Category: Out there

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Quantum Determinism

New Scientist: “Underneath the uncertainty of quantum mechanics could lie a deeper reality in which, shockingly, all our actions are predetermined.”

Early last month, a Nobel laureate physicist finished polishing up his theory that a deeper, deterministic reality underlies the apparent uncertainty of quantum mechanics.

So all of those mind-blowing paradoxes only look like paradoxes because our minds are too puny to find the order beneath the chaos, and the free will debate is up for grabs again. But remember, not all deterministic systems are predictable (weather, anyone?), and if we can’t predict, then we may as well be free. And even if we aren’t, I’m with Isaac Bashevis Singer: “We must believe in free will — we have no choice.”

How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?

Music: Junior Kimbrough :: I Cried Last Night

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Helium Hat Revisited

Helium10 Back in February, I was on the lookout for an original Mark V mixed gas hard hat diver’s helmet for Dad’s 70th birthday, but had been quickly priced out of the market. Eventually Dad decided he’d be OK with a replica, and we went for it. This weekend celebrated by sliding the helmet over his head, swinging open the porthole and making him blow out his candles from within the hat. He went straight to brother’s pool to christen it, a kid in a candy store.

That’s me in the hat above — more at Flickr.

Music: Talking Heads :: A Clean Break (Let’s Work)
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World Without Numbers

A pair of stories (reproduced from The Globe and Mail and BBC News) about researchers’ discovery in 2004 that members of the Amazonian Piraha tribe apparently lack capacity for any kind of math whatsoever — not even simple counting. A few relativistic number words – “one-ish” and “two-ish” describe many and few, but that’s it. They are, apparently, alone in the world in their lack of any kind of numerical system.

… the hunter-gatherers seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting. Not only that, but adult Piraha apparently can’t learn to count or understand the concept of numbers or numerals, even when they asked anthropologists to teach them and have been given basic math lessons for months at a time.

So can they not do numbers because their language doesn’t contain the concept, or do they not have number words because their brains don’t contain the concept?

“The question is, is there any case where not having words for something doesn’t allow you to think about it?” Prof. Gordon asked about the Piraha and the Whorfian thesis. “I think this is a case for just that.”

Music: Paul Bley :: Line Down
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Wooden Bikes

Woodenbike1 Surfacing one of my favorite highlights from the Maker Faire, woodenbikes.com sports a dozen or so bicycles with frames made from driftwood logs, 2x4s, hunks of plywood, and old patio furniture reconstituted as recumbents, unicycle variants, suspension units. The bicycle is a perfect low-tech hackable for beach bums and weekend welders, and for reasons I can’t put my finger, has got my cranks turning (pardon bad pun). Miles and I could have a gas on the Rear Captain Tandem. Looks like Dylan and Co. got to ride a few last weekend, though they weren’t allowing rides when M and I were there. Guess I’ll just have to MAKE one.

Music: Radiohead :: How To Disappear Completely
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Maker Faire 2006

Makerfaire2006 Headed to San Mateo for Make: Magazine’s “Maker Faire” (could strangle them for plopping an “e” on the end of the name) – a confab for hackers and geeks who like to… make stuff. Busting with energy and ideas. Robots of all stripes (of course), flame throwers, Segway hacks, cardboard fabs, neon tube bending, wooden bikes, drive actuator music box, earth-magnet LED tossing, live-circuit graffiti, BBQ grill pool heater, steam-bots, mechanical theremin, painting bots, The Woz playing Segway polo, collaborative sound jams… an incredible day, and Miles didn’t want to leave.

Since my fave image publishing app Image Rodeo seems to have ceased development, decided to try a couple of experiments.

First whack at using Apple’s iWeb to extract sets directly to a non-.Mac gallery. Overall, pretty cool for 1.0, but iWeb doesn’t preserve iPhoto comments as captions (how lame is that?) and forces you to use the big popup slideshow viewer rather than putting each image onto its own page. It also does some URLs-with-spaces stuff that I hated, and had to modify after the fact. Limiting overall, but the built-in template collection is slick.

Next tried Frasier Spiers’ excellent Flickr Export plugin to poot directly from iPhoto to Flickr. Correctly extracts caption data, and gives you all that rich, chocolatey tagging goodness, but without the fancy templates, of course. I’m OK with that. Flickr’s got it all figured out, and as long as there’s a strong bridge from local metadata to remote, I’m buzzing.

Been buzzing with “make” energy all day.

Music: Tom Ze :: Xiquexique

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Trading Up

A Montreal blogger is “living on magic,” trying to trade up from a red paper clip to a house. His trades thus far are almost surreal:

  • Paper clip for a fish-shaped pen
  • Fish-shaped pen for a clay doorknob with a funny face on it
  • Clay doorknob for a camping stove
  • Stove for a generator
  • Generator for an “instant party”
  • Instant party for a snowmobile
  • Snowmobile for an all-expenses-paid trip to Yahk, British Columbia
  • Yahk trip for a panel van
  • Van for a recording contract
  • Recording contract for the year of free rent in Phoenix

We should all live on such magic.

Music: The Roches :: Mr. Sellack
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Pet Food Healthier

It’s official, sort of: According to one study, pet food is healthier than many fast foods.

Nutrition experts who compared 30 human meals with 15 pet foods discovered that Gourmet Gold cat food, with 2.9 grams of fat per 100 grams, was eight times less fatty than pieces of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) which had 23.2 grams of fat per 100 grams and 1.9 grams of salt.

Scientist John Searle, from the Global food-testing lab in Burton upon Trent, says ““It would not do a human any harm to eat this cat and dog food. It would be categorised in the green or amber levels. But some convenience foods would fall in the red or unhealthy category.”

Music: The Roches :: Damned Old Dog
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King of the Mondegreens

Now that The Archive has been collecting user votes for a few months, I’ve created a Funniest lyrics page, showing aggregate vote tallies for the top 250 lyrics. It’s been interesting watching vote counts go up and down, as most votes seem to cancel each other out. 5,000 page views may result in a net positive of just 50 or so “Funny” votes (I see this phenomenon with the submissions backlog as well). Unsurprisingly, the collective consciousness considers the bawdiest mishearances the funniest. Which is a shame, since it pushes brilliant mishearances like Clown control to Mao Tse Tung toward the bottom of the list. But that’s democracy. For ya.

Music: Half Man Half Biscuit :: On Passing Lilac Urine