Brilliant Explanation of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

I love skimming slashdot... For the cynical crowd that they are, they sure do have some members with their brain cells all pointing the same direction. 

O Palin, My Palin

Prior to the beginning of the Republican primaries, my wife and I made a bet that Sarah Palin would enter the race for the GOP presidential nomination. I was certain that she’d run, and my penalty for being wrong was that I had to write a heartfelt Ode To Sarah, expressing why the country would have been a better place if she had run, and deliver it without warning from a soap-box at some family function. In contrast to my long and illustrious tradition of welching on bets with my wife, I delivered the following perversion of Walt Whitman’s ‘O Captain, My Captain’, at our Memorial Day jamboree.

-----------------

Oh Palin! My Palin! Thy POTUS bid is gone;
     The country’s full of asses, and asses do it run.
     Our party votes that Mitney hack, because there’s no real choice,
     While greatness lies behind your locks, and locked up in your voice.

     But O votes! votes! votes!
     O yearning states of blue,
     The brothers Koch, that’s Dave and Chuck
     Would leap to fund you.

O Palin, My Palin, your country longs for thee!
     Articulate, you’d rep in step with rightousexuality.
     Our oil could not hide, nor guns be tucked away,
     And Russian vistas snapped from cameras on the clearest day.

     What ants! What lemmings!
     What insane pachyderms!
     They ride the fence like champs,
     but will not fence out foreign worms!

O Palin, My Palin, I can’t believe you passed!
     Our foreign policy has needed backbone in its mast!
     Obama and that Clinton fool are pansies in the field,
     I wish the world could see a rogue like you with nukes to wield!

     But Hope, sweet Hope,
     Thy faint alluring scent,
     The wish of men that once again,
     You’d run Vice President!








 …SARAH PALIN FOR VP 2012!!!

The Attack of the Metaphors

A old friend of mine used to chuckle about the observation that anything can be a metaphor for Life.  It’s true – take any situation or object that can be cast into positive and negative qualities, and *bang!* you have a metaphor for Life, because Life is also easily cast into positive and negative qualities.   For example, “Life is a movie.  Sometimes it’s Casablanca, sometimes it’s Howard the Duck.”  Obviously the pathway from the metaphor to its object can be more or less direct, but you get the picture.   This process has some very direct correlations to the concept of basis expansion in quantum mechanics, which I’ll save that for another post.  

I think this is the same process responsible for the sensation that the world is laughing at you when you have some dramatic cataclysm in your life.   For example, if you’ve ever had a bad break-up, you may have noticed that suddenly every damned song that plays in your vicinity is about love and pain.   Doesn’t matter how much you try to avoid it, these themes always come to find you.  Check out the movie Better Off Dead and you’ll see what I’m talking about.   I think this is because, when you’re feeling extreme emotion, your perceptions become polarized by that emotion, e.g. when you’re very sad, you resonate with (notice and empathize with) the happy or sad qualities inherent in everything you look at, and because (as a species) we’re so good at anthropomorphizing our surroundings, things that don’t normally register as having emotional content can take on those qualities.  (e.g. look at an electrical outlet and pretend it’s a human face.   do the same with the front grill of any car.)  From personal experience, this effect is self-reinforcing, until the emotions subside or an outside distraction reduces your tendency to view the world along those lines.   It’s a very difficult trench to break out of, but it seems to get shallower as you get farther away from the cause of the cataclysm.

I wish you the best of luck and strength, my friend – the road you’re stepping on has a bunch of potholes, but you’re a tough person, you have a ton of support, and you have the most beautiful children in the world (like every proud father).   I hope you discover that the hill is more gentle than you fear, and watch out for those metaphors – they aren’t really meant for you…

Python Documentation

I’ve recently been trying to reload the quantum mechanics that I learned during my stretch in the physics department at UT, and I ran across a rather cool python package called PyQuante, which contains a variety of useful tools for performing quantum chemistry calculations. It’s my first *significant* foray into python, and I have to say that I’m addicted.

The one huge drawback that I’ve found in dealing with python, though, is that even though there are a huge number of free packages out there for dealing with a wide range of complex tasks, their documentation universally *sucks* compared to similar offerings in other languages. This perception may be related to the fact that I’m a cheapskate and haven’t shelled out for a decent IDE, but the community *seems* to feel that using a commandline “help()” command (behaves similar to *nix ‘man’ feature) is enough to cut the butter. It ain’t. Typing anything besides the direct object of my query, particularly something that has to be syntactically correct in order to function properly, is a huge waste of my time, when compared to the online help systems offered by many other commercial compilers and their packages. Yeah, I’m talking about .NET. Yeah, I’m talking about Borland’s compilers and components. If I remember correctly, I can get it out of eclipse with a php plug-in. Cold Fusion, for all of its flaws, has a decent help system (compared to what I’ve encountered in python).

SO here’s the best solution I’ve found so far (on Win7x64):

- grab nssm so you don’t break a sweat on the next step

- run the PyDoc web server as a windows service. this will get you an html interface to your code library.

- then get a copy of NetGrabber 4.1. you’ll have to obtain a registered version in order to do the next step.

- point NetGrabber at your local web server (e.g. http://localhost:8000), and grab a coffee. note: make sure you drop the thread count down to 1 or 2 during the project setup – the pydoc web server choked hard when I set the thread count to 8.

- after about 20 minutes, NetGrabber will ask you if you want to create a CHM file, to which you answer ‘Yep’.

Open up your new CHM file, and you’ll see that you now have a nice *fast*, *searchable*, cross-linked snapshot of all documentation that your python packages have natively available.

Rock the house.

I should mention here that my copy of python actually came with a fairly extensive help file (in .chm format), to temper my bad-mouthing of python documentation. It does not cover the modules I’ve installed, however, like PyQuante, scipy, numpy, and mdp, which (as I’ve been discovering the hard way) contain many modules that reference one another.

What I really need is something that will resolve references within a source file and make *that* clickable back to the proper *.py module & object definition, though the answer to this might be in my earlier comment about forking out for a decent IDE. Perhaps a static code analyzer.

Cheers!

:-)

I pray too

It’s 4am, and my youngest daughter is fitful. No deep and long dreaming tonight, but I don’t mind. Somewhere between the stress of climbing a flight of stairs every hour in the middle of the night and the happiness of being the Daddy that makes the night feel safe again, there’s a balance that doesn’t seem to allow resentment to exist. I’ll just keep listening to the static hiss of the monitor, and do what I always do in these in-between spaces – continue the endless imaginary conversations I have with people I care about.

Right now, it’s my grandparents. I spent a lot of time with them as a kid, mostly after they’d moved to NY. Before that it was the week or two weeks here and there at their place in MD, but when they moved closer I ended up at their place a lot.

I’ve always felt like a personality mosaic – a jigsaw puzzle composed of the people I’ve spent time with and loved. There was a long stretch of time when I would go to my grandparents’ place after school instead of home, because my parents were working. I loved every minute of the time I spent there – even regular chores seemed fun, and there was always something better around the corner, like a tasty dinner or a quick trip up to the pond to catch a bass or bluegill. They were always to optimistic about me, always made it so clear that they loved me, all the time. They’d bark at me now and then, like a mother dog telling her pups to stop chewing on her feet, but I don’t have a single memory of feeling put down or shaking my metaphorical fist at some unfairness.

So it was a really Good Thing for me, and there are pieces of my soul that I trace directly back to that part of my life – my ability to tie a bowline knot with my eyes closed in under five seconds, my driving style (not everyone sees this as a good thing), my devotion to logical pictures of the World.

A large and important piece of this mosaic: I believe they taught me how to love my best friend – Amy. I think a lot of people have helped to teach me this, and continue to - it’s a very cyclical process – but I wouldn’t know what qualities to respect and emulate if I hadn’t had good role models, and my grandparents are that classic couple that moves easily between being affectionately close, to being co-conspirators, to being an arm for the other to lean upon, and back, in the deepest sense of the vows they took when they were married. They showed me this goal, and it’s one of many things I want to be when I grow up.

--

In my grandparents’ house, we would always pray together before meals, holding hands. I’ve never been a Christian and never prayed by myself, but I almost always participate in others’ prayers to some extent, out of respect for the positive hopes being expressed within them. So when I hear that others have prayed for me, I appreciate the love they’re showing by talking to the highest power they know on behalf of nobody in particular, just me.

It struck me this morning as I thought about my grandparents, wishing I could tell them all of this and infinitely more, wishing them even more strength and patience than they’ve already shown, that there isn’t much difference between what I’m wishing and what I would ask of God.

I guess I pray too.

Every day.

Cleaning House

I see that Providence, Rhode Island has been taking steps to carefully and thoughtfully weed out the teachers in their ranks that are lazy and ineffective. The ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ method is sure to produce excellent results, and improve the overall morale of the teaching staff in that region.

My Question, however, is, “Why stop there?”

If the gross incompetence that seems to lace the teaching profession is such a boil on the derriere of this country’s financial system, and it can be lanced with such ease, why not extend this solution to the remainder of the public sector? Surely there are other types of public servants that are perceived as dead weight on the country’s trek to economic recovery?!

How about policemen? This profession has been riddled with documented corruption and incompetence since before our country even existed. Fire ‘em all! Can’t come back ‘til the lie detector says you’re clean!!

How about sanitation workers, ‘cause heaven knows they could be working faster, better, and cheaper. Fire ‘em all! Let ‘em pass an Army obstacle course before they can come back.

Ooooh! I’ve got a GOOD one!!!

How about our politicians?

Seems to be all the rage right now.

The Hollow Argument

I think part of the problems with motivating students (and adolescents/children in general) is that there are a huge range of arguments that adults make, that the younger folk may actually have a valid counterargument for, but are unable to express it because it shows a lack of respect for the adult. An example of this happened today in school, as I was struggling to explain to a student why it was useful / important to complete Living Environment labs, and one of the immediate arguments that came to mind was that “You need it to graduate”. This is a circular argument, which kids can intuitively spot in a heartbeat –

Student: “Why, as an adult, do you feel that it’s important for me to take this class?”

Teacher: “Because you need it to graduate.”

Student: “Why do I need to graduate?”

Teacher: “Because the State mandates it.”

Student: “Why does the State mandate that I must graduate from high school?”

Teacher: “Because they feel that an education is the foundation necessary to become a functioning part of our society.”

Student: “How did they arrive at this conclusion?”

Teacher: “It was voted into Law by our government.”

Student: “So, if I may paraphrase, a group of adults representing a larger group of adults voted this mandate into Law because they felt that it was important for me to have this education before entering the adult world?”

Teacher: “Yes.”

Student: “And if I may simplify my prior statement, it’s because a group of adults felt that it was important?”

Teacher: “Yes.”

Student: “So you, an adult, are telling me that the reason it’s important for me to take this class, is because a group of adults felt that it was important to take this class?”

Teacher: “Oh.”

Now, most students would tend to keep it at a less detailed level:

Student: “Why, as an adult, do you feel that it’s important for me to take this class?”

Teacher: “Because you need it to graduate.”

Student: “That sounds like bullsh*t to me…”

--

Oh well. Gotta find some more authentic reasons…

Tangled Invitation

Just read a Wired article on the potential for forward-only time travel using quantum entanglement. Cool article, lays it out cleanly even for those that don't know a ton about quantum mechanics. Based on what I know of this field, and what I know about quantum entanglement, I totally buy this argument - I think it's completely reasonable, and almost obvious to those that happen to look in that direction.

Here's the quick idea - two particles (typically photons) can be created so that in some ways they act like one, until they are measured in a particular way, at which point one takes the 'positive' value, and one takes the 'negative' value. If they aren't both measured the same way, then they aren't guaranteed to be mirror images of one another, and so the act of measuring an entangled photon in Guam is actually impacting (instantly) the value of measuring its entangled sibling in Bermuda. This behavior is pretty well established in the scientific community, lots of experiments that confirm this behavior, lots of theoretical support for this behavior, etc. The thing that all of these experiments have in common, however, is that they separate the two photons by a certain amount of space. What the scientists in this article demonstrated was what happens if the particles are separated in time, or rather that it was actually possible to create a situation where two entangled particles were separated by time, not space. What you then end up with in that scenario is the ability to teleport quantum information from one end of that linkage to the other. (caveat - I'm only part of the way through the arxiv article)

So that got me to thinking (we are in Completely Unsupported Bullshit Land, btw) - if you can entangle the past to the future, it seems like you could reverse that effect: measure the future particle "first", which would cause the entanglement to collapse "before" the "older" measurement, which could then allow you to teleport a quantum state backwards in time.

There would be a catch - the entanglement has to be generated from the "older" point in time, and at that point you don't know what information might be sent back, so you'd have to generate the "carrier states", read them and reconstruct a quantum state on the *assumption* that one was teleported back from whatever the future target time was, and see what you get. Sort of like sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope into the future and seeing what was sent back.

Assuming you manage to engineer all of the kinks out of that process, including the reminder to send something back in time, 15 minutes from now (instead of grabbing that coffee you needed), then you've just created a way to directly evaluate the 'multiverse' theory of time evolution.

some scientists believe that every possibility of every decision actually takes place, and results in multiple universes in which each of those possibilities is played out. some believe that the universe is neatly buttoned up, and you are simply unable to do something that would violate the self-consistency of the decisions that have and will be made. This is hard to envision until you start thinking about time travel. Maybe just watching "Back To The Future" (parts 1-3) would give plenty of explanation: if you go backwards in time and convince your mother to be a nun, would you suddenly disappear, would you continue to exist as this alternate story played itself through without your birth, or would history somehow "heal" itself by finding some other means of causing your birth?

With this 'backwards in time' setup, you could measure that directly -when you send an invitation into the future, then the reception of information back from the future could alter that future. if the future disappears / changes sort of 'instantaneously' based on changes in the past, then that should tend to disrupt the ability to receive a coherent message back from that future. For example, I receive a string of numbers from the future that looks like a lottery number, I'm going to suddenly stop focusing on science and get my ass to the nearest gas station to try that sucker out. If it was legitimate, then I might be to hungover the next day to go to the lab and send that number back to myself. Heck, I might have taken a sudden trip to Bermuda. If the future is changing based on my having won the lottery, then it seems like it would be difficult to receive (at the very least) more information after that lottery number, since that was the information that would *cause* the future to change drastically, but possibly even getting *close* to the completion of that number would cause oscillation among the possible futures, some of which sent the message back to me, some of which did not. Sort of like talking to a multiple personality individual whose personality switches were triggered by the word "the". Pretty much any conversation with this person cause multiple switches, and really hamper their ability to participate in the conversation.

Bottom line, is that if we ever demonstrate this effect in reality, and if my conjecture regarding the ability to send information backwards is accurate, then the ability to receive a clean signal from the future would significantly weaken the multiverse theory, while the inability to receive a clean signal would support the multiverse theory.

quick and dirty network connectivity test

This is just a checklist for someone with basic computer management knowledge, but not a lot of experience debugging network connectivity issues. A failure in any of these tests probably should prompt a call to the tech admin, but this set of tests can provide useful information in figuring out exactly what the problem is. Comments and corrections welcome…

Assuming that your main server is at ip address 192.168.1.2

1. Make sure you have a valid ip address :

• Start a command prompt (cmd.exe)
• At the command prompt, type ipconfig <hit enter>

2. Start checking connectivity to certain locations by using the ping utility.

• Ping the server by typing ping 192.168.1.2 <hit enter>
• Ping google at ip address 8.8.8.8 by typing ping 8.8.8.8
• Ping google by name by typing ping www.google.com

3. Open google in a web browser

4. Open the email program and hit ‘send & receive’

Here’s what it means when these tests fail:

1. Ipconfig test fails: If you do not have a valid ip address, i.e. 192.168.1.xxx, where “xxx” is between 3 and 255, that means that you are not connected to the network. Either something is physically wrong with the connection between you and the network (bad network card or bad cable), or the DHCP server may be failing to respond to the request for an ip address (this is the more likely problem – cables and network cards don’t often go bad unless you drop something heavy on them :-) ).

2. Ping the server fails: If you do not have connectivity to the server, then check the server – if it’s running, try to ping the internet from the server – chances are that there’s something wrong with the *server*’s ability to connect to the network. At this point, I would probably consider rebooting the server.

3. Ping google by ip address fails: If you have a valid ip address and you can ping the server, but can’t ping google by ip address, then your internet connection is probably down – ISPs periodically go down, or there could be something wrong with the router. Either way, resolving this will probably involve a call to the ISP, or your tech admin.

4. Ping google by name fails: if you can ping google by ip address, but not by name, there is a problem with the DNS server – the program on the server responsible for translating between hostnames and ip addresses, (e.g. www.google.com -> 173.194.33.104). You can try to reboot the server, but resolving this will probably involve a call to your tech admin.

5. Open google in a web browser fails: if all tests up to this point work, and this one fails, then you have a software problem on the machine you’re testing, either a configuration issue or a virus.

6. Check email fails: if all tests up to this point work, and this one fails, then you either have a configuration issue in the mail program (something wrong in the account setup), or the mail server is down (which is more likely, if you haven’t touched the account setup recently).

[SOLVED] Windows 7 64-bit ATI Radeon XPress 200M Drivers

There are enough bullshit solutions out there that I feel a need to promote the one that actually worked.

 

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprohardware/thread/e0f6eb2b-6b81-423d-b52c-cbf1b1d30c2d

 

Bottom of the page,  there’s a link to download a rapidshare file:

 

http://rapidshare.com/files/385644526/200mAMD64.zip

 

download it, unzip it, open your device manager, right-click on the video driver, choose “update driver software”, “browse my computer for driver software”, find your unzipped folder with mr. shakeyplace’s driver goodness, hit “next”, and break out the bubbly. 

 

THANK YOU Mr. ShakeyPlace!!!

 

 

The vultures are circling our species.

I just finished reading this article about BPA in our diet, and found myself wondering if we have more dangerous predators today than we did as hunter-gatherers: as a wanderer, there were a variety of animals that would have gladly eaten us for dinner, but they would only take one or two at a time, so being a part of a larger group really added a level of safety, just from the mathematical standpoint. Now, being a part of a large group really just makes us a bigger, more attractive target to the corporate interests that want to farm our consumerism while steadily feeding us chemicals that probably kill us a little each day, but certainly help their profitability.

Do you hear it?

That, Mister Anderson, is the sound of inevitability.

The Yummy Chewy Center

This is a thought about the purpose of learning high-school physics, and an attempt to answer the question of "why do i need to learn this crap?"

Many elements of the physics curriculum can seem to be pointless, knowledge for its own sake, which is a terrible argument for high school students, or probably most people (when it's in a field that they *haven't* identified as their life's work). My feeling is that physics (and possibly some other disciplines) is like a tootsie roll pop. There a lot of vaguely interesting elements to be learned, and you keep going since you're already in it, and then all of a sudden you get to the yummy chewy center, and you remember that this was the reason you took the wrapper off the sucker in the first place.

In physics, the chewy center is the feeling of being a bad-ass. You look out upon the world and everything you can see is something you understand the dynamics of, how it moves, why it moves.

Lots of people can do this though, whether they've taken physics or not.

In physics, the chewy center is that knowledge that even though you may only have figured the height of that tree to the nearest 10 feet, you did it with nothing in your hands but air. You could tell someone roughly how much that bus weighs, and how many SUV's it would obliterate if it fails to brake properly.

Lots of people can do this, whether they've taken physics or not.

In physics, the chewy center is that knowledge that if you chose to pick up a calculator and a pencil, you change from a reasonably smart, observant person into a magician, who can look at the shadow of a tree at noon on a summer day and tell someone what their longitude and latitude is. You could be the person that tells the bus driver exactly how much space they need to leave in order to avoid obliterating those SUVs.

Nobody can do this, without learning the concepts we teach in physics.

So if you want to have a choice someday, whether to push that magician button or not, then strap on that pointy hat and grab your tootsie roll pop.

Adult vs. Child

I think one of the huge differences between a child and an adult is that a child does not automatically accept that even with good intentions, one can be repaid with pain and misunderstanding. Adults have learned this lesson, and don't charge into a situation with their good intentions pinned to their shiny shields.

Chinese Water Torture

I just had an interesting and vigorous discussion in my Intro to Education class about unintentional discrimination. It started out as a commentary on those seemingly harmless (to me) comments that teachers make that get their students fired up with a little 'girls versus boys' competitiveness, e.g. when a boy does something good, saying "ooh girls, don't let em get away with that!", and vice versa when a girl does something good, with special care taken to make sure that the comments are balanced within the context of a single class. That's a pretty vague description, but the point is that the instructor was making an effort to intentionally foster competition between the boys & girls of the class without endorsing either side.

My reaction was that there's nothing wrong with these types of comments as long as you keep a bead on whether it's bothering any of the students, and stop if you see some evidence of that. The girls in my class saw it differently - they felt that they'd prefer not to be placed in that kind of competitive situation, and that it felt like discrimination. The guys in the class and the girls in the class (it was a small class) lined up perfectly along those lines - guys felt that it was no big deal (but were willing to stop), girls felt that it was out of line.

I started out feeling fairly confident of my position, but as the discussion moved on, I was reminded more and more of some of my extremely rare experiences with racial discrimination, specifically the unintentional ones at the hands of my friends.


Some quick history on myself: I grew up in a rural upstate NY town, lived in the hills well outside that town, on a farm, in a relatively poor family. My parents were relatively poor, but this was somewhat by design for them as they struggled to embrace a self-subsistent lifestyle. My school was mid-sized for the area - about 100 students per grade, and I was one of maybe six black kids in the entire school district throughout my years there. I don't think I ever saw much real discrimination there, partly because I'm a fairly low-profile person, partly because the school was populated with really decent people, and partly because my parents taught me to let it slide off my back, so it basically went in one ear and out the other. There were situations that pinched me a little, though, and the stuff that I remember the most clearly through the years are the situations where it was my friends that were making me feel uncomfortable.

It was always clear to me that it wasn't intentional, but there it was, and the discomfort was worse for the fact that I knew I could never say anything to them about it, because they would either feel terrible, or they would conclude that I was hypersensitive and draw away from me slightly; neither of these options seemed like a win to me. One instance in particular was related to the one black girl that joined my grade briefly in high school. I never really became good friends with her, and my perception is that we both deliberately maintained a neutral attitude towards each other, to avoid the assumption that we were going to stick together just because we had the same skin tone. We had friends in common though, and I found that after a number of months I began hearing from a few of my friends, "You should go out with her!"

Up to that point, none of my friends had made any recommendations at all of that sort to me - I was (and still am) a relatively shy person when it comes to women, and I think some of the kids translated this into a suspicion that I was gay. But once they decided to break the ice, of course, my internal reaction was pretty negative - "What, you think the two black kids outta get together, eh?", "If she's so great, why don't you ask her out?!", and "There are plenty of hot girls in this school, why exactly are you only recommending this one to me??"

My public reaction was just to drop the issue without taking any action on it. In retrospect, I have mixed regrets about handling it that way - from what I heard, she was actually an extremely vibrant personality, kind of an edgy tomboy, probably exactly the kind of person I would have wanted to be close to. I also believe now that there are a variety of plausible non-racially related reasons why they may have brought her up to me, one of the simplest among them being that she may have asked them to [note: if you were there, you may recognize this as wishful thinking on my part]. I'll never know for sure.


So, after bringing these experiences back to mind, I thought about the similarities between the two events, i.e. the two distinct interpretations they each elicited from the majority participants versus the minority participants. Namely, the majority participants (the guys, and my friends) had pure intentions, and the negative interpretation of their actions wasn't even on their radar as an element of the situation. The minority participants (the girls, and myself) could acknowledge the possibility of pure intentions, but still couldn't put aside the negative feeling caused by the form of the comment.

How is someone supposed to sort out the correct way of behaving? Both views of the same event are absolutely valid, given the information that each party has at their disposal. People in these situations don't typically engage in a philosophical debate with themselves before they react, so there's little hope that they're going to think hard about the opposing viewpoint and moderate their reaction. It has to be an a priori understanding, something that pre-educates everyone about how to navigate this type of misunderstanding.


The glorious punchline: I'm not sure how to solve this problem. But I did think of analogy that feels very accurate, and may shed light on how to be sensitive to the stress of being in the minority. Picture a victim of Chinese Water Torture. Supposedly the art of driving a person insane, by randomly dripping water on the exact same spot of their strapped-down head. I've heard that, along with the intense psychological stress it creates, there is also a significant amount of real pain. So then imagine this victim escapes from their torturers, only to find themselves caught in someone's sprinkler system. Some of the drops will hit the tender spot on their head, and it will cause far more psychological and physical pain than a drop of water really should, but whether or not it makes sense to the innocent sprinkler, the pain is real.

Similarly, a person in an oppressed minority of one sort or another is randomly, but steadily poked in the exact same place over and over again (whether they shrug it off or not). After a while, it really becomes difficult to decipher the intentions of the one poking that spot. After a longer while, it becomes difficult to care what their intentions are. It's just irritating.

On the other hand, I'm a staunch believer of the idea that intentions must be taken into account, always. There are so many little feuds in the world that are constantly created out of thin air, simply because of a mistake or a misunderstanding, that honorable positive intentions have to be respected where they're seen, or they'll be stamped out through negative reinforcement. From this perspective, I've felt that it was my responsibility to look for reasons not to be offended, and to grow thick skin. I think it's possible to be supportive of the overall fight to end discrimination without finding each instance and taking it to court.

So homeowners, turn off your sprinklers when you see someone hurting in its shower. Tortured masses, recognize the scars that your victimization left you with, and plan ahead. Carry an umbrella.

Michael Kintner: Microsoft Word 2007 won't close correctly

Michael Kintner: Microsoft Word 2007 won't close correctly

I love elegant solutions to obscure problems. My wife's copy of Office 2007 suddenly started failing to open documents when clicked on, and hanging up on close - going into this loop of freezing, "finding a solution", and restarting itself. I had also seen this behavior with one of my clients, but hadn't run across this solution. Many man-hours down the drain on this one, but Michael's post is the cherry at the end of the tunnel, er, the light at the bottom of the bowl, er, yeah. Rock on with your bad self, Michael, and many thanks!!

Thoughts on healthcare

I'm currently being bombarded by pleas for grassroots participation in events whose goal is to cut through the misinformation cloud that's being perpetuated by those that wish to derail or at least entangle the health care reform effort. When is the health care reform legislation agenda going to stop shifting around, so I can contribute informed and specific support instead of blind support for this nebulous notion of "the system need reform, but on Tuesday it's going to have a public option, on Wednesday it's going to be a coop-based system, etc"? I strongly support a government-run single-payer system with regulated costs. I also support a branch of the health care system that is exempt from that regulation but is also not covered by the public insurance, to allow a space for continued innovation and profit. I envision something like this:

Company X develops a new technique for robotic surgery. The new machines that are the result of that research are manufactured and sold into the hospitals that chose not to opt into the public health system's patient pool. The procedures that use these machines are performed at those hospitals (at prices comparable to today's insanity) until they've developed a usage history and a few years of profit-taking. Then those machines are sold into the public health system hospitals at a fixed (regulated) profit margin with respect to the actual manufacturing costs. Rinse, repeat.

I would gladly pay increased tax dollars to make this happen.

I'm not against the concept of people with $$ being able to spend it on getting the best cutting-edge health care available. I am against a system where that's the only option; i.e. people without $$ are unable to get access to base-level health care and technology that's been around for years without being completely leveled financially.

Net Neutering Reality

today's will

Free Will vs. Fate. A couple problems i run into when i'm trying to figure this one out -- first, it's easy to get into clever verbal one-liner solutions that aren't meaningful, like "I think you have the free will to determine your fate" - what the hell does that really mean, and even if you figure that out, what does it add to the debate? I use this example because I think I said it once in a college discussion class, and felt then like I'd made a very sound point. c'est la me...

second, and more importantly, you run into problem eventually where you can't find the entry point for freedom of choice. sure i can move my arm like this, in some woohoo! unexpected direction, but where exactly did that exertion of free will express itself in the physics of all of the interactions that made it happen? I mean, I felt the exertion of will, but I don't believe that my will did everything - some of the processes (e.g. muscle contraction) seem to happen as a result of the exertion of will, not as an active/ongoing part of the exertion of will. I couldn't will my muscles to contract without triggering the neurons between my brain and my arm (as far as I know).

So that second problem is the meat of the issue. Something i thought of this morning was the idea of free will within boundaries - probably not a new concept, but with the (plausible to me) addition of this - those boundaries are eigenvalues of the current state of your body at any given moment. You are free to make any choice that you can imagine, but your imagination is limited to a specific group of possibilities for any situation.

This flows nicely with the 'consciousness is an emergent property' theory - we're made up of many smaller systems, stacked down to whatever level of granularity physics has comfortably theorized. The most successful theories on the smallest known systems are within the realm of quantum mechanics, which, among other things, postulates that these small systems have a distinct set of options for any situation in which they are forced to make a choice of some sort (and that choice has measurable effect). Those choices are the eigenvalues of a function representing the choice/measurement. If you assume that for each choice we make, that choice is a biological --> chemical --> physical process, then that process would include the 'uncertainty within a given range of choices' behavior, which may translate to a sense of free will on the macroscopic level.

Physics has already demonstrated to my satisfaction that it's possible to have a system that obeys these rules containing uncertainty, yet still get the 'classical-physics' predictability that we see on the macroscopic level and our intuition tells us must be a part of any accurate model of the world.

question for barak

you're a good person. you seem to be on the verge of landing in the center of the political melee in a time when pressure is incredibly high to succeed at everything you set your hand to. what can we as citizens do or not do to help you avoid the moral cynicism that seems to seep into the hearts of so many politicians, understanding that we are partially to blame for pushing them in that direction?

Michele Bachmann thinks she knows what time it is.

Censure Ms. Michele "McCarthy" Bachmann!!