And you thought Auburn's Alabama was better than Oregon!

The following is a letter that was published in The Statesman Journal, the newspaper from Oregon's capital, Salem:

Kitzhaber must stop adulterous lifestyle
News that the governor has been living what I consider an adulterous life hurts, because voters hoped for a person who would lead Oregon to higher ethics.
History has long proved that nations with low ethics soon collapse, and is showing in our country.
Either the governor and his girlfriend get honorably married or people must recall him from office. Already people are noticing how nature is showing signs of distress by damaging storms. What is real?
God's laws still apply, even to top-level officials. They should look inside those Bibles they put their hands on and put those words into action again.
— Joe Spenner, Stayton

I had no idea that weather patterns can be affected by any governor's lifestyle.  Things we find out everyday, eh!

College sports and the lack of critical thinking

So, finally, the BCS national championship hoopla is over.  But, we have very little time to get some badly needed rest--the March Madness will soon be upon us!  Of course, I have already landed in hot water for comments about that one :)

The following letter to the editor shows how messed up our thinking has become when it comes to sports:

Shame on Oregonians who rooted for Auburn
I didn't attend OSU or U of O and neither did my kids. My husband was a professor at Western.
Monday night I was in front of the TV rooting for the Ducks not because I'm fond of green and yellow or I like Eugene better than Corvallis, but because that team was representing Oregon where, except for a trip to the Rose Bowl (which is no small feat), nothing amazing has happened sports-wise since the Blazers won the championship in the '70s.
For those who were spitefully cheering for Auburn, shame on you. This was about more than a game. This was the Whos from Whoville shouting, "We are here! We are here!"
We were people rallying together for a team who was representing our beautiful state. Yeah, it would have been great if they had won, but they played with great sportsmanship, class and heart right down to the last second.
They showed the country that we Oregonians are about more than just spotted owls and rust. I'm a proud webfooted hillbilly.

Says a lot about critical thinking, which is supposedly the reason why universities exist in the first place.  Increasingly though, it appears that universities are merely the convenient physical framework to offer non-stop sports and keep people entertained.

One commenter in the newspaper's site has this to offer:

Out of 120 kids on their roster about 25 come from Oregon High Schools.

Almost 50 come from California.

Another 45 come from other states.

Tell me again why I should be ashamed of myself for not rooting for them?

:)

The football-academic complex called "universities"

A few years ago, there were all kinds of speculations that USC's star player, Reggie Bush, was being paid in violation of NCAA rules.  It was a collective shrug of sorts as a response to such news.
Now, yet another star player and payments--this time at Auburn. 

The fact that an amateur athlete allegedly soliciting a six-figure payment to secure his services barely raises the eyebrows of college football lifers only serves to highlight how insulated the college athletics echo chamber has become. 

A lot lies beneath these high profile news items.  A lot more mundane stuff that goes unreported. Like courses with diluted standards to keep players within the passing grades ...

Oh well. A few decades ago, the president of the University of California system summarized what it means to keep a university going: parking for faculty, sex for students, and football wins for alumni.  So, no point challenging the football-academic complex, which will find ways around any number of Congressional investigations.

The Large Hadron collider, and SEC college football?

Last week I attended the physics event at the University of Oregon--of course, about the Hadron collider in Europe. One of the questions was, "what is the worst thing that could happen at the LHC?". Jim Brau's response was to the point: if the collider doesn't work, that will be the worst thing.

I wonder if we got a taste of it. Apparently a "30-ton transformer used to power cooling stations for portions of the Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) gigantic superconducting magnets failed last Thursday, just one day after the LHC went online."

So, why the college football piece in the title of the post? Bizarre as it sounds, a headline that I read was "Auburn vs. LSU: SEC's early version of the Hadron Collider". It gets even stranger--the analysis employs more physics stuff:

The “Big Bang” you will hear rumble through the night air around 7:45 EST this Saturday will resonate from the epicenter of Jordan-Hare Stadium, not from Switzerland and France.
I’m not a physicist and I know very little about protons, particles, and kinetic energy but if they’re anything like these Tigers, collision is a very appropriate term to describe these two teams when they meet.

BTW, what is a hadron? Here is the explanation.

And, here is a rappin' explanation of the LHC :-)