Eideard

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

About 1,000 National Guard soldiers will report for duty Saturday in Puerto Rico, activated by the governor this week to help fight a drug-fueled crime tsunami that has flooded the Caribbean island.

The military personnel will repair police cruisers and join local authorities on patrols in the most crime-ridden areas of Puerto Rico, mainly in poor parts of the commonwealth’s largest cities. One soldier will accompany a police officer on each patrol, said the National Guard chief, Maj. Gen. Antonio Vicens.

“The problem that exists now is that the police are short of personnel,” Vicens said. “What we are going to do solely is to help them. First, we are going to help them with mechanics, provide them with more than 100 mechanics so that their fleet of patrol cars can go out on the street. Once we have that, we are going to have joint preventive patrols.

“You won’t see military vehicles on the street. What you’ll see are police patrols on the street…”

Gov. Luis Fortuno announced the call-up in his annual state of Puerto Rico speech Monday night, saying the help is needed until more officers can be trained. He did not set a timetable.

In a separate development, Fortuno announced Tuesday that U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodriguez Velez had reached an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department and the Puerto Rican Police Department for the federal agency to have jurisdiction over a series of major crimes. Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States and more stringent federal U.S. laws can apply…

Rodriguez said the agreement will streamline the prosecution of cases and allow federal agents immediate access to some crime scenes.

“We feel very strongly about fighting crime,” she said Thursday. “It’s much better to fight crime together. This is an additional crime-fighting measure.”

There certainly seems to be enough crime to fight, eh?

Maccone claims glass can unbreak – for example

Imagine if a cold cup of coffee spontaneously heated up as you watched. Or a cracked pane of glass suddenly un-broke. According to physicist Lorenzo Maccone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you see things like this all the time – you just don’t remember.

In a paper published last week in Physical Review Letters, he attempts to provide a solution to what has been called the mystery of “the arrow-of-time”.

Briefly, the problem is that while our laws of physics are all symmetrical or “time-reversal invariant” – they apply equally well if time runs forwards or backwards – most of the everyday phenomena we observe, like the cooling of hot coffee, are not. They never seem to happen in reverse…

So why will your coffee spontaneously cool down, but not heat up?

Maccone’s solution is to suggest that in fact entropy-decreasing events occur all the time – so there is no asymmetry and no associated mystery about the arrow of time.

He argues that quantum mechanics dictates that if anyone does observe an entropy-decreasing event, their memories of the event “will have been erased by necessity“.

Maccone doesn’t mean that your memories will never form in the first place. “What I’m pointing out is that memories are formed and then are subsequently erased,” he tells me.

When you observe any system, according to Maccone, you enter into a “quantum entanglement” with it. That is, you and the system are entangled and cannot properly be described separately.

The entanglement, Maccone says, is between your memory and the system. When you disentangle, “the disentangling operation will erase this entanglement, namely the observer’s memory”. His paper derives this conclusion mathematically.

Smacks of philosophic Idealism to me. Mind over matter. Or mind over matter over mind over matter.

In any case, accounting for physical processes with non-material devices.