Wheat-dogg’s world
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Once in a while, a student will ask me a question that sends me back to the books (as it were) to learn something new. He wanted to know about zero point energy (ZPE), and Wikipedia was not helping him out much.

I couldn’t either at the time, so I dutifully poked around the web to learn more about ZPE. For a “zero,” the concept has some pretty far-reaching effects.

As it turns out, ZPE (and its cousin, the zero point field) is connected to the very questions of where mass and inertia come from, and may provide an explanation of why electrons, for example, have both wave and particle properties.

Anyone who spends any time at all learning physics sooner or later learns that everything in the science is connected. So it is with the ZPE, it seems.

First, we need to understand what the ZPE is, then we can investigate how it connects to all these other basic physical phenomena.

In classical physics, it was assumed that the internal kinetic energy of a substance could theoretically be reduced to zero, by cooling the substance to absolute zero (-273 C or 0K). And indeed, we can chill things down to a mere fraction of a degree above absolute zero. It is, for a couple of reasons, impossible to reach zero, however.

As its Dec. 7 premiere approaches, be prepared to hear a growing hue-and-cry about the supposed anti-Christian messages in The Golden Compass.

The Golden Compass is yet another fantasy movie epic based on literary epics, like The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia series. [We might also throw in Harry Potter as another example, though HP is an entirely different kind of story.]

Written by an avowed atheist, British author Phillip Pullman, the Golden Compass is like anti-Narnia. Rather than supporting the idea of defending an all-powerful authority against rival forces, Pullman’s trilogy depicts its young heroes as bringing the reign of the authority to an end.

Some Christians who see the anti-Christ lurking behind every tree have already declared The Golden Compass anti-Christian and are encouraging parents to keep their kids out of the theatres, lest their tender minds be subverted by the Evil One.

The Harry Potter books and movies, after all, have created an entire generation of Satanists and wiccans. The Golden Compass might now create an entire generation of doubters or agnostics. It’s the end of civilization as we now it!

C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series began as a fantasy epic for young readers, but Christian allegory worked its way into the books. Many Christians adore the books, since they offer a more obviously religious alternative to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and other fantasy epics.

Working in a fairly liberal independent high school shelters me from the kind of close-mindedness endemic to some large public schools, like Cocoa Beach Jr/Sr High in Florida.

At that school, a group of students are being heckled, threatened and insulted for wearing peace T-shirts every Thursday. It’s a reactionary backlash reminiscent of the ’60s anti-war protests.

Sophomore Skylar Stains (front row, right) and a friend decided to wear peace shirts every Thursday to school. Within a short time, they had 30 other students in their ad hoc Peace Shirt Coalition. Then things got ugly.

Group member Lauren Lorraine told Florida Today that students started approaching the group members, yelling obscene things at them.

“People just turned on us like that,” she said. “At least 10 boys stood up and yelled things at me at once, and we couldn’t even walk through the halls without a harsh comment being made.”

Signs they put up on their lockers promoting peace were defaced with swastikas and white-power slogans, covered up with pro-Bush or pro-war signs, or just torn down. One group of students has taken to wearing the Confederate flag shirts to show their support for the troops in Iraq.

From Florida Today:

Uh, right. Sorry, kids, I don’t see the connection between the Confederate flag and Iraq. Different war, different context. As for the racism thing, all I can say is, these kids must have been raised in a cultural vacuum.

If you watch Fox Snooze (and I feel sorry for you), you may have heard Fox commentators/blowhards Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson pontificating about the alleged “War on Christmas.”

According to O’Reilly, Gibson and other conservative demogogues, secular forces are working to eliminate Christmas from the US of A, leading to the downfall of this great Christian nation.

(I use those words sarcastically, please note.)

Their latest tactic is to enumerate how many retailers use the word “Christmas” in their adverts. The Liberty Counsel, a conservative Christian group associated with the late Jerry Falwell, has published a “naughty and nice” list of major retailers; nice retailers preserve Christmas, naughty ones use the generic word “holiday.”

Avoiding the word “Christmas” is just more evidence of a vast anti-Christian conspiracy, O’Reilly & Co. contend.

This nonsense derives from Christians losing several court cases in which the American Civil Liberties Union has successfully argued that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause precludes governmental agencies from erecting overtly religious displays.

No creches in city hall, in other words.

Those Christians given to delusions of paranoia have taken these signs and wonders as evidence of an anti-Christian movement in the United States. O’Reilly and Gibson, in particular, have created a straw man argument with their “war on Christmas” diatribes.

A straw man argument is a logical fallacy. You caricature the opposing viewpoint and focus your attacks on the “straw man,” instead of the opponent’s actual statements, hoping to score a few points in your favor.

A surprisingly progressive school board in Portland, Maine, voted last month to allow students at one middle school to receive contraceptives confidentially from the school’s health clinic.

Parents of students at King Middle School have to give their children written permission to visit the clinic, but anything that happens in the clinic, including prescribing birth control pills, would be private, even from the parents.

True to our democratic process, the policy was suitably debated in public meetings, and the school board by majority vote approved the new policy. Since we have a decentralized educational system in the States, the birth-control policy only affects this one school in this one district.

But sex is an emotional subject in the US of A, and handing out contraceptives to pre-teens and teens is even touchier.

O the horror!

Those guardians of all that is pure and holy, the religious right, had to stick their nose in Portland’s business, of course. A Maine legislator is posturing about the whole affair, proposing new laws making it illegal for schools to hand out contraceptives without specific parental consent.

I suppose they hope to save the nation, and the state of Maine, from eternal hellfire and damnation. These are the same folks who push abstinence-only sex ed, after all.

The King Middle School policy, if you check it out dispassionately, is perfectly sensible. Out of 510 students, only five would actually qualify for contraception, according to The Associated Press. Those five are apparently sexually active.

My latest assignment for my students has been to participate in the Cassini Scientist-for-a-day Essay Content. In the process of working with them, one of my kids told me something I found very disturbing.

She doesn’t care about space and space exploration.

Woof. It’s hard to come back with a short and snappy answer to that comment, other than the standard teacher admonishment, “Well, do the essay anyway.” It was honest, and I suppose a somewhat legitimate reason for not being keen on doing the assignment, but it is simultaneously a sad comment on her intellectual curiosity.

It’s a feeling that is shared by many others, I suppose. It explains why the US public is now so bored by space exploration, almost 40 years after two guys walked on the Moon. The gee-whiz has gone out of space.

[Since writing this post, I discovered Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, blogged on “Why Explore Space?” He answers the question better than I can.]

Cassini is part of a long-term mission to explore Saturn, its moons and its ring system. Its companion probe, Huygens, landed on Titan, the only moon in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere. Together the two probes have sent back spectacular images of the ringed planet and its moons since their arrival in July 2004.

To connect students with space exploration, the Cassini team is sponsoring a contest in which students have to argue in a 500-word essay why one of four possible imaging targets is the best. They have to provide evidence that their chosen target would provide the most scientifically useful information.

The other burning election issue here was a initiative to fund the public libraries with an increase in the city occupational tax. It’s the words “increase” and “tax” that doomed the proposal from the start.

Metro Louisville voters killed the library funding proposal by a 2-1 margin, even though the tax increase of $2 for every $1,000 earned would have added only a pittance to most workers’ tax levies. I guess it’s the principle of the thing.

Louisville spends less money per capita on its libraries than most other cities its size, about $24 a head. Nashville by comparison spends almost twice that. There is a proposal before the Metro council to expand the library system dramatically over the next few years. The main question was, naturally, how to pay for such a worthy cause.

Taxing the citizenry for any project is never a popular idea, so I’m wondering what the council expected in proposing such a numbskull idea when the economy seems to be teetering toward a recession, people are losing their homes, and Fortune 500 companies are laying off workers by the thousands.

Supporters of the tax, which would have cost a person making $40,000 a year a measly $80 over 12 months, spent scads of money — $400,000 by one account — trying to drum up support for the tax hike. Meanwhile, opponents raised a fraction of that to lobby against the tax.

Only in Kentucky can we make molehills into mountains, I’ll tell ya.

Normally, I try to avoid commenting politics in this blog, since are so many political blogs that do a much better job than I can. After yesterday’s elections in Kentucky, I just have to say something, though.

For me, the two big issues were the gubernatorial race between Republican Gov. Ernie Fletcher and Democrat Steve Beshear and the library funding resolution in Louisville. This post will deal with the first issue.

For you out-of-towners, the governor’s race was basically about three issues: casino gambling, God and Fletcher’s shady hiring practices, in about that order. There were other issues, of course, but from my lofty vantage point in the Knobs of Indiana, it seemed all anyone talked about was gambling, God and grand jury indictments.

Kentucky has had a lottery for years. When it was first proposed, the proceeds were to fund education. In the end, the schools really didn’t get much, but here it is, never to go away. That kind of gambling seems to be OK now.

Kentucky has had horse racing practically since the invention of the horse. People wager money on horses (”Go, baby, go!”), but apparently that kind of gambling is OK. It’s tradition, after all.

Kentucky’s basketball teams at U of L and UK usually go the NCAA tournaments. There are gambling pools for March madness, sometimes out of sight of management, but they’re generally OK, too.