Can't say it better than the late Michael Crichton:
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

"That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.

"But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't."

Caution! Angry post (**** anger rating)

Ok, I haven't written for a long time, mostly because it seems increasingly pointless. Facebook® has long since eclipsed Xanga among the incredibly small group of people who ever read the banal blatherings that they found on this blog.

But there is a deep sort of anger welling up in my chest and I need to let it go (and therein lies the problem, because the anger I am talking about is from a kind of knowing that is hard to articulate; it is a kind of vague web of understanding derived from multiple sources, all milling about in my mind, and the sum total of them is a thoroughly ticked-off me.)

The ever widening circle of influence of Islam, and the complete idiocy with which the ignoramuses in multi-culti land have welcomed it, tops the cake. Consider this video from jihadwatch.org of a rally in Toronto, wherein we hear the adherents of the "religion of peace" screaming racist epithets ("Jews are monkeys") and boldly stating that Hitler didn't finish the job. (By the way, that's not "hate speech", but writing a book about the people who attend such rallies is.)

Actually, this does more than upset me. I get a little bit scared when I see how much of Europe is already controlled by such Islamists, and when I see the agenda they are bringing to my own backyard (well, figuratively speaking at least).

There are a bunch of things that make me excited/nervous in the deep recesses of my mind:

• the Large Hadron Collider is turning on in the next month(s) - we will have 10 TeV running at low luminosity by September. I never actually thought it might be finished one day
  
• I accepted a position to be the Western representative for the ECP Centre
• Ezra Levant is speaking at the Fraser Institute next week
• some really interesting papers on multivariate boosted decision trees, and my idea of machine learning for physics analyses