Category: FWIW

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Schrödinger’s Cat And Public Policy

Schrödinger’s cat is a famous thought experiment summed up this way,

A cat is placed in a box, together with a radioactive atom. If the atom decays, and the geiger-counter detects an alpha particle, the hammer hits a flask of prussic acid (HCN), killing the cat. The paradox lies in the clever coupling of quantum and classical domains. Before the observer opens the box, the cat’s fate is tied to the wave function of the atom, which is itself in a superposition of decayed and undecayed states. Thus, said Schroedinger, the cat must itself be in a superposition of dead and alive states before the observer opens the box, “observes” the cat, and “collapses” it’s wave function.

Of course, the problem with thought experiments like this when used to analogize scientific issues is obvious. Let me pop the bubble around this one: how long is the cat in a “superposition of dead and alive states” while closed in this sealed box?

Just long enough for its air to run out so that it suffocates.

Geniuses just don’t seem to think these things out. Einstein discussed Schrödinger’s hypothetical cat with the guy for at least 15 years without ever noting this simple problem with the thought experiment, as far as I can tell. That’s just one of many reasons why I don’t trust the smart people in government to decide what’s best for me. They just don’t seem to look at (or care about) any of the options outside their own paradigm.

Besides, they might just be the kind of person who doesn’t like cats and will put ’em in boxes to suffocate to death.

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Christian Worship Music: An Aside

While I was reading, Thoughts on Worship Music, from the resources at Christ Church, Moscow Idaho, I thought about the time a pastor objected to a particular song on the basis that it was “melancholy”. Now, this was either an idiosyncratic reaction to the song itself, which was an upbeat, joyous expression of personal religious experience or a highly unusual use of the word, “melancholy”. Since he went on to elaborate that it was a “downer” I believe it was the former, since the common usage of “melancholy” indicates

“–a gloomy state of mind, esp. when habitual or prolonged; depression.”

or when used as an adjective, as he used it,

“-causing melancholy or sadness; saddening: a melancholy occasion.”

NO ONE (and I mean a BIG zero with the rim kicked off) else I have asked about this song has EVER agreed that it, is “saddening”, gloomy or depressing.

That leaves a much, much less common usage of the word to mean,

“-soberly thoughtful; pensive.”

Ah, perhaps he did mean it in this manner and objected because it led people to be thoughtful, contemplative. Knowing both his sermonizing and his temperament, it’d not surprise me that he’d not want people actually THINKING about what was going on…

*heh*

Back to more of the thoughtful (and thought-povoking) articles at Christ Church.

Continue reading “Christian Worship Music: An Aside”

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FWIW–not suchabigdeal

Folks over at the Win7 Forums are making a big deal out of the Windows Experience Index. My Win7 Pro box that’s cobbled together from a base of a 3-year-old HP Media Center PC is a kinda low-middle-of-the-road PC. Not so much a powerhouse (although by changing out the memory and primary hard drive, it could be a lot hotter), but Good Enough for most purposes, including running several VMs on top of the host Win7 OS.

FWIW,

I don’t know what the deal is with the Aero score. 1GB of discrete video RAM on the nVidia vidcard; Aero never bobbles or hesitates; smooth as silk. Something arcane I don’t care about. Son&Heir’s monster Asus gaming notebook scores higher on gaming, memory and hard drive marks but about the same on Aero scoring, so I’m not at all sure that the Aero score matters at all to my own experience.

Especially since I do much of my computing in Linux Mint in a VM. *heh*

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More Kind Than Deserved

Dennis Prager, in excessively kind and gentle fashion, takes Charles Johnson, of Little Green Nutballs (which I will not link) to the woodshed (kindly, gently) with, An Open Letter to Charles Johnson.

For those of y’all who may have missed the blogospheric kerfuffle, Charles Johnson once ran Little Green Footballs (still not linking it), which, once upon a time, long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, used to be a place where he fought against the evils he today defends. No, not just defends; virulently, slanderously–in many folks’ opinions–attacks those with whom he once allied himself.

Prager reiterates Johnson’s list of “justifications” for his switch and rebuts them all. Here’s #9, a typical example,

9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.). [Johnson]

I saw Pamela Geller’s site (The New York Times Magazine article about you cited it — Atlas Shrugs — and mentioned nothing remotely approaching your charges against her or her site) and I’ve interviewed Robert Spencer. Your charges against them only cheapen the words “fascism,” violence” and “genocide.” [Prager]

As I said, Prager takes Johnson to the woodshed most convincingly (read it for yourself) and, IMO, all too gently, especially given the fact that I have read the positions and assertions of all the parties Johnson condemns and have a good idea of their place in “the right”. Johnson’s place? IMO, Little Green Nutballs is juuuust the place for him… until someone can get commitment papers in order, for his own good. Then, of course, if a physical etiology for his psychological issues can be diagnosed, perhaps medical treatment could return him to sanity.

Of course, if there’s no one in his family who cares enough about him to begin commitment proceedings, he’ll likely spend the rest of his life frothing at the mouth and baying at the moon.

Continue reading “More Kind Than Deserved”

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A World of Meaning

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.“–Inigo Montoya

With appreciation for the language adopted by the King James translators of the New Testament, I offer this use of the structure of I Corinthians 13:13,

“Now there abide these three: phonemes, syntax and semantics; and the greatest of these is semantics.”

Continue reading “A World of Meaning”

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Kitchen Fan

I’m a fan of Wolfgang Puck’s kitchen wares. It started around seven years ago when I found a nice set of Puck-ish mixing bowls with lids. Mixing bowls are always an issue around here–having enough, appropriate sizes, etc. No more. That the set included some whisks and such and was at a “fell-off-the-truck” price was just lagniappe I couldn’t pass up.

Since then, various Puck-ish wares, such as his 10-cup rice cooker (ours is actually an older model, same essential features, though), have found their way into our kitchen and proved themselves useful, durable and versatile. The most recent addition came because of the ongoing deterioration of our once top o’ the line “waterless” cookware. Oh, the pots n pans are still in fine shape, but, over the past 30 years, the Bakelite handles have slowly gone the way of the dodo. Yes, I have tracked down a source for replacement handles (and lid knobs), but the total cost would’ve been around what it cost to buy this:

No, the set’s not “waterless” and only the bottoms of the pots n pans are multi-clad, but with very little adaptation of my cooking habits, the past six months’ use of them has been positive, without exception.

I saw a FB comment a while back panning *heh* the set because the user said the handles got too hot and the pans were not “no-stick”–even hard to clean. Bushwah. Someone didn’t RTM (“read the manual”–bowdlerized for those folks who’re too prissy for “RTFM” :-)). Instructions for the set say explicitly to use them on NO HIGHER than medium high heat. That and the old rule that any cook worth his salt knows for keeping pans “unsticky”–“hot pan, cold oil: food won’t stick”–has meant I have experienced neither of the issues the person who DIDN’T “READ THE MANUAL” had with the pans.

To be fair, after 30 years of using “waterless” cookware that was also designed for the same heat range as this set, that wasn’t an adjustment for me. But, no. Paying $100 for a bunch of pots n pans and then not even reading the little one-page instruction card that came with ’em is just stupid.

So, in a very, very (very) inexpensive set of pots n pans (with some nice lil tools as well–minimalist spats n spoons, useful meat fork, another nice whisk), I have found some surprisingly advanced features and decent build quality, and so I’m pleased. Heck, my cheapo set of six stock pots (found at another “fell-off-the-truck-pricing” store–six, admittedly cheap stock pots in graduated sizes for $25? Yeh, even for cheap stock pots, that’s really cheap) even has lids that can double up on some of the pots n pans when I do not want to use the glass lids, for whatever reason.

I have my eye out for more Puck-ish wares…

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Coakley Concedes…

…but, just wait. I still say the Dhimmicrap liars, thieves and kleptocrats aren’t finished with this race. Sure, the Dhimmis will dodge seating Brown as long as they can and seek to “reconcile” the Obuma Healthscare & Enslavement Bill, but more, I still think the party of Christine Gregoire and Al Franken has some fraud up its sleeves. As soon as the “votes” can be manufactured…

Well, maybe the Dhimmicraps will save that for the coming Fall mid-term. Maybe, but it’s like the story of the scorpion and the frog. It’s just their nature.

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Poor “Mother Earth” Just Can’t Catch a Break…

Treehuggers may doom the environment:

Will Vegetarian Humans One Day ‘Emit’ More Carbon Dioxide & Methane Than Cows?

In a suppositional 2060,

“…the relative significance of direct human flatulence to the total carbon dioxide and methane loads was shown to have increased dramatically by a massive human shift to a highly legume- and cabbage-dependent diet. More vegetarian farts, in other words.”

At least folks’d have the wherewithall to perform CPR w/o having to get up close and personal with a stranger’s lips… well, in one sense at least. (OK, I’m linking the video, but I’m not posting it here. *heh*)

This video, OTOH, just begs to be posted with this topic:

(Of course, this all presupposes that CO2 is “bad” for the environment. Plants don’t seem to think so, though, and even if it were to cause “global warming” it’d just extend growing seasons, etc. Methane? Yeh, well, we could bottle that… )

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Been a “Fun” 24 Hours

Yesterday afternoon–about 26 hours ago, now, internet connectivity here at twc central went south again. *sigh* About 2.5 good weeks of decent service and… kablooey!

Yeh, yeh, I walked completely through the troubleshooting tree with the voice-prompt call-in (even though I had the process memorized long, long ago). No, that didn’t help. Yes, the first thing on calling in was a recorded message saying my ISP was experiencing an unusually large call volume from my area. No, according to the supposed customer service reps I eventually reached, there was no outage (then why the swamping with calls such that it took 7 hours before I could actually reach a live person?). No, going through the troubleshooting tree with a live person resulted in no different result than doing it with the automated process or on my own.

Nor did changing out the “modem” (cable “modems” are NOT modems; they are specialty routers–very, very different technology to a modem). Heck, in the process of many, many reboots of this computer as a part of the multiple efforts I made to comply with “support’s” requests, my primary hard drive scrambled Windows boot process to the point that the Win7 repair Environment wouldn’t. Repair it, that is. (S’all right, really. I had a spare hard drive I had really meant to install it on but because of a lapse of memory had failed to, so another easy-peasy quick fresh install from upgrade media onto a bare drive. *heh*)

Fresh install of Win7 (and yes, I had tried using Ubuntu and Puppy Linux to connect, as well–as well as attempting to connect directly to the cable “modem” with other computers) and still no connectivity. Went through yet another ineffective t-shooting process (which, BTW, included power cycling both the modem and the computer attached to it), called in again and got a sweet lil idjit who informed me that my modem had been “Online for the past 15 hours.” 15 hours during which I had power cycled it several times, had changed it out for another modem, etc.

Riiiight. Went through the t-shooting tree one more time and… magically, it worked this time. Not. While lying to me aboiut my modem having been active and online for the past 15 hours, the lil idjit reset on her end. At least, that’s the best I can figure from here, since I KNOW information I’ve received from my ISP over the past 24 hours (heck, the past 6 months) has been… suspect, at the very best.

It’d just be nice if–just once–instead of playing CYA even one person would say, “Oops! Our bad. We screwed you up. Sorry.”

Meanwhile, since Lovely Daughter and her fiance were going to be out “shopping for cake” (Gee, some sheet cake and a couple lil cakes, one for bride and one–if that–for groom. What’s the stinking big deal? Wedding cake all tastes like sugar-soaked cardboard, anyway… ), he let my Wonder Woman use his network/internet connection to take her mid-term for one of her grad school classes while I shoveled his drive and did some shopping of my own. 😉 (Yeh, didn’t have to shovel his drive, but since Lovely Daughter had borrowed my 35-year-old snow shovel–hey! another 65 years and it’ll be an antique!–I figured, why not?)

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A Key Difference?

Aside from the uncharacteristic botched attribution (the line quoted is from “The Young British Soldier” not “Chant Pagan”–though both are Kipling) this comment by John Ringo, inserted into his translation of a (generally favorable!) French article on close association with American forces in Afghanistan, is telling:

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Kipling knows the lines from Chant Pagan: ‘If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white/remember it’s ruin to run from a fight./So take open order, lie down, sit tight/And wait for supports like a soldier./ This, in fact, is the basic philosophy of both British and Continental soldiers. ‘In the absence of orders, take a defensive position.’ Indeed, virtually every army in the world. The American soldier and Marine, however, are imbued from early in their training with the ethos: In the Absence of Orders: Attack! Where other forces, for good or ill, will wait for precise orders and plans to respond to an attack or any other ‘incident’, the American force will simply go, counting on firepower and SOP to carry the day.

This is one of the great strengths of the American force in combat and it is something that even our closest allies, such as the Brits and Aussies (that latter being closer by the way) find repeatedly surprising. No wonder is surprises the hell out of our enemies.

And in an afterward to his translation of the original article, Ringo goes on to say,

What is hard for most people to comprehend is that that attitude represented only the most elite units of the past. Current everyday conventional boring ‘leg infantry’ units exceed the PT levels and training levels of most Special Forces during the Vietnam War. They exceed both of those as well as IQ and educational levels of: Waffen SS, WWII Rangers, WWII Airborne and British ‘Commando’ units during WWII. Their per-unit combat-functionality is essentially unmeasurable because it has to be compared to something and there’s nothing comparable in industrial period combat history.

This group is so much better than ‘The Greatest Generation’ at war that WWII vets who really get a close look at how good these kids are stand in absolute awe.

My association with the current crop of American armed forces is second and third hand, but the boys (and they are largely still boys in many ways) I know from America’s Third World County who’ve “seen the bear” in Afghanistan and Iraq certainly fit the mold in upholding this standard. (Man, I’m getting old. I had some of these kids in children’s choirs… *heh*)