Translate

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Je suis sick of this shit






This is becoming criminal negligence on the part of European leaders.


The chain of attacks from Paris to San Bernardino to Istanbul to the Ivory Coast and now to Brussels




I want to first send my condolences to the families of those murdered in today's terrorist attack in Brussels

The chain of attacks from Paris to San Bernardino to Istanbul to the Ivory Coast and now to Brussels, and the daily attacks in Israel – this is one continuous assault on all of us. In all these cases the terrorists have no resolvable grievances. It’s not as if we could offer them Brussels, or Istanbul, or California, or even the West Bank. That won't satisfy their grievances. Because what they seek is our utter destruction and their total domination. Their basic demand is that we should simply disappear. Well, my friends, that's not going to happen. The only way to defeat these terrorists is to join together and fight them together. That's how we'll defeat terrorism with political unity and with moral clarity. I think we have that in abundance.

Thursday, March 17, 2016

Confessions of a Republican (LBJ 1964 Presidential campaign commercial)




If the choice ends up to be between Clinton and Trump I would abstain from voting, at least that is how I feel today. It may be that Trump is making all these extreme statements just in order to get elected, and that when he becomes president he would be more reasonable. After all, Rudy Giuliani, whom I respect, supports him. But even in this best case scenario, I am disgusted that we as voters would have to vote for a Schrödinger's cat.





An explanation of ‘Schrödinger's cat’ from Simon Singh’s  The Code Book


Erwin Schrödinger, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933, invented a parable known as ‘Schrödinger's cat’, which is often used to help explain the concept of superposition. Imagine a cat in a box. There are two possible states for the cat, namely dead or alive. Initially, we know that the cat is definitely in one particular state, because we can see that it is alive. At this point, the cat is not in a superposition of states. Next, we place vial of cyanide in the box along with the cat and close the lid. We now enter a period of ignorance, because we cannot see or measure the state of the cat. Is the cat alive or has I trodden on the vial of cyanide and died? Traditionally we would say that the cat is either or alive we just do not know which. However quantum theory says that the cat is in a superposition of two states – it is both dead alive, it satisfies all possibilities. Superposition occurs only when we lose sight of an object, and is a way of describing an object during a period of ambiguity. When we eventually open the, we can see whether the cat is alive or dead. The act of looking at the cat forces it to be in one particular state, and at that very moment the superposition disappears.  



Tuesday, March 15, 2016

An answer from Rudy Giuliani about Donald Trump

This morning Rudy Giuliani was in Beer Sheva, visiting the Advanced Technologies Park and I had no knowledge that he was here and by the time I heard of his visit he had left to give a lecture at Ben-Gurion University nearby. So I walked across the new pedestrian bridge to BGU and got in during his lecture on  The International Aspects of the Cyber Threat.

At the end of the lecture he opened the floor to questions and I asked him two.

On his stand on the dispute between Apple and FBI he was evasive and said that he cannot give his opinion.

But then I mentioned that today was Super Tuesday and  that I would like to know what he has to say about Donald Trump's proclaimed neutrality in the Israel-Palestinian conflict when Hamas's Charter, Article 7  calls for the killing of Jews.   How could  he be neutral?  


Rudy Giuliani answered (the exact wording I cannot recall)  that he had  known Donald Trump for many years and that Trump had this incredible tendency to say stupid things before he thinks. Trump had made an unfortunate comment,  but that he is a friend of Israel.