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It was pretty disappointing to waste my once-in-almost-a-lifetime opportunity in Geneva on eating at the CERN café I'm glad I didn't miss too much.

We don't do a whole lot of 'science vacationing', though I take in science centers and botanical gardens whenever I can. In Vancouver, I take in the science center in the big Olympic golf ball. Last time I was there, there was a China exhibit with papermaking and a spouting bowl (I loved these so much, I ordered one from Acme Klein Bottle :) The observatory on Vancouver Island near Victoria has some fantastic little tours and a great visitor center, including a nearly-portable planetarium (seriously, it seats maybe 8 people) and some displays (I got a chuckle out of the Big Bang exhibit, which was shut down with an appropriate sign "Still Working The Bugs Out" :)

We did get some CERN postcards and send them off to people, and took pictures in front of all the used equipment anyways :)

Thanks for the kind offer of a tour! The probability of us going that way is small, and we're likely to interfere with ourselves *grin*, but if we do happen to be by Denmark in the next few years, we'll look you up, and if it's later, we'll try anyhow!

Kind regards,

-- Ritchie :)

It was pretty disappointing to waste my once-in-almost-a-lifetime opportunity in Geneva on eating at the CERN café I'm glad I didn't miss too much.

We don't do a whole lot of 'science vacationing', though I take in science centers and botanical gardens whenever I can. In Vancouver, I take in the science center in the big Olympic golf ball. Last time I was there, there was a China exhibit with papermaking and a spouting bowl (I loved these so much, I ordered one from Acme Klein Bottle :) The observatory on Vancouver Island near Victoria has some fantastic little tours and a great visitor center, including a nearly-portable planetarium (seriously, it seats maybe 8 people) and some displays (I got a chuckle out of the Big Bang exhibit, which was shut down with an appropriate sign "Still Working The Bugs Out" :)

We did get some CERN postcards and send them off to people, and took pictures in front of all the used equipment anyways :)

Thanks for the kind offer of a tour! The probability of us going that way is small, and we're likely to interfere with ourselves *grin*, but if we do happen to be by Denmark in the next few years, we'll look you up, and if it's later, we'll try anyhow!

Kind regards,

-- Ritchie :)

Well, when it comes to QM we're only taught (what else?) the Copenhagen interpretation - the rest aren't even mentioned, except maybe for some graduate courses which is really a shame.

I may not have all the nuances of the Copenhagen interpretation, but it always struck me as a "dead end" in the search for reality. Not that there necessarily is a reality "behind" QM, but even with Bell's nonlocality proof, strange things like the neorealists' pilot wave theory seem like they open up more avenues of investigation even if they do end up wrong or misguided. QM is too incredibly strong and counterintuitive to stop at 'just' using the probability equations.

Well, in my humble opinion, etc. :)

P.S. Drop by sometime.

We live in Canada, and actually won a trip to Switzerland this summer. We went to Geneva and rode the #9 down to CERN. Couldn't get a tour booked in under a year, never mind the few months we had, unfortunately, and when we got there, even the Microcosm exhibit was closed, so my attempts at getting to a scientific "mecca" were foiled (though I did eat in the cafe and had the Menu Proton special :)

There are so many things over there - it's a shame we're at such a distance. At least my fiancée-soon-to-be-wife, who's a high school science teacher, has a lot of Danish heritage - which might make a good excuse to visit. I trust you don't have to book campus tours or anything too far in advance? :)

We also picked up, some time ago, an odd little 'graphic novel' about Niels Bohr's life called Suspended In Language. I'd be surprised if they didn't sell it on campus - it was a mighty nifty book, something that belongs in a collection next to Gonicks' Cartoon History of the Universe :)

I'm pretty glad to hear of your experience. The Copenhagen institute has a mythical quality for those of us looking at the last 100 years of science. Niels cast a pretty big shadow. I'm glad that it's still pretty open and free.

I've been following cosmology for ages, and the current mainstream ideas seem like an exercise in being exotic for exoticness' sake. I've been singularly unsurprised at information coming back from Spitzer and the like that we're still finding normal galaxies 13.3 billion light years away. I've been reading some of the material from the 30's and 40's, and quite frankly, we haven't addressed their concerns very well in the intervening 65+ years. But I digress :)

Quantum Mechanics is pretty amazing, all things considered. No matter what weird experiments have been thrown at it, including Einstein's objections, it just works. It's freaky and awe-inspiring that the universe has an utterly "invincible" underpinning that isn't about actual waves or particles of matter or energy, but probability. Do your probability wave math, run the experiment, and watch the statistics pile up. I must admit, I still don't know how to absorb the fact that you can get individual electrons seemingly "interfering with themselves".

It's a little embarrassing that we really have no idea what quantum mechanics means. If Nick Herbert's summary is still valid, we have four, completely separate mathematical ways of looking at quantum mechanics and eight major camps of interpretation. All of the mathematical means (Feynman's sum-over-histories, Heisenberg's matrices, etc.) are utterly indistinguishable. It's an embarrassment of riches in the 'possible explanations' department.

Personally, though, I'll take the options that don't require some airy-fairy "consciousness" as the only observer that can 'collapse the wave function', making consciousness mystical instead of an extremely complicated but theoretically understandable biological process, and options that don't prevent further questioning (I don't want any "the theory is all there is" bits like with, ironically named considering the open atmosphere, the Copenhagen interpretation :).

Nick Herbert's book, albeit some 20 years old now, is still excellent. I just finished it recently, and reviewed it on my blog.

It's a sobering thought that so many 'realities' could describe what's going on in quantum mechanics.

The thing I like about the FreePascal crowd is that they don't go overboard adding shortcuts and special rules. I remember trying out GPC, and wondering if there was any hope of porting one of my frameworks to it, but it's practically Alice-in-Wonderland-esque in there. At least, my impression was that the ground was constantly shifting. Heck, you can use & and | instead of and and or.

I'm pleased also to hear that FreePascal is moving to Subversion - we've been using Subversion as a version control system for a while, and it's a very, very nice alternative to CVS.

I'm also glad that FreePascal has introduced interfaces. We've been forging a very nice foundational class library from interfaces. I have a few presentations put together for CDUG here in town, specifically for Delphi, but now relevant to FreePascal. (I wonder if the Generics trick will work in FP or not :)

Lazarus was still very, very rough around the edges last I checked. Perhaps after my wedding, I'll have time to poke my nose in there and at least help clean things up :)

-- Ritchie

Now that I've got my machine back up and running with a full fresh install of Fedora (too much fighting trying to upgrade from RH7.3 the source code way - yikes :), I am back to running my background SETI@Home and Folding@Home.

I've compiled the 2.4 Kernel targetting Athlon before, and it made a significant difference in speed to those relatively intensive tasks. I informally benchmarked it simply by noting how fast ./xsetiathome performed when you ran it with a custom kernel versus the i386 kernel (at the time, having to run NVidia's driver setup each time - just wasn't as happy linking against the custom kernel). Custom kernels, even ones where all you do is tell it which processor to -march against, are fast, and you can tell.

I think I'll be back to recompiling my own kernel so I can get me some speed again :)

Any brave souls tried to get the 2.6 kernel compiled and running under Fedora Core 1?

I remember the scores of Chicken Littles that came out of the woodwork when Anders got 'fished' from Borland. Regardless, under the hands of Chuck J and others, it still went along swimmingly.

It's actually pretty interesting the ties between some parts of Borland and Microsoft's .NET team. (I was at BorCon a couple of years back when Anders did a keynote speech, and did demonstrations of ASP.NET... using Delphi 7's .NET Preview Compiler to very good effect.) They've had to face a number of the same challenges. .NET actually has to approach the Windows API in the same manner as many decent class libraries have (glad to see that the .NET framework is miles away from the spaghetti vomitus of MFC, likely in part an Anders influence). Borland had to work around the idiosyncracies of the Windows rich-text APIs in making their TRichText control. Such experiences are valuable. In return, Borland gets some excellent heads-ups on the technology.

I've had a chance to use Delphi 8/for .NET, and I must say that Danny Thorpe, Corbin Dunn et al have done a marvellous job in making porting to .NET easy. Compared to porting to Kylix/CLX (which 'everyone wanted', but nobody would pay for - *laugh*), porting to .NET was a breeze. I even ported DUnit across while I was at it :)

As to missing generics, I, too, missed some sort of generics. I loved Ada's model for generics, loathed the way most C++ compilers handled templates (more specifically at the time, how they handled errors and tracing :), although I got good mileage out of them.

I have an implementation of Rossen Assenov's generics for Delphi (using a trick similar to that in C++ before the 2.1 standard) here on my web page. A few limitations (which you can get around if you're not averse to 2-layer-deep includes :), but works like an absolute charm, and it does still work in Delphi for .NET (though you will have to ensure you aren't using pointers in your list classes if you want to be managed-code compliant :).

I prefer Ada's treatment of generics for the way it makes the use of the generic explicit. To make an integer-based stack, you'd declare a new type based on the Stack generic with an Integer as a type.

I remember when C++ got its templates (IIRC, that was in the 2.0 specification); it took compiler developers a long time to integrate the features. Before that, we'd put together token-pasting (##) macros.

Trying to track down troubles in a C++ template used to be utterly atrocious; define-at-first-use (e.g. first time the compiler encounters Stack<int> per target file) combined with the way the compile/link actually generated the templates behind the scenes made for... to put it mildly... a cryptic experience in a very long error log, usually at link-time. *laugh* Based on some more recent MSVC error listings I've seen, I don't think it's gotten much better ;)

(P.S. Does anyone know whether IBM has removed all the unnecessary #pragmas from their 'STL' implementation? :)

I'm personally interested in generics in any given language for a few reasons:

• Less typing
• Less typecasting
• Changes to the algorithm occur in one spot
• Type-safety at compile-time

None of those reasons make or break using a language. I've survived with and without generics for years on end.

Java should do quite well by generics. They will be useful. C++ got along famously without them, but did better with them. Indeed, lack of them in a language is no indication that the language wouldn't be useful with them.

Delphi has no official generics, either, but just like C++'s old token-pasting, there are ways to do generics in Delphi, too.