Hmp

[avevale_intelligencer]

stakebait linked to this, which (like most science journalism) I suspect is not nearly as exciting as the headline makes it sound. I also have some doubt about its veracity; apparently:

"...the detection of the qubit in the future must be symmetric in time with its creation in the past. "If the past detector was active at a quarter to 12:00, then the future detector must wait to become active at precisely a quarter past 12:00 in order to achieve entanglement."

I'm as interested in time travel as the next fan, but I can't help wondering (unlike any of the commenters, at least at the time of writing) what an arbitrary division of time based on the rotation of our particular planet and a more or less random point on its surface has to do with anything. But then, since I don't know what a "qubit" is, maybe that's a silly question. Maybe you have to know if a particular particle is running on GMT before you use it. Or maybe this whole thing is a little scientific joke. I don't know.

In another collection of links, browngirl linked to this, which is a very persuasive article whose thesis is that the Tea Party's main problem with American government for the last eighty years is that it mitigates the effect of karma; in other words, that it supports and helps people who are in trouble as a result of their own mistakes. They feel (it says), being basically conservative and libertarian, that everyone should stand or fall by their own efforts, and if they fall they should fall hard because that's the way the world is. Thus they're as unhappy with Bush's bailout of the banks as they were with Roosevelt's New Deal.

I don't need to tell anyone here that I disagree utterly with this. I've been supported and helped too many times when I was in trouble as a result of my own mistakes to have any claim on that particular patch of moral high ground, and the people who helped me seem to have thought it was a good idea at the time. I certainly did, and do. We are here to help each other, not to judge each other; that's my feeling, and it's a fairly strong one. (Which is not to say that I approve of Bush's bailout of the banks, but that likewise should be clear from previous posts.)

But quite apart from that, while there may be some in the Tea Party who feel that way, I find it hard to believe that everyone in that camp is acting from such--noble?--motives. I could be wrong, though. Frequently am.

There's a lot more, but I have work to do. I hope everyone's having a good Friday (not a Good Friday, though, that's not for a while yet).

Comments

[akicif.livejournal.com]

The bit missing from the qubit detection story is something along the lines of "Suppose the pair-creation event takes place at noon:"

[armb.livejournal.com]

To be fair to the science journalists, that bit isn't just missing from the story, it's missing from the abstract of the paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.2565