Links for 2010-04-24

"Here is what the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says about religion:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ..."

Sometimes a comma is just a comma and not a vast chasm separating two competing and incompatible ideas. The two clauses there do not conflict. At all. They are logically necessary counterparts of one another. Congress may not make any law establishing religion and Congress may not prohibit the free exercise of religion. Congress may not make any law establishing religion because to do so would be to prohibit the free exercise of religion."

"Now before my friends out there in the conservative blogosphere go crazy and consign me to the same place they consign, well, everyone I know, it's important to clarify that there is a principled jurisprudential debate to be had, on the need to constrain the judiciary. There is a need for a thoughtful discussion about how to interpret the Constitution and what judges should take into consideration while doing so, and I dearly hope we will spend the coming weeks having it. My only point here is that most Americans, having been terrified by the specter of "liberal activist" judges legislating from the bench, should be equally terrified at the prospect of "humble judicial minimalists" who are institutionally powerless to do anything at all to protect America's women, its workers, its minorities, and its environment. I suspect most Americans still want to believe that if they are the victims of discrimination or injustice or brutality, the courts are a place to go for vindication."

A huge upgrade over the original mud flap girl.

"CUORE is not the first nuclear physics experiment to have benefited from ageing lead. Researchers in the US used 450-year old lead from the hull of a sunken Spanish galleon to line their IGEX experiment. What is different about CUORE, however, is the sheer quantity, as well as the quality, of the ancient material. Rather than simply being lined with lead, the ship that sank off the coast of Sardinia had lead as its cargo, lead being an important commodity in ancient Rome since it was used for all sorts of objects, from water ducts and urns to coins and bullets for slings. "This ship was specialized to transport lead so it is a treasure," says Fiorini, who is CUORE spokesperson. "It multiplies by many times the quantity of ancient lead available in the world." "

"[T]he real question is what do we call 10^x when we don't know x? I suggest the prefix "huh". Examples: "My answer of about 5 huh-people wasn't good enough to land me a job at McKinsey and Company." "Einstein calculated that the cosmological constant was about huh inverse seconds squared."

Another prefix that is needed is to express when you don't really care what the hell the size is. For this I might suggest "meh." Example: "The circumference of a African swallow's leg is about mehmeters, thus rendering it incapable of carrying a coconut.""