Stop Spewing, You Don't Know What You're Talking About

Heisenberg In Real Life

Chooky is in the midst of walking through his recent readings about quantum physics, and let me sum up by saying you will leave the end of this month slightly smarter and way way way more confused (as well as generally feeling in awe of the people who thought this stuff up). I'm only about half-way through and there are a couple of things that absolutely floored me when I read them.

The first was Einstein's thought experiment to work through a fact about light. Newton said that you cannot know that you are in motion without it being relative to something else. If you are flying at 500 miles an hour (relative to the Earth) and a ball is sitting in front of you also flying at 500 miles an hour, you will look at the ball and think you are both stationary unless you feel the wind on your face, see the ground, etc. Einstein then said, if I was traveling at the speed of light, and had a mirror next to me, the mirror would be black. This is because none of the light that left my face would go anywhere (it would all be stationary). THEREFORE, I would be able to tell I was traveling at the speed of light with no external reference. Therefore, you cannot travel at the speed of light OR the speed of light is not a constant OR you can tell what speed you are traveling at without an external reference point. One of these MUST be true! With one thought, Einstein unleashes a whole world of new physics. One little thought!

Second, Heisenberg declares that "(accuracy in momentum)*(accuracy in position) is less than a constant". You may know about the double slit experiment in physics, where streams of electrons are passed through a shrinking hole and then hit a wall where you can see their impact. When the hole gets small enough, the electrons behave like both a wave and a particle. The best part about this is that as you shrink the hole, the circle on the wall indicating where the electrons are hitting the wall first gets smaller (as you would expect) THEN larger THEN displays the Airy Pattern (as Chooky says, think bullseye). Getting smaller? I get it... the hole is getting smaller so it makes sense. Bullseye pattern? I get it... that's the point of the experiment, the electron(s) interfere to create the pattern. But getting larger in between? THAT'S the Heisenberg principle! Because you know the position to a greater degree, the momentum MUST increase. Because the momentum increases, they are dispersed over a larger area, creating the larger circle. Can you believe how insane this is? It's like you were staring at a baseball in flight through a pair of binoculars. As you began to focus the binoculars, the baseball began to stretch out into a blur so you couldn't tell if it was going really fast or going really slow. CRAZY!

The thing that floored me about both of these is how utterly simple it is once you understand the principles behind them. It just goes to show that even the most complicated things can be reduced to a simple example. In fact, if you cannot reduce a given problem, you're probably not thinking hard enough about it. And if the only way you can explain something is through an overly complex method, stop it. You don't fully understand it enough to teach it to someone else.

Vertical Sightseeing

One of the cool things about Google Maps (and the upcoming MSN Virtual Earth) is the ability to get a view of just about anywhere in the world. This is a great site for tracking lots of those interesting items through Google Maps. Is it just me or does it seem like this is going to be the next kind of celebrity? People are going to be running around their backyards and on their roofs to decorate it in some way that can be seen by satellite. Boy I'm glad I live in a condo.

D

Smoking Through the Generations

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Effects of Smoking May Be Passed Down through Generations

I was initially skeptical of this study, only in that I could not see a way that the effects of smoking could have been passed down in any way from mother to daughter let alone from mother to grandchild. But, when thinking about the immune system, that could be a very viable way for this to be passed on. My question with the study is did they control for children whose mothers smoked when they were pregnant but then STOPPED smoking when they were born. Because I have to imagine that if you're desparate enough to smoke when you're pregnant, it's pretty unlikely that you're not going to be smoking after you've had the baby. Still, it just amazes me that tobacco has still been as accepted as a product for as long as it has. You're talking about the only product which is not only proveably addictive but proveably increases your chance of dying. Yet I cannot buy alcohol on Sundays. The multiple personalities of the government always annoy me. Either regulate EVERYTHING (please don't) or let me do what I want without prejudice.

The Amazing OpenX

The Amazing OpenX!

Heh. When someone has an entire product designed to undo the "advances" you have made, you've probably done something wrong. Here's a perfect example of where something was designed (blister packaging) which is perfect for one audience (manufacturers) and totally worthless for another audience (consumers) yet, in order to be successful, it needs to satisfy both. Must be those space devils!

My Recent Experience Installing SP1 for Windows Server 2003

I'm going to try to use as many searchable words as possible in the following post. When I was doing my recent install of SP1 for Windows Server 2003, I had the hardest time finding out why it kept failing because it kept coming up with the same meaningless error box: "Access Denied". Are you really so short on characters that you're worried about running out of text and have to put up something that brief? It turns out that the problem was probably my fault, in that I was trying to lock down my machine and probably dropped the write permission on a specific registry key. The key in question was:

  • HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\KernelFaultCheck

Well, you could have printed that out, or at LEAST pointed at a log and told me where to look!

Turns out that everything DID get logged, and once someone told me where to look ("setupapi.log") it was easy to do a search on "Access Denied" and find the following:

  • #-086 Deleting registry value "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\KernelFaultCheck"
  • #E033 Error 5: Access is denied.

Look, MS (and all other SW makers), I know you're trying to get stuff out, but help us do some digging on our own! You could do any of the following:

  • Print out the error location/library where it failed
  • Print out a more specific error name/value
  • Print out the log in which to look for more info
  • Format the log in XML so you can read it with a tool like a normal human
  • Collect all the failed logs (I know that PSS must have done this a hundred times) and point out what the failings were and if/how you solved the problem

I know that printing out stuff like stack traces are totally useless, but printing out error messages as bland as the above one is also useless. Tell us where to look! Hopefully, posts like this one will help just in that it populates the search engines with more information. Other than that, the update is running great!

D

Online Chess Board

Java chess games: database search, analysis

I was browsing through the paper this morning, and came across the chess pages in the NY Times. It's so hard to see the intricacy of the game, even with the description, but I was near the computer so I found the above site... plus this page detailing some of the positions. Particularly cool about this is the ability to just paste in any game (or search for past games) and then watch as the game unfolds. Very neat!

You know where I'm going, and you know where I've been

Wired News: Ad Execs Want to Track Every Move

Ok, I know they WANT to track every move, but how? Even if I carry a pager device around and it shows that I passed 14 billboards on the way home, will that really indicate that I saw them? I think this is one of those academic things (which happens to cost the company more than $100 M) which, on the other end, you'll get a ridiculous amount of noise and discover that people who drive red cars are %0.06 more likely to go to TGIFs than to Applebee's when they hear a White Stripes song on the radio, and whoopty do, because correlation does not prove causation.

One thing that caught my eye was this:

"One thing we found is that since the consumer has a fast forward in their hand, they will use it," Pizzurro said. However, the company also found that people are unlikely to bother fast-forwarding through one ad.

Project Apollo could offer advertisers insights into which messages resonate with viewers, and which fall victim to fast-forward.

Doesn't this optimize for some kind of ad which you will be forced to watch... OR DIE? Battling Seizure Robots anyone?

Cheap Gas via Google Maps

Cheap Gas - Washington

Damn, this is cool. I mean DAMN. You know what's the neatest about this is that Google did absolutely nothing here. All they did was provide the maps and the ability to highlight points on the map (through a non-published API of all things!). Yet, people are extending it like mad. The Terraserver guys should be kicking themselves over and over again.

Walking = Exercise

NPR : Pedometer Fitness Fad Takes Off

I couldn't help but laugh when I heard this. I love the idea that walking is the answer to all our exercise/obesity issues. Through the magic of time travel, allow me to discuss this with my ancestor of 500,000 years ago.

Me (Present Day): Hey ancestor, what's happening?
Great-Great-(Great)^12,000-GrandDad: Ogg?

Oops, that's a bit far. Let's chat with my ancestor of 10,000 years ago.

Me (Present Day): Hey ancestor, what's happening?
Great-Great-(Great)^250-GrandDad: Yo.
M: You wouldn't believe what's taking off nowadays, old man! It's called a pedometer!
G: Uh... what?
M: Yeah, it's called a pedometer, and it measures how many steps you take each day.
G: So? What are you going to do with that?
M: Well, now we can measure how much we've walked every day to make sure that we've get enough exercise!
G: What's exercise?
M: Today we need to make sure we move around enough or else we’ll get fat and die young.
G: Why?
M: Cause we eat so much!
G: … *disbelieving look*
M: Uh, well, in the future, we eat sweets and meat and carbs and Cinnabons and FatBurgers and Slurpees and … well, I could go on but my mouth is drooling. The problem is that we eat so much, and then do not do anything that we get obese and that causes us to die early.
G: So let me get this straight, you have so much food that you DIE?
M: Yeah!
G: Um, tough life. Couldn’t you just eat a little less so you don’t die?
M: Easier said than done. Imagine that Cinnabon’s are the sweetest of the sweet and if you taste even just a little bit, you’re completely addicted.
G: I guess.
M: Yeah, so we have to do things that are hard like run for miles or lift heavy things or swim in a lake in order to not die.
G: So you can train to kill your food more easily and defend your family?
M: Um, no, we get food from a place called a store where stuff just sits around waiting for us to pick it up. We don’t really have to defend our family cause dangerous animals are usually in far off places or in restricted nearby locations called zoos.
G: Yikes. Sounds really dangerous. I pity my descendants.
M: You don’t need to be so sarcastic.
G: Fine, so what’s this pedometer thingy?
M: Well, other than running or swimming or lifting heavy things, another way of getting exercise is by walking and the pedometer tracks how much you walked.
G: Walking is exercise?
M: Yeah! It’s super easy.
G: Of course it’s easy, how the hell else are you supposed to get from place to place.
M: Well, we have these things called cars that … you know what, never mind. Just assume we can magically move from place to place without walking.
G: So, if I understand correctly, you have all the food you want, and you don’t need to walk anywhere so, in order to correct this clearly disasterous situation, you need to not eat food which is readily available everywhere and walk a bunch, even though you don't need to.
M: I guess that about sums it up.
G: …
M: What?
G: You guys have got to be the dumbest people I’ve ever heard of. I really do pity my descendants.

Tune in soon when I have a conversation with MY great^250-grand kids and discover they need to hire sleep and breathing trainers because they have machines that take care of that annoying habit in the future!

D