Pollyanna ponders morality and science

Pollyanna is glad to be back with you and to tell you of her new job modeling bras...  For the record, this picture came up when I googled Pollyanna/Images.

Glad to model bras

With the equinox coming up Pollyanna has been thinking a bit about astronomy.  Right now, if you look at the eastern sky a few hours after sunset, you will see a lovely combination of a full moon with Jupiter as it were catching up to it

A Moon-Jupiter conjunction on Aug. 26, 2010. Credit: Tom Cocchiaro. 

Last year Jupiter came as close as it ever does to the Earth at opposition and was the brightest object in the sky after the moon.  It is quite bright now as you can see by looking.

This sky map shows how the moon and Jupiter  appeared on Sept. 15, 2011 at 10 p.m. to skywatchers with clear skies in mid-northern latitudes.
CREDIT: Starry Night Software

View full size image

Oppositions (the Sun, Earth and Jupiter lining up)of the Earth and Jupiter occur roughly every 400 days, because  Earth catches up to Jupiter and laps it in its race around the sun.  Because the orbits of the planets are slightly elliptical, the distances between oppositions vary, and  the next time [Earth and Jupiter] will be as close as they were in 2010 will not  be until 2022.  This year the opposition will be in late October. 

Since Pollyanna's egomaniac brother Titan was so much into himself last week, she will attempt to make it up to a few smaller satellites of Saturn, in this case Pandora and Prometheus.

Pandora credit Cassini

From zebratigerfish.blogspot.com do not open that box!

Prometheus credit Cassini

Credit jegsworks.com Careful with that fire!

Here they are hard at work as  shepherds of the F-ring of Saturn.   This link includes a movie of the pair in action.  Between them they keep the ring intact and have an orbital resonance that helps them do the job, although there is some suspicion of chaos here. The mythology of both of them is well known.  Pandora opened a famous box(actually a jar, but mistranslated in the 16th century) and Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, for which he was punished by Zeus by being bound naked to a pillar in the Caucasian mountains. A griffon-vulture ate at Prometheus' liver all day long. During the bitter cold of the mountain night, the liver became whole again--poor chap, he only meant well.
Pandora stats: Size: Irregular, 114 x 84 x 62 kilometers - 13th largest moon of Saturn 
Orbital radius:141,700 kilometers - 2.35 Saturn radii - outer shepherd of the F ring 
Orbital period: 0.6285 days -about 1/25 of Titan’s 
Discovery: 1980 by S. Collins et al.
Prometheus stats: Size: Irregular, 145 x 85 x 62 kilometers - 11th largest moon of Saturn
Orbital radius: 139,353 kilometers - 2.28 Saturn radii - inner shepherd of the F ring
Orbital period: 0.613 days - about 1/26 of Titan’s
Discovery: 1980 by S. Collins et al.

BINARY STAR PLANET

The planet eclipses, or transits, both stars; and the stars regularly eclipse each other too

Some of you may remember the Asimov science fiction story Nightfall in which a civilization lives on a planet orbiting a binary pair of stars.  We now have an observation of such a planet from the Kepler space telescope.  For a brief exposition see BBC news.  The scientific paper is in the latest issue of Science  for those having access.  It is a most exciting discovery and Pollyanna is thrilled.

PALEONTOLOGY
Pollyanna is quite taken with the new finding  about a possible human ancestor. Just be careful about telling any of the Republican candidates about it. They should fear the competition. I refer you to the  details.  Alas there is a 24 second popup commercial in the video, but it is worth the wait and the noise.

Fossils of the extinct hominid known as Australopithecus sediba were accidentally discovered by the 9-year-old son of a scientist in the remains of a cave in South Africa in 2008,   The fossils' mix of human and primitive traits found in the brains, hips, feet and hands make a strong case for it being the immediate ancestor to the human lineage, scientists report in the Sept. 9, 2011, issue of the journal  Science.

The fossils included remains of a male juvenile (whose cranium is shown here) along with a female of the same species, who was likely in her 20s or 30s.

CREDIT: Brett Eloff.  

MORALS AND YOUTH
Pollyanna and I have been discussing an article in the NYTimes that Yosefa sent us about the lack of moral sense among young people, in particular the moral relativism that has become so common.  The idea that "if it feels good it is OK" can have terrible implications.   David Brooks deplores this and received some interesting feedback. We recommend the article. In a recent New Yorker the issue of a universal morality is discussed in a profile of the philosopher Derek Parfit. Unfortunately, as usual, the New Yorker access depends on subscription, but there are many other sources of information about Parfit and his work.   He believes he has a formulation:
 "An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some principle that is optimific, uniquely universally willable and not reasonably rejectable."
BTW, I could not find optimific in my full-sized Webster, but the OED online had it, (adjective: Philosophy, producing the maximum good consequences. Origin: 1930s: from Latin optimus 'best' + -ific) so it is not a made up word.  In any case, the formulation by Parfit makes sense.  I tried my own experiment with youth and morality by asking an educated young woman (nameless) what she thinks about the nefarious plan of our government to relocate by force 30,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel.  She had not heard of the issue, which brings to mind the famous exchange:
Q.: What is the difference between ignorance and apathy?
A.: I don't know and I don't care.
One commenter welcomed Brooks to old age.  I recall that Herodotus, the 4th century BC Greek historian, had many complaints about the youth of Athens and the future their moral laxity might engender.

Book Review: How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, David
Kaiser W. W. Norton, New York, 2011. $26.95 (372 pp.). ISBN 978-0-393-07636-3

The book is  reviewed in Physics Today  by Silvan Schweber.  If the link does not open for non-subscribers, there is another review in the New York Times by George Johnson. I quote from the Physics Today review:
"In this book David Kaiser contends that a small group of graduate students “planted the seeds that would eventually flower into today’s field of quantum information science.” He would like to have us believe that this self-titled Fundamental Fysiks Group, with parallel efforts from “a few other isolated physicists, contributed to a sea change in how we think about information, communication, computation, and the subtle workings of the microworld.” Starting in May 1975, the Fundamental Fysiks Group met weekly at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Their primary concern was the exploration of the foundations of quantum mechanics in search of explanations for parapsychological, or ‘psi,’ phenomena. From the “spooky actions at a distance” phenomena in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) gedanken experiment, the Fysiks Group was led to hidden-variables descriptions of quantum mechanics and to Bell’s theorem."   Obviously Schweber is not convinced and I will reserve judgement until I have a chance to read the book.

When I was a student we were told that "Quantum Mechanics works, so shut up and calculate". The advent of recognition of the EPR critique of quantum physics, awareness of the implications of  Bell's Theorem and the new experimental results on  retrocausality which are indeed spooky and weird, may well have been helped by the nonconformism of the FFG.  It is certainly interesting.

The 2010 Wolf Prize in Physics was given for work related to retrocausality. The prize was given to Prof. John F. Clauser of the US,   Prof. Alain Aspect of France’s École Normale Supérieure de Cachan and Prof. Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna. The jury in this field praised them “for their fundamental conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, specifically an increasingly sophisticated series of tests of Bell’s inequalities, or extensions thereof, using entangled quantum states.” I went to their symposium and it was like entering Wonderland. The experiments reported were the most counterintuituve results I had ever heard. The bottom line is that we must either give up Special Relativity or give up reality as we understand it. Here is a video and some links. Enjoy!

In a lighter vein Betty White can still sing and dance in a tribute to Morgan Freeman on the occasion of his receiving a life achievement award from the American Film Institute--thanks to Yosefa for sending this clip to me

One thing that does not amuse Pollyanna is the content of many talkbacks.  In particular, she shares XKCD's opinion of comments on YouTube films:

Since Gene Weingarten has remained silent for a while, I can only update you on American politics with some theology from Rick Perry  and a disclaimer from God re Pat Robertson as delivered to us by our guru Andy Borowitz.  As you may know, Robertson says it is OK to divorce a spouse with Alzheimer's disease. That is not amusing at all.

Pollyanna shows up late, but here she is

Pollyanna wishes to start with best wishes for the holiday that just ended, Eid el Fitr, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan 1432 AH,  to all her Muslim friends.and a Happy Labor Day to all our friends in North America

She also wishes to apologize for the delay in the blog caused by an internet glitch that lasted for a few days. For several days YandA had no Internet. They survived the deprivation by actually talking to each other of which Pollyanna approved and in fact they did better than the XKCD folks.

 She would like to share with you an infrared view of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334).

The Cat's Paw Nebula (NGC 6334) is a vast region of star formation. The whole gas cloud is about 50 light-years across. (Credit: Image courtesy of ESO)

This new portrait of the Cat's Paw Nebula was created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument at the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, combining images taken through blue, green and red filters, as well as a special filter designed to let through the light of glowing hydrogen.

SOCIAL PROTEST
Last night Pollyanna went with her blogger friends, Titan and YandA to a massive demonstration in Tel Aviv.
It was possibly the largest demonstration ever in Israel and it showed the depth of anger and dissatisfaction of young Israelis with their situation under a neoliberal capitalism that has enriched a very few and effectively destroyed the future of an entire generation. While we support the aims of the protesters and their tent cities that have sprouted up around the country, we cannot but share the regret of Diana Kimmerling over the lack of political content in their protest. Despite this, Pollyanna believes that they are worthy of the support of all decent people. They are in real trouble and people who are not sure where they will live next month or how they will feed themselves and their families can be forgiven for not having a broader view. They also have been indoctrinated since birth with the Israeli ethos, which is basically a totalitarian type of democracy (vid. Titan's blog last week) and generations of brainwashing cannot be overcome easily or quickly. . The fact that they are finally able to reject the spurious arguments about "security" that are being thrown at them now is in itself a minor miracle. Dr. Shiri Tannenbaum, who is both a medical resident leading the young doctors' protest against the recent collective wage agreement signed between the government and the Israel Medical Association and an activist in Physicians for Human Rights,  spoke fervently. She  raised the issue of the blatant inequality in medical care including the state of the Arab and Bedouin communities and was received  positively by the participants. Let us hope for the best.

GOOD THINGS HAPPEN
Pollyanna is glad that a  child in Pennsylvania who was about to be tried in adult court for a murder he committed at age 11(now he is 13) has been transferred to juvenile court. This was a case about which Amnesty International and other human rights groups raised a mighty outcry and it worked. We are all very pleased as well about a man who was wrongly convicted was exonerated by DNA evidence and finally met the people whose  technology freed him.. In particular we like it because Yosefa's son Adam is the Sr. Manager, Business and Product Development and the Israel Site Director of Life Technologies.

OK, now for some GOODIES FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE
One very exciting new result is that  gastric bypass , a surgical procedure designed to help obese people lose weight has a surprising side effect. It can reverse the progress of Type 2 diabetes. This was initially considered almost alchemy, but now the biochemistry has been elucidated as well. We wish this had been known long ago.

 SUSY is elusive or in trouble:No this is not a runaway child, just supersymmetry in elementary particle physics. It appears that the Large Hadron Collider is not coming up with the anticipated particles. “For supersymmetry, this is a decisive moment in time,” said theorist Lars Bergstrom of Stockholm University.

Supersymmetry is a model that solves some significant problems of the Standard Model of particle physics. SUSY doubles the zoo of elementary particles by adding a partner for each of the particles we already know. It handily relates different types of particles in the  Standard Model and offers an appealing candidate for dark matter.  So far, scientists have found no evidence of SUSY particles at the LHC.

Things are  looking bad for the simplest models of supersymmetry. Scientists at the LHC have been chipping away at two basic SUSY theories since they began analyzing data in 2010. But dozens of other models are still in the running, and scientists have more than one way to test them. Still, as Prof. Bergstrom says, never underestimate theorists. On the other hand, the lower limit on the mass of the Higgs boson seems to be coming down. Stay tuned!

GEOPHYSICS AND SEISMOLOGY  have some news for us as well. It appears that life is older than we thought and recent discoveries in Australia indicate that life was around and metabolizing sulfur something like 3.4 billion years ago. The results are out in Nature . If anyone has difficulty bringing up the paper, just email Pollyanna and she will be glad to help. On the physical side, new research is revealing more details than we have ever known about the core of the Earth. To understand what form it might take under the extreme conditions at the center of the Earth, Professor Kei Hirose set himself a seemingly impossible challenge: to recreate the  conditions at the core in his lab at the SPring-8 synchrotron near Osaka, Japan. After 10 years of trying, he has finally succeeded. Others have used .wave propagation through the core to deduce its characteristics

Our Science News in Brief for this week deals mainly with astronomy. We hope you find it of interest.

Our book review is about a the cells of a woman who died of cancer but whose immortal cells have served medical research for over sixty years. The book Eternal Life by Rebecca Skloot  was recently reviewed in the NYTimes by Lisa Margonelli.

Gene Weingarten is still not around, but Pollyanna is glad that Colonel Gaddafi

has been run to earth albeit in an unlikely place, reported by Andy Borowitz and our friends from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal have a solution for the problems of existence.

Pollyanna greets you

Pollyanna is back after a long hiatus. Last week you all took a blast from grumpy brother Titan, so she will try to be a bit nicer. Not that she has any illusions about the world in which we live, but she still tries to live up to her name and be glad.  She would also like to tell you that Googleblogs have been creative and have decided to  "improve" the system so now it takes two clicks instead of one to open a link.  Last week Titan showed you lovely Helene who orbits ahead of Dione around Saturn. Pollyanna would like to show you the tinier brother Polydeuces

His stats:

Size: Roughly 13 kilometers Orbital radius: 377,400 kilometers - 6.26 Saturn radii - within the E ring -at Dione’s trailing Lagrange point (L5) - co-orbital with Dione and Helene Orbital period: 2.7369 days -about 1/6 of Titan’s Discovery: 2004 by Carl Murray  Polydeuces orbits Saturn on the same circular path that Dione does, but behind Dione, and the centers of Dione, Saturn, and Polydeuces form an equilateral triangle.

The little moon is named for the twin brother of Castor, together the Dioscuri or Hero Twins; better known by his Roman name Pollux. Polydeuces was considered godly enough to be admitted to the divine court on Mount Olympus, while his brother was sent to Hades as a mere mortal. But Polydeuces could not bear eternal separation, so the  gods allowed the twins to remain together forever, spending half the year in the Underworld and the other half on Olympus. Pollyanna thinks that is cool to wander around in the Elysian Fields and that Polydeuces should be admired for his sacrifice of Olympus for the sake of being with his beloved brother.

Maybe the gods were nice to him because of the Pollux jokes that he had to put up with in the Roman world. Pollyanna has just threatened to fire me and to write the blog herself. 

IN MEMORIAM NANCY WAKE 

This great lady who was a true hero of WWII passed away at age 98. 

Adam Butler/Associated Press

Nancy Wake, a French Resistance hero of World War II, in 2004.

It is thrilling to read of her life and deeds and to think that there are people who will take risks and struggle for causes that they regard as greater than themselves. May she rest in peace.

RIGHTS OF WOMEN

One area of human rights in which Pollyanna takes a strong stand is the rights of women. As you know, she is a committed feminist. Today she applauds two news items from the Center for Reproductive Rights. One is from the United States, "Today’s decision by the Department of Health and Human Services to require health insurance companies to cover a full range of contraceptive methods without co-payments is a tremendous victory for women and represents a huge stride towards reducing unintended pregnancies in the U.S. and promoting healthier, planned childbirth," says the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The other is from Brazil and involves justice eight years after a tragedy. Alyne da Silva Pimentel would have been 37 years old today if Brazil’s government had honored its responsibility to protect her fundamental human rights. Instead, because she was poor and Afro-Brazilian, she died in 2002 after being denied basic medical care to address complications in her pregnancy. She was only 28 years old. And her death was completely preventable. Although nothing can reverse Alyne’s fate,  a groundbreaking decision handed down today by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women means that Alyne’s mother and daughter will finally see justice served—and women worldwide will benefit from the ruling issued in her name.  

AROUND THE WORLD

We can start out with some good news on the human rights front. Six activists who were under political detention in Malaysia  have been released .  Of course, they never should have been detained in the first place.

SERENGETI ROAD PLANS SCRAPPED--HURRAY! 

Bat eared fox who depend on the herbivore migration for his food

The government of Botswana has scrapped a plan to build a tarmac road across the Serengeti. This would have had devastating effects on the indigenous wildlife and Pollyanna is very glad that sense prevailed in this case. Here is someone who certainly is happy about it.

DINOSAUR EXTINCTION NEWS
There has been much discussion about the three meter gap in the fossil record at the time of the presumed extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species. Of course, there is another view: supported by Rick Perry and the Tea Party folks.  It may be the first senior moment in history,  to say something of the judgement of old man Noah:

It now appears that the finding of a fossil specimen has put this problem to rest. . The abstract is free and open. If anyone wants the full article, please let me know and I will download it for you in pdf format. While we are into paleontology, there is a new report from Alaska of the finding of the nearly complete fossilized skeleton of a  thallatosaur,

a long-tailed sea creature that plied warm, shallow waters in the early days of dinosaurs and became extinct at the end of the Triassic period some 200 million years ago.

With all this attention to evolution and such heresies, Pollyanna would like to even up with some attention to the DAWN OF RELIGION Many of us have visited Stonehenge and marveled at the ability of prehistoric people to build such a structure. It appears that there exists a site in Turkey that eclipses Stonehenge both in age and in the technological sophistication involved. There are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. I

strongly recommend reading this report   from National Geographic--even very busy people who lack the time to follow the links.

Apropos religion, it is interesting that at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem there is a 53 year old project going on to try to find a definitive text for the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible. It is a daunting project. This is an endeavor so meticulous, its pace so disconnected from that of the world outside, that in more than five decades of work the scholars have published a grand total of three of the Hebrew Bible's 24 books. (Christians count the same books differently, for a total of 39.) A fourth is due out during the upcoming academic year.

If the pace is maintained, the final product will be complete a little over 200 years from now. This is both a point of pride and a matter of some mild self-deprecation around the office.

MARS IS WET--WELL SOMETIMES

Rill indicating flow of water:NASA image

Evidence has been found that might well indicate that at certain times ofthe year, water might actually flow on Mars, mainly on slopes facing the summer sun. NASA first found signs of water on Mars more than a decade ago, but earlier indications were that any existing water would be frozen and concentrated at the poles. Recently analyzed images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite show dark, finger-like features that extend down some slopes and crater walls on the planet during its late spring through summer, fading in the Martian winter. Here is the press release,  the NASA announcement and also the scientific paper, which is a bit more reserved than the press, as it should be.  This is the free abstract and if anyone wants the full paper, I will be glad to provide it through my library access.  Pollyanna and I think it is exciting and we hope you share our excitement.

CORRUPTION AT THE COLOSSEUM 
When Pollyanna and I saw this item, we were sure that someone was fixing the gladiator matches at the Colosseum and that someone should inform the Emperor.

Emperor Augustus

This could only lead to the decline and fall of the Empire and to the writing of a colossal book by some 18th century Englishman.On closer inspection, it turns out to be a bit more contemporary.

 I recall that Daphne was relieved of 150,000 lire (about $100) at the Colosseum by some enterprising Roman pickpocket. Yosefa got ripped off in an Athens hotel elevator for about 80 Euros by some skillful practitioners of the craft.There must be something about women connected to me.

Pollyanna also has some strong opinions on environmental matters and would be grateful to any of you who
would (very quickly) sign off on a petition to the President of Brazil to prevent concessions to loggers that would greatly endanger the Amazon basin and its great rain forest along with the environment of the entire world.

We would like to pass on some science tidbits  and refer you to a review of an interesting book. by Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of Sascha, but not accountable for him) and send you off with a dose of humor, first from our friend XKCD

 and then Gene Weingarten, who arouses empathy in all of us who have ever tried to learn to play golf.

Pollyanna at Midsummer, Dreams and All

Pollyanna is back and is as usual looking for things to be glad about. As you can see, last night she dreamt that she was Mae West

What do air crews call a life vest?

and there was nothing to do but to go along with her. It came out when she was innocently reciting a little poem about a little girl who had a little curl etc. and ended it with "when I am good, I am very very good and when I am bad I am better."  The source of this is well known and here is Pollyanna as the grand lady of the silver screen.

IN MEMORIAM  MAX MATHEWS

Last April, Max Mathews, the first person to get a computer to play music, died at the age of 84. As I write now, I am listening to music from KUSC Los Angeles online, with a good amplifier and speakers connected to my computer,  enjoying Baroque music and taking it for granted. He and I overlapped at Bell Labs in the 1960's but I never met him. We should all be grateful for his contribution to our lives. I append an obituary and recommend picking up on the audio links.

While on the topic of music, which Pollyanna loves, let us share a news item about an extreme reaction to  a performance and a few blog posts from the Opinionator on how Daniel Felsenfeld and Michael Gordon  became composers. We also had a visit by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan in 2009 Photo by: MR Photo / Corbis Online

 in Israel which was quite well received. The reviewer found it necessary to mention that Dylan is Jewish. So what? Indeed he and I were both born in St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth MN, although he grew up in Hibbing MN, then an iron mining town in the Mesabi Range, but again so what?   I doubt that being born Jewish was at all relevant to  the development of his career. We Israelis have some kind of obsession with our brethren around the world.  During the soccer World Cup tournament last year, the Israeli commentator made a point of the fact that the US team had two Jewish players. Did they say a Hebrew blessing every time they kicked the ball?  Did the Great Referee in the Sky keep them from being knocked out of the tournament by Ghana?  When Limor Livnat, who gives idiots a bad name, was Minister of Education, she had a list compiled of 100 great Jews of the last 100 years and the students had to learn it by heart, poor kids. The late Baruch Kimmerling asked a valid question--what did the ethnicity of Einstein, Freud, Krebs and the others have to do with their achievements? I fear the provincialism of the shtetl will not go away.

JAMES THURBER REMEMBERED: 1894-1961

Fifty Years since his Death

We were told in The New Yorker last week about an event in New York City in memory of James Thurber. Let me quote Frank Mankoff-

"Last Sunday at the 92nd Street Y, I was delighted to be part of an event entitled “Keith Olbermann and Friends: On James Thurber”—and pleasantly surprised to learn that Olbermann was my friend, even though we had never met before. The evening featured readings from “Fables for Our Time” by Olbermann and by Thurber’s daughter, Rosemary, who talked about growing up in a “Thurberized” household. Calvin Trillin talked about the Midwestern sensibilities that influenced Thurber’s humor and his own. The comedian Scott Blakeman was the moderator.  And I gave a little presentation claiming that, important as Thurber was to humor writing, he was even more influential in shaping the modern New Yorker cartoon."

I have been an avid admirer of James Thurber (the link is for those challenged by youth or sanity) ever since I can remember, which, alas, is a very long time. If he had only written The Secret Life of Walter Mitty it would have been enough for us. Indeed he took New Yorker cartoons from this:

via this:



to this truly great one:

I think that he belongs in the pantheon of great humorists along with Mark Twain, Robert Benchley and Thorne Smith,  just to mention a few who come to mind. One of his greatest very short stories  is  The Peaceful Mongoose in which he takes a shot at the warlike atmosphere of the Cold War and the McCarthy days. It is quite apt for Israel today.

…who didn’t want to fight cobras or anything else” and was rumored to be “not only pro-cobra and anti-mongoose but intellectually curious and against the ideals and traditions of mongoosism.

I append a link to a collection of his quotes . My favorite is  "There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception".

I would like to share a reading of a Thurber short story as done by Keith Olbermann on his TV show:


PUTTING
Our Sunday evenings are devoted to introducing Hillel,

aka the coffee table monster

our four year old grandson, to various branches of sports, all of which he associates with popcorn. Last Sunday, we saw the final round of the US Golf Open which some young chap from Ulster won with a record 72 hole score of 16 under par. As we watched these guys sinking putts from outer space on very twisty greens, Yosefa came up with the hypothesis that there are little receivers in the balls and remote controls in the golfers' pockets. Not bad, but someone has come up with some insights on the physics of great putting  which we would like to share with the golf buffs among you.

SCIENCE
Pollyanna, as usual, would like to share some science tidbits with you.  The first one, with which we start  lest we forget, deals with a potential treatment and prevention of Alzheimer's disease by means of as common a substance as cinnamon!  We are proud that this was done at our beloved Tel Aviv University.  Do not forget to take your cinnamon every day.

The question of the ORIGIN OF LIFE has long been a subject of interest to scientists.   At one university in Israel  (guess which one) this research had to be disguised under an innocuous sounding name lest the power of the Inquisition be unleashed upon the lab.  It is generally agreed that DNA could not have been  the  starter in the absence of proteins and vice versa (chicken and egg  issue), but now it appears that its poor relation RNA played a crucial role in starting self-replication.  It also seems that the starter "soup" may not have been in the warm seas but in ice and slush.which could mean  that life might start in hostile extraterrestrial environments.

We also would like to share some news items from Earth and Environmental Science with you.

Pollyanna loses her cool and her glad attitude when WOMEN'S RIGHTS are violated.  A Toronto police officer suggested that women would be safer if they did not "dress like sluts" which generated a huge reaction and outcry, and justly so. Now the "Slutwalk" movement has reached India where abuse of women is a national sport. Let's hear it for the brave women of New Delhi who are standing up for their rights.  She also has some strong feelings about women's rights in Saudi Arabia.  Maureen Dowd lets fly a barrage at Hilary Clinton for her pussyfooting on the subject.  Driving is a crime?!!!  Apparently the price at the gas pump can douse a lot of the flame of human rights.


Keith Olbermann is back on the air on Al Gore's new network after parting company with  MSNBC. I would like to introduce you to his first show.   Pollyanna is pleased that it had such a successful debut and crushed Fox in the ratings.


Pollyanna is very glad that Louisiana  did not pass a law that would have let  Creationism into the classroom. Hurray!   Teaching  science is hard enough  without religious and political interference.  In  New Hampshire it appears that there will be a struggle next year to keep religious dogma out of the schools.  She is also delighted at the release from prison of Ai Wei Wei  and the 20 year ban on mining in the Grand Canyon.  

Since we have bugged you quite a bit today, we will tell you about a book about what bugs you.  We certainly hope that you still read books.  Much noise is being made about the demise of the printed book and if indeed it is lost to us, we will have lost the process of linear acquisition of information.  It is a problem worthy of your consideration.

This has become very long  so we shall send you off smiling with Gene Weingarten and his search for the elusive googlenope.

Pollyanna and Shavuot week

Pollyanna is back after enjoying the Shavuot holiday, the holiday of the giving of the Torah and of the first fruits of the harvest season.

Here is Pollyanna bringing in the first fruits.  Of course, these days we go to the supermarket, buy fruit, put a floral wreath on the kid's head and send him/her with his/her basket to school.  Alas, the modern world.  Shavuot also marks the giving of the Torah and the Ten Commandments, but I am not sure everyone appreciates that.

with thanks to the Dry Bones cartoonist.  In synagogue this week we read the Book of Ruth, which describes how a convert immigrant woman became the great-grandmother of King David.  The Israel Religious Action Committee (IRAC), the legal arm of the Reform movement, published the attached simulated correspondence with Eli Yishai, our ultra Orthodox Interior Minister.  . We strongly suspect that if Ruth were to come to Israel today. she would be deported.

This week I read the haftara (reading from the prophets) from Ezekiel I, in which a vision is seen by the prophet that some have interpreted as a low-latitude  aurora.   Allow me to quote from a paper.  
" Perhaps the earliest detailed description of a low-latitude aurora is that found in Chapter 1 of the Biblical book of Ezekiel, analyzed in detail by Siscoe et al. (2002) (see also Silverman, 2006b)"  .
One must ask whether the north magnetic pole had indeed been in a favorable position at the end of the seventh century BCE.  Pollyanna and I think it is an interesting speculation.  If you have never seen a real aurora, this is what Ezekiel might have seen:

An Eskimo tale tells us that the lights are spirits in the sky playing catch with a walrus skull. Another legend describes the lights as flaming torches carried by travelers to the afterlife.  Galileo thought that they were reflections of solar light from the polar caps.  Today we understand the emissions to be the result of collisions of solar particles accelerated in the terrestrial magnetic field with atmospheric atoms.  All magnetic planets have them.  Here is a Hubble Space Telescope image of the aurora of Jupiter:

 The bright spot to the left is the "footprint" of the magnetic flux tube threading  the active satellite Io..

Since Pollyanna is a modest and well brought up girl, there will be no discussion in this blog of the underwear of Rep. Weiner  In fact, Pollyanna thinks that Andy Borowitz has overworked the silly subject as have the pundits of the Washington Post and the NYTimes.  We are tired of it and would prefer to deal with real issues.

THINGS TO BE GLAD ABOUT 
There are things to be glad about in the realm of science and Pollyanna is delighted to share them with you.  In general she loves science because it is beautiful and it works:

For the scientifically challenged, this is the Planck black body radiation function that helped lay the foundations of Quantum Mechanics.
Of course, she is a bit sentimental about this issue: 

We start with a possible breakthrough in mitigating the risk of breast cancer. A study funded by the Pfizer drug company (proper disclosure) indicates that certain drugs can have a prophylactic effect on breast cancer. Let us hope that it works out.

Physicists have long wondered why our universe is made up almost totally of matter and antimatter is almost completely absent. When matter meets antimatter the result is mutual annihilation. When the universe came into being, there should have been equal amounts of   matter and antimatter and the fact that we are here to ask the question indicates that somehow matter won. How and why are unanswered questions. Maybe our predecessors were not so lucky...

In any case,the people at CERN, the home of the LHC,  have taken a major step toward elucidating the mystery and Pollyanna is very glad about it as she is about all advances in science.  They have managed to confine antihydrogen for about sixteen minutes whereas in the past confinement times of fractions of a second were the longest achieved.  Here is a video from CERN

You are invited to read more.
Let us hope that no one from the future comes back to sabotage the LHC before it finds what it was designed and built to look for.  We are already seeing threats.  Some people do not like the Higgs for some reason.

Dark matter, the stuff that is supposed to make the galaxies move as they do, is another Holy Grail of science.  It is extremely difficult to detect and major efforts are under way.  It is supposed to consist of Weakly Interacting  Massive Partices or WIMP's.  There is also speculation about Super Wimps which sounds a bit oxymoronic, but physicists have a certain style.  There are now indications that it might have been observed in a Minnesota mine and a cave in Italy., but the jury is still out. There is also a possibility that a galactic collision observed by our old friend Chandra might indicate the existence of dark matter.

Galaxy collision:  x-rays (pink) are emitted when the interstellar gas clouds collide, while the dark matter (blue) remains aligned with distant stars because it is unreactive .

WORLD OCEAN DAY
Wednesday was not only Shavuot, but also World Ocean Day.  Pollyanna and I would like to share some watery impressions with you courtesy of Mother Jones.

GOOD HUMAN RIGHTS NEWS
Usually Pollyanna leaves the human rights ranting to her brother Titan, but she is very glad to share the good news of the release of a political prisoner in Azerbaijan. Here is his thank you letter to all the Amnesty International people who worked for his release.
BOOK REVIEW
 This week Pollyanna is presenting books dealing with the charismatic figure of Malcolm X.  For the younger readers, he was a militant leader of the civil rights movement and the right hand of Elijah Mohammed, the founder of the Nation of Islam in the US.  He later split with the Nation of Islam and was assassinated by them in February, 1965. Recently a new  biography of Malcolm X entitled “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” by a Columbia University professor Manning Marable has come out.  The author sadly died on April 1, 2011 at age 60 just a few days before publication of the book. The book challenges both popular and  scholarly portrayals of Malcolm X, describing a man often subject to doubts about theology, politics and other matters, quite different from the figure of unswerving moral certitude that became an enduring symbol of African-American pride. He is particularly critical of the celebrated Autobiography of Malcolm X  now a staple of college reading lists, which was written with Alex Haley and which Mr. Marable described as “fictive.”  A detailed discussion by David Remnick of books about Malcolm X appeared in The New Yorker of April 25, 2011.   I hope you can open it.

As we said, Andy Borowitz is obsessed with the congressional underpants but  Gene Weingarten is sharing his tribulations with us and wondering whether public speaking is not worse than death.

Pollyanna wants to wish all the new graduates success in their endeavors in the world.