Reflecting on the S&L scandal of the past, the sub-prime scandal of the present, payday loans with 100% APR, the massive national credit card debt rate (and the horrendous interest rates they charge), the bankruptcy "reform" bill written by the credit card companies, all along with EASY CREDIT and YOU DESERVE IT NOW, I'm left realizing that we finally have an answer.

The question is: What will they do once they've stolen absolutely everything you have?

The answer is: Steal everything you'll ever have in the future.

is the love child
of lust for the infinite
this is why the Tetragrammaton
should not be spoken

roolz!

for which we have no physical evidence and inherently can have no physical evidence.

Reading this

sciencenews.org/articles/20070512/fob3.asp

I had an insight about quantum physics. More a personal and pedagogical insight than anything else, but I wish someone had explained it to me this way eons ago.

A quantum is an abstraction about a region of space-time - an abstraction focused on probability of interaction.

If you're already with me, you probably won't benefit by reading any further. I'm sure this is a bug Duh! for many people. They got it in junior high, high school, grad school, whatever, depending on their degree of precocity. I'm sure someone(s) will say to me "yeah, Minkowski wrote about that in 1908" or somesuch.

If you're not already with me, or are hanging on tenuously, it might be worth reading farther. I presume there's a narrowish slice of the population who might find this helpful. You have to be at least a little interested and a little knowledgeable, but not yet past the point I just got to.

For a long time I figured I would have to get a much better grasp of the mathematics to understand quantum physics any better. To a large degree, I'm sure that's still true (was it Feynman who said something like "if you thought you understood quantum physics the first two times, you were wrong"?). But at least this makes me more conceptually comfortable with the whole thing.

As I read the (old, familiar) statement "physicists say that each photon travels through both slits simultaneously and then interferes with itself on the other side" I visualized this diamond-shaped track in 3-space, something I had probably visualized many times before.

Something suddenly struck me. Not exactly the way I'm going to try to explain it, because this shares with talking-about-dreams that quality of distortion/definition through recall.

It went something like this: a particle is just an abstraction about a region of space-time. A wave is just an abstraction about a region of space-time. So is a quantum.

The particle and the wave are more intuitively and experientally familiar to us.

Intuitively, a particle is a small, dense object with definite mass and dimensions. If given a push, it goes from place A to place B over time T, producing a track through space-time.

A wave is more diffuse, but conceptually it has a definite magnitude at a given time and place and a direction of motion. The track of that motion through space-time has a series of magnitudes associated with it - electric and magnetic fields or sound pressure or wave height, etc.

These are just models of the things around us. Models that, for practical purposes, fit some things very well. These practical purposes focus on (what most call) our ordinary experiences.

But the quantum abstraction is equally pragmatic.

Modern physics, at the level of quantum effects, is focused on observable events and their probabalistic nature. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Schrödinger wave equation are, to me, the two outstanding signposts for this view.

At some level, it's not that there's some thing that goes through both slits and recombines with itself on the other side. That's just another model. What's pragmatic about this model is that it works in terms of making measurements through interactions and predicting their probability.

Considering the region of time-space that passes through both slits and recombines on the other side Just Works Better than the particle or wave abstraction. In this case, the wave abstraction works pretty well with the picture of photons as waves in an electromagnetic field. But it falls apart somewhat when it's electrons or whole atoms producing the interference fringes. That's when the quantum picture scores a pragmatic win.

It's not that Schrödinger's cat is in some superposed state of dead and alive, resolved by our observation. It's that the superposed state is a good, practical model in terms of observable events. You can derive results from reasoning and calculations about superposed states that you couldn't derive without them - or derive the results more easily or conveniently.

There may or may not be some clearly defined ultimate reality, something that Definitely Is and Clearly Happens at Definite Times and Places. Certainly, the idea is very reassuring.

Meanwhile, we use our senses and instruments - extensions of our senses - to make measurements, refine models and try out new models. Particles, waves and quanta are just some of those models.

Afterthoughts:

Thinking about time and space as a 4-dimensional continuum helps out this visualization - which is what brought Minkowski to mind. Maybe he really did write about this.

I'm not saying that this is how thinking about quanta originated or evolved. I'll leave that to those who study the ontology and epistemology of science. I'm just saying that, quantum mechanics being what it is now, this is a way that helps me think about it.

Yes, I realize that the phrase "The track of that motion through space-time" is, to some, not philosophically pure. Tough. You know what I was getting at. I was talking about intuitive and experiental models, not a static, non-causal pictures of space-time.

happens when the programmer chooses a data representation.

than I can ever imagine coming from the Bush administration. And he's given a large audience an opportunity to discover just how unreadable Chomsky's polemicism is.

interested in the free market when they're surrounded by no-bid contracts?

you could pick from any of the letters in UGLY.

From: here

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
4. Supremacy of the Military
5. Rampant Sexism
6. Controlled Mass Media
7. Obsession with National Security
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined
9. Corporate Power is Protected
10. Labor Power is Suppressed
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
14. Fraudulent Elections

Words out of shrub's own mouth:

Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so.

If court orders are so unnecessary (as shrub now tells us), why was he so insistent that he was getting them?

The question might be: how does one get things done?

I find my doubt severely tested every day.

Whatever good will had been bought by the FOSS fans in Sony's consumer electronics division (and the results of this query suggest those fans are somewhat numerous, influential or both) has been blown away by Sony BMG. Perhaps the electronics people would do well to rename themselves and divorce Sony BMG.

lately gives just an inkling of what would've happened had France joined the Coalition of the Willing.

One advantage of being out of step with the rest of the world is that I can always hear my own footsteps.

when salespeople, one and all (and their HTML surrogates), are no longer compelled to upsell relentlessly.

don't see how much social enterprise is encompassed by enlightened self-interest.

Fundamentalist Socialists are blind to how much capitalism offers in building a worker's paradise.

A quote for the day from Kurt Vonnegut:

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the Second World War and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?

howcome they've thrown around so many no-bid contracts over the past few years? Could it be 'cause they're more like neomercantilists than neoconservatives? (I guess I should save that question for a whole nother rant.)