Displaying comments 1 to 50 of 658
MeFi post:
Inflatable Electric Cars
Whether it´s legal to drive an inflatable car on the road will depend on local ordinances, which dealers or individual buyers will be responsible for knowing. But, as XP Vehicles estimates a $200 billion market for alternative energy vehicles, changes in regulations seem inevitable.
Between that and "exact details won't be released until the official launch" I have to concur that it sounds like someone fishing around and... [more]
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at 5:05 PM on June 5, 2008
MeFi post:
Reality
That would mean that you believe that wavefunction collapse occurs for everyone, simultaneously.
"Wavefunction collapse" is a concept that is itself from a particular interpretation of QM, or at least it's present only in a subset of interpretations.
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at 2:53 PM on June 5, 2008
If there was voting about it, I would vote against the hypothetical cats too. I hate their hypothetical pantsuits and their hypothetical controversial Reverend.
But seriously, I agree with ssg. Schrodinger's cat is more of a metaphor for pop misunderstandings of QM to me, rather than a consistent or useful metaphor for anything in physics.
As far as the meaning of the experiment I think lalochezia had it right up at the top, that non-realism is... [more]
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at 4:47 PM on June 5, 2008
MeFi post:
Our own Tibet
the extent you're likening Warren Jeffs to the Dalai Lama
My turn to say "what"? As if I mentioned either Warren Jeffs or the Dalai Lama.
You're going to compare and contrast Tibet with... the FLDS?
Nope, I'm comparing and contrasting China being cavalier and prejudicial in its handling of Tibetans with cavalier and prejudicial actions against fringe Mormon churches in... [more]
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at 2:07 PM on April 8, 2008
MeFi post:
A road is a road is a road
The former security guard who was a mathematician in the Soviet Union before he was a security guard and has been a university professor of mathematics for almost two decades since then? Amazing.
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at 6:53 AM on March 21, 2008
MeFi post:
Contemporary Hooverville
I've got sympathy for the plight of the homeless and I think more should be done about it - I think we ought to at least guarantee a livin'-at-the-YMCA bed-and-a-shower level of existence and more.
But it seems unlikely to me that this situation could really have been caused by the subprime mortgages crisis. Someone who has to go directly from owning a house to being homeless with no rental options in between has a sufficiently unstable financial situation (whether due... [more]
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at 3:06 PM on March 18, 2008
MeFi post:
The Biggest Threat to Our Nation
We need to make these hillbillies wear flannel armbands so that they can be easily identified. I don't want to have to listen to what someone actually says to figure out whether they're bigoted or not.
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at 9:39 AM on March 13, 2008
♪ “Throw the hillbilly down the well
So my country can be free…” ♫
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at 10:09 PM on March 14, 2008
FFF I hear what you're saying but I personally have to regard the anti-hillbilly kind of bigotry as more insidious in some ways for the exact opposite reason - it accepts that it's okay to be bigoted by unblinkingly construing that the object of bigotry is “wrong” and you're “right.”
For an example, check out this AskMe thread. I bet that at least some of the people in it who got all moralistic and enthusiastically, contemptuously judgmental about smoking cigarettes... [more]
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at 11:15 PM on March 14, 2008
MeFi post:
asleep at light speed
Pastabagel mentions Celestica, Stellarium is another great open source one which is more focused on planetarium-type display. (And is evidently actually built in to one commercial line of planetarium projectors?) Those crazy French and their ortolans and astronomy software projects.
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at 4:24 PM on March 14, 2008
MeFi post:
my grandma married an engineer, so did my mom, oh and I'm one too
This actually makes perfect sense to me, not because I think that there's something about engineering which would tend to make one a terrorist, but because it makes sense that someone who in general likes solving problems (and has other personality characteristics, obviously) might be drawn to both a career in engineering and might also regard as more worthwhile or noble a terrorist solution to a major political or social problem - a relatively small-scale bit of work or sacrifice that solves a... [more]
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at 9:11 AM on March 10, 2008
Electrical Engineering: With great power comes I² · R responsibility.
© 2008 XMLicious all rights reserved.
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at 2:21 PM on March 10, 2008
MeFi post:
Interactive 3D concept mapping...does your brain work like this?
This is just a close-up of a standard data visualization fisheye view of a graph, btw. But it would be cool if this kind of thing and more advanced data visualization practices became more widespread on the web like the examples in this post show. I've been kind of surprised that fisheye graph site navigation tools haven't been more common.
A good critique, Miko; I think if they weren't doing the close-up by trimming off the distant vertices, but rather showed the... [more]
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at 6:23 AM on March 10, 2008
But is it really the time that is saving daylight? Shouldn't it be daylight-saving schedule, perhaps pronounced all British-like? (just kidding)
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at 12:24 PM on March 10, 2008
MeFi post:
Obama supporter shocked to see herself in Hillary ad
The terrible swift sword of irony. Snuffing out the Clinton campaign aborning. She's such an underdog, why won't they just leave her alone instead of beating her over the head with inflammatory garbage like this?
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at 9:49 AM on March 10, 2008
loquacious: Underdog, you say? With that bankroll? What the hell, man, are you on glue?
I was kidding. Saying her campaign was "aborning" was sarcasm too, it's been running continuously since 2000 (1992?)
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at 11:27 AM on March 10, 2008
MeFi post:
HP -1
.
posted to MetaFilter by XMLicious
at 11:40 AM on March 4, 2008
The Onion chimes in.
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at 12:55 AM on March 6, 2008
Thank you for asking the questions which lead me to question myself and my place in the world, I didn't have the vocabulary to describe my personality until I discovered "Chaotic/Good".
That's what the American political scene needs, some good old Gygax alignment terminology! We need to switch “liberal” to “chaotic” and “conservative” to “lawful”. But I can't decide if Dick Cheney would really be Lawful Evil or just Neutral Evil.
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at 3:56 PM on March 6, 2008
MeFi post:
iPhones at ACU
Now there's a thought. Do plants grow better on battlefields?XX.I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head.(Actually, it's time for some googling! and then some realizing! that fertilizer already contains blood, as well as bone.)... [more]
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at 10:31 PM on March 5, 2008
MeFi post:
The Hulk is on the trim side, actually
That's not necessarily true. Comic book superheroines have to have breast implants made of depleted uranium instead of silicon. This greatly increases their average body mass and requires them to wear stainless steel girdles.
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at 2:33 PM on March 4, 2008
MeFi post:
"235 clean pairs of underwear to gate 35, please."
Something like this happened on a flight I was on - not so much the near-crash but the almost landing and taking off again - and a little kid who was looking out the window said in all seriousness, “Must've been the wrong airport.”
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at 8:17 AM on March 3, 2008
MeFi post:
Looking for some dumb quotes?
And don't forget the ❝heavy quotes❞ and ❛heavy apostrophes❜ that Unicode has brought us. Heavy and smart‼
With all of the ways that internet denizens and copywriters use quotes incorrectly and in the wrong places, leave it up to a designer to complain about what they look like. I could totally out-pretense him.
hypenation point ‧ hyphen ‐ non-breaking hypen ‑ swung dash ⁓ en dash – figure dash ‒ em dash —... [more]
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at 2:50 PM on March 2, 2008
MeFi post:
Animal Minds
Just think of all the hilarious slapstick movies with animal leads we'll be able to make once we can more successfully communicate with animals. I want to see Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker, and Mr. Speed Bump the prarie dog fighting crime together.
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at 10:41 PM on February 29, 2008
MeFi post:
Fight! Fight! Fight!
The ferret and the cat is good... the ferret's like, “Ha HA! I will stand UNDER you! Ha HA! I will stand ON TOP of you!”
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at 4:17 PM on February 29, 2008
MeFi post:
Papa Palmérino Sorgente, the Pope of Montréal
I just noticed that in the photo of him smiling and wearing his crown he's standing in front of the handwritten sign with directions to the bathroom. That's so totally him.
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at 10:11 PM on February 28, 2008
In one of the links it said that he did rebuild his shop after the fire… just noticed a video amongst all the crazy Flash stuff in the Made in Montreal page, which seems to be a clearer version of the Google Video, and it ends with “Papa Palmérino: 1919-2005” so I guess he has passed to that big trinket shop / art gallery in the sky. Good show someone made a documentary about him first.
.
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at 11:15 PM on February 28, 2008
Hmm... I can't decide whether the crown or the beaver hat with feathers is more formidable.
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at 3:08 PM on February 29, 2008
MeFi post:
lil komsomol playkit
It is pretty Orwellian. Maybe there's a little note at the end of the instruction manual that says, “…and kids, don't forget to turn in your parents if you see them doing anything suspicious!”
On the other hand I can see how the X-ray machine would be intriguing to little kids. I always wanted to ride on the baggage claim conveyors.
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at 2:14 PM on February 27, 2008
MeFi post:
It's Official.
About a week ago I saw something really shocking. Uncut CNN footing from 1992 that went out over satellite to affiliate stations who were supposed to add their own commercial programming over the break. In the clip, Larry King tells candidate Bill Clinton, "Turner wants to change the world... he can really help you."
❊ Gives KirkJobSluder the secret Illuminati handshake while making the devil horns with other hand. ❊
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at 11:12 PM on February 26, 2008
MeFi post:
Quantum Mechanics: Myths and Facts
Whozatt? It doesn't even get another single hit on MeFi search. But if you can explain I will consult with my brethren in the Order of Extraordinarily Tagged Antelopes and perhaps add it.
posted to MetaFilter by XMLicious
at 2:03 PM on February 25, 2008
The reason to build up lots of tags is because that's how the “related words” associations are made.
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at 2:04 PM on February 25, 2008
Definitely a good caveat Skorgu, that's why I made the note about validity in the post. But I should mention that Googling Hrvoje Nikolić turns up lots of links to other papers and conferences where he has presented. (Though this could still of course be by a doppleganger or impostor.)
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at 2:11 PM on February 25, 2008
Don't talk about Captain Archer that way! (Interesting side note, though… the phrase “quantum leap” actually isn't something in science itself as many people I've run into have thought, it's referring to the historical significance and speed of the development of QM.)
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at 2:51 PM on February 25, 2008
I'm not a physicist either but to my knowledge it's only local hidden variables that have been ruled out (by the Bell's Inequalities test? is that what you're talking about philar?). Global hidden variables, which I believe are part of the Bohmian interpretation which he mentions, are not considered disproven.
My interpretation of what I've read about the Bell's Inequalities has been that the experiments were mostly concerned... [more]
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at 4:12 PM on February 25, 2008
Jpfed: I always privately assigned the meaning "tunnelling" to "quantum leap". It's cooler than imagining it to mean "a tiny discrete increment of leap".
My interpretation (and James Burke's interpretation too if I'm correctly remembering an episode of Connections) is that it's referring to the way that in the space of less than a decade all of physics was turned completely upside down by the... [more]
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at 4:33 PM on February 25, 2008
philar: not Bohr ― Bohm, the American who worked on the Manhattan project and sort of went low-profile in physics in his later years.
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at 4:37 PM on February 25, 2008
Yeah, Humanzee, I have to agree with you about the wave / particle thing. I think the issue is that we just need a third term to describe whatever these quantum entities are, forget “wave” and “particle”.
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at 6:04 PM on February 25, 2008
You practically have to take a college-senior level course in QM to follow all the math here, and by the time I finished that course, I knew most of this stuff.
Unless you have a background in just some higher math instead of high-level physics, like me. ;^)
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at 9:08 PM on February 25, 2008
Good point sswiller. I should have hunted down something more basic-level about QM, that would've made for a better overall post.
But here's a consolation prize: the Scientific American article Misconceptions About the Big Bang.
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at 11:24 PM on February 25, 2008
I'm seriously curious now about the phrase “quantum leap” now. I've never heard it used to refer to quantum tunneling or electrons shifting between energy levels on its own, not once to my recollection, and I've known about those QM effects since I was a little kid. I've only ever heard it used that way by someone claiming that it doesn't mean a sudden systemic advance.
I wish I had something more definite but here's a Google Books quote from... [more]
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at 2:28 PM on February 26, 2008
No, I'm not aware of that notation being used in pure math. I've skimmed over explanations of it but I haven't studied it at all. As I said in the first comment, I wouldn't by any means say that I thoroughly understood the paper in entirety, but having gone pretty far in mathematics helps.
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at 7:43 PM on February 26, 2008
From tonight's Colbert Report, talking about a news item:
Steven: “I've seen more provocative titles on physics papers!”
Bullet Point: “How To Get Longer-Lasting, Firmer Electrons”
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at 9:35 PM on February 26, 2008
Yeah, that's the impression I've gotten of many physicists / physics students both from talking to them and reading what they write on the web. You'll see guys answer the most intricate technical questions with confidence and aplomb and verbose detail, then fumble on a basic conceptual question. Or some rigidly refuse to talk about anything conceptual.
That reminds me of a story my high school calc teacher told about having a conversation with a student and realizing... [more]
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at 10:54 PM on February 26, 2008
