Monthly Archives: May 2011

Meet Me in Small Claims Court

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We maintain that arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems and crime’s adjudication as Justice must be seen to be done.

When I read that in Statement From the Family of Osama bin Laden, my irony meter broke. They owe me a new one.

I was out of town on May 1 (and all of last week), and have had only intermittent chances to catch up on all of the happenings, but do have some thoughts. There are only a few things that bother me at all, I think. The kind of celebration I saw Monday night/Tuesday morning made me a tad uncomfortable; I understand it, but the first thing I thought of was the media coverage of the reaction in some (not all) places in the middle east after 9/11. It wasn’t obvious that they were celebrating justice or reveling in revenge. That gives me pause. Labeling it as justice also has some issues. I don’t know what a better description would be, but the word implies that this was somehow tied in with the criminal justice system, with due process and rights. It wasn’t. This was a military action, and it was justified.

Terrorism is a strange mix of criminal activity and war. But one must not forget that it is still war in many of its actions. Bin Laden declared war on the US in 1998 and carried out overt acts, killing thousands, and not just in the US. The attribution of these deeds solely as criminal acts is, I think, naive and simplistic. This did not take place on US soil. The notion that the appropriate response to locating him, in foreign territory, would to be to serve an arrest warrant is ludicrous. Good men put their lives at risk in this operation, and would have been at greater risk if they had been under a restriction to capture but not kill, or with similar rules of engagement. Keep in mind that we had other options, like sending a missile or a GPS/laser-guided bomb. An enemy general in a war does not need to have a pistol in his hand at the time of action in order to justify bombing his headquarters. This, I think, is no different. This was a war of bin Laden’s choosing, and it is likely that the only way the ending could have been different would be if he had surrendered of his own accord. Which he had the option to do at pretty much any point.

Fred Clark at slacktivist has some excellent posts (its predecessor is linked within) on the reasoning behind the justification. There is a mention of the Nuremburg trials after WWII in a post by Glenn Greenwald, which I have not read. Those trials took place after the war was over, with prisoners who had been captured, many of whom were captured after hostilities had ceased. That’s an important distinction, I think. Prisoners are taken when they have made an overt act of surrender. Absent that, they are considered combatants, and don’t have to explicitly “go” for a weapon to be considered dangerous. I would not consider the risk trading even one more life for Osama bin Laden’s capture to have been acceptable. His killing was not arbitrary, nor was it the execution of a criminal sentence. It was part of the war that he declared, and unlike the slaughter of civilians he orchestrated, was justified.

Beyond the Ridiculous Transition

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Normally dry ice will sublime to gas, but that changes when you put it under pressure,

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I must note that explosions such as this are begging to be filmed in slow-motion.

Mightier Than the Sword, but Less Dangerous Than High Voltage

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Uncertain Principles: Why So Many Theorists?

For whatever reason, theoretical physicists and mathematicians are far more likely to be barking mad than experimental physicists. Maybe because concrete comparisons to experimental data require a sort of basic groundedness that theory does not. Maybe because the crazy would-be experimentalists all electrocute themselves early on, and those who survive switch to theory.

The Market Won't Take Care of That?

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Video: They Sure Don’t Make Pyrex Like They Used To

When World Kitchen took over the Pyrex brand, it started making more products out of prestressed soda-lime glass instead of borosilicate. With pre-stressed, or tempered, glass, the surface is under compression from forces inside the glass. It is stronger than borosilicate glass, but when it’s heated, it still expands as much as ordinary glass does. It doesn’t shatter immediately, because the expansion first acts only to release some of the built-in stress. But only up to a point.
One unfortunate use of Pyrex is cooking crack cocaine, which involves a container of water undergoing a rapid temperature change when the drug is converted from powder form. That process creates more stress than soda-lime glass can withstand, so an entire underground industry was forced to switch from measuring cups purchased at Walmart to test tubes and beakers stolen from labs.

The video in the link has some slo-mo goodness, and explains that there are two categories of pyrex: consumer-grade and lab-grade. So the labware theft is not of vintage materials no longer available, possibly it occurs in order to avoid being tracked by actually purchasing it; there are fewer suppliers of lab-grade apparati than there are department stores selling the cheap stuff.

Taking this idea to the illogical extreme is Texas (surprise!), where it is illegal to buy/sell an Erlenmeyer flask (among other labware) without the proper paperwork, as it is considered an aid to making illegal chemicals. (I happen to own one, along with some beakers — they comprised my bar glassware back in the days when I had housemates and we threw parties; I could mix some pretty precise cocktails, and a 600 ml beaker is a good size for such drinks. The Erlenmeyer flask’s role was that of a wine decanter.) I wonder if this is a “shall-issue” permit. Regardless, it appears easier to get a handgun in Texas than lab glassware. Or Sudafed, since Pseudoephedrine is on the list as well, without mention of a threshold below which it’s not necessary to get a permit. I’d love to hear if anyone in the Lone Star State has applied to buy (or better yet, transfers/furnishes to someone else) a cold-remedy pill.

They're All Named Bob

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Here’s a pendulum demonstration that was part of an Exploratorium exhibit in the atrium of the Hyatt where I was attending a frequency & timing conference this past week. The bobs all start off in phase but since the period (or frequency) of a pendulum depends on \(sqrt{L} \) (or its inverse), the relative phases rapidly diverge. The bobs occasionally hit a condition that looks less chaotic, such as the slightly-out-of-phase S shape, and the condition where alternate bobs are 180º out of phase. They then go back to the “S” before briefly all being in phase again. That occurs when they have all undergone an integral number of oscillations, with each one having undergone one more cycle as its neighbor as you move from the front to the back (long to short)

Here’s another video, via @JenLucPiquant with even more bobs.

I Don't Care What You Did Last Summer

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What your teachers are doing

All of your public school teachers have a history. Almost all of them have masturbated. Many of them have smoked marijuana. Almost all of them have dated; most of them have danced. Some of them are gay. Some of them are heterosexual. Almost all of them have private kinks which you don’t know about, because they don’t practice them in public, let alone when they’re doing their jobs. Some of them have been sex workers.

And you know what? All of them can be fired or blacklisted by local prudes on school boards or the school administration. Teachers: you don’t get to be human. This outrages me.