The TG Daily has the article Schrödinger’s Cat could be visible after all.

Researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Ottawa have used a comparatively new technique to directly measure for the first time the polarization states of light. Their work has implications for the weird Uncertainty Principle, which states that certain properties of a quantum system can be known only poorly if other related properties are known precisely.

It is hard to figure out what is really going on here in an article written in the popular press, but it is an intriguing possibility that big changes are coming in the field of quantum physics.

According to WikiPedia

Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935.

That’s how I figured that the cat had last been seen 78 years ago.

Maybe the article Canadian researchers take a sneak peek at Schrödinger’s Cat and a step toward a quantum computer in the Canadian National Post will add a bit more to understanding this.

“I can’t say that we’re getting around the Uncertainty limit, because within quantum mechanics there is no getting around it,” said Mr. Salvail.He cautioned that explaining such things in words risks “losing the subtleties that are captured in the mathematical expression” of the theory.

“We’ve kind of gone back and exploited the subtleties in the Uncertainty Principle,” he said. “It’s strange, but so fascinating.”

I have read the above WikiPedia link more thoroughly now.  Even though I had previously read a book (twice) about  Schrödinger’s Cat, I don’t remember reading the explanations of why it wasn’t a problem at all.   It seems so obvious now that a Geiger counter is the very measurement that collapses the wave function and eliminates the uncertainty.  I can’t understand why Einstein and Schrödinger would have such a long discussion about this thought experiment.  If there is no conceivable way to measure whether or not the event happened in order to trigger a macroscopic event, then there is no paradox.

I have to keep in mind the quote above,  ‘explaining such things in words risks “losing the subtleties that are captured in the mathematical expression”’.  There must be some subtleties that I am missing here that kept Einstein and Schrödinger occupied for so long with this seeming paradox.

Thomas Creamer, Chairman of the Sturbridge Board of Selectmen, has put together an excellent edited video of the presentation of the Petition to Keep the Moratorium on Municipal Incinerators in Massachusetts.  He has edited in a lot of material to back up what the participants discussed at the presentation. (The deadline for signing the petition has passed.)

I’d like to comment on Mary Redetzke’s remarks about the ideal incinerator producing nothing but carbon dioxide and water from simple hydrocarbons. Reaching this ideal behavior is far more difficult than you might think if you don’t think very deeply about this.

Simple hydrocarbons contain no other elements than hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. There is no real-life waste stream that contains only simple hydrocarbons. To capture all other elements but these three from a waste stream is close to impossible. The other elements in the waste stream are not convertible into carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen by any chemical reaction. Converting one element into another involves nuclear reactions which would release so much energy, that they would blow up the incinerator and the surrounding area for miles around if such nuclear reactions could be achieved, which they cannot.

If some genius did somehow come up with such a process, then it could be explained and it could be demonstrated on a small scale in a laboratory. Until that explanation and demonstration is possible, no life-sized incinerator should be built to use an imaginary technology that probably cannot ever exist.

Not until the politicians and appointed officials can make such demonstrations and explanations publicly available and widely known should there be any change to the moratorium.

The Worcester Telegram and Gazette has the story Fitchburg State incinerator plan aired. If you get all the way to the bottom of the article, you will see:

At the DEP’s regional office in Worcester, recycling advocates from Central Massachusetts Progressives and local officials from Central Massachusetts delivered more than 400 comments on the proposal.

Steven S. Greenberg, an engineer and one of the founders of Central Massachusetts Progressives, said the new technologies the DEP is talking about are a mystery.

“I’m surprised at this change in policy because of this supposedly new technology,” he said. “It would be nice if MassDEP would tell us what it is, because I’m an engineer and I have no clue what new technology can turn matter into something else. If they got it, they should tell us. It is not like a state or national security secret.”

And the state accuses us of trying to mislead the public.  They’ve got the fantastic claims.  They need to back up those claims with some cold, hard facts.

The Real News Network has this series of interviews that was done starting on May 12, 2010. Now that Bradley Manning is getting to explain why he did what he did, this is a must see series for right now.

It is the best explanation that I have seen of what it is like to learn to be a soldier.

The first segment is this video below:

Josh Stieber, a member of the army company that came upon the Iraqis murdered by the US helicopter crew, discusses the Wikileaks video and army training that makes killing civilians acceptable

1. The Video that Bradley Manning says Pushed Him to Upload to Wikileaks
2. Training makes killing civilians acceptable Pt2
3. Training makes killing civilians acceptable Pt3
4. Training makes killing civilians acceptable Pt4

My training in the Army in 1967 during the Viet Nam War Era is completely consistent with what Josh Stieber says in these interviews. Part of the difference between what Stieber went through and what I went through is that I was a lot older when I went through basic and advanced infantry training than what Josh was. I did not have nearly the difficulty that Josh did in understanding what was going on with the training I was being given. I understood that the racism and dehumanizing of the enemy was probably a necessary part of preparing me to be a good soldier and to survive my tour of duty. However, since I could understand what the training was trying to do and I had to reject what it was trying to teach me about the enemy, I knew that I would probably not survive being in combat.

I was lucky in that I already had finished college and had a degree in Electrical Engineering. I managed to get an assignment as an engineer at Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for the rest of my tour of duty after training. The closest I came to combat was when our company commander at the arsenal volunteered our services to the local police to quell the riots after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Fortunately, the local police had the good sense to decline the offer.

If I have the time someday, I might explain why I have a sense of pride in the fact that I was threatened with the charge of mutiny punishable by death while I was in Philadelphia. I sometimes have nightmares of being drafted again into the Army at my current age, whatever age that might be at the time of the nightmare. I keep saying, “Look at my record. Are you sure you really want me back?”

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is asking you to Reward Keith Ellison for standing up to FOX

Clips like this are the only things that I can watch that involve Faux Noise. Otherwise I try to protect my TV and my computer from being ruined by having to participate in displaying this stuff.

Wired has the story You Don’t Want Super-High-Speed Internet, Says Time Warner Cable.

Time Warner Cable chief technology officer Irene Esteves says you don’t really want the gigabit speeds offered by Google Fiber and other high speed providers.
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Esteves did say that if demand and applications pick up, the company would be interested in offering faster connections to communities, The Verge reported. But by then, it may be too late for the incumbents.

Communities across the country are sick of waiting for the big telcos or Google to bring them faster speeds and are taking matters into their own hands. Lafeyette, Louisiana and Chattanooga, Tennessee are the most famous examples. Both have built gigabit speed municipal networks that provide access. Meanwhile, cities like Seattle and Chicago are contracting with Gigabit Squared to turn unused fiber optic infrastructure into consumer internet connections.

Thirty years ago, I returned to Bolton, MA after having spent a year in Oakland, CA.  I called the phone company to complain about the slow internet speed in the sticks of Massachusetts compared to what I had experienced in California.  They came to visit me at work to explain the difficulties they experienced upgrading the computer service.  Only people who worked in the high tech industry were willing to pay for better service.  I told them then that if they didn’t get their act together, the able companies would eat their lunch.

In 2006, I moved to Sturbridge, MA from a dozen or so years stay near Portland, OR.  Verizon could not provide DSL to my house like it provided to my house in Oregon.  So I cut the Verizon wire, and went with Charter Cable for my TV, internet, and telephone connection.

Verizon is now trying to sell me FiOS, but it is too little, too late.  And besides, my house is not in the area to which they can provide FiOS service.

In a twist on history repeating itself, I may eventually be able to get a municipal service and bypass both the phone company and the cable company.  In high tech, if you snooze, you lose.

Private enterprise is supposed to be more efficient than government according to some pundits.  Can you think of a more efficient way to deliver a package than is the apparent route of this delivery that I am expecting today?

Travel History

Yes, I know, it must have something to do with region boundaries and which location is able to make local deliveries within its region that includes my house.

Of course there is the 9 hour trip from Willington to Auburn to consider. I could have used a bicycle to get it to Auburn faster. That’s 35 miles which Google says should have taken 39 minutes. I could have driven to Willington to pick up the package a day earlier and saved two tolls on the Mass Pike.

The Washington Post has the piece Sotomayor, Kagan ready for battles by Dana Milbank. A few excerpts might give you the gist of the article.

The acerbic Scalia, the court’s longest-serving justice, got his latest comeuppance Wednesday morning, as he tried to make the absurd argument that Congress’s renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 by votes of 98 to 0 in the Senate and 390 to 33 in the House did not mean that Congress actually supported the act. Scalia, assuming powers of clairvoyance, argued that the lawmakers were secretly afraid to vote against this “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

Kagan wasn’t about to let him get away with that. In a breach of decorum, she interrupted his questioning of counsel to argue with him directly. “Well, that sounds like a good argument to me, Justice Scalia,” she said. “It was clear to 98 senators, including every senator from a covered state, who decided that there was a continuing need for this piece of legislation.”
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Sotomayor allowed the lawyer for the Alabama county seeking to overturn the law to get just four sentences into his argument before interrupting him. “Assuming I accept your premise — and there’s some question about that — that some portions of the South have changed, your county pretty much hasn’t,” she charged. “Why would we vote in favor of a county whose record is the epitome of what caused the passage of this law to start with?”

Apparently these women Justices and Senators like Elizabeth Warren just don’t know how to show the proper deference to the bullies of the world.  That’s why I voted for Warren and am glad that Obama appointed these two Justices.

We had a successful presentation of the petition at the Mass DEP regional office in Worcester today. You can view the following image gallery without the frame

That is a rhetorical question I have been asking myself.  Rejecting austerity, as the Italian voters appear to have done, is to reject an economy killing program.  Should be good, right?  Well, of course not.  As the Yahoo! Daily Ticker explains in the article Why Italy’s Election Has Caused Global Markets to Crater:

The ECB says it will buy government’s debt, provided that said government engages in various reforms that the ECB wants to see.

There’s only one catch. Voters hate austerity. And voters hate when their own politicians are taking their cues from an institution like the European Central Bank, rather than domestic needs.

And that’s the phenomenon that came home to roost last night.

The political parties seen as continuing along the existing ECB-preferred path did badly. The rebellion voters (Silvio Berlusconi and populist Beppe Grillo) did much better than expected.

And this has the potential to undermine all of the progress made in Europe over the past several months.

So the real problem is that The European Central Bank will only do what it ought to do, inject liquidity into the sovereign debt market, if the countries receiving the injection will do what they ought not do, go on an austerity program.

Just as in the US, there’s a big thirst among elites for structural reforms to reduce long-term deficits.

Well, that’s not the real reason elites want structural reform.  Applying Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior, the real explanation could be that the elites want the markets to tank to create a buying opportunity for them.  That way they can buy up whatever assets they don’t already own at fire sale prices.  What else are corporations sitting on several trillion dollars of liquid assets waiting for?