God, what is it with Xanga users and their desire to embed MP3s from my server on every pageload? I wrote a mod_rewrite rule when I first spotted this a while back (suckas!) — it only works when an external referer is detected, which embeds often don’t pass. For now it’s just a principal thing, but if gets more annoying I’ll probably have to take more extreme measures (referral/ip/user whitelist).

• JavaScript, asynchrony and closures
• Remote Scripting with the XML DOM
• Defining the Game – more Miguel de Icaza freaking out about Avalon/XAML

Quantum Mechanics: Not Just a Matter of Interpretation

It has been widely accepted that the rival interpretations of quantum mechanics, e.g., the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and my father John Cramer‘s Transactional Interpretation, cannot be distinguished or falsified by experiment, because the experimental predictions come from the formalism that all such interpretations describe. However, the Afshar Experiment demonstrates in an interaction-free way that there is a loophole in this logic: if the interpretation is inconsistent with the formalism, then it can be falsified. In particular, the Afshar Experiment falsifies the Copenhagen Interpretation, which requires the absence of interference in a particle-type measurement. It also falsifies the Many-Worlds Interpretation which tells us to expect no interference between “worlds” that are physically distinguishable, e.g., that correspond to the photon’s passage through one pinhole or the other.

Fascinating discussion in the comments.

Seach under “Vaidman bomb” for an interesting take on interaction-free measurements. This is related to the “seeing with no light” article in Scientific American a few years back. Surprisingly, one can build experiments which have radically different results contingent on adding a component with arbitrarily small probability epsilon of interacting. The bomb part is phrase this way: Suppose I have a photo-detector connected to a bomb trigger. With what probability can I determine that the photodetector is there or not without setting off the bomb? The answer is I can do this with arbitrary small probability of setting off the bomb. This sounds very similar to Cramer’s description of Afshar’s result, and is perfectly understandable in all three interpretations of quantum mechanics.

more…

Sorry, folks. The waveform was collapsing along nicely there for a while, but in pure non-deterministic fashion, we’re back to no one actually knowing anything…

Will be implementing IE7 (max-width) so images should be returning to normal soon.

Hey, this is cool: Mozilla Related Blogs aka Blogupdates.

Also, since when did Youngpup come back? Looks cool, will have to go through the structural changes.

Classic Onion:

Cheney Wows Sept. 11 Commission By Drinking Glass Of Water While Bush Speaks

Making notes for a longer essay, better laid out thoughts when I have time.

One surprising thing about working w/in a University IT is a strange reluctance
at a high level against open source.  
This is to be completely expected from a corporate perspective, and reflects
the background.
two definitions of enterprise level, from the top down and bottom up
blurred in Net/.com (was a real difference in how IT is done) 
what does support mean
internet infrastructure: bind/bsd/linux/sendmail/apache/java/ssh
getting things done, not a problem, consistently more efficient/successful
vs commercial offerings
understanding it doesn't necessarily scaled out of that env; has it been tried?
current approach not very sucessful
se best practice, management, cio issues

My orkut geomap:

Tracking some gmail (related) conversations:

• EmailUsabilityWishlist – Justin Mason’s email thoughts, updated w/ some gmail comments
• Blinded by Gmail’s Gigabyte?
• Gmail’s not turning a blind eye

So, Technorati has introduced the idea of conversation tracking in their iconography, but it’s not actually displayed or ordered as one. (I was going to include technorati links to all these, but it doesn’t didn’t because it’s not actually that useful for tracking conversation flow from these links).

• craigslist.org > rants & raves > Hey Crackhead – YOU ARE A CRACKHEAD. WHY DON’T YOU OWN A CRACKPIPE? – OMG, thanks Andy, I think this made my week
• IBM Subpoenas Almost Everybody – including EV1. told ya so
  • IBM Subpoenas EV1 – When you follow the advice of lawyers you end up just where they want you, in court
  • EV1 made a dumb choice… Now the linux community hates US!
    

    Listen EV1 you messed up with the whole SCO choice, you admitted it now you.re only hurting US. Popular Linux software called Yum has blocked all ev1 users from using their updating software! Can you donate money to someone else to make this better? You seem good at buying people off!

• Brad’s Google TextAd implementation is a great idea – inlining ads for those coming from search engines.
• mezzoblue Safar 1.2 CSS test – dave does some experimenting (hey, did you know that 15% of my blog visitors are browsing on Safari? this and other more fun facts soon when I get a chance)
• My Scary Farewell Letter – HL2 drama; ooh, I want to know the juicy details left out
• Softimage|XSI For Half-Life 2 Available – Softimage|XSI EXP, a free version just for making HL2 content (tutorial). Delays schmelays, I have a feeling that HL2/Source will be the platform of choice for Machinima and other emerging markets (although that SDK really needs to come out)

Peter Van Dijck‘s blog, Guide to Ease is great and chock full of all kinds of ideas and links that I have no time to follow right now.

• Nested Facets – faceting w/in larger taxonomic structures
• 10 Classics from Cognitive Science – all available for d/l as PDFs
• HP Speechbot – speech-to-text + indexing

Lately I’ve been closing tabs instead of blogging. Forget email, Google needs to organize my bookmarks/browser history. Soon to dump: geolocation, geowanking links, more Gmail thoughts, deconstruction; oh, also should write about Wil Wright, who spoke on campus Thursday. That was frickin great.

We’ll see how I survive the next couple days. Have a couple large projects/papers to (try to) finish.