Finally, almost a century after the revolution in physics, quantum mechanics is finally ready for your household!

Hooray for the genius who came up with this name and the crappy pictures my mobile phone camera takes when I neglect to clean the lens.

Of course, my relationship with Dr. Sbaitso was never quite as intimate as Matt’s experience, but reading the article still triggered some tarnished memories of trying all possible jumper permutations on my SoundBlaster Pro in order to stop NHL Hockey from crashing when SoundBlaster sounds were enabled.

After trying all the combinations in vain, I discovered that the crashing NHL Hockey was QEMM‘s fault. Manually reshuffling my CONFIG.SYS to get the required amount of conventional memory finally let me play with sound effects!

Of course, that was before I got on the Internet and my maximum attention span diminished to about ten minutes.

At long last, it appears that Google Maps now includes actual maps for Vienna! The dataset is still pretty lame (‘Your search for “universität” near “wien” did not match any locations’), but it’s a start.

Being a student in Austria is a comparatively nice thing, financially speaking. Tuition is free, and I even get rather generous help with my daily expenses. Being a working student in Austria complicates matters. Somehow, all the benefits I receive appear to have rather stiff limits on allowed extra income, which leads to this approximate chart of net income over hours worked:

Adorable – in my model, working more than 277 hours a year actually makes me lose money for every hour I work. Of course, the incentives might be designed to keep me from working too much to complete my university studies, but that would really be better handled by increasing the amount of university credit required for continued subsidy. I presume that the limits that I hit were meant as a means test to keep subsidies away from “rich people”. Even if one agrees with the basic idea (and ignores that it’s easy to bypass the kinks if one has enough capital to incorporate), it would still be smarter to keep my side of the equation upward sloping, so that I would actually have reason to keep on working and pay back the state.

A bit over a month old, but still interesting: John Walker (best known for founding Autodesk), in the course of reviewing “The Cosmic Landscape”, decides to compare the book’s proposal of a string landscape (“Theory 2″) with the notion of an intelligent designer(“Theory 1″), and finds the latter more convincing.

In a refreshing change from the usual “… and then, it’s suddenly scientific to say that the Designer is the God of our Holy Book!”, Walker reflects on whether we might be living in a simulation. Quoting liberally, links mine:

Suppose this is the case: we’re inside a simulation designed by a freckle-faced superkid for extra credit in her fifth grade science class. Is this something we could discover, or must it, like so many aspects of Theory 2, be forever hidden from our scientific investigation? Surprisingly, this variety of Theory 1 is quite amenable to experiment: neither revelation nor faith is required. What would we expect to see if we inhabited a simulation? Well, there would probably be a discrete time step and granularity in position fixed by the time and position resolution of the simulation—check, and check: the Planck time and distance appear to behave this way in our universe. There would probably be an absolute speed limit to constrain the extent we could directly explore and impose a locality constraint on propagating updates throughout the simulation—check: speed of light. There would be a limit on the extent of the universe we could observe—check: the Hubble radius is an absolute horizon we cannot penetrate, and the last scattering surface of the cosmic background radiation limits electromagnetic observation to a still smaller radius. There would be a limit on the accuracy of physical measurements due to the finite precision of the computation in the simulation—check: Heisenberg uncertainty principle —and, as in games, randomness would be used as a fudge when precision limits were hit—check: quantum mechanics.

I don’t know nearly enough about the physics behind this to have an opinion on this, but from a programmer’s point of view, John’s points are rather well-made. In yesterday’s post, John references a paper summarizing puzzling observations within the solar system, and asks

Wouldn’t be interesting if all of these effects could be explained by the choice of too large a numerical integration step in a simulated universe?

Fun. I skimmed the paper, and I am awed by the fact that “we” (the species) are able to measure things like the Pioneer anomaly – an acceleration of (8.74 ± 1.33) × 10⁻¹⁰ m/s², observed from a distance of over 10⁹ km… Mind-blowing.

I know nothing about search engine optimization, but I thought I knew how to move a web site the good way… When moving this blog’s base URL and migrating it, I set up heaps of RewriteRules to keep all the old links working and made all them redirect to the correct stuff on the new site. Still, it seems that Google doesn’t like this site any longer – Wannabe Everything is hit number 123 on Google for my name, after tons and tons of old mailing lists posts, PGP key server entries and Usenet quotations.

Dear lazyweb: Why does Google hate me, and how can I make it stop?

Planarity is the new notpr0n.

Via jwz.

Hah… I just found out on teemu’s blog that EAST erh, egg will take place in Vienna next week. I’ve never made it to any hacker events beside the big summer camps, but jumping on the subway and going three stops is just too good to skip this. The only problem is that I’ll be in Carinthia part of the time, but I hope I’ll make it anyway.

While I am interested in philosophy, I am acutely aware that it might seem like a big waste of time to many people. For example, my personal hero Richard Feynman told his children that he would be happy with any careers that they would choose, but when his son Carl chose to study philosophy at MIT, he wrote:

I find myself asking, “How can you be a good philosopher?” I see now that, like the poet son who never thinks of money (because he expects the old man to pay) you have chosen philosophy, over clear thought (and so your old man goes on with his clear thoughts) so that you can fly above common sense to far higher and more beautiful aspects of the intellect.

Alfred Korzybski, back in the 1930s, was confident that all philosophy (with the exception of epistemology) would soon be viewed only as historical case studies of psychopathology. So, how does one describe the point of philosophy in one line? I like this version that I stumbled across in the opening speech to the thirtieth anniversary celebration for Richard Dawkins‘ The Selfish Gene:

But first let me talk about Richard [Dawkins] as an intellectual plumber. I first came across the notion of an intellectual plumber when I was sitting in my then Oxford College, Pembroke, next to Simon Blackburn, the philosopher now at Cambridge. I turned to him and asked, “What’s the point of philosophy anyway, Simon?”

And he said, “Well, think of it this way, John. You’re just a biologist, you sometimes have leaks in your thinking, and what you need is an intellectual plumber to patch up those leaks, and that’s what philosophy will do for you. ”

Nice. The audio makes a rather nice podcast, too, though it’s not very rich in information. Another highly recommended piece of Dawkins fun: The Root of All Evil, a BBC Channel 4 documentary in which Richard Dawkins shares his concern about religion. They don’t call him Darwin’s Rottweiler for nothing – the show feels like a slightly more intellectual version of Russel Crowe’s “Fighting Around the World”. For an example, we get to see this choice exchange between Dawkins and evangelist preacher Ted Haggard:

Dawkins: Well, it’s certainly very effective, what you do… I mean, it seemed to
me to have all the arts… I mean, I was almost reminded, if you can
forgive me, of a Nuremberg rally… such incredibly… Dr. Goebbels
would have been proud…

Haggard: Well, I don’t know anything about the Nuremberg rallies, but I know that lots of Americans think that it’s a rock concert.

I wasn’t quite sure whether to laugh or cry (and settled on hysterical giggling, which probably frightened some people who happened to be in the tram with me this morning a bit). While Dawkins is a bit more confrontational than I’d personally be, it’s rather refreshing to see someone as aggressively preach a scientific world view as we normally see religious people preach theirs. I couldn’t help but laugh a couple of times, like when Dawkins incredulously asks the person explaining the holy relics in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, “You don’t believe that yourself, do you?”. If you’re not religious, hunt the torrents for this gem of publically financed TV production, it’s both hilarious and slightly disturbing at the same time.