Martin Meenagh blog

Mr Toad and The Business of Nearly-Men The Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States, at the time of writing, seems to be boiling down to a choice of two men most notable for their participation in business, rather than politics, Herman Cain and Mitt Romney. Neither are the caricature which campaigns project to the world, and both are being tested by a GOP which is in a particularly silly and demented funk about policy and principles. The candidates are having to attach themselves to nostrums that are, well, frankly mad. Watching them, however, made me think of past elections which seemed winnable and in which 'outsider' candidates could have made the grade. Mo Udall, in '76, for instance, would have made a wittier and more western mormon candidate than Romney, though I think that ultimately he would have lost to Ford. Wendell Wilkie would have run a virtual pastiche of FDR's administration, before dying in 1944, leaving an empty Vice presidency (his...

Relativity, in the Library, with a washboard?... Apologies for the obscure Cluedo reference. There have been numerous explanations put forward for the 'superluminal' neutrinos which some claimed that they had observed a few weeks ago. I discussed a few of them, sideways, by referring to Cherenkov radiation and some poetry, but today (via wattsupwiththat ) I came across a neat explanation for the CERN 'faster than light' discovery . You can read the report for yourself. It basically rests on relativity. The team measuring the passage of neutrinos from CERN to Italy across the 730-sum miles coordinated clocks using GPS systems 20000 miles above. These satellite clocks were moving in such a fashion that the detectors seemed from them to be travelling towards the neutrinos, and at speeds where time may have been slightly dilated. The proposed discrepancy between their measurements and those on the ground is 64 nanoseconds, which is almost exactly what was seen in the resul...

Wall Street Pro Courtesy of zerohedge , here's a blast from the past--2009 in fact, when US economists were drivelling about the 'green shoots of recovery' in an unwise fashion. It's a fine demonstration of what the phrase 'An Active and Informed Citizenry' means, though very sweary, so if you have sensitivities in that regard, don't watch.

iDied I've never been an apple user, but the company's obsessive concern for design and development has spilled over into the other products that I use, and it's products are things of beauty. I have stood and just looked at them more than once in my life. It's perhaps that which gives me the distance to reflect that the circumstances of Steve Jobs' birth suggest were he to be conceived today, that he would have been aborted by a good many of those who have built a value system around his products. His adoption seems to have been difficult too. It isn't absurd to speculate that the rage that propelled him by all accounts might have something to do with his early experiences. I'm sure that there is some observation on synchronicity to make too, given the parallel one can draw between his origins and those of Barack Obama. There's a lot to be said for children who struggle into this world with the odds against them. For once, though, the blogosphere is no...

Glenn Beck to Launch Childrens' TV Channel I'll avoid the obvious question of whether this actually does constitute a career change for a moment, because I've been tickled by the reaction to this news on the National Public Radio website . In the comments section, as I read it, people of a sensibility which it's fair to say is different from that of Mr Beck wrote observations involving terms such as 'crap meter' 'misinformation' 'anti semitic', 'retard', 'this guy is like herpes' and 'wack-job conspiracy theorist.' These terms, which were not of the sort one Mr Gladstone once deployed with Queen Victoria, were then followed by a series of separate, censored statements stamped 'comments removed for not meeting NPR community discussion rules'. What community, and which discussion, allows swearing, observations on mental health, the use of the word 'retard' in any context, and comparisons to unpleasant and tra...