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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • my attempt is to balance the perspective of what has become polemic, faith-based scientific dogma completely divorced from fact with some kind of reality-based reasoning and investigation.

    I believe this reveals a real lack of understanding of how modern science is done. I’ve heard similar complaints about scientists being blinded by orthodoxy from anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and from people promoting their alternate models of physics (e.g. “everything is made of photons”). In every case the complaint is based on their own ideological blindness, misunderstanding of the science, or both.

    The idea that scientists are unwilling to interrogate modern theories or entertain alternatives is ridiculous. The most interesting results aren’t those that reaffirm the standard model or expectations, it’s those that are in conflict with our best understanding of reality. These are the observations and theories that reveal new physics. This is the stuff of Nobel prizes.

    Searches for physics beyond the standard model are commonplace; physics conferences generally have at least a few sections devoted to them. There are large collaborations doing experiments that search for physics that’s inconsistent with the standard model, for example searches for neutrinoless double beta decay or the neutron electric dipole moment.

    Even experiments that ultimately reaffirm the standard model began as attempts to interrogate it and discover things that challenge it. At the LHC, Atlas and CMS both observed the Higgs boson and found its properties were consistent with the standard model. If you talk with any of the physicists involved, they were actually disappointed that no new physics was observed. This was the most boring possible result.


  • Alright I’ll bite. I don’t think this is AI drivel, I do think this article comes from a place of a serious lack of understanding of the standard model and quantum mechanics.

    Yes, prior to the discovery of quantum mechanics some physicists realized that if they made certain assumptions, the math “just worked out”. They did not understand why this was the case, and being good scientists they sought to. They were also clear about their lack of a model to justify this math.

    The development of quantum mechanics not only solved all these problems, but also predicted additional physics that has since been verified (solid state mechanics for example is just applied quantum mechanics, and predicted and described the transistor).

    The reason quantum mechanics and the standard model of particle physics are treated as the best description of reality we currently have is because they are in fact. Attempts to describe cosmology and observational physics based in alternative models all do a worse job, either failing to account for observations or making unphysical predictions.

    A quote from the article:

    While MOND successfully predicts many galactic phenomena, often with greater simplicity than dark matter models, it faces its own challenges, particularly in galaxy clusters, and has often been dismissed by the mainstream physics community, sometimes explicitly because it is perceived to “lack mathematical elegance” or deviates too far from the established framework of General Relativity, suggesting theoretical preference can overshadow empirical parsimony.

    This is incorrect. MOND is generally dismissed because as the article admits, it fails to account for all observed behavior. If you have to pick a model that describes more observed phenomena, which do you choose: the model that matches nearly all empirical data, or the one that only matches a subset but maybe could do better if someone could come up with the right formalism? If one insists that MOND is the path forward, then it is they who are dogmatically blinded by their choice of model.


  • Opening a new line of credit is only a temporary hit to your score. Multiple cards in a short time will be a bigger hit, but it’ll eventually pass.

    Most if not all of those cards offer a free credit report that could tell you how much of an impact this had on your score and how quickly it improves. If you have another existing card (don’t sign up for another one) you may be able to see the change to your score once these hard credit pulls hit your credit report.

    If not, wait a month or so and use one of your free annual credit reports. You get one report per year from each agency for free, with no consequence to your credit score. There’s 3 credit agencies, so in principle you can check your credit every 4 months for no cost.



  • The deep sea detector in the news uses Cherenkov radiation to detect the neutrino.

    A neutrino can interact with the nuclei in water molecules (so hydrogen and oxygen nuclei) and produce a charged particle like an electron or a muon. The outgoing particles carry the energy of the incident neutrino, so they can be emitted at a speed greater than the speed of light in the liquid medium.

    Note this is much less than the speed of light in a vacuum, so this isn’t breaking any physics. When charged particles (electrons, muons) pass through a medium at speeds greater than light in that medium, they emit Cherenkov light in a forward cone.

    The Cherenkov light is analogous to the shockwave formed when breaking the sound barrier. Since it points in the direction the particle was traveling, you can detect the shape of the light cone with a large array of photon detectors and reconstruct the direction of the neutrino.









  • My employer has a “buy American” policy that kicks in for purchases over a certain dollar amount. To get an exemption, you need to identify 2 domestic options and state why they aren’t sufficient.

    Recently I needed to replace a module in an existing system that happens to be made by a non-US company. There is literally no valid alternative - only this one company makes the modules that are compatible with each other.

    So I had to identify 2 American made products that were vaguely similar and state why they didn’t meet our specifications. Though “Vaguely similar” is a stretch - it was equivalent to explaining to someone why you can’t buy AA batteries to replace a car battery.






  • It was intentional, the goal was to permanently separate children from their families to deter immigrants and asylum seekers.

    This is a LONG article, but extremely detailed with tons of interviews and documents to back it up like emails and memos obtained via FOIA requests: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/trump-administration-family-separation-policy-immigration/670604/

    It’s also paywalled, but once archive.org comes back online you can find it there. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

    The main takeaway is that the family separation policy was pushed by Trump and his administration incessantly. It took a while to really start because various government officials were reluctant to do it, and kept trying to placate the White House by slow walking the whole thing.

    At one point, government lawyers who process asylum claims realized that the separated children were being shipped away from the local holding facility without any documentation, effectively “losing” them in the system. The lawyers figured this was just a terrible error and began processing asylum claims by the parents faster. If they could get it done within a week or so, the children would still be held in the nearby facility and could be reunited with their parents.

    The white house was furious and directed the holding facility to start “relocating” the children faster, so that they’d be lost in the system before the parents could be processed.

    The cruelty is the point.