My Favorite Boogie-Woogie.

The pianist Pete Johnson (1904 – 1967) recorded the same tune with several different titles:

"Kaycee Feeling"
"Kaycee on my mind"
"J. J. Boogie"
"Swingin' the Boogie"

Most of these I found on iTunes (so I can't share them with you), but the last one is on YouTube:

Culture Made Stupid

This is the companion volume to the better known Science Made Stupid by Tom Weller. Here is a short excerpt:

Physics Majors are an Endangered Species in Texas

What is it about physics that turns students off in Texas?

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201110/physicsprograms.cfm

Five physics majors graduating per year at each school is all it would take to save these departments. Is that such a difficult problem? Apparently it is.

In the bleak future, physics students will usually be watching the lectures on TV, which is better than nothing, but hardly optimal.

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201112/electcoaltion.cfm

Even fewer students will want to major in physics under these conditions. This will lead to a vicious circle, with more cuts at the participating schools.

Then who will train the future high-school physics teachers in Texas?

A beautiful performance

Update on GE Appliance Repair Ripoff

Back in the days of DU2, I started a thread about having been overcharged by GE for repair on an oven. For that ancient history, go to

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2398626

A few things have happened since then.

1. I finally got through to GE customer service, which, after a week, informed me that my request for a partial refund of labor charges had been denied.

2. Next, I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau (as DCKit had recommended in the previous thread).

3. For good measure, I also filed a complaint with the California Department of Consumer Affairs, a section of which is concerned with "Electronic and/or Appliance Repair".

I'll let y'all know if and when either the BBB or the Calif. DCA takes any action on my behalf.

Higgs, CMS, ATLAS, LHC ... What is this alphabet soup all about?

Here is some background on the recent story about the possible discovery of a new particle.

Peter Ware Higgs, FRS, FRSE, FKC (born 29 May 1929), is an English theoretical physicist and an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh.



Higgs and others suggested that certain particles acquire mass through a mechanism involving a new particle, called the Higgs Boson, evidence for which may have been found this year at the Centre Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. The following diagram shows its layout, including the two general-purpose particle detectors: ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), data from which were recently reported as consistent with the existence of the Higgs Boson.



The LHC lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference, as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. This synchrotron is designed to collide opposing particle beams of either protons at an energy of 7 teraelectronvolts (7 TeV or 1.12 microjoules) per nucleon, or lead nuclei at an energy of 574 TeV (92.0 µJ) per nucleus (2.76 TeV per nucleon).[1][2] The term hadron refers to particles composed of quarks.



The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the intention of testing various predictions of high-energy physics, including testing for the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson[3] and of the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetry.[4] It was built in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.

Read more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Higgs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

CSU Chancellor Expounds on History of Math

While discussing the price of college textbooks, Charles B. Reed, the chancellor of the California State University (CSU) system, made an astounding statement, according to the print edition (but not the online edition) of today's LA Times:

"far as I know, algebra and calculus haven't changed in 500 years".

That's news to me. The consensus among historians of math is that calculus was invented by Isaac Newton (1642–1727) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1716). But what do they know? Charlie Reed, whose doctorate is in teacher education and whose salary is $421,500 (also with a $30,000 per year retirement bonus), is the supreme authority at CSU.



For more information about this "captain of erudition" (Thorstein Veblen's memorable phrase), browse:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_B._Reed

We came very close to nuclear catastrophe in 1962

"Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov ... (30 January 1926–1999) was a Soviet naval officer. During the Cuban Missile Crisis he prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo and therefore a possible nuclear war. His story is to this day unknown to the wider public ...



"On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of eleven United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph trapped a nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot class submarine B-59 near Cuba and started dropping practice depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, believing that a war might already have started, wanted to launch a nuclear-tipped torpedo, despite the Soviets being informed that practice depth charges were being used.[3]

"Three officers on board the submarine — Savitsky, the Political Officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and the second in command Arkhipov — were authorized to launch the torpedo if agreeing unanimously in favor of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch,[4] eventually persuading Savitsky to surface the submarine and await orders from Moscow. The nuclear warfare which presumably would have ensued was thus averted."

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov