Meaningful Meaninglessness: Albert Camus\u27 Presentation of Absurdism as a Foundation for Goodness

In 1957, Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature. By that time he had written such magnificently important works such as Caligula (1938), The Stranger (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Plague (1947), The Rebel (1951), and The Fall (1956). Camus was a proponent of Absurdism, a philosophy that realizes the workings of the world are inherently meaningless and indifferent to the human struggle to create meaning. Absurdism, however, is not a nihilistic philosophy. In The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, and Caligula, Camus offers a foundation of optimism and morality

The Court as Archive

"Until the late 20th century, ‘an archive’ generally meant a repository for documents, as well as the generic name for the wide range of documents the repository might hold. An archive could be visited, and then also searched, to discover past actions or lives that had meaning for the present. While historians and historiographers have long understood the contests that archives contain and represent, the very idea of ‘the archive’ has, over the last 40 years, become the subject and object of widening and intensified consideration. This consideration has been intellectual (from scholars in a wide range of disciplines) and public (from communities and individuals whose stories are held captive, or sometimes hidden or excluded from official archives), as well as institutional. It has involved scrutiny and critique of official archives’ limitations and practices, as well as symbolic, affective and theoretical expansion and heightened expectation of what ‘the archive’ is or should be. The very language of ‘the archive’ now carries freight as administrative practice, normative value, metaphor, description and aspiration in different ways than it did in the 20th century. This collection offers a unique contribution to these reinvigorated and sometimes new conversations about what an archive might be, what it can do as a consequence, and to whom it bears custodial responsibilities. In particular, this collection addresses what it means for contemporary Australian superior courts of record to not only have constitutional and procedural duties to documents as a matter of law, but also to acknowledge obligations to care for those materials in a way that understands their public meaning and public value for the Australian people, in the past, in the present and for the future.

Baryons Electromagnetic Mass Splittings in Potential Models

We study electromagnetic mass splittings of charmed baryons. We point out discrepancies among theoretical predictions in non-relativistic potential models. None of them seems supported by experimental data. A new calculation is presented.Comment: 4 pages, Proc. of ISS97 Tashkent 6-13 Oct. 9

Measuring the photon distribution by ON/OFF photodectors

Reconstruction of photon statistics of optical states provide fundamental information on the nature of any optical field and find various relevant applications. Nevertheless, no detector that can reliably discriminate the number of incident photons is available. On the other hand the alternative of reconstructing density matrix by quantum tomography leads to various technical difficulties that are particular severe in the pulsed regime (where mode matching between signal an local oscillator is very challenging). Even if on/off detectors, as usual avalanche PhotoDiodes operating in Geiger mode, seem useless as photocounters, recently it was shown how reconstruction of photon statistics is possible by considering a variable quantum efficiency. Here we present experimental reconstructions of photon number distributions of both continuous-wave and pulsed light beams in a scheme based on on/off avalanche photodetection assisted by maximum-likelihood estimation. Reconstructions of the distribution for both semiclassical and quantum states of light (as single photon, coherent, pseudothermal and multithermal states) are reported for single-mode as well as for multimode beams. The stability and good accuracy obtained in the reconstruction of these states clearly demonstrate the interesting potentialities of this simple technique.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, to appear on Laser Physic

Preliminary investigations on sunburn in Chardonnay grapevine variety

The aim of this investigation was to determine if a temperature response curve can be used to describe sunburn in grape berries. Trials were carried out at the Viticulture and Enology Department (University of California, Davis) on cv Chardonnay (clone 29) grown under both field and greenhouse conditions. Greenhouse plants were two years old, grown in 5 L pots, and watered daily with a modified Hoagland’s nutrient solution. The vines were pruned to two shoots with one or two clusters per shoot, and the shoots were vertically trained to approximately 1.5 m. Field-grown vines were clone 29 grafted onto 101-14 rootstock, planted at 2.5 x 3.7 m spacing, cane pruned, and VSP trained. Rows were north-south oriented. In order to increase the temperature of the berry surface, solar radiation was concentrated using a normal reading lens with different magnifications degrees. Temperature was measured with a copper-constantan thermocouples attached to the berry surface. Experiments were performed just before harvest. Sunburn was caused by using different ranges of temperatures held constant for 2 or 5 minutes in the case of greenhouse plants and 5, 10, and 15 minutes in the case of field-grown plants. The effects of treatments were rated on visual basis by a panel of 3 people at one day intervals for three or four consecutive days after the treatments. On the last day, treated berries were harvested and analyzed for cell viability and membrane integrity using the fluorescein diacetate (FDA) technique. In greenhouse grown vines, a temperature of 38-40 °C for 5 minutes was sufficient to cause visual symptoms of sunburn two days after the treatments, even if no cells were permanently damaged. In field-grown vines, 5 minutes at 40-43 °C caused 12.4% cell mortality and permanent surface deformation. In conclusion, exposure of berries to a surface temperature of 40-43 °C appears to be effective in causing sunburn in greenhouse and field-grown plants. The radiation regime experienced by the cluster during the growing season may be important to determine the critical level of temperature causing sunburn

Isospin Splittings of Baryons

We discuss the isospin-breaking mass differences among baryons, with particular attention in the charm sector to the $\Sigma_c^{+}-\Sigma_c^0$, $\Sigma_c^{++}-\Sigma_c^0$, and $\Xi_c^+-\Xi_c^0$ splittings. Simple potential models cannot accommodate the trend of the available data on charm baryons. More precise measurements would offer the possibility of testing how well potential models describe the non-perturbative limit of QCD.Comment: 4 pages, aipproc.sty, Proceeding of Hadron 9

Interaction of Bifidobacterium animalis Subspecies lactis (Bb12) and Salmonella typhimurium in Continuous-Flow Chemostatic Culture

A commercially available probiotic, Bifidobactenum animalis subspecies lactis (Bb12) was adapted to and maintained in a continuous-flow chemostat culture. We evaluated the growth characteristics and mteractive effects of Bb12 and Salmonella typhimurium (St) when cultivated singly or together. When the continuous-now culture of Bb12 was challenged with 104 to 107 CFU/ml of St, the St was eliminated within 24 h. This was replicated 3 times. Because the pH of the Bb12 was 4.5, it appeared that St elimination was due to the reduced pH. In a second study, St was grown in pure culture and the pH reduced to 4.5. Although still present, St concentrations dropped to unculturable levels within 28 h. In a third study, the pH of the Bb12 culture was maintained at pH 5.6 by means of a continuous drip of NaOH and challenged with St. Although at reduced concentrations (1.03 CFU/ml), the St remained in the chemostat until day 9 when the drip was discontinued By day 14, the St was elimmated. It is apparent in these m vitro studies that Bb12 has antagonistic properties against St and it is possible that there could be some in vivo applications of Bb 12 against St

Homodyne Bell's inequalities for entangled mesoscopic superpositions

We present a scheme for demonstrating violation of Bell's inequalities using a spin-1/2 system entangled with a pair of classically distinguishable wave packets in a harmonic potential. In the optical domain, such wave packets can be represented by coherent states of a single light mode. The proposed scheme involves standard spin-1/2 projections and measurements of the position and the momentum of the harmonic oscillator system, which for a light mode can be realized by means of homodyne detection. We discuss effects of imperfections, including non-unit efficiency of the homodyne detector, and point out a close link between the visibility of interference and violation of Bell's inequalities in the described scheme.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures. Extended version, journal reference adde