holometer Proposal.  Maybe the following quote explains it better than the Popular Science article:

The theory of black hole evaporation, whereby a black hole state converts to free quantum particle states in flat spacetime, also suggests a fundamental bound at the Planck scale. The correspondence is remarkably precise: the entropy of a black hole, identified with the total number of degrees of freedom, is one quarter of the area of its event horizon in Planck units. This idea has led to the conjecture that all of physics may be “holographic”, encoded in some way on null surfaces or light sheets at Planck resolution. However, there has been no experimental test of this conjecture.

For your information they state that Planck time = 5.4 X 10^-44 seconds.

The Los Angeles Times article titled In two years, a fearful turn in Obama’s speeches, ends with the following:

“As a candidate in 2008, Obama made an appealing but naive promise to bring Republicans and Democrats together in Washington and end the bitter partisan standoff,” said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies and writes about governance. “He learned that was easier said than done.

“He is now giving voice to a reality that he was hesitant to accept.”

Notice the difference between my headline and the one used by the Los Angeles Times. Like two drunks propping each other up as they walk out of the bar, maybe if you put the slant of the two different headlines next to each other, they could hold each other up.

Of course, even the fellow from the Brookings Institution could have phrased it, “President Obama gave the Republicans a chance to put aside their bitter partisanship, but they didn’t take it.” Are three drunks holding each other up better than two?

I found Thaddeus Russell: Why I Got Fired From Teaching American History on the George Mason University’s History News Network web site.

If I had a category, “And Now For Something Completely Different”, I would place this item in it. In describing what got him fired, the article has the following to say:

I showed them that during the American Revolution drunkards, laggards, prostitutes, and pirates pioneered many of the freedoms and pleasures we now cherish — including non-marital sex, interracial socializing, dancing, shopping, divorce, and the weekend — and that the Founding Fathers, in the name of democracy, opposed them.

I haven’t been following Oregon politics very closely since we left in 2006. I was surprised to see that John Kitzhaber is running for governor again. He got a lot of great things accomplished the last time he was governor (1995-2003). He didn’t do a great job of getting himself a lot of good publicity for what he accomplished. I hope he has better luck this time.

Tim Wise posted this article on his web site, Bikini Liberalism: Juan Williams, Implicit Bias and the Trouble With NPR.

I’ve never been a fan of Juan Williams. Far too chummy with his FOX News colleagues and too eager to attack longstanding civil rights leaders in the name of supposedly courageous political “independence,” Williams is one I have never thought to defend before.

But today such a defense is deserved. Williams, it turns out, has been done a supreme disservice by his other employer, National Public Radio, and it is a disservice to which the harshest condemnation should be applied.

Sometimes Tim Wise and I see eye to eye and sometimes we don’t. In this case, I agree with what he said and the way he said it.  I am not a fan of Juan Williams, but in this case NPR may have done to Juan Williams what was done to Shirley Sherrod.

Whether pro or con Williams firing, I must admit I have not seen the whole interview.  I could be wrong no matter which position I take.

The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch in The New York Review of Books is a review of the movie Waiting for “Superman”,

Had I not read this review before seeing the movie (which I have not seen yet), I might have fallen for the premise of the movie.  (Perhaps I might have guessed at some of the information in this review.)

Just a few selected examples from the review follow:

Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates.

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Perhaps the greatest distortion in this film is its misrepresentation of data about student academic performance. The film claims that 70 percent of eighth-grade students cannot read at grade level. This is flatly wrong.

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Another highly praised school that is featured in the film is the SEED charter boarding school in Washington, D.C. SEED seems to deserve all the praise that it receives from Guggenheim, CBS’s 60 Minutes, and elsewhere. It has remarkable rates of graduation and college acceptance. But SEED spends $35,000 per student, as compared to average current spending for public schools of about one third that amount.

Read the rest of the article to understand some of the other “tricks” SEED uses to get the results that it does.

If we want public schools to achieve the success that some charter schools achieve, then we must know the entire suite of techniques that the Charter Schools use.  If we pick a few techniques that fit our preconceived notions of the cheapest way to achieve good results, we will be astonished to find that public schools cannot make the same achievements.

The article Britain Details Radical Cuts in Spending, Citing Debt in The New York Times may give a hint at what is going to be happening in countries around the world. It may even come to a country near you after the November elections.

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer unveiled the country’s steepest public spending cuts in decades on Wednesday, sharply reducing welfare benefits and eliminating almost half a million public sector jobs over the next four years as the country seeks to free itself of crushing debt from the global financial crisis.
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The cuts, far more detailed and sweeping than those in many other Western nations, were depicted by the opposition as a reckless gamble that could tip the country back into recession. Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour opposition, called the five-year austerity plan the “biggest gamble in decades.”

As more and more countries adopt policies like this, then we will finally see who is right and who is wrong about Keynesian economics.  No longer will we have to argue about this subject.

The last time this was tried on a massive scale was in 1937.  The results of that test were only overcome after a World War.  Can civilization survive again after a cure like that?

How are you preparing for the impending test?

The New York Times has the article  Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore by Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. Read the article to see how he justifies the following conclusion:

In short, the economist’s cost-benefit approach — itself long an important arrow in the moral philosopher’s quiver — has much to say about the effects of rising inequality. We need not reach agreement on all philosophical principles of fairness to recognize that it has imposed considerable harm across the income scale without generating significant offsetting benefits.

I was just thinking about Bill Gates reported $40 billion fortune. If he just sat back and got a 5% return on this fortune, he would earn $2 billion every year.  Can you imagine the problem of figuring out how to spend $2 billion on your small family?  It’s a good thing he doesn’t get it in cash.  He’d need help just cleaning it up to make room for him to fit in his house.