Two out of ten isn’t that bad, right?

Yesterday was Blasphemy Rights Day. A day intended primarily to raise awareness of the importance of freedom of expression, especially of opinions which are contrary to religious views. After all, why should I, a non-believer, be beholden to another’s self-imposed rules? With this thought I decided to see how well I would measure up to some of those rules. Rather than messing about with about petty things like eating bacon or wearing clothes of more than one fabric, I decided to opt for the ten commandments. Surely everyone lives their life pretty much adhering to those, right? Well, it turns out I didn’t do so well.

Which God particle is it?

Last week researchers at CERN announced that the have observed a new particle which is consistent with the theory of the Higgs boson. Confirmation of the existence of this particle will explain why other particles have mass (see here for a nice explanation). Since it helps to explain a fundamental property of matter, the Higgs boson is occasionally referred to as the “God particle” by those outside those scientific community. But, the question which the teams at CERN haven’t answered is which God?