The Social Being versus The Machine Being Transfer

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Time that was previously spent interacting socially has increasingly been displaced by the virtual variety. A recent editorial in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine made the timely point that social networking “encourages us to ignore the social networks that form in our non-virtual communities. … The time we spend socializing electronically separates us from our physical networks.”

From there, Dr. Sigman makes something of a leap, suggesting on the basis of no experimental evidence that virtual social networking, by way of Web sites like Facebook or Twitter, probably does not confer the same health benefits as actual, unmediated social interaction.Is Social Networking Killing You? - The Lede Blog - NYTimes.com

Entretempo: Relativity and how to have a roof over the head and food on the table

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The wave theory was wildly successful in explaining nearly all optical and electromagnetic phenomena, and was a great triumph of nineteenth century physics. By the late nineteenth century, however, a handful of experimental anomalies remained that could not be explained by or were in direct conflict with the wave theory. One of these anomalies involved a controversy over the speed of light. The constant speed of light predicted by Maxwell's equations and confirmed by the Michelson-Morley experiment contradicted the mechanical laws of motion that had been unchallenged since the time of Galileo, which stated that all speeds were relative to the speed of the observer. In 1905, Albert Einstein resolved this paradox by revising the Galilean model of space and time to account for the constancy of the speed of light. Einstein formulated his ideas in his special theory of relativity, which radically altered humankind's understanding of space and time. Einstein also demonstrated a previously unknown fundamental equivalenceenergy and mass with his famous equation between

where E is energy, m is rest mass, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum.