Husband charged in disappearance of Laci Peterson and unborn child

What makes this case special? Laci Peterson's disappearance and her likely murder is tragic. Yet there were at least two other pregnant women in California within the last year who disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Is it that her husband is a suspect? Husbands are always suspects? Is it that she was young, beautiful, and with child?
The reason I ask this question is that I saw the story and reflexively I wanted to write about it here. Yet how is it relevant? I don't pretend to write for a news website. Here is the original story from MSNBC.com. Whoa! Scott Peterson was arrested as I was writing this post.
One has to wonder, who gets to decide which stories are newsworthy? Which murders are the grisliest, kidnappings the most heartrending, car accidents the most tragic, robberies the most shocking, foreign events the most important, etc.? Network executives might answer that the public decides indirectly by rewarding the most relevant news media with their ears and eyeballs. I don't think so. Public preference plays a role and is often blamed for the dumbing down of the news; but I don't think that is a fair answer. The news media filters the news to align with their own private agendas and biases. Journalists operate under the pretense of objectivity but most people would agree that "objectivity" is only a smoke screen to protect the journalist. I've come to prefer opinion journalism to straight news reporting since opinion and thus bias is already acknowledged. (at least I think it should be)
So to come full cicle in this blog post, why Laci Peterson? Why her particular tragedy? If her husband had been arrested two weeks earlier would anybody care, or would stories of death and destruction in Iraq been more important?
What is news?

Manned Space Flight!

A secretly built airplane appears to be poised to fulfill the dream of flying into space without the aid of booster rockets. You know what this means? Companies will be able to go bankrupt flying from New York to Jupiter, instead of just New York to Paris. Here's the story on MSBC.com. The most amazing aspect of the story is that the development of the plane was privately developed. It isn't often that private developers conduct successful secret large scale projects of this kind.

Dueling point's of View at Slate

Finally, a journalist has emerged to answer Mike Kinsley directly and he works for Slate! Imagine that, the best answer to Michael Kinsley's constant sniping at the Bush administration comes from one of his own employees. Yesterday, Michael Kinsley accused the Bush administration of favoritism in allocating contracts to rebuild Iraq. The very next day Christopher Hitchens shot back. I don't know what Christopher Hitchens' political persuasion is but he consistently defends conservative positions with a skill and ferocity that warms the heart of Republicans everywhere. I am just curious how long he'll last. If I understand how Slate works Christopher Hitchens will continue working there a long time. However, it would be surprising that anybody who defies their superior as directly as Hitchens does would last any length of time.

Back from Aggieland

I have decided that Texas A&M isn't such a bad place after all. I partied last night with several of Aggieland's finest students and I have to say that the social life there is much better than what I experienced at UTD. One thing though, Aggies drink like fish! Apparently there isn't anything to do in Bryan that doesn't involve imbibing huge quanities of alcohol.

Sudden Insight: Relativity. gravity, and bowling balls...

As a child, I had a strange fascination for relativity theory. I'd pore over encyclopedias for hours reading about gravity equaling curvature, space-time, and squinting at impenetrable equations. Even now, I am prone to protracted discussions about relativity, quantum physics, and the basis of all reality. Last night (this morning) I was engaged in a protracted conversation on the topic of the origin of reality, relativity, etc. when I started talking about gravity being equal to curvature. The metaphor I had eventually settled on in my mind was of a bowling ball sitting on a bed covered in 2 dimensional graph paper bed sheets. The bed sheets would curve underneath the bowling ball and objects on the bed sheet would naturally sink toward the bowling ball. I quickly realized that this metaphor was unsatisfactory. The objects did sink toward the bowling ball but only because of gravity and not any warping of the bed. If this example was held in outer space for instance, it would immediately lose its illustrative qualities.
I was about to go to bed when a better metaphor hit me. What if space-time was an elastic container that warped to restrain massive objects? I envisioned elastic graph paper stretched around large objects embedded in the plane of the paper. Smaller objects moving in the vicinity of the larger object would tend to draw close to the larger object because the larger object had compressed their space in the graph paper. Smaller objects tend to move toward larger objects because they have less room to move! Imagine that objects move only along the lines in graph paper, and that suddenly the graph paper developed a square that was swollen or distended, while the rest of the graph stayed roughly the same size. If you lived in the graph paper and defined your frame of reference from the graph paper you would not see the bending of your space but you would see objects tending closer to the center of the warped area. Looking at gravity this way also explains why gravity is diminished at distance from a mass. The warping is less severe and has less influence on movement. Since there are no visible lines for us to observe or an visible higher frame of reference we cannot percieve the bending and flexing of our space-time.