Please. Do you have any idea what percentage of Harvard students get there because they were legacy admissions? It's far smaller than you seem to suggest. In reality, maybe 15% of students at Harvard are legacies (I'm guessing here based on my personal experience). And of those, perhaps 25%-35% are smart enough that they really deserve to be there anyway. So yes, there are a small number of folks being admitted these days because of who their parents are, not because of what they have done, but don't blow it out of proportion.
If anything, there were more athletes at Harvard who were there undeservedly (from an academic perspective) than there were legacies. So you could just as well say "college athletics are destroying the integrity of the academic program and making a feudalism out of a supposed meritocracy".
My advice: spend more time focusing on yourself and not so much time worrying about everybody else. For the record, nobody in my family had ever attended Harvard, or any Ivy League school for that matter, and I was the norm, not the exception during the late 90s. Things were very different 30-50 years ago, from everything I hear, so please don't judge today's students by the standard of people who were admitted 35 years ago. If anything, it would be far more accurate to say that the Ivy League of today is far more meritocratic than it ever was in the past.
Also remember that Larry Summers (new president of Harvard) came in and one of the first things he did was change the financial aid rules to make sure that those who legitimately couldn't afford the tuition at all would not have any residual contributions expected, and that the middle class students weren't getting so screwed over in financial aid as well. If anything, Harvard is now far more meritocratic than the vast majority of private colleges in this nation.
Jesus man, it's not an interview on string theory. This guy has done a lot of excellent work on the legal aspects of spyware, he's a fellow at the Berkman Center, and that's all more important than the fact that he apparently keeps trying to add more degrees before he's finished the last one.
Lord, some people get so nasty just because somebody goes to Harvard.
Actually, no you can't. Not in Greenwich. When you get off the highway in Greenwich, from the Merritt Parkway (Route 15) one of the more notable things is the presence of cops. Many cops. And if you look suspicious in any way, you can damn well better believe they will pull you over or follow you. I have been pulled over just off the Round Hill Road exit because I was making a U-turn and looked confused, and was pulled over twice when my mother was teaching me to drive stick shift on the streets of Greenwich.
And downtown Greenwich has more cops per square foot then any other smallish town in America. During the day _every intersection_ along Greenwich Ave (the main street of "downtown") has a cop at the corner directing traffic, harrassing jaywalkers and generally enforcing any laws they see fit, especially if you don't look like you belong (i.e. you aren't dressed like you are from Greenwich, in other words, you don't look rich).
So yes, by all means, try wandering around Greenwich with your Canon 8 megapixel camera snapping pictures of whatever you see fit. We'll see how long your little data collection quest lasts. You have to realize who the people who live in Greenwich are - they pay tens of millions of dollars for those houses because they don't want the hustle and bustle and hoi polloi wandering around that you get in NYC. They are paying for their privacy, and they don't want you getting up in their business.
You don't seem to understand what Greenwich is. Many of the CEOs and financial leaders of New York live in Greenwich. It's probably the wealthiest suburb of New York City.
In one high profile event two years ago, Eddie Lampert, the famous investor and private equity dealmaker (same guy who led the buyout of KMart this year and was in the news for that) was kidnapped and held for ransom (before being released by his incompetent kidnappers).
As for terrorist events per se, I don't know that it seems terribly likely. Though there are several corporate headquarters, and many hedge funds and financial groups based out of Greenwich as well. Anyway, while unlikely compared to something in NYC, it's definitely not as utterly ridiculous as you are making it sound.
Something tells me you've never really spent much meaningful time in New York. I've lived many places in this country so I feel qualified to comment. Before I moved to New York as a teenager, I was surrounded by morons everywhere I went. I had an intermittently unhappy childhood, thinking I was a worthless geek who would just never be popular.
Then my family moved to New York and I started going to a top notch private school here. Suddenly, I was surrounded by fairly bright people, many of whom didn't hate me, they were actually envious of me because I got better grades then they did. I became active in activities in high school, and started dating a decent number of girls. I learned the joy of public transportation when you are 15 years old - no dependence on your parents for "the car" like you have out in the burbs. Complete freedom - which admittedly I went a bit overboard with for a while.
New York is a fabulous place, with zillions of cultural opportunities that just don't exist outside of the city. Some of the brightest, hardest working people in the country live and work here. Also some real scumbags, which frankly makes it similar to every other place I've ever been. They are just often rich scumbags. It is expensive as hell, and it's not a good place to be if you're just ekeing out a living and don't have much money to burn. This is true. But to suggest that most of the people here are criminals or deserve to be in prison is just ignorant.
Now, I return you to the regularly scheduled programming of making fun of Texas because it's populated with dumb rednecks.
There are two possibilities. One is that there was intent to blind pilots and cause aircraft to crash, in which case 25 years sounds pretty light to me. Life imprisonment would be appropriate for attempted, premeditated mass murder.
The other possibility is that it was a stupid, stupid person who wasn't really thinking about the consequences of what they were doing at the time and there was no premeditated intent to cause a plane to crash. If that is the case, I think 25 years is a bit extreme.
In any case, hopefully a jury will figure out what the case was - as long as it doesn't go before a secret court with hearings closed to the public, then I'm happy.
The problem is when sales start suffering and things aren't going well on that end of the business, senior management will tell the project manager to stuff it or get fired, and that they have no choice and the customer absolutely can't be told that feature X has too high a time cost to make it into the next release.
If your project manager is completely constrained, then it's not his fault that he can't push back on poorly defined business requirements or ridiculously unreasonable timelines.
The solution is your sales team needs to buy-in to the idea of properly qualifying customers and setting expectations reasonably, or not setting expectations at all until project management has been brought into the sales process. The "lie, cheat, do anything to close the deal" technique often fucks small companies over leaving these disastrous projects in its wake. And yes, bad project management, poorly defined requirements or changing requirements and other factors can certainly ruin a project too.
That's great in theory, but if your sales and marketing people aren't willing to cooperate, it can be hard for the project manager who is sometimes dictated to what he can or cannot tell the customer ("we already sold them feature X without asking you, so no, you don't get to tell them that feature X adds two months to the deadline").
Actually it's even simpler than that. If you commit to buying a bunch of nVidia's shit, they will gladly let you exhibit at their booth. nVidia is a business, and if they think a company is going to spend a few million VC dollars placing large orders for graphics chips with them, they aren't going to refuse them some space alongside their other clients.
Of course, there's nothing about "partner" or any other special relationship beyond nVidia selling their chips to Infinium in the article (really a press release) that I read. They are trying to make themselves look legitimate though, but it's pretty pathetic that this is the best scheme they can come up with for doing that.
Re:A great idea that needs more press.
on
Time Sharing Cars
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· Score: 1
I dunno, my first car was a 5500 dollar 1991 Acura Integra. That thing was a trooper - other than when my roommate crashed it (twice) it never needed any real work done, put about 60,000 miles on it. Brakes had to be resurfaced and a rotor or two replaced, but that happens with every car you street park over a New England winter in Boston (seriously, it's cheaper to just pay for a parking spot, you try to cheap out on parking it always bites you in the ass). And timing belt replacement and other scheduled maintenance, that was it.
Seriously - if you want a used car, consider an Acura, they are usually remarkably reliable (except for my friend's old Legend he had in college - he got it off a salvage title for 2 grand, spent 3k fixing it up, and it ran like shit for a year then fell apart). As long as you make sure you know the history of the used car and trust that the previous owners were anal and cautious, there shouldn't be too much of a problem.
The problem is the word "free" and its ambiguity - when people hear that software is "free" the first thing they think of is "free of cost" because of the context that they usually pay money for software. Now, if you tell a CIO or IT manager that the software gives their business "freedom" from vendor lock-in, "freedom" to modify or optimize to their needs and "freedom" to innovate, they will respond much better.
Again, we come back to the terrible marketing sense of the FSF. Yes, we all (Slashdotters) know that the FSF means "Free" (with a capital F) as in the value of "Freedom", but to those who haven't been indoctrinated, the phraseology and context merely evoke "free stuff", which is the wrong idea for businesses and individuals.
Too bad "freedom software" is such a frigging mouthful.
Bell's Inequality proves that non-local hidden variable theories are impossible, if I remember correctly. It is very convincing. But it doesn't prove that non-local hidden variable theories are impossible.
I remember there are some ways of addressing questions about non-local effects from Advanced Q. Mech. in college, but it's been too long and I think I was too hung over at the time to remember the details.:)
The folks at Intel and AMD take quantum mechanics extremely seriously before they release new semiconductor devices; would you rather have it any other way?
You misunderstand - they take the calculations and implications of quantum mechanics seriously as do I. I just don't take quantum mechanics too seriously in the sense of providing _real_ answers to the hard questions. I think quantum mechanics is very much correct, I just don't think it is complete (nor do I necessarily think that a more complete theory is possible, I'm just saying that QM leaves many unanswered questions and epistemologically unsatisfactory answers).
Furthermore, my throw-out of QFT and QED was just to cover my ass since my knowledge of both is modest. I have seen how they work in basic calculations - as always with physics it was hard for me to believe that "this is it?" when I actually saw things at work. I don't believe that QED or QFT provide any more direct answers to the measurement problem itself, though QFT speaks somewhat to the related issue of non-locality. Though non-locality can I guess be treated mostly with the tools of traditional QM, viz. Bell's Inequality.
Anyway, it's been about 5 years since I've looked at any of this stuff, so please excuse my muddled thoughts and poor memory.
Right, in other words, things are still very bad in parts of the country, which I fully agree with. However, many of those parts of the country were effectively under warlord control before 2001 as well, and the rest was under Taliban control, which wasn't much better.
So moving away from the specific problems with a despotic warlord ruling over Herat and moving back to the leadership of the rest of this large nation, we come back to my original statement - that Afghanistan is _more_ democratic now than it was under the Taliban. Not that it's a shining beacon of national unity, strong central government, human rights or anything else.
Also - the claim that these warlords somehow magically appeared after 2001 is ludicrous - they have been operating in parts of the country with impunity for years. I have a friend who is on Human Rights Watch staff and I've confronted her about her organization's tendency to hyperbole in their releases before, and even she agrees that they sometimes push the boundaries of reasonableness with the things they say.
Oh yeah, and for a more formal statement of what I just said and an explanation of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (entirely unsatisfactory) and the many worlds hypothesis (nutty) and other joyously insane answers to the measurement problem, see the Measurement in QM FAQ.
Being aware of an electron does not make it change.
That's not quite true. The thing is quantum mechanics is probabilistic... so that electron is, in general, in some superposition state before you "become aware" of it (i.e. measure it). This means there is some chance it's in state A and some chance it's in state B when measured.
But such superposition states have actual physical consequences as well (probability interference, wave-like properties). Anyway, once you "become aware" of that electron, it is in some exact and certain state. Your measuring inherently changes the state.
This leads to insane arguments and discussions, since the electron (well, more likely a photon in this case, so let's call it such) is used to measure Buckingham Palace, then the photon interacts with your retina to create a measurement event then the pulses carry information to your brain.
So when did the "measurement event" really occur? When did the waveform collapse into a fixed state? Why does consciousness or awareness of quantum states seem to play a fundamental role in quantum mechanics? This must be an artifact of the mathematics behind Q. Mech. and not a real physical phenomena, right?
Unfortunately, as far as I know, there are no really good answers forthcoming from the physics community about these issues. Physicists don't really seem to agree nor do they really care what is meant by "measurement" from a philisophical point of view (e.g. "why do you ask this question, foolish student, can't you see the observation operator is applied to the quantum state, thereby collapsing the waveform?").
Don't take quantum mechanics too seriously - like everything else in physics, it's a great model for answering questions in a certain domain, but it says nothing about the answers to questions outside its domain. Advanced theories, like quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory have more to say about this topic, I'm sure, but likewise surely leave equally large gaps in knowledge.
Yes, we all take the official doctrine hook line and sinker. That's why about 49% of us worked so hard to get Bush out of office, and why in almost every one of the states with a well-educated populace he was defeated soundly.
I know, I know, you're really just pumping your blog and trolling as you always do Troed. You could at least acknowledge an "ends justifies the means" debate when one exist.
Clearly Afghanistan is far more democratic now then it was under the Taliban, this isn't even worth discussing - you can't compare Afghanistan with the democracy of a modern first world country, which will take decades to achieve there. And Iraq, of course, I will reserve judgement for, but it's hard to get less democratic than Saddam Hussein's regime (doesn't mean I think the invasion of Iraq was justified however).
Pretty insightful post for an AC. You are correct - I don't think it justifies flagrant insensitivity and meanness, but experiencing the full grief of the death and misery that afflicts the human race would of course destroy a person's psyche.
So we do our best - when a newsworthy event happens that is associated with mass death and destruction we should pause, give a moment of respect and sadness for the people affected and try to move on with our lives because we don't have much other choice. Yes, humans have evolved to be tribalist, to care first and foremost about those we are in some way connected to, those we live near, work with, talk to, and interact with and their loved ones. Let's not try to overly rationalize emotional experiences, they don't always fit into a neat logical framework.
But we could at least show a modicum of respect (and the vast majority of posts in this story do, it's just a few trolls and dickheads who are being actively nasty).
Yes, and I'm pretty sure Cirrus' planes use this system, which they purchase from this company. So it's the same thing - Cirrus is their largest customer, since relatively few people want to retrofit something like this onto an existing plane.
I don't see this being more practical in small planes than simply having individual passenger parachutes in small planes, and letting them bail.
The thing is that only works if you are at high enough altitude that you have time to put on the parachutes, get the door open, jump out, and have the parachute deploy.
This is much faster - you just pull a lever and it deploys, and thus is much more likely to help out in the more common real world scenarios where something goes wrong shortly after takeoff or before landing (obviously, you have to be high enough for this parachute to deploy, and it's hard to look up the stats right now as their server is toast).
To clarify - the assessments of sexuality of the cast are based on conversations with female friends and family members who watch SG-1 (strangely enough, my mother is a huge SG-1 fan, mostly because she thinks Richard Dean Anderson is a "hunk").
As a straight guy, I myself would make out with Amanda Tapping, though she is getting along in years a bit (note the makeup they use to cover up the lines on her face), and is currently pregnant. And, uh... I'm not into that sort of thing.
Agreed, Don Davis was a fabulous part of the show, most particularly because he served as a strong counterpoint to the tongue-in-cheek performances of Richard Dean Anderson and the altogether non-military SG-1 team. It kept the show grounded in its setting, and helped bridge the suspension of disbelief factor for me.
Don Davis didn't need to be the ultra-charismatic leading man, there was RDA's manly rogueishness, Christopher Judge channelling a ridiculously buff black version of Brent Spiner's Data, and Michael Shank's geeky-but-sexy factor.
Anyway, I too would like to see Don Davis come back in for a more regular role - send RDA off planet for the season on some special mission and bring back Davis.
Slashdot Mirror
Please. Do you have any idea what percentage of Harvard students get there because they were legacy admissions? It's far smaller than you seem to suggest. In reality, maybe 15% of students at Harvard are legacies (I'm guessing here based on my personal experience). And of those, perhaps 25%-35% are smart enough that they really deserve to be there anyway. So yes, there are a small number of folks being admitted these days because of who their parents are, not because of what they have done, but don't blow it out of proportion.
If anything, there were more athletes at Harvard who were there undeservedly (from an academic perspective) than there were legacies. So you could just as well say "college athletics are destroying the integrity of the academic program and making a feudalism out of a supposed meritocracy".
My advice: spend more time focusing on yourself and not so much time worrying about everybody else. For the record, nobody in my family had ever attended Harvard, or any Ivy League school for that matter, and I was the norm, not the exception during the late 90s. Things were very different 30-50 years ago, from everything I hear, so please don't judge today's students by the standard of people who were admitted 35 years ago. If anything, it would be far more accurate to say that the Ivy League of today is far more meritocratic than it ever was in the past.
Also remember that Larry Summers (new president of Harvard) came in and one of the first things he did was change the financial aid rules to make sure that those who legitimately couldn't afford the tuition at all would not have any residual contributions expected, and that the middle class students weren't getting so screwed over in financial aid as well. If anything, Harvard is now far more meritocratic than the vast majority of private colleges in this nation.
Jesus man, it's not an interview on string theory. This guy has done a lot of excellent work on the legal aspects of spyware, he's a fellow at the Berkman Center, and that's all more important than the fact that he apparently keeps trying to add more degrees before he's finished the last one.
Lord, some people get so nasty just because somebody goes to Harvard.
Actually, no you can't. Not in Greenwich. When you get off the highway in Greenwich, from the Merritt Parkway (Route 15) one of the more notable things is the presence of cops. Many cops. And if you look suspicious in any way, you can damn well better believe they will pull you over or follow you. I have been pulled over just off the Round Hill Road exit because I was making a U-turn and looked confused, and was pulled over twice when my mother was teaching me to drive stick shift on the streets of Greenwich.
And downtown Greenwich has more cops per square foot then any other smallish town in America. During the day _every intersection_ along Greenwich Ave (the main street of "downtown") has a cop at the corner directing traffic, harrassing jaywalkers and generally enforcing any laws they see fit, especially if you don't look like you belong (i.e. you aren't dressed like you are from Greenwich, in other words, you don't look rich).
So yes, by all means, try wandering around Greenwich with your Canon 8 megapixel camera snapping pictures of whatever you see fit. We'll see how long your little data collection quest lasts. You have to realize who the people who live in Greenwich are - they pay tens of millions of dollars for those houses because they don't want the hustle and bustle and hoi polloi wandering around that you get in NYC. They are paying for their privacy, and they don't want you getting up in their business.
You don't seem to understand what Greenwich is. Many of the CEOs and financial leaders of New York live in Greenwich. It's probably the wealthiest suburb of New York City.
In one high profile event two years ago, Eddie Lampert, the famous investor and private equity dealmaker (same guy who led the buyout of KMart this year and was in the news for that) was kidnapped and held for ransom (before being released by his incompetent kidnappers).
As for terrorist events per se, I don't know that it seems terribly likely. Though there are several corporate headquarters, and many hedge funds and financial groups based out of Greenwich as well. Anyway, while unlikely compared to something in NYC, it's definitely not as utterly ridiculous as you are making it sound.
Something tells me you've never really spent much meaningful time in New York. I've lived many places in this country so I feel qualified to comment. Before I moved to New York as a teenager, I was surrounded by morons everywhere I went. I had an intermittently unhappy childhood, thinking I was a worthless geek who would just never be popular.
Then my family moved to New York and I started going to a top notch private school here. Suddenly, I was surrounded by fairly bright people, many of whom didn't hate me, they were actually envious of me because I got better grades then they did. I became active in activities in high school, and started dating a decent number of girls. I learned the joy of public transportation when you are 15 years old - no dependence on your parents for "the car" like you have out in the burbs. Complete freedom - which admittedly I went a bit overboard with for a while.
New York is a fabulous place, with zillions of cultural opportunities that just don't exist outside of the city. Some of the brightest, hardest working people in the country live and work here. Also some real scumbags, which frankly makes it similar to every other place I've ever been. They are just often rich scumbags. It is expensive as hell, and it's not a good place to be if you're just ekeing out a living and don't have much money to burn. This is true. But to suggest that most of the people here are criminals or deserve to be in prison is just ignorant.
Now, I return you to the regularly scheduled programming of making fun of Texas because it's populated with dumb rednecks.
There are two possibilities. One is that there was intent to blind pilots and cause aircraft to crash, in which case 25 years sounds pretty light to me. Life imprisonment would be appropriate for attempted, premeditated mass murder.
The other possibility is that it was a stupid, stupid person who wasn't really thinking about the consequences of what they were doing at the time and there was no premeditated intent to cause a plane to crash. If that is the case, I think 25 years is a bit extreme.
In any case, hopefully a jury will figure out what the case was - as long as it doesn't go before a secret court with hearings closed to the public, then I'm happy.
The problem is when sales start suffering and things aren't going well on that end of the business, senior management will tell the project manager to stuff it or get fired, and that they have no choice and the customer absolutely can't be told that feature X has too high a time cost to make it into the next release.
If your project manager is completely constrained, then it's not his fault that he can't push back on poorly defined business requirements or ridiculously unreasonable timelines.
The solution is your sales team needs to buy-in to the idea of properly qualifying customers and setting expectations reasonably, or not setting expectations at all until project management has been brought into the sales process. The "lie, cheat, do anything to close the deal" technique often fucks small companies over leaving these disastrous projects in its wake. And yes, bad project management, poorly defined requirements or changing requirements and other factors can certainly ruin a project too.
That's great in theory, but if your sales and marketing people aren't willing to cooperate, it can be hard for the project manager who is sometimes dictated to what he can or cannot tell the customer ("we already sold them feature X without asking you, so no, you don't get to tell them that feature X adds two months to the deadline").
Actually it's even simpler than that. If you commit to buying a bunch of nVidia's shit, they will gladly let you exhibit at their booth. nVidia is a business, and if they think a company is going to spend a few million VC dollars placing large orders for graphics chips with them, they aren't going to refuse them some space alongside their other clients.
Of course, there's nothing about "partner" or any other special relationship beyond nVidia selling their chips to Infinium in the article (really a press release) that I read. They are trying to make themselves look legitimate though, but it's pretty pathetic that this is the best scheme they can come up with for doing that.
I dunno, my first car was a 5500 dollar 1991 Acura Integra. That thing was a trooper - other than when my roommate crashed it (twice) it never needed any real work done, put about 60,000 miles on it. Brakes had to be resurfaced and a rotor or two replaced, but that happens with every car you street park over a New England winter in Boston (seriously, it's cheaper to just pay for a parking spot, you try to cheap out on parking it always bites you in the ass). And timing belt replacement and other scheduled maintenance, that was it.
Seriously - if you want a used car, consider an Acura, they are usually remarkably reliable (except for my friend's old Legend he had in college - he got it off a salvage title for 2 grand, spent 3k fixing it up, and it ran like shit for a year then fell apart). As long as you make sure you know the history of the used car and trust that the previous owners were anal and cautious, there shouldn't be too much of a problem.
The problem is the word "free" and its ambiguity - when people hear that software is "free" the first thing they think of is "free of cost" because of the context that they usually pay money for software. Now, if you tell a CIO or IT manager that the software gives their business "freedom" from vendor lock-in, "freedom" to modify or optimize to their needs and "freedom" to innovate, they will respond much better.
Again, we come back to the terrible marketing sense of the FSF. Yes, we all (Slashdotters) know that the FSF means "Free" (with a capital F) as in the value of "Freedom", but to those who haven't been indoctrinated, the phraseology and context merely evoke "free stuff", which is the wrong idea for businesses and individuals.
Too bad "freedom software" is such a frigging mouthful.
Bell's Inequality proves that non-local hidden variable theories are impossible, if I remember correctly. It is very convincing. But it doesn't prove that non-local hidden variable theories are impossible.
:)
I remember there are some ways of addressing questions about non-local effects from Advanced Q. Mech. in college, but it's been too long and I think I was too hung over at the time to remember the details.
The folks at Intel and AMD take quantum mechanics extremely seriously before they release new semiconductor devices; would you rather have it any other way?
You misunderstand - they take the calculations and implications of quantum mechanics seriously as do I. I just don't take quantum mechanics too seriously in the sense of providing _real_ answers to the hard questions. I think quantum mechanics is very much correct, I just don't think it is complete (nor do I necessarily think that a more complete theory is possible, I'm just saying that QM leaves many unanswered questions and epistemologically unsatisfactory answers).
Furthermore, my throw-out of QFT and QED was just to cover my ass since my knowledge of both is modest. I have seen how they work in basic calculations - as always with physics it was hard for me to believe that "this is it?" when I actually saw things at work. I don't believe that QED or QFT provide any more direct answers to the measurement problem itself, though QFT speaks somewhat to the related issue of non-locality. Though non-locality can I guess be treated mostly with the tools of traditional QM, viz. Bell's Inequality.
Anyway, it's been about 5 years since I've looked at any of this stuff, so please excuse my muddled thoughts and poor memory.
Right, in other words, things are still very bad in parts of the country, which I fully agree with. However, many of those parts of the country were effectively under warlord control before 2001 as well, and the rest was under Taliban control, which wasn't much better.
So moving away from the specific problems with a despotic warlord ruling over Herat and moving back to the leadership of the rest of this large nation, we come back to my original statement - that Afghanistan is _more_ democratic now than it was under the Taliban. Not that it's a shining beacon of national unity, strong central government, human rights or anything else.
Also - the claim that these warlords somehow magically appeared after 2001 is ludicrous - they have been operating in parts of the country with impunity for years. I have a friend who is on Human Rights Watch staff and I've confronted her about her organization's tendency to hyperbole in their releases before, and even she agrees that they sometimes push the boundaries of reasonableness with the things they say.
Oh yeah, and for a more formal statement of what I just said and an explanation of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (entirely unsatisfactory) and the many worlds hypothesis (nutty) and other joyously insane answers to the measurement problem, see the Measurement in QM FAQ.
Being aware of an electron does not make it change.
That's not quite true. The thing is quantum mechanics is probabilistic... so that electron is, in general, in some superposition state before you "become aware" of it (i.e. measure it). This means there is some chance it's in state A and some chance it's in state B when measured.
But such superposition states have actual physical consequences as well (probability interference, wave-like properties). Anyway, once you "become aware" of that electron, it is in some exact and certain state. Your measuring inherently changes the state.
This leads to insane arguments and discussions, since the electron (well, more likely a photon in this case, so let's call it such) is used to measure Buckingham Palace, then the photon interacts with your retina to create a measurement event then the pulses carry information to your brain.
So when did the "measurement event" really occur? When did the waveform collapse into a fixed state? Why does consciousness or awareness of quantum states seem to play a fundamental role in quantum mechanics? This must be an artifact of the mathematics behind Q. Mech. and not a real physical phenomena, right?
Unfortunately, as far as I know, there are no really good answers forthcoming from the physics community about these issues. Physicists don't really seem to agree nor do they really care what is meant by "measurement" from a philisophical point of view (e.g. "why do you ask this question, foolish student, can't you see the observation operator is applied to the quantum state, thereby collapsing the waveform?").
Don't take quantum mechanics too seriously - like everything else in physics, it's a great model for answering questions in a certain domain, but it says nothing about the answers to questions outside its domain. Advanced theories, like quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory have more to say about this topic, I'm sure, but likewise surely leave equally large gaps in knowledge.
Yes, we all take the official doctrine hook line and sinker. That's why about 49% of us worked so hard to get Bush out of office, and why in almost every one of the states with a well-educated populace he was defeated soundly.
I know, I know, you're really just pumping your blog and trolling as you always do Troed. You could at least acknowledge an "ends justifies the means" debate when one exist.
Clearly Afghanistan is far more democratic now then it was under the Taliban, this isn't even worth discussing - you can't compare Afghanistan with the democracy of a modern first world country, which will take decades to achieve there. And Iraq, of course, I will reserve judgement for, but it's hard to get less democratic than Saddam Hussein's regime (doesn't mean I think the invasion of Iraq was justified however).
Pretty insightful post for an AC. You are correct - I don't think it justifies flagrant insensitivity and meanness, but experiencing the full grief of the death and misery that afflicts the human race would of course destroy a person's psyche.
So we do our best - when a newsworthy event happens that is associated with mass death and destruction we should pause, give a moment of respect and sadness for the people affected and try to move on with our lives because we don't have much other choice. Yes, humans have evolved to be tribalist, to care first and foremost about those we are in some way connected to, those we live near, work with, talk to, and interact with and their loved ones. Let's not try to overly rationalize emotional experiences, they don't always fit into a neat logical framework.
But we could at least show a modicum of respect (and the vast majority of posts in this story do, it's just a few trolls and dickheads who are being actively nasty).
Sorry, I guess it was too cerebral for the Slashdot audience. Next time I'll dispense with the subtlety for fear of being labelled a troll.
This is ridiculous moderation abuse. You don't have to think my joke is funny, but that doesn't mean it's a troll, for god's sake.
to pay your £699, you frock-wearing tea-drinkers.
Yes, and I'm pretty sure Cirrus' planes use this system, which they purchase from this company. So it's the same thing - Cirrus is their largest customer, since relatively few people want to retrofit something like this onto an existing plane.
I don't see this being more practical in small planes than simply having individual passenger parachutes in small planes, and letting them bail.
The thing is that only works if you are at high enough altitude that you have time to put on the parachutes, get the door open, jump out, and have the parachute deploy.
This is much faster - you just pull a lever and it deploys, and thus is much more likely to help out in the more common real world scenarios where something goes wrong shortly after takeoff or before landing (obviously, you have to be high enough for this parachute to deploy, and it's hard to look up the stats right now as their server is toast).
To clarify - the assessments of sexuality of the cast are based on conversations with female friends and family members who watch SG-1 (strangely enough, my mother is a huge SG-1 fan, mostly because she thinks Richard Dean Anderson is a "hunk").
As a straight guy, I myself would make out with Amanda Tapping, though she is getting along in years a bit (note the makeup they use to cover up the lines on her face), and is currently pregnant. And, uh... I'm not into that sort of thing.
Agreed, Don Davis was a fabulous part of the show, most particularly because he served as a strong counterpoint to the tongue-in-cheek performances of Richard Dean Anderson and the altogether non-military SG-1 team. It kept the show grounded in its setting, and helped bridge the suspension of disbelief factor for me.
Don Davis didn't need to be the ultra-charismatic leading man, there was RDA's manly rogueishness, Christopher Judge channelling a ridiculously buff black version of Brent Spiner's Data, and Michael Shank's geeky-but-sexy factor.
Anyway, I too would like to see Don Davis come back in for a more regular role - send RDA off planet for the season on some special mission and bring back Davis.