Links for 2009-12-29

"The "Peter principle" undoubtedly appeals to the cynic in all of us. It is also quite possibly true, if subsequent academic studies are to be believed. The longer a person stays at a particular level in an organisation, the more most measures of their performance fall - including subjective evaluations and the frequency and size of pay rises and bonuses. It is a finding entirely consistent with the idea that people eventually become bogged down by their own incompetence."

"I want to address all of the criticisms that Obama should have returned to the White House rather than staying in Hawaii after the attempted bombing. While the readers of this blog know that I am very critical of him, I can't fault him on this one. If you were a black guy with close family in Africa and a Muslim name, would YOU get on an airplane while the TSA is on the alert for Nigerian Muslims?"

"[T]he last two weeks in a nutshell:"

"The year that is now ending began with some areas of science in ruins. One section of the Large Hadron Collider looked like a train wreck with several-ton magnets lying about smashed after an electrical connection between them vaporized only nine days off a showy inauguration.

The Hubble Space Telescope was limping about in orbit with only one of its cameras working.

But here is the scorecard at the end of the year: in December, the newly refurbished collider produced a million proton collisions, including 50,000 at the record energy of 1.2 trillion electron volts per proton, before going silent for the holidays. CERN is on track to run it next year at three times that energy.

The Hubble telescope, after one last astronaut servicing visit, reached to within spitting distance of the Big Bang and recorded images of the most distant galaxies yet observed, which existed some 600 million or 700 million years after the putative beginning of time"

"I'm writing a mystery novel I'm calling "The Attraction of Darkness." The central thread of it is that there are four physicists, two men and two women, who collaborate and discover what dark matter is. For this, they ought to get the Nobel Prize. But the rules are that at most three people can share it. One of the four dies, supposedly a suicide, but then, maybe not. I'm hanging a lot of sex and music and philosophy on it."

"What happens when your kids won't give you a turn on the Wii? Simple. You take their LEGO bricks and their slinky and do some physics."

An invaluable resource for solar system tourists.

"I have a theory as to why the airline industry puts up with all this. It's because they know that they can't afford to increase either the number of their flights or the size of their fleets to meet any future increase in demand -- or even, really, the current demand -- and so they secretly welcome anything anybody who isn't them does that serves to reduce the number of potential passengers."

"Methodists, for example, rely on John Wesley's "quadrilateral" of scripture, tradition, reason and experience. The American evangelicals appealing to a "high view of scripture" don't necessarily oppose such a scheme, but they would insist that one leg of Wesley's four-legged stool was more important than the others. Scripture, they argue, is the trump card. And the claims of scripture supercede the claims of tradition, reason and experience when those claims are in conflict.

This is the precise point at which my attempts to achieve disagreement with my evangelical brothers and sisters inevitably fails. Because at this point I want to say that if your reading of scripture conflicts with reason and experience, then you're reading it wrong. But I can't seem to phrase this in such a way that this is what they hear. What they hear, instead [...] is me suggesting that reason or experience, rather than scripture, should be the trump card and the tallest leg on this off-kilter stool."