I forgot just how strange and cool quantum physics can be…
Interesting interview with P.J. O’Rourke on Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
An excellent editorial by Carl Hiaasen in the February 17th Miami Herald.
Florida’s plucky refusal to embrace 21st century education is one reason that prestigious tech industries have avoided the state, allowing so many of our high-school graduates (and those who come close) to launch prosperous careers in the fast-food, bartending and service sectors of the economy.
By accepting evolution as a proven science, our top educators would be sending a loud message to the rest of the nation: Stop making fun of us.
Is that what we really want?
Continue reading…
Very interesting (and fairly brilliant) comparison of Fight Club to Calvin and Hobbes.
Flash forward to the timeframe depicted in Fight Club. Calvin/Jack has reached an all-time low. He has done everything society has told him to do but is completely void of happiness. Hobbes, newly adjusted as “Tyler Durden” (after all, grown-up Calvin would no longer accept a jungle animal walking, talking, and eating canned tuna), re-enters Calvin/Jack’s life, determined to show Calvin everything he’s done wrong, whether he likes it or not.
Tyler to Jack: “I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I’m smart, capable, and most importantly, I’m free in all the ways you wish you could be.”
Calvin has always idolized Hobbes. In Weirdos From Another Planet, he dresses up like a tiger and attempts to live in the woods. Like Hobbes, Tyler is cool, collected, and incredibly cerebral. Given this evidence, one can conclude that Tyler is Hobbes, reincarnated after being trapped inside Calvin/Jack’s brain for so many years. Just as Calvin is Jack, Hobbes is Tyler.
God help those who do not help themselves.
— Wilson Mizner
This is ridiculous…
This sort of thing is why I stopped watching TV news years ago.
P.S. Go Ron!
From Wired.com:
2. Schrödinger’s cat
A cat is trapped in a box with radioactive material, a Geiger counter, and a mechanism rigged to release poison if particle decay is detected. According to Erwin Schrödinger, the cat exists in two probable states. But that doesn’t track with reality (cats are not both alive and dead). Proposed in 1935, the postulate illustrates that some quantum concepts just don’t work at nonquantum scales. Also that Schrödinger was a dog person.
8. Parfit’s teleporter
Philosopher Derek Parfit is famous for basing thought experiments on sci-fi.
In 1984, he envisioned a teleporter malfunction, like the one that made two James T. Kirks in an episode of Star Trek. Teleporters annihilate every particle in you, then rebuild them from scratch. What happens if the original isn’t destroyed? Which is the real you? Parfit says both. Evil Kirk would disagree.
Great article from David Wong – why 99.99999% of the world’s population are “one-dimensional characters” to us:
Picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if you wish. We’ll call him Slappy.
Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. You’d be sad if Slappy died, wouldn’t you?
Now, imagine you get five more monkeys. Tito, Bubbles, Fluffy, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is distant and quiet. And so on. They’re all your personal monkey friends.
Now imagine a hundred monkeys. Then a thousand.
How long until you can’t tell them apart? Or remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? If you get enough monkeys, you’ll eventually have enough that you no longer even care if one of them dies.
Now, each of these monkeys is every bit the monkey that Slappy was. It’s just that you don’t give a rat’s ass any more.
EDIT 20100601 – updated with new link to cracked.com
Good essay from Steve Olson:
When did America become a nation of frightened wimps? When did we cross the line from courage to cowardice? Was it sometime in the 1990s? After the Oklahoma City bombing? After the Columbine shootings? After 911?
When did we decide to allow the police to smash into private homes without knocking and identifying themselves? Recently, in the suburb I live in, a special police force dressed in black Nazi style uniforms busted into a suburban home without warning and dragged a school teacher out of her house with an automatic weapon at the back of her head. They forced her to the ground, handcuffed her, and hauled her away while her neighbors watched. They did it without a warrant and without consequence. Why? A misunderstanding. That is precisely why we need checks in place, to avoid misunderstandings and abuses. The police chief said, “When we realized it was a mistake, we all had a good laugh.” If a group of unidentified men dragged his wife away at gunpoint, I wonder if he would still think it was funny.
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