How are particles accelerated at the Large Hadron Collider?

Brian Dorney at CERN:

ScreenHunter_05 Apr. 27 09.58 Firstly, physicists rely on a principle many of us learn in our introductory physics courses, the Lorentz Force Law. This result, from classical electromagnetism, states that a charged particle in the presence of external electric and/or magnetic fields will experience a force. The direction and magnitude (how strong) of the force depends on the sign of the particle’s electric charge and its velocity (or direction its moving, and with what speed).

So how does this relate to accelerators? Accelerators use radio frequency cavities to accelerate particles. A cavity has several conductors that are hooked up to an alternating current source. Between conductors there is empty space, but this space is spanned by a uniform electric field. This field will accelerate a particle in a specific direction (again, depending on the sign of the particle’s electric charge). The trick is to flip this current source such that as a charged particle goes through a succession of cavities it continues to accelerate, rather than be slowed down at various points.

A cool Java Applet that will help you visualize this acceleration process via radio frequency cavities can be found here, courtesy of CERN.

Now that’s the electric field portion of the Lorentz Force Law, what about the magnetic? Well, magnetic fields are closed circular loops, as you get farther and farther away from their source the radii of these loops continually increases. Whereas electric fields are straight lines that extend out to infinity (and never intersect) in all directions from their source. This makes the physics of magnetic fields very different from that of electric fields. We can use magnetic fields to bend the track (or path) of charged particles. A nice demonstration of this can be found here (or any of the other thousands of hits I got for Googling “Cathode Ray Tube + YouTube”).

More here.

Pakistan transgenders pin hopes on new rights

Aleem Maqbool at the BBC:

ScreenHunter_04 Apr. 27 09.47 In the back streets, in a squalid neighbourhood of Pakistan's largest city, is a tiny, shabby apartment.

It is where we find “Shehzadi” getting ready for work.

Wearing a bright yellow dress, and scrabbling around her make-up box, she is doing her best to cover up her decidedly masculine features.

Shehzadi is transgendered: physically male, but psychologically female.

“When I was about six or seven, I realised I wasn't either a boy or a girl,” Shehzadi says.

“I was miserable because I didn't understand why I was different. It was only when I met another 'she-male' that I felt peace in my heart and my mind.”

Like so many other of the estimated 50,000 transgenders in Pakistan, Shehzadi left home as a teenager, to live with others from the same community.

“I'm happy being with other transgenders, but there are many problems,” Shehzadi says. “People don't understand, and they abuse us. It's hard to get somewhere to live, or even to move about normally. I get teased when I stand and wait for a bus.”

Separate identity

Shehzadi also shows us her ID card. She is unhappy that it says “male.”

But this is something that should soon change.

More here.

confessing

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How did Augustine write Confessions? Well, in the strict sense, he didn’t – he didn’t set words down on papyrus or parchment. Augustine has been painted, by artists as great as Botticelli, Carpaccio and Benozzo Gozzoli, seated at a desk and writing. He did not do that. Oh, he undoubtedly wrote notes to himself or lists of items or instructions to individual brothers in his monastic community. But the books, sermons and letters that have come down to us were all dictated to scribes. Even a book that feels as intimate as Confessions was spoken to several of the many scribes Augustine kept busy. That was the normal practice in antiquity. Even in prison, Saint Paul had a scribe on hand. Even when living as a hermit, Saint Jerome had teams of scribes. The population of ancient scribes was a vast one. Writing was a complex and clumsy process. That was especially true in the classical period, when papyrus scrolls were used. One needed at least three hands to unroll the scroll on the left, to roll it up on the right, and to write a series of columns in the intermediate spaces. Besides, even the mixing of the ink and trimming of the reed pens (quills arrived in the Middle Ages) had to be done while the scroll was held open at the spot reached by the scribe. Since the rolls were written on one side only, they could run to great lengths, as much as 30 feet long.

more from Garry Wills at The New Statesman here.

african oil is changing

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Jim is an American oilman from Oklahoma, and he’s sitting in a darkened corner of a whorehouse in downtown Luanda. He’s fat, white, gaping lazily at the black African prostitutes in fuchsia-colored miniskirts and heels who patrol the floor. He orders a beer, sits back on the leathery couch to watch the dimmed lights flicker off the shiny bar tops, the dark wood of the balustrades, the crystalline shimmer emanating from the disco ball that dangles like a low-hanging fruit. Waitresses in short, tight tops, jeans, and fuzzy rabbit slippers pad around sleepily taking orders and comments. Jim has been to this place and places just like it so often in the twenty years he has lived and worked in Africa that he seems — and I wonder if he also feels this — to fit in as comfortably here as anywhere else I might imagine for him, a bar in West Texas, a beetle-stained butte, gazing contentedly at the sand. More men have begun to drift in now, and along with them more languages. There is a smattering of French. And German. There’s Dutch, Spanish, and of course Portuguese, the language of the colonizers. The diamond men are coming, Jim says. And the arms men, too. The barman pumps the volume up, Bobby Brown then Shakira. More women stream in. African oil is changing, Jim explains. For a long time, several decades in fact, Nigeria was the undisputed king of the continent. It had the best oil and more of it than anyone else. Jim worked there for years, risked kidnappings, armed attacks on heavily guarded offshore rigs, the mighty chaos of Lagos. Like other oilmen he lived in a compound with grocery stores, restaurants and bars, and rarely ventured outside, and then only when it was absolutely necessary. But in 2007, times are changing, he says, ordering another bottle of Nova Cuca, a local beer, from a passing waitress and taking a slinking, unsmiling look at her bottom as she walks away. Angola is becoming the new king.

more from Scott Johnson at Guernica here.

the revolution unravels

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I saw a murder one afternoon in central Benghazi. The victim was a tall, heavily built man in his thirties wearing jeans and a grey sweatshirt. Three quick shots rang out to our left, my driver pulled the car in and there the man lay, one leg still moving as a slick pool of very red blood ran down the tarmac from his head. The city courts, used as offices by the rebels’ Provisional Transitional National Council since its ascent to power in Benghazi in mid-February, were just five minutes away. For all the judicial authority they had over the murder scene, with its guns, gangs and absence of police, they might as well have been in another country. The victim was a local man irritated by the sound of shooting in his apartment block doorway, where the killer had stood firing aimlessly in the air: a regular pastime in the city. He had asked the gunman to go elsewhere. Instead, the man shot him three times in the head and throat and then fled, pursued by passersby. Over the next two hours, the victim’s family seized the killer’s brother and a friend, who was blind, as hostages. Then two pickup-loads of rebels tried to storm the apartment to release the men but were driven off by heavily armed family members and residents. Guns and rage determined the outcome, not law. I left without seeing it end after the fury became too much to endure. Revolutions are tumultuous, and it would be naive to expect a smooth establishment of law and order in Benghazi so soon after the frantic violence that accompanied the populist uprising of the early spring. But Libya’s revolution is regressing, despite the air strikes by the Nato-led coalition.

more from Anthony Loyd at Prospect Magazine here.

Five new stories alter our view of Daphne du Maurier

From The Telegraph:

Du_maurier_main_1878275f Daphne du Maurier valued secrecy. In 1993, Margaret Forster’s haunting biography of the author drew on unprecedented access to personal letters, but was published with a picture of du Maurier on the dust-jacket cropped across the mouth. She would not give up all her secrets, not even to a fellow writer as subtle and talented as Forster. Like the Cornish house, Menabilly, which she loved all her adult life and immortalised as Manderley in Rebecca, du Maurier’s personal and creative life are cunningly hidden from view. Except that, once in a while, as though she were controlling the plot of her posthumous reputation from beyond the grave, another intriguing set of clues turns up and the certainties shift again.

Daphne du Maurier was born in 1907; the daughter of the theatre critic Gerald du Maurier and granddaughter of the novelist George du Maurier. She resolved to become a writer in her late teens and in her early twenties left London for the isolation of Fowey, on the south Cornish coast. Of du Maurier’s earliest short stories, Forster wrote: “All have one striking thing in common: the male characters are thoroughly unpleasant. They are bullies, seducers and cheats. The women, in contrast, are pitifully weak creatures who are endlessly dominated and betrayed, never capable of saving themselves and having only the energy just to survive.” In recent years, five new early stories have been discovered by a committed du Maurier fan and collector, Ann Willmore, co-owner of the shop Bookends of Fowey. These stories present some strong female characters more than capable of challenging or oppressing their unpleasant male counterparts.

More here.

All About the Invidious Irritants That Irk Individuals

From The New York Times:

Book If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s somebody kicking the back of my chair. That, and the public clipping of fingernails. And loud gum chewing. Oh yes, and the neighbors’ muffled stereo, and people who are habitually late, and there are actually 20 or 30 other little problems I have with the world at large. But now on to you.

You get every bit as annoyed as I do by car alarms that never stop, fingernails screeching down blackboards, and a fly buzzing around your head. The prolonged whining of a child, your own or somebody else’s, drives you crazy. In other words, some annoyances are particular to the individual, some are universal to the species, and some, like the fly, appear to torture all mammals. If ever there was a subject for scientists to pursue for clues to why we are who we are, this is the one. And yet, as Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman make clear in their immensely entertaining survey, there are still more questions than answers in both the study of what annoys people and the closely related discipline of what makes people annoying.

More here.

Tuesday Poem

Happiness

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
their women and children and a keg of beer and an
accordion.

by Carl Sandberg

Ian McEwan on Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels

Alec Ash in The Browser:

AA: Your first choice is What Science Offers the Humanities, by Edward Slingerland. Tell us a little about the book first.

Ian-mcewan IM: It’s a rather extraordinary and unusual book. It addresses some fundamental matters of interest to those of us whose education has been in the humanities. It’s a book that has received very little attention as far as I know, and deserves a lot more. Edward Slingerland’s own background is in Sinology. Most of us in the humanities carry about us a set of assumptions about what the mind is, or what the nature of knowledge is, without any regard to the discoveries and speculations within the biological sciences in the past 30 or 40 years. In part the book is an assault on the various assumptions and presumptions of postmodernism – and its constructivist notions of the mind.

Concepts that in neuroscience and cognitive psychology are now taken for granted – like the embodied mind – are alien to many in the humanities. And Slingerland addresses relativism, which is powerful and pervasive within the humanities. He wants to say that science is not just one more thought system, like religion; it has special, even primary, status because it’s derived from empiricism, or it’s predictive and coherent and does advance our understanding of the world. So rather than just accept at face value what some French philosopher invents about the mirror stage in infant development, Slingerland wants to show us where current understanding is, and where it’s developing, in fields such as cognition, or the relationship between empathy and our understanding on evil. Slingerland believes that there are orthodox views within the humanities which have been long abandoned by the sciences as untenable and contradictory.

More here.

The evolution of language

From The Economist:

20110416_stc528 Where do languages come from? That is a question as old as human beings’ ability to pose it. But it has two sorts of answer. The first is evolutionary: when and where human banter was first heard. The second is ontological: how an individual human acquires the power of speech and understanding. This week, by a neat coincidence, has seen the publication of papers addressing both of these conundrums.

Quentin Atkinson, of the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, has been looking at the evolutionary issue, trying to locate the birthplace of the first language. Michael Dunn, of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, has been examining ontology. Fittingly, they have published their results in the two greatest rivals of scientific journalism. Dr Atkinson’s paper appears in Science, Dr Dunn’s in Nature.

The obvious place to look for the evolutionary origin of language is the cradle of humanity, Africa. And, to cut a long story short, it is to Africa that Dr Atkinson does trace things. In doing so, he knocks on the head any lingering suggestion that language originated more than once.

More here.

Hell

A response to “A Case for Hell” by Ross Douthat in the New York Times.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

Devil This enthusiastic stumping for the reality of Hell betrays not only a shriveled sense of human decency and a repulsive interest in pain inflicted on others, but a deplorable lack of imagination. People have a hard time taking eternity seriously. I don’t know of any theological descriptions of Hell that involve some version of parole hearings at regular intervals. The usual assumption is that it’s an eternal sentence. For all the pious musings about the centrality of human choice, few of Hell’s advocates allow for some version of that choice to persist after death. Seventy years or so on Earth, with unclear instructions and bad advice; infinity years in Hell for making the wrong decisions.

Hell isn’t an essential ingredient in humanity’s freedom of agency; it’s a horrible of invention by despicable people who can’t rise above their own petty bloody-mindedness. The thought of condemning millions of people to an eternity of torment makes Ross Douthat feel good about himself and gives him a chance to indulge in some saucy contrarianism. I tend to take issue with religion on the grounds that it’s factually wrong, not morally reprehensible; but if you want evidence for the latter, here you go.

More here.

Truth, Balance, and Freedom

Editor's Note: Akeel Bilgrami has kindly given us permission to publish here the text of a lecture that he delivered at The New School and which is also included in the Chomsky Notebook collection of writings.

by Akeel Bilgrami

9780231144759 Though there is much radical –and often unpleasant– disagreement on the fundamental questions around academic freedom, these disagreements tend to be between people who seldom find themselves speaking to each other on an occasion such as this or even, in general, speaking to the same audience. On this subject, as in so much else in the political arena these days, one finds oneself speaking only to those with whom one is measurably agreed, at least on the fundamental issues. As proponents of academic freedom, we all recognize who the opponents of academic freedom are but we seldom find ourselves conversing with them in academic conferences. We only tend to speak to them or at them in heated political debates when a controversy arises, as for instance at Columbia University over the promotion of faculty in Middle Eastern studies, or in those states where the very idea of a curricular commitment to modern evolutionary biology is viewed with hostility. I will not be considering such controversial cases of overt political influence on the academy. This is not because they are not important. The threats they pose are very real, when they occur, and the need for resistance to these threats is as urgent as anything in the academy. But they raise no interesting intellectual issues at a fundamental level over which anyone here is likely to be disagreed. If there is disagreement in a forum of the kind at which we are presently gathered, it is likely to be on relatively marginal questions, such as, for instance, whether academic freedom is a special case of the more basic constitutional right to free speech or whether instead it is a special form of freedom tied to the specific mission of universities.

What might a philosopher contribute to these more marginal questions? In this brief lecture, I would like to make a fuss about a standard argument for a conception of academic freedom which we all seem to subscribe to when it is coarsely described but which, when we describe it more finely, and look at the arguments more closely, is quite implausible and leads directly to thoroughly confused ideas about displaying ‘balance’ in our classrooms and our pedagogy quite generally. I will then use some of the points and distinctions I make in this critique to explore whether there is scope for locating more subtle and interesting (and actually more pervasive) kinds of threat to academic freedom than the obviously controversial ones that I mentioned above which all of us here, I assume, find an abomination, and which, as I said, raise no interesting issues for any of us, even if they ring urgent alarms. At the very end, I will venture to advocate imbalance of a very specific kind in the ‘extra-mural’ domain, when it is neither inquiry nor classroom curriculum that is at stake but the effort to engage the intellectual and political culture at large.

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The Life of an Ephemeron

by Justin E. H. Smith

Mossie Going through a difficult separation? Feeling lonely? Well I've got just the book for you. It's called After Kinship, and it's by Janet Carsten. She says that the focus on the affine pair as the basic unit of anthropological theory was really only a projection of mid-twentieth-century Euro-American ideology into an ethnographic field where bonds of kinship are by and large much more fluid than Lévy-Bruhl et al. were able to understand. I don't know why they keep this kind of stuff away from the 'self help' section of the bookstore. It cheers me right up.

I went to the Lawrenceville Petco and inquired about getting a cat to keep me company. “I'd really like a cat,” I said to the teen-aged employee, “but I'm worried about hygiene.”
“Cats are only as filthy as their owners,” she said, rehearsing some bit of wisdom she did not seem fully to comprehend.
“Well, suppose I'm filthy,” I replied.
“Oh. Maybe you should get, like, a hermit crab?”

I received a message from a former student. “Hey,” it started out, “I heard you're retired now. That's too bad! You were a great teacher!” For the record, I'm 38, and I'm on a temporary research sabbatical. And I am not a 'teacher'.

Facebook now has sidebar ads that are supposed to speak to the particular interests and desires of the social-networking site's individual users. Recently I've been getting an ad that beckons: “Hey Philosopher! Find your market!”

Now this is why I can't have a cat: Just today I discovered an uneaten basket of raspberries, purchased in January, at the bottom of my desk drawer. It was sitting on top of the copy of Being and Time that I've been carrying around with me for complicated reasons I need not go into here. Little remained of the raspberries, as they had been gradually replaced by thousands upon thousands of fruit flies. If I had a cat, I would have joked to her: Well look at that, countless generations of them have come and gone since January, and they still haven't outgrown their Heidegger phase.

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Cogito, Non Ergo Porcus: a Review of Jonathan Kramnick’s Actions and Objects: from Hobbes to Richardson

31YWRt3B+XL._SL500_SL160_by Maeve E. Adams

“I think therefore I’m Liberal”; “I think therefore I’m Dangerous”; “I think therefore I’m Single”; “I think therefore I’m Vegetarian”; and my personal favorite “I think therefore I’m Ham.” These phrases—emblazoned on t-shirts, billboards and, in the case of the latter, the headers of blogs—offer up perverse reinventions of Renee Descartes’ oft-cited (and oft-misunderstood) theory of human consciousness and existence, articulated in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).

These modern slogans do not, however, make much sense if we try to see them as a logical extension of Cartesian philosophy. Descartes’ theory is not strictly partisan, for starters. His excursus is, in part, an attempt to make sense of what makes all (or at least most) humans human—what makes them more than “rocks and turnips” (44) or “blueberries and doorknobs” (78), as Jonathan Kramnick might say, with characteristically wry humor, if he were writing about Descartes.

Kramnick’s new book, Actions and Objects: from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010), from which I have borrowed these phrases, is not strictly about Cartesian philosophy. Kramnick’s delightfully written and keenly insightful new book is, however, about a series of related philosophical conundrums concerning human consciousness that preoccupied a wide array of writers in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These writers run the whole gamut, from philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and David Hume to the poet known as Rochester and novelists Eliza Haywood and Samuel Richardson. In theorizing conceptions of consciousness, as Kramnick discusses, these writers debated attendant theories of existence, motivation, feeling and action that still preoccupy philosophers of mind today. In throwing a wide net, Kramnick’s book reminds us that these seemingly strictly philosophical questions were engaged by writers who came at them through a myriad of genres of writing.

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Kids Stuff

by Hartosh Singh Bal

0340796251 Like so many others in India, I grew up on tales from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and the books of Enid Blyton. Well produced children’s books with an Indian context were rare, and now looking back I’m not sure as children we needed such a context. Most children’s books are lived out in world of fantasy, where more things are possible than we ever allow ourselves to imagine as an adult. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, related either as oral tales or in abridged and sanitized versions, fulfilled such a role admirably and even today I find the flying broomsticks, magic spells and talking animals of Harry Potter somewhat tame compared to all that I took for granted as a child.

In this world Enid Blyton fitted in admirably, I’d say Enid Blyton was a better children’s writer for those reading her in India than in England. For us the world she described was a land of fantasy as unreal and magical as Narnia or the Shires. Meals of tongue sandwich and lemonade at the bottom of the garden had a magical quality, now rather sadly and blandly dispelled after tasting tongue as an adult. In this magical world I now learn there were undertones of racism, but these were lost on us, a golliwog was just another inhabitant with no existence for us as a caricature. In the same way it was only as an adult that I registered that the Narnia books were an allegory, the Lion as a stand in for Christ was thankfully lost on us in India.

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Holes

By Syed Haider Shahbaz

“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.” Gabriel Garcia Marques, Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

“Before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for everyone there should be someone to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valour that one could have one becomes very alone.” Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Our lives are but the chronicles of a death foretold. Day to day, from birth, there is only one certainty: we will die. And so, like Marquez’s narrative, begins our journey; from the first sentence we know the end – the certainty of our death. Yet, the narrative is gripping. Life is compelling – in its own many small and mysterious ways. And what, after all, is compelling? How does Marquez make us read when he has whispered the end into our ears, casually, like the news of our death?

There are some things in life that they do not talk about in the classroom. One of them is holes. Not just any holes – bodily holes: assholes, vaginas, noses, sweat pores, mouths, ears, penises. Because of my friends, I became obsessed with holes. They liked peering in their assholes. At least, Martin did. He tried to write a poem about his asshole. The poem, well enough, made him fall in love with his asshole. Its darkness, its depth, its wrinkles and curves, the small pieces of shit stuck all over it. How manly, he said, he thought. Whenever he came out to drink whiskey in his ill-fitted plaid shirts, ginger hair, armed with an accent and a childish smile, he talked of his asshole. We all knew his asshole intimately and adored it as intensely as him. It became his muse. And we all peered into our assholes. Deep down, and smiled, privately.

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La Dolce Vita, or Love Letters to Poets

by Mara Jebsen

Part one, with photos by Syreeta Mcfadden (thebellepoque.tumblr.com)

Samelana-2

Una Poetisa Counts Her Blessings While Reading Woolf in a Brooklyn Cafe
  1. I like the sound of poetisa!

2. Louise Bourgeois drove a screwdriver

down through my skull at the Guggenheim.

3. I am so proud to be une poete, the sun

makes a raging silver shape

out of a car, flips it

onto my retinas, shouts it there

incandescent, a good knife.

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