The question is "what maintains the orientation". What maintains it is simply the angular momentum conservation. If the total angular momentum has $J^2=j(j+1)\hbar^2$ for $j=1/2$ or $j=3/2$, it obviously can't change because the whole vector $\vec J$ (including its length) is conserved. An up-spin may not spontaneously change to a down-spin and there is no value in between.

The quantum mechanical problem for the bound state of quarks has, much like similar problems for atoms, some solutions with various values of the spin. Just like in atomic physics, the symmetry or antisymmetry of the orbital part of the wave function is correlated with the wave function for the spins, and therefore with the total spin, in various ways to guarantee that the overall wave function is antisymmetric. Some of these solutions have $j=1/2$, others have $j=3/2$. There are no other values of spins one may get by combining three $j=1/2$ spins.

What maintains quark spin alignments in baryons?
Many times when working on code, I search for the occurrences of variables with similar names. For examples, find all matches of var1 and var2 as:

/\&lt;var1\&gt;\|\&lt;var2\&gt;


Now I really like the Highlight Search feature of Vim, b/c once I do the search, all the matching instances pop out in yellow color.

Is there a way to assign different colors to different terms in the search string? That is, all matches of var1 be yellow and of var2 be green?
