Highfalutin

Macroscopic decoherence - the idea that the known quantum laws that govern microscopic events, might simply govern at all levels without alteration - also known as "many-worlds" - was first proposed in a 1957 paper by Hugh Everett III. The paper was ignored. John Wheeler told Everett to see Niels Bohr. Bohr didn't take him seriously. Crushed, Everett left academic physics, invented the general use of Lagrange multipliers in optimization problems, and became a multimillionaire. It wasn't until 1970, when Bryce DeWitt (who coined the term "many-worlds") wrote an article for Physics Today, that the general field was first informed of Everett's ideas. Macroscopic decoherence has been gaining advocates ever since, and may now be the majority viewpoint (or not). But suppose that decoherence and macroscopic decoherence had been realized immediately following the discovery of entanglement, in the 1920s. And suppose that no one had proposed collapse theories until 1957. Would decoherence now... more... - Eric Logan from Bookmarklet

""This is the world where my good friend Ernest formulates his Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment, and in this world, the thought experiment goes: 'Hey, suppose we have a radioactive particle that enters a superposition of decaying and not decaying. Then the particle interacts with a sensor, and the sensor goes into a superposition of going off and not going off. The sensor interacts... more... - Jason Wehmhoener

GINSBERG: That's what Whitman is saying. LOFTON: It's gibberish. GINSBERG: That our own minds are so vast that we can wind up contradicting ourselves without having to freak out about it. It's very similar to what the poet John Keats said about negative capability. He said the quality of a very great poet like Shakespeare was his ability to contain opposite ideas in the mind without an... more... - Jason Wehmhoener

when the change came, it came subtly, like a thief in the night, taking away something precious and irreplaceable. “Well maybe Santa will bring you a deer rifle for Christmas,” I told Lawrence. “That is, if you behave and are a good boy. You don’t want to be on Santa’s naughty list.” A broad smile came over Lawrence’s 11-year-old freckled face. “Sure Dad,” he said, eyes twinkling. “So what are you smiling about,” I shot back. “Oh nothing, Dad. Nothing at all. Just wondering about the deer rifle.” And so it happened. My heartstrings twanged and my eyes misted up. Time rolls on. Then came the confessions. How the clues added up. Our various cover-up stories over the years suddenly were placed in the context of a bigger picture. Faith was shaken. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Faith. We have our eyes and ears. We use our senses from the moment we are born to suck in countless bits of information. Our young brains are vacuum cleaners. As we age, our developing brains filter this... more... - Eric Logan from Bookmarklet

"In order to make Facebook as open and connected as possible for everyone, one of our goals is to understand how different populations of users join and use the service. With that objective in mind, the Facebook Data team recently sought to answer the question, "How diverse are the ethnic backgrounds of the people using Facebook?" This is a tough question to answer because, unlike information such as gender or age, Facebook does not ask users to share their ethnicity or race on their profiles. In order to answer it, we focused on a single country with a large and diverse population—the United States. Comparing people's surnames on Facebook with data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, we are able to estimate the racial breakdown of Facebook users over the history of the site." - Itachi from Bookmarklet

"Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races." - Itachi from Bookmarklet

Certainly, one could never use knowledge of how drugs work differently in different genetic backgrounds to help cure disease, right? - Mr. Gunn

Kilometre-long pulses of light have been stored for over one second in a 0.1 mm cloud of ultracold atoms – before being revived and sent on their way. This latest demonstration of light storage using electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) is the first to break the second barrier using ultracold atoms and has the added bonus of preserving the quantum state of the incoming pulse. The physicists in the US who carried out the experiment say that the work could play a key role in quantum information technology. EIT is a phenomenon in which certain media that do not usually transmit light at a certain wavelength can be made transparent by applying light at a slightly different wavelength. Physicists first realized more than 20 years ago that EIT could be used to slow down a pulse of light so that it could effectively be "stored" in a medium. The first person to see EIT in an atom cloud was Stephen Harris at Stanford University in 1991, and he went on to slow light by a factor of 100... more... - Eric Logan from Bookmarklet

New speed of light 25 km per hour at absolute zero. - Eric Logan

Kinda makes you wonder if the speed of light is really the speed of light given how cold and cold atom filled space is. - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

"The company was promising quantum computing for the masses and, while it did demonstrate a machine that exhibited qubit-like behavior, the company never really silenced critics who believed the underpinnings of the machine were rather more binary in nature. Those disbelievers are surely shutting up now, with word hitting the street that Google is has signed on, building new image search algorithms that run on D-Wave's C4 Chimera chip." - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

"In the spirit of the season, I thought it would be fun to discuss a Christmas related paradox. The necktie paradox begins as follows (source). Two men are given neckties by their wives as Christmas presents. Over drinks they start arguing about who has the cheaper necktie. They decide to make a playful wager to settle the matter. They will talk to their wives to find out which necktie is more expensive. The man with the more expensive necktie will be the loser of the bet, and additionally, he has to hand it over his necktie to the other as a prize. How fair is this wager to either play?" - Itachi from Bookmarklet

"On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT) Project Honey Pot received its billionth email spam message. The message, a picture of which is displayed below, was a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phishing scam. The spam email was sent by a bot running on a compromised machine in India (122.167.68.1). The spamtrap address to which the message was sent was originally harvested on November 4, 2007 by a particularly nasty harvester (74.53.249.34) that is responsible for 53,022,293 other spam messages that have been received by Project Honey Pot." - Itachi from Bookmarklet

"Adonis (Greek Ἄδωνις, Adonis, from the Northwest Semitic 'A-D-N) is a figure of West Semitic origin, where he is a central cult figure in various mystery religions, who entered Greek mythology. He is closely related to the Egyptian Osiris, the Semitic Tammuz and Baal Hadad, the Etruscan Atunis and the Phrygian Attis, all of whom are deities of rebirth and vegetation.[1] His cult belonged to women: the cult of dying Adonis was fully-developed in the circle of young girls around Sappho on Lesbos, about 600 BCE, as a fragment of Sappho reveals" - Itachi from Bookmarklet

"Adonis is one of the most complex cult figures in classical times. He has had multiple roles, and there has been much scholarship over the centuries concerning his meaning and purpose in Greek religious beliefs. He is an annually-renewed, ever-youthful vegetation god, a life-death-rebirth deity whose nature is tied to the calendar. His name is often applied in modern times to handsome youths." - Itachi

h/t Cole: http://friendfeed.com/colejol... - Anthony Citrano

This story, taken with this: http://friendfeed.com/silas21... makes for grim reading. Hell in a handcart.... - WorldofHiglet

“After going through an extended period of highly ritualized consultations and deliberations, the president has arrived at a decision that never was much in doubt, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake. It was also, for the president, the easier option. It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.” - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

"Go ahead: Laugh if you want (though you’ll benefit your brain more if you smile), but in my professional opinion, yawning is one of the best-kept secrets in neuroscience. Even my colleagues who are researching meditation, relaxation, and stress reduction at other universities have overlooked this powerful neural-enhancing tool. However, yawning has been used for many decades in voice therapy as an effective means for reducing performance anxiety and hypertension in the throat." - Itachi from Bookmarklet

One official said the collider had done more in a few hours than it did in nine days of operations last year. The LHC is being used to smash together beams of protons in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe. Housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border, it is the world's largest machine. During the experiment, scientists will search for signs of the Higgs boson, a sub-atomic particle that is crucial to our current understanding of physics. Although it is predicted to exist, scientists have never found it. The machine was heavily damaged when an electrical fault caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel just nine days after it was first launched in September last year. During 14 months of repairs dozens of giant superconducting magnets that accelerate particles at the speed of light had to be replaced. Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), the LHC will create similar conditions to those which were present... more... - Eric Logan from Bookmarklet

Witnessing the launch of Immortality, Inc.? Going Back to Move Forward Anti-aging research is a rich and varied territory right now. Researchers are finally beginning to get a handle on the actual causes of aging. With this increased scientific understanding, some researchers now believe they are on the way to figuring out how to stop it, and—eventually—how to reverse it. University of California, Riverside biochemist Stephen Spindler reported on his research seeking caloric restriction mimetics. It is well established that restricting many mammal species to about two-thirds of what they would ordinarily eat extends their healthy lifespans. For example, calorie restricted mice live up to 50 percent longer, and experience less heart disease and cancer than those who eat as much as they want. Spindler is now screening a variety of compounds including pharmaceuticals to see if they mimic the effects of calorie restriction in mice. He presented early results that show that some compounds,... more... - Eric Logan from Bookmarklet

“What are the odds that intelligent, technically advanced aliens would look anything like the ones in films, with an emaciated torso and limbs, spindly fingers and a bulbous, bald head with large, almond-shaped eyes? What are the odds that they would even be humanoid? In a YouTube video, produced by Josh Timonen of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, I argue that the chances are close to zero...” - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

I thought the reptilians looked like George Bush and Dick Cheney at least until they shape shift ? - Eric Logan

There was a race of Ancient Humanoids in StarTrek that because of their seeding efforts throughout the universe most other organisms discovered to be humanoid as well (Cardassians, Romulans, Klingons, etc). I suspect though that the real reason was because of the difficulty in portraying other shaped lifeforms back then in TV with decent acting - Itachi

"Why do we find ourselves so close to the aftermath of this very strange event, this Big Bang, that has such low entropy? The answer is, we just don't know. The anthropic principle is just not enough to explain this. We really need to think deeply about what could have happened both at the Big Bang and even before the Big Bang. My favorite guess at the answer is that the reason why the universe started out at such a low entropy is the same reason that an egg starts out at low entropy. The classic example of entropy is that you can take an egg and make an omelette. You cannot take an omlette and turn it into an egg. That is because the entropy increases when you mix up the egg to make it into an omelette. Why did the egg start with such a low entropy in the first place? The answer is that it is not alone in the universe. The universe consists of more than just an egg. The egg came from a chicken. It was created by something that had a very low entropy that was part of a bigger system.... more... - Jason Wehmhoener from Bookmarklet

"I like to say that observational cosmology is the cheapest possible science to go into. Every time you put milk into your coffee and watch it mix and realize that you can't unmix that milk from your coffee, you are learning something profound about the Big Bang, about conditions in the very, very early universe. This is just a giant clue that the real universe has given to us to how... more... - Jason Wehmhoener

"The 70th anniversary of World War II is being commemorated around the world, but the contribution of one group of soldiers is almost universally ignored. How many now recall the role of more than one million African troops?" - Itachi from Bookmarklet

My grandfather actually served during WWII in Ethiopia (Abyssinia), but for the Italians under Mussolini since Somalia was still a colony of Italy then. - Itachi

Thanks for sharing. - Eivind

"Radiolab dedicates this hour to an exploration of numbers. Those pesky little things on the chalkboard. Where do they come from and what do they really do for us? We bring you stories on how they confuse us, connect us, and reveal secrets about us." - Itachi

Thanks for sharing. I've just started listening to RadioLab, and I think it's brilliant. Can't wait to hear this episode. - Joel Zehring

just watched. quite excellent. good review by ebert. - Ňicķ from Bookmarklet

"The belief that Twitter is more than just another communications platform continues to spread, kind of like swine flu for media geeks. And like the flu, it’s plunging victims into feverish hallucinations: “Twitter saved the Iranian protestors!” they cry, neglecting the fact that it, uh, didn’t. “Twitter made the Kogi Korean BBQ Taco Truck a sensation!” Yay, a fast-food truck makes money. “Twitter kept us updated about Balloon Boy in real time!”" - Itachi from Bookmarklet

Maxamad: what is the basis for those claims? what is the overall yearly uptime for twitter website or api, and how does this truly compare to other messaging platforms? what is wrong with its security? there is an HTTPS login https://twitter.com/ and OAuth is pretty reliable if implemented properly - Mike Chelen

Yar. - Itachi

"This is an open question: What is this fractal? It's a method for filling a 2D plane with circles in an orderly way - circles made of circles, all the way down. There are published examples of similar systems, like the Apollonian Gasket, the Kleinian Groups, Indra's Pearls, but I've never seen this particular arrangement before, and I've been looking for over ten years." - Ňicķ from Bookmarklet

"Is the glass half empty or half full?" - Itachi from Bookmarklet

As support for the findings on who socializes with whom, my favorite conversation from this past summer was overhearing a Black girl share with a White girl information she had just discovered: "BG -- You White? Really, Girl, you breakin' my heart." "WG -- Didjya think I was Hispanic or somethin'?" "BG -- Somethin', yeah, but not White. [draws word out with scorn][pauses, then shrugs] But that's okay. You're alright." - Mickey Schafer

"The Setup is one of my favourite websites. 'the setup is a bunch of nerdy interviews. what do people use to get the job done?' " - Itachi from Bookmarklet

ha! - .LAG liked that

"Hi. My name is Brandon Paton and I am 17 years old. I am the CEO and President of stealth mode startup College Credential, Inc. I have founded four successful internet startups (one of which was acquired), and currently serve on the board of advisors of a rapidly growing startup. And don’t forget I’m only 17. Sound impressive? Too bad, because most of what I just told you is not true." - Itachi from Bookmarklet

"It’s been two years since Kurt Vonnegut departed this world, and it’s hard not to feel a bit rudderless without him." - Ňicķ from Bookmarklet

lol .... "It was possibly a good thing that she never had children." - dkb