Apparently, there’s a resolution in the UN that wants to reward Iran for its recent openness about its nuke program, and just forget about the past 20 years of its running it covertly. (Story here) Apparently, if we’re nice to them now, they’ll stop trying to build nuclear missiles.
I would like to say for the record that I believe that France &co. (the sponsors of this resolution) are a bunch of suckers, and are going to seriously regret this one day.
I’m not sure if this is just them automatically trying to oppose whatever the US does (the US proposed an essentially opposite resolution a few days ago) or if they seriously believe that Iran is going to be nice to them just because they’ve been secretly (and illegally in several instances, I may add) selling them military technology for a couple of decades.
But if you listen carefully, I’ll bet you can hear the giggling all the way from Tehran.
This bit of political cynicism brought to you by another day of sleep dep and coding…
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 
It sounds to me like a ‘clever’ attempt to iron out unpleasant creasing in relationships between certain European countries and Iran, probably forking in two motivations
1: if it actually leads to some sort of accord, etc. great, but short term goals may be to simply be able to point and say ‘we did this, everyone should listen to us’ when/if this proposal makes things quiet down in the Middle East. Political weight.
Any peace in the Middle East at this point should be considered temporary at best, and preparation for considerable violence at worst.
2: Economics. I don’t think I need to elaborate on that much more. Maybe under the table economics, but… economics. Everybody seems really worried about money these days.
I think you’re quite right.
While I think Khatami is probably honorable, there’s no way I trust the clerics or any of the apparati they influence.
Any commentary on the new mystery meson?
The what?
http://physicsweb.org/article/news/7/11/7 and http://www.iop.org/news/649; KEK found it, Fermi confirms. 3872MeV.
Hmm. The PhysicsWeb article talks a great deal about a “mystery meson,” but the original article it references (here) is a lot less dramatic. The “four quarks” that the PW article is referring to are simple two quarks and two antiquarks, not a violation of SU(3) gauge symmetry, and the particle is conjectured to be a meson-antimeson bound state, which is interesting, but not quite so revolutionary a thing.