Saturday, September 24, 2011

The Legal Watchdog: Faster than the speed of light?

Photo by Amy Kushner
I try to stick to law-related topics, but every once in a while I’ll delve into matters that are way over my head, like college sports and even physics.  In a post from the not-too-distant past—titled Time’s Up, Einstein—I wrote about how physicists created the concept of “dark matter” simply to keep Einstein’s theory of general relativity alive.  In other words, they made up this dark matter—matter that we can’t see or detect in any way—so that Einstein’s equations will continue to hold true.  The alternative would be to discard Einstein’s theories and start from scratch—an option “too scary to contemplate.”  But now, Einstein’s theories may have been dealt another blow: some things can move faster than the speed of light. 

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

A satirical take on conference realignment: “Big East” changes name to “Big”

Big East Conference commissioner Phillip Bray recently announced a planned Big East expansion, and a corresponding change in conference name.  The league will be dropping the word “East,” and will now simply be known as “Big” or "Big Conference."  Bray attributed the name change to recent conference realignment.  “With the Big East likely to pickup the Big Twelve Conference leftovers of Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa State, and Baylor, the name ‘Big East’ is no longer accurate, honest, or ethical,” Bray insisted.