It just might, says Scientific American:

The universe has no center and no edge, no special regions tucked in among the galaxies and light. No matter where you look, it’s the same—or so physicists thought. This cosmological principle—one of the foundations of the modern understanding of the universe—has come into question recently as astronomers find evidence, subtle but growing, of a special direction in space.

The first and most well-established data point comes from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the so-called afterglow of the big bang. As expected, the afterglow is not perfectly smooth—hot and cold spots speckle the sky. In recent years, however, scientists have discovered that these spots are not quite as randomly distributed as they first appeared—they align in a pattern that points out a special direction in space. Cosmologists have theatrically dubbed it the “axis of evil.”

This hasn’t yet been confirmed, and nobody knows what it might mean if it were. Still, it’s got cosmologists pretty excited, because if true, it will rewrite our understanding of the universe.

“So which direction does the universe point, then?” my son asked when I read him the item.

As if there were any doubt:

UPDATE: Clues now that scientists at CERN may have discovered the Higgs boson, a.k.a. the “God particle.” An announcement may be made Tuesday. What might this mean? Watch this. 

Or, if you don’t have time for the 11 min video, this from the National Post gets to the heart of it:

The boson was posited in 1964 by British physicist Peter Higgs as the agent that gave mass to matter in the wake of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, making possible the formation of stars and planets, and eventually the appearance of life.

But efforts since the mid-1980s to find the particle in the U.S. Tevatron collider and the LHC’s predecessor at CERN, the LEP, and prove Higgs correct by smashing particles together and creating mini Big Bangs, have until now failed.

The boson has been called the “capstone” of Albert Einstein’s universe of elementary particles and three fundamental forces that control the cosmos under the “Standard Model” finalized by physicists in the 1970s.

The Higgs particle was the missing linking brick in this architecture.

Its discovery, if eventually confirmed and especially if it is at the low mass levels where bloggers are saying ATLAS and CMS have found it, would open the way to what CERN calls the “New Physics” of super-symmetry and dark matter.

Some top scientists, such as Briton Stephen Hawking, have long voiced doubt that the boson exists and should be replaced in the Standard Model by something else.

But in an interview in the December edition of the British monthly Prospect, the 82-year-old Higgs – who has been tipped for a Nobel prize – said that “if you tried to modify the theory to take it out, the whole thing becomes nonsense.”

I cannot imagine wanting to see this in ten thousand lifetimes. I would rather strangle cats. I would rather be a strangled cat:

Warren Beatty’s weirdo daughter attacks Cher’s weirdo daughter.  Where would we be without feuds between the transgender children of Hollywood stars? Can’t they both lose?

Powerful piece of writing from BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin, describing how she learned she has breast cancer. Excerpt:

Another woman came in, and held my hand. Dr. Funk shot the biopsy gun in the air first so I wouldn’t be afraid of the sound. That’s when the shaking started and my heart started pounding.

I cried, but someone else was doing the crying, someone else was doing the shaking, someone else was lying there, and now the gun was diving in to someone else’s flesh to bring back rock samples from outer space for the lab to analyze.

The shaking didn’t stop. I tried to dial the people I loved on my iPhone with one hand while the assistant held down my other arm, pushing cotton into the place where the probe dove in for samples, where blood was now coming forth.

My fingers were cold and shaking, and I couldn’t hit the numbers on the screen. When I finally got through, someone else’s voice was coming out of my mouth, and it was taking forever for the stuttery radio transmissions to beam through space, from the cold planet I was lost on, way out here, far from home.

I remember telling my sister goodbye in February 2010, maybe a week after her cancer diagnosis. She looked like her normal self. It was hard to believe these things that were probably going to kill her were growing inside her body. The next time I saw her, two months had passed. She had had lots of radiation, and was on heavy chemotherapy. She looked horrible. Body badly bloated. Voice barely there. Breathing labored. It all came so fast. And she was never well again. But she was always, always loved. That’s not nothing.

Nothing new here for regular readers of this blog who remember our past discussion of Jonathan Haidt’s work, but still, a nice interview with Haidt on the Scientific American blog, re: his forthcoming book. Excerpt:

Now, Haidt is putting the finishing touches on his next big project, The Righteous Mind, which is due out in March 2012. He was motivated to write The Righteous Mind after Kerry lost the 2004 election: “I thought he did a terrible job of making moral appeals so I began thinking about how I could apply moral psychology to understand political divisions. I started studying the politics of culture and realized how liberals and conservatives lived in their own closed worlds.” Each of these worlds, as Haidt explains in the book, “provides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to attack by arguments from outsiders.” He describes them as “moral matrices,” and thinks that moral psychology can help him understand them.

To understand what constitutes these moral matrices Haidt teamed with Craig Joseph from the University of Chicago. Building on ideas from the anthropologist Richard Shweder (with whom they both had studied), they developed the idea that humans possess six universal moral modules, or moral “foundations,” that get built upon to varying degrees across culture and time. They are: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Sanctity/degradation, and Liberty/oppression. Haidt describes these six modules like a “tongue with six taste receptors.” “In this analogy,” he explains in the book, “the moral matrix of a culture is something like its cuisine: it’s a cultural construction, influenced by accidents of environment and history, but it’s not so flexible that anything goes. You can’t have a cuisine based on grass and tree bark, or even one based primarily on bitter tastes. Cuisines vary, but they all must please tongues equipped with the same five taste receptors. Moral matrices vary, but they all must please righteous minds equipped with the same six social receptors.”

Take Haidt’s test and see how your moral matrix is constructed at YourMorals.org. Can’t wait for this book!

Andrew Sullivan draws attention to polling showing that relatively few people answer affirmatively when asked if this statement reflects their own personal view: “My faith or religion is the only true path to salvation, liberation or paradise.” Of people in all the countries polled, the only people who poll over 50 percent agreement are Saudis and Indonesians — and in Saudi Arabia, a stunning 25 percent disagree. In the US, only 32 percent agree with this statement.

In truth, I couldn’t agree with this statement, as worded. I believe Orthodox Christianity is the fullest expression of the true path to salvation, liberation or paradise. But I don’t agree that only Orthodox Christians will find their way to salvation. My view is that God may save anyone, but that if anyone is saved, it is through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and through the mercy of God the Father, who, in his infinite wisdom and compassion, may choose to extend it to those who confessed Christ imperfectly, or who didn’t confess him at all. That, by the way, is the official teaching of the Catholic Church. It’s not the same thing as universalism, which holds that everyone will be saved, no matter what.

This question, also asked by the pollsters (see the pdf here), is better at drawing out these subtleties: “My faith or religion is the only source of ultimate truth, but those who do not share it may be saved, find liberation, or reach paradise.”  This comes closer to my belief, but still, the question is problematic. What do they mean by “ultimate truth”? I’m sure they don’t mean “complete truth,” because hey, what about science? I’m sure they’re getting at sources of metaphysical truth, but still, the question is not as precise as one wishes it were.

There is a third option on this poll: “My faith or religion prevents me from knowing with any certainty whether anyone will be saved, find liberation, or reach paradise.” Well, this is mostly true as well for me, and also for Catholics who adhere to Church teaching. We may know only a few of those in heaven; we canonize them as saints. But no Catholic or Orthodox believes that only canonized saints are in heaven. And we are not permitted to say that anyone in particular is in hell. We just don’t know for sure, and it’s presumptuous to say.

My overall point here is that this poll is not a reliable guide to what and how people believe, in terms of comparative religion, as it seems to be. I do think it’s generally accurate in its finding that Muslims worldwide are far more committed to the exclusivity of their faith than are Christians, and that Christianity is far less strong in Europe than in other regions. But this is surprising?

Boy, was this stupid:

 He could have bet a beer. Or maybe a steak dinner.

But during a heated dispute with Rick Perry during Saturday night’s debate in Des Moines, Iowa, Mitt Romney extended his right hand and asked the Texas governor if he’d wager $10,000 to settle a dispute over his healthcare record. The rich bet instantly provided Romney’s opponents with new ammunition for their charge that he’s out of touch with middle-class America.

“I’m just saying, you’re for individual mandates, my friend,” Perry said to Romney.

“You’ve raised that before, Rick, and you’re simply wrong,” Romney responded, extending his hand toward Perry. “Rick, I’ll tell you what: 10,000 bucks?”

Perry laughed it off: “I’m not in the betting business.”

It was an exchange that spanned less than a minute. But it’s one that likely won’t soon be forgotten.

Only $10,000? What about the keys to the Maybach?

Gingrich also got off a good line at Romney’s expense tonight:

“The only reason you didn’t become a career politician is because you lost to Ted Kennedy in 1994.”

UPDATE: A new piece in the NYT suggests that to smear Romney as an out-of-touch Richie Rich is especially unfair. Excerpt:

Soon after Mitt Romney handed out eye-popping bonuses to top performers at his private equity firm in the early 1990s, a young employee invited him to ride in his brand-new toy — a $90,000 Porsche 911 Carrera.

Mr. Romney was entranced by the sleek, supercharged vehicle: at the end of a spin around downtown Boston, he turned to the employee, Marc Wolpow, and marveled, “Boy, I really wish I could have one of these things.”

Mr. Wolpow was dumbfounded. “You could have 12 of them,” he recalled thinking to himself.

But Mr. Romney had insisted on driving an inexpensive, domestic stalwart that looked out of place in the company parking lot — a Chevrolet Caprice station wagon with red vinyl seats and a banged-up front end.

It was a stark sign of the tug of war, still evident in Mr. Romney’s life, between an instinctive, at times comical frugality, and an embrace of the lavish lifestyle that accompanied his swelling Wall Street fortune.

Mr. Romney, 64, has poured $52 million of his own money into campaigns for the Senate and the White House, but is obsessed with scoring cheap flights on the discount airline JetBlue.

He has acquired six-figure thoroughbred horses for his wife, Ann, yet plays golf with clubs from Kmart. And he has owned a series of multimillion-dollar homes, from a lakefront compound in New Hampshire to a beach house in California, but once rented a U-Haul to move his family’s belongings himself between two of the vacation retreats.

Friends, co-workers and relatives describe Mr. Romney, now seeking the Republican presidential nomination, as something of a paradox: a man exceedingly deft at and devoted to making money who has never become entirely comfortable with his own wealth.

I had a fascinating conversation this evening at an event. My interlocutor was N., who had left a Wall Street job as a trader to focus on family. N. is a serious Catholic, and told me that working on Wall Street was a constant challenge to one’s faith and to one’s sense of morality. I asked for an explanation. N. said that there was so much money (and therefore power) sloshing around the Street that it was very, very difficult to keep your head on straight, and not to lose perspective.

“It’s like a cult, being at the investment banks,” N. said. “You come there straight out of college, and from the beginning you’re rolling in money. The salaries are great, you get to stay in the best hotels when you travel, they take you out to the most amazing bars in Manhattan. One year they hired [A-list movie star/comedian] to perform at a private function for us.”

“It’s so amazing that before long, you don’t want to do anything to upset the status quo,” N. continued. N. said that the herd instinct takes over, and pretty soon everybody is starting to see their purpose in life, both professional and personally, as doing whatever it takes to preserve these privileges. N. dwelled on how shocking it was to observe how much emotions and group psychology — not objective analysis — drove decision-making. Going along to get along. Everybody was making money, N. said, which the cult of Wall Street believes is a sign that its devotees must be doing something right under heaven.

N. got out. And doesn’t miss it. But N. does worry a lot about where all this is headed, given personal experience revealed to N. that the psychology of those that work in Wall Street investment banks is so divorced from reality. That’s what I heard tonight at the party. Your mileage may vary.

That seems to be the confusing message of this Wall Street Journal editorial bashing the close relationship between the head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and Jon Corzine, given the CFTC’s oversight failure in the MF Global mess. Here’s how the editorial ends:

In classic Washington fashion, Mr. Gensler is nonetheless using his agency’s regulatory failure in MF Global to impose still more rules and argue for still more power. A better response would be to acknowledge that the political system has already entrusted too much power to regulators, who can never be all-knowing and all-seeing but are often vulnerable to political influence from executives or firms they know and like. Investor beware: Regulators cannot protect you.

OK, I get the point that regulators can be weak or compromised. But why does the failure of this regulator to do his job well mean that we should reduce regulation (which is the obvious implication of the Journal’s “better” response)? I don’t get it. Isn’t this like saying that a corrupt or incompetent police chief who let’s a crook rob a bank under his nose leads to the conclusion that we have too many laws and we’d be better off reducing the number of laws and cops?