Teeny, tiny Dirac neutrino masses: an unorthodox point of view

There are now strong hints suggesting that neutrinos do have a mass after all. If they do have a mass, it would have to be tiny. Why is it so? Is it Dirac or Majorana? Can one build a model in which a teeny, tiny Dirac neutrino mass arises in a natural way? Can one learn something else other than just neutrino masses? What are the extra phenomenological consequences of such a model? These are the questions that I will try to focus on in this talk.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, LateX, aipproc style. Talk presented at the Second Tropical Workshop on Particle Physics and Cosmology, Neutrino and Flavor Physics, 1-6 May 2000, San Juan, Puerto Ric

You Think You Think

This is a study in thinking according to, but not withheld by, traditional methods from the branch of philosophy called Experiential Philosophy. Philosophers are interested in the topic of thought, if no one else. Yet, thinking is what we do sixteen hours a day. Or, as this study will show, thinking is what is done to us sixteen hours a day. What is thinking? Why is it? And, who is in charge here anyway? The following book will enter these questions and make a serious attempt to keep deviations from target as small as possible. The thesis of this book is based on the recognition that thought is an activity in human beings that (1) proceeds in a fragmented way and that (2) basically cannot be halted. We cannot opt out of thinking. The conclusion is that this accounts for human suffering, lack of direction, and chaos in daily actions and decisions. This leads to the further conclusion that thinking is not something we do, it is something that is being done in us

everybody doing what everybody else is doing

The title is drawn from economist Abjihit V. Bannerjee’s 1992 study ‘A Simple Model of Herd Behaviour’, in which he notes ‘There are innumerable social and economic situations in which we are influenced in our decision making by what others around us are doing. Perhaps the commonest examples are from everyday life: we often decide on what stores and restaurants to patronize or what schools to attend on the basis of how popular they seem to be. … We set up a model in which paying heed to what everyone else is doing is rational because their decisions may reflect information that they have and we do not.’ Such herd behaviour may arise through an information cascade which, as David Easley and Jon Kleinberg note in their book Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World, ‘has the potential to occur when people make decisions sequentially, with later people watching the actions of earlier people, and from these actions inferring something about what the earlier people know.’ In everyone doing what everyone else is doing, players make selections from a series of actions, judging what to do in response to choices made by others around them. First performed: Plus Minus Ensemble, Material, City University Experimental Music Group, Performance Space, City University, London, 08.04.14

Faulty Phrases: There Are No Absolutes & The Truth Is Relative

There are no absolutes:\u27 The truth is relative:\u27 Each phrase im­plies and necessitates the truth of the other. An absolute is something that is universally true, that is, its truth is independent of all other factors or contexts (New Oxford American Dictionary). To say, there are no absolutes:\u27 is to say that there are no inde­pendent universal truths. All truths are therefore dependent. The truth is relative makes exactly this claim. Philosophically speaking, that which is relative is dependent on something else (New Oxford American Dictionary). But the concepts of relativity and dependence do not exist in a vacuum. For something to be relative it must be relative to something. For something to be dependent it must be dependent on something. What that something is depends on the external factor or context being referenced. Thus, both phrases boil down to the same basic premise: the truth is entirely dependent