harmonicminer

Quantum wonders: Nobody understands

It is tempting, faced with the full-frontal assault of quantum weirdness, to trot out the notorious quote from Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman: “Nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

It does have a ring of truth to it, though. The explanations attempted here use the most widely accepted framework for thinking about quantum weirdness, called the Copenhagen interpretation after the city in which Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg thrashed out its ground rules in the early 20th century.

With its uncertainty principles and measurement paradoxes, the Copenhagen interpretation amounts to an admission that, as classical beasts, we are ill-equipped to see underlying quantum reality. Any attempt we make to engage with it reduces it to a shallow classical projection of its full quantum richness.

Lev Vaidman of Tel Aviv University, Israel, like many other physicists, touts an alternative explanation. “I don’t feel that I don’t understand quantum mechanics,” he says. But there is a high price to be paid for that understanding – admitting the existence of parallel universes.

In this picture, wave functions do not “collapse” to classical certainty every time you measure them; reality merely splits into as many parallel worlds as there are measurement possibilities. One of these carries you and the reality you live in away with it. “If you don’t admit many-worlds, there is no way to have a coherent picture,” says Vaidman.

Or, in the words of Feynman again, whether it is the Copenhagen interpretation or many-worlds you accept, “the ‘paradox’ is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be”.

Being a musician, I have to wonder if this parallel universe thing, with a new universe sprouting up to contain each contingency that “could” have happened but “didn’t” in our universe, means that for every wrong note in a jazz improvisation there is some universe where it’s the right note.

At various times in my life, I think I’ve created a LOT of universes.

NYC bomb suspect seized aboard Dubai-bound plane

A Pakistani-born U.S. citizen was hauled off a plane about to fly to the Middle East and arrested in the failed attempt to explode a bomb-laden SUV in Times Square, authorities said Tuesday. One official said he claimed to have acted alone.

Faisal Shahzad was on board a Dubai-bound flight that was taxiing away from the gate at Kennedy Airport when the plane was stopped and FBI agents and New York Police Department detectives took him into custody late Monday, law enforcement officials said.

U.S. authorities “will not rest until we have brought everyone responsible to justice,” Attorney Eric Holder said early Tuesday, suggesting additional suspects are being sought.

In Pakistan, intelligence officials said at least one man has been detained in the southern city of Karachi in connection with the Times Square case: a man named Tauseef who was a friend of Shahzad. He did not say when the man was picked up.

So, despite the lefty media chortling when it looked like the perpetrator was a “middle aged white guy”, it turns out the would-be murderer wasn’t a “right wing tea bagger” after all.

Instead, he was that utterly unremarkable and common species, an Islamic radical willing to kill innocents for his beliefs.

The crazy left will have to wait for another day, when their much-to-be-hoped-for right wing radical birther teabagger nutjob will finally do something they can point to as evidence of Christian violent extremism. But, as below, they keep hoping.

From the Department of Nauseated Head Shaking: Baby Boy Lives 2 Days After Botched Abortion

The U.K. Telegraph reported today that a 22-week old Italian baby boy died after being abandoned after a failed abortion. This wasn’t any back-alley abortion–the child was left by hospital doctors to die alone, but lived for almost two days. From the Telegraph:

He was discovered alive the following day, some 20 hours after the operation, by Father Antonio Martello, the hospital chaplain, who had gone to pray beside his body.

He found that the baby, wrapped in a sheet with his umbilical cord still attached, was moving and breathing.

The priest raised the alarm and doctors immediately arranged for the infant to be taken to a specialist neonatal unit at a neighbouring hospital where he died on Monday morning.

Italian police are investigating the case for “homicide” because infanticide is illegal in Italy.

The law means that doctors have had an obligation to try to preserve the life of the child once he had survived the abortion.

The Italian government is also considering an inquiry into the conduct of the hospital staff.

The Telegraph reports that this is not the first instance of a child born alive during an abortion in Italy, that a similar event happened three years ago. But I’d bet that these are just two incidents of many that go unreported.

The other involved a baby in Florence who weighed just 17oz when he was aborted at 22 weeks because of a suspected genetic disorder but lived for three days.

In both cases, the children were aborted because prenatal tests had revealed the possibility of birth defects. As if ending the life of a helpless child in the womb wasn’t enough, the fact some doctors might leave children to die is truly terrifying. The pro-abortion side rails that Born Alive Infant protection laws serve no purpose but to threaten Roe v. Wade, but then there are stories like this one.

President Obama, as an Illinois State Senator, voted against any legal protections for infants who happened to survive an abortion.

Regarding the flap over Arizona’s recent decision to be a little more pro-active in regard to possible illegal aliens who come into contact with the police, there seems to be an Arizona Backdraft

Those who are shouting “racial profiling” are the ones who fear being profiled. Actually, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” All of that does not enable illegal activity.

All it takes is a drivers’ license or a verifiably valid social security card.

Until this Arizona bill was passed, the policy in many municipalities was to look the other way when it came to an illegal immigrant UNTIL that individual committed another crime. It actually appears that those most outspoken about the Arizona immigration law are what are known as “sanctuary cities.

There is a lot more to be written about Arizona SB1070, including the fact that a number of other states including Utah, Colorado, Texas, Ohio are considering similar actions. In the coming weeks we will also see how the Administration deals with the Arizona legislation that it characterizes as a shortcut that will merely inflame the immigration debate “instead of solving the problem.”

Perhaps what is being missed here is that Arizona and other border states may be acting in the best interests of their citizens. That the federal government is uncomfortable in this exercise of power to govern locally is interesting in itself. That Mexico is telling its citizens to not travel to the US is among the wonderful ironies of national policy and world politics.

At the bottom line, it is essential to understand that in reality the “Arizona Problem” is a result of more than a decade of inaction regarding US border security. Policy setting for immigration was never “PC.” What we’re watching now is the exercise of states rights & concurrent exercise of power to push the federal government to action. The question then is, “what action will the federal government take?” Will it lean toward stronger security of the border or “forgiveness” and “amnesty” for those already here illegally?

I’m on my way to donate blood today. I am AB-, and also something called CMV-, so the local blood bank people call me if I don’t show up, and beg for me to donate.  Now it appears that China is accepting donations (involuntary) of organs “harvested” from its dissidents and political prisoners.

China’s hidden policy of executing prisoners of the forbidden quasi-Buddhist group Falun Gong and harvesting their organs for worldwide sale has been expanded to include Tibetans, “house church” Christians and Muslim Uighurs, human rights activists said Monday.

In a news conference on Capitol Hill, several speakers, including attorney David Matas of B’nai Brith Canada and Ethan Gutmann of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said their investigations have unearthed a grisly trade in which an estimated 9,000 members of Falun Gong have been executed for their corneas, lungs, livers, kidneys and skins.

They likened the practice to the Nazi treatment of Jewish prisoners in World War II concentration camps, which included using them for sadistic medical experiments and taking the gold fillings from the teeth of corpses.

The newest wrinkle, they said, is that organs from other religious prisoners, specifically dissidents from China’s Christian, Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist communities, are also being harvested to satisfy an insatiable global demand.

“These groups are useless to the state,” Mr. Gutmann said. “They are toxic, so you can’t release them. But they’re worth a great deal of money in terms of their organs.”

Organs from just one person can fetch a total of $100,000 on the worldwide market, he added.

The Falun Dafa Information Center issued at Monday’s news conference its annual report on China’s persecution of Falun Gong.

The charges of organ harvesting and its spread to other religious and ethnic groups were made by the researchers and activists based on their extensive interviews with former prisoners and families of prisoners, and based on analysis of statistics, including health numbers, released by the Chinese government.

Although the practice of harvesting organs from prisoners has been documented as early as 1992 by Chinese dissident Harry Wu’s Laogai Research Foundation, it was not until 2006 that the Epoch Times, a Falun Gong publication, accused the Chinese government of using its adherents for the practice.

In 2005, Chinese Vice Minister of Health Huang Jiefu acknowledged that 95 percent of all transplanted organs come from executions, said Mr. Matas, whose 2009 book “Bloody Harvest,” co-written with David Kilgour of Ottawa, a former member of the Canadian Parliament, details the practice.

Yes, the crown jewel of republican democracy in the former Soviet Union satellite nations has to be this:

One can only speculate about what goes on in the parking lot.  More photos here.

The Banality of Race

In March 2007, Barack Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois and a presidential aspirant, spoke in the Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama. Just over 40 years before, civil rights marchers were horribly beaten at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma by state troopers under the command of Sheriff Jim Clark. In the pulpit of Brown Chapel, Obama laid claim to the legacy of the civil rights heroes who suffered on the bridge. “So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama,” Obama said. “Don’t tell me I’m not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama. I’m here because somebody marched.” Congressman John Lewis, whose skull was cracked at Selma, endorsed the claim: Obama, he said, “is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.”

In The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, David Remnick portrays the 44th president as a fulfillment of the promise of the civil rights generation. There can be no doubt that Obama’s identification with those heroes is part of the story of his life and work; in reaching the White House, he has realized a dream that seemed quixotic not so long ago, when Jim Crow laws were still in force. But the president’s conception of himself as a fellow-laborer in the vineyards of the civil rights prophets is surely not the whole story. In studying Obama almost exclusively as a man of racial destiny, Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, not only fails to pluck out the heart of the president’s mystery; he evokes a vision of race that has become a too-familiar element in modern liberalism, an article of faith that has done a good deal to undermine liberalism’s moral sensibility.

It is not simply that the racial aperture in The Bridge is too narrow to do justice to the ascent Remnick traces. A book constructed on the figurative underpinning of the bridge at Selma is practically bound to be organized as a morality play. But the tone of moral indignation, so justified where the incidents in Selma in 1965 are concerned, is less obviously fitting where the subject is a man’s rise to the presidency. The passionate pursuit of political power is always a morally ambiguous spectacle; there is a shortage of both satisfactory saints and believable scoundrels. A moral romance, however, requires a villain, and in The Bridge Remnick is at pains to make racism into the dragon that his hero must dramatically slay.

Exactly right.

If America was still mostly “racist,” Obama would not be president. It really is that simple.

Big bangs (12 pictures)

We all have to go sometime.

Churches with funny names.  Or worse.

British airspace may reopen on Tuesday

Air traffic controllers may be able to start opening UK airspace tomorrow, the transport secretary, Lord Adonis, said todayas British Airways reported that results of airline test flights without passengers provided “fresh evidence that the current blanket restrictions on airspace are unnecessary”.

The National Air Transport Service (Nats) was expected to update its advice this afternoon, a no-fly zone is at present expected to last until at least 1am tomorrow, but Adonis, who has been in constant contact with forecasters, air traffic bodies and European colleagues, said: “It may be possible to start opening UK airspace tomorrow.”, The Guardian reports.

European safety experts, aircraft manufacturers and national authorities are examining whether “it is possible to refine the safety guidance under which the airlines operate to get more flights in the air,” Adonis said.

“As we get more data from test flights and are able to refine the analysis of the data that comes from the Met Office and the metrological services, the experts are looking to see whether it is possible to identify safe paths that may make it possible for flights to take place even while we have the presence of ash,” Adonis said. “There is no question whatever of us putting at risk people’s safety.”, BusinessWeek informs.

You’d think they’d be thrilled. Less pollution from all those planes flying uselessly around Europe, and more ash in the sky blocking the Sun and reducing global warming.

Next time, try to kill the right one.

Who do you trust?  Not Uncle Sam, that’s for sure.

And Armaments for All Pictures at the link.

Strange situation was caught up on Russian analogue of Google street view. On one of the streets of St. Petersburg city there are clearly visible people with guns in the middle of the bright day, looking like just got those guns from some office. Taking in consideration that most types of guns are illegal to own for a common person in Russia, and clearly not legal to carry it openly except while on hunting makes this bit puzzling.

Another way the left wants us to be like peace-loving, low-crime Russia: making it illegal for “a common person” to own guns, except, of course, for apparatchiks, commissars, the Russian Mafia, and the politically well-connected.

In other words, just like Chicago.

Seven Things Wrong With The Anti-Terrorism Policies of the TSA

# We are treating the War on Terror as a war on terror, and not a defense against jihad. We’ve made the decision that naming jihad as the enemy would give it an enemy. There is also a strong current of political correctness running through the debate. Some will now call me names, as if acknowledging that for religious reasons some people hate our culture makes me the bad one.
# Because we’re fighting terror, we identify tactics we dislike, and not the tacticians. This means that as long as the enemy can fit within the rules we define for legitimate users of our system, common sense gives us no probable cause to investigate further. In scrupulously avoiding the use of “profiling”, we ignore things we should not. Further, to avoid insulting a subset of legitimate users, we end up treating everyone as a suspect.
# We publicize each new attack and react to it, successful or not, leading both the public and the enemy to believe that such attacks are more common and more successful than they actually are.
# The controls we enact are in reaction to each new attack, rather than against all such attacks. This will lead to the eventual crippling of the enforcement system, as both its legitimate users and its enforcers become overburdened. Each new rule gives a hint to the attacker of what to try next.
# The rationale for a security control must be clear or the public will reject the control, one way or another. This is called psychological acceptability. An unacceptable control, such as too low a speed limit, will be ignored or will cause the public to find some clever means around the control. The key is that the public must perceive that the control offers enough protection to justify its use.
# Instituting controls to win the battle for perception doesn’t work. The only policy goal it achieves is a false sense of security. We believe that if following the rules is difficult for legitimate users, it must be more so for the enemy. In fact, the opposite may be true. Warning everyone what will be searched when boarding a plane, for instance, tells the enemy what not to bring along.
# A complex apparatus with a dense set of confusing rules can result in security through obscurity, which is to say, no security. Those enforcing and following the rules are led to believe that because of the hassle, no one could circumvent the rules. Someone not concerned with following the rules may find a way around them that those concerned with their minutiae miss or discount.