Monthly Archives: February 2006

Supersweet!

Bush, Float from their album Golden State.

Really, really, REALLY nice!

Bush
we back up to the waves
this is the truth of days
when i am with you
i feel a little brave

the madness and the wars
the circles that we run
confusion is in for
what we have become

Geeks around the world, unite!

Though it’s still February, March is rapidly approaching and there are two very special occasions in March that I think you should spend some time with. Both occur on a very auspicious day to geek-kind, March 14th. The cleverer lot of you will realize that this is International Pi Day! But the insanity doesn’t stop there. March 14th is also Albert Einstein’s Birthday! That’s like having a bleeding edge video card AND getting to use it too. Here’s an idea on how you can celebrate. Invite an irrational number of friends over, stand in a perfect circle and pontificate about a Unified Theory of the Universe, all the while chanting
“Newton was a simpleton!”…

Getting close now!

A week and a bit!

Then what? You might wonder.
Then Betty will be back in my life. The snow needs to melt, now! and then a week of rain to get rid of all the salt on the roads and then:

Betty
Betty, she’s hot, isn’t she 😉

Mmm, can’t wait much longer!

Hardware faliure!

end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 11047335
end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 11047335
end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 11047335
end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 11047335
end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 11047335
end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 11047335

times several thousand…

/dev/hda is one of the harddisks in my desktopmachine. I/O error means something is severely wrong. Spent most of yesterday trying to get backups before the bastard died completely, I think i succeeded. I have replaced the drive with a new 200 GB Maxtor series 10 and are creating a partitiontable right now. Then it is time to role the backup back on… Wish me luck!

Stand by me….

Thoughts on physics #3

Wigner’s Friend.

Wigner’s friend is a variation of the Schrödinger’s cat paradox in which a friend of the physicist Eugene Wigner is the first to look inside the vessel. The friend will find a live or dead cat. However, if Professor Wigner has both the vessel with the cat and the friend in the closed room, the state of the mind of the friend (happy if there is a live cat but sad if there is a dead cat) cannot be determined in Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics until the professor has looked into the room although the friend has already looked at the cat. These paradoxes (Schrödinger’s Cat and Wigner’s Friend) are intended to indicate the absurdity of the overstated roles of measurement and observation in Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Timetravel

This bit was spawned by a discussion about quantumphysics, how timetravel and Douglas Adams arrived at the scene is beyond me. But as always Douglas Adams had an answer for us, this is probably not it:
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

To resume:
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the history of catering.
It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is (wioll haven be) enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe.
This is, many would say, impossible.

In it, guests take (willan on-take) their places at table and eat (willan on-eat) sumptous meals while watching (willing watchen) the whole of creation explode around them.

This, many would say, is equally impossible.

You can arrive (mayan arrivan on-when) for any sitting you like without prior (late fore-when) reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were, when you return to your own time (you can have on-book haventa forewhen presooning returningwenta retrohome).

This is, many would not insist, absolutely impossible.

At the restaurant you can meet and dine with (mayan meetan con with dinan on when) a fascinating cross-section of the entire population of space and time.

This, it can be explained patiently, is also impossible.

You can visit it as many times as you like (mayan on-visit re-onvisiting… and so on – for further tense correction consult Dr. Streetmentioner’s book) and be sure of never meeting yourself, becauses of the embarrassment this usually causes.

This, even if the rest were true, which it isn’t, is patently impossible, say the doubters.

All you have to do is deposit one penny in a savings account in your own era, and when you arrive at the End of Time the operations of compound interest means that the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for.

This, many claim, is not merely impossible but clearly insane, which is why the advertising executives of the star system of Bastablon came up with this slogan: “If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?”

Here pussy-pussy-pussy

Thoughts on physics #2

Schrödingers Cat

A thought experiment introduced by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 to illustrate the paradox in quantum mechanics regarding the probability of finding, say, a subatomic particle at a specific point in space. According to Niels Bohr, the position of such a particle remains indeterminate until it has been observed. Schrödinger postulated a sealed vessel containing a live cat and a device triggered by a quantum event such as the radioactive decay of the nucleus. If the quantum event occurs, cyanide is released and the cat dies; if the event does not occur the cat lives. Schrödinger argued that Bohr’s interpretation of events in quantum mechanics means that the cat could only be said to be alive or dead when the vessel has been opened and the situation inside it has been observed. This paradox has been extensively discussed since its introduction with many proposals made to resolve it.