Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

UAW 2865 has put up a website, giving fake grades to the University administration, and claiming that “over 6,000 members of UAW 2865″ including “12,000 Teaching Assistants, Tutors and Readers” signed a document criticizing the administration.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Following is the list of first 10 names of signatories from the website (the rest are in the page source; I’ve commented it out so that you don’t have to scroll down 6000 lines)

Allison Wyper
Nanor Mankerian
Jonathan Cass
Rebecca Fraynt
Kathy Swift
Jordan Hanson
Rebecca Bonebrake
Janel Fink
Ashley Koda
Chien-Ting Chen

I challenge you to look up those names in the Calnet Directory. You won’t see them there. While all this proves is that in a sample of 10 names, none of them were UC Berkeley (graduate) students, a random checks of several more names reveal the same result.

I won’t lie like the despicable “leaders” of UAW 2865. I do see a couple names that I do recognize (one current GSI and another who has been a GSI before), so I do recognize that there are real signatories there. But if UAW 2865 is going to quote “6000″ as if those “6000″ were drawn from pool of “12000″ GSIs, etc., then they should have done due diligence to ensure those 6000 signers were actually current, teaching members of UAW 2865.

This kind of trickery is both an insult to the administration’s and GSIs intelligence. The fact is, UAW 2865 is intentionally botching up this contract negotiation in order to have an excuse to declare a strike.

GSIs of UC Berkeley—Unite! Stand up against these corrupt union leaders.

I’m using a brief lull this weekend (including today) to catch up on some reading I should have done weeks ago. Here’s an interesting passage (Griffiths, pg. 103):

A deuteron can be pulled apart, but only by pumping enough energy into the system to make up the difference. (If it puzzles you that a bound state of p and n should weigh less than the sum of its parts, the point is that the binding energy of the deuteron—which, like all internal energy, is reflected in its rest mass—is negative. Indeed, for any stable bound state the binding energy must be negative; if the composite particle weighs more than the sum of its constituents, it will spontaneously disintegrate.)

This is interesting in light of the last Physics 129 problem set, where we were trying to describe the neutron’s charge distribution by breaking up into a proton and a virtual meson (labeling it “virtual” on the basis that neutron didn’t have enough rest mass to account for proton and a meson, of any mass). But maybe it wasn’t a “virtual” meson after all. Perhaps the neutron can be considered a bound state of two real particles: a real proton and a real π^-.

I’ll have to go through some estimates to see if this makes any sense at all.