Further, it should be noted that since relativistic quantum theories (such as quantum field theory) can always be expressed in terms of a local Lagrangian density, it follows that probability mass in such theories always flows locally through configuration space, and therefore that a classical configuration of the system’s (field) variables can still be made to evolve locally in a way that simply tracks the flow of the conserved probability current in configuration space.
Source:
74 words. I think the climax is at “simply”.
Here’s the vocabulary (48 words), sorted alphabetically, with repetitions:
The , published in 2006 by and Simon Kochen, says in rough terms, that if we (as humans) have free will then so do . As you would ordinarily take it for granted that you have “free will”, and if you follow their argument, then elementary particles, or, since all of matter is said to be made up of them, matter has free will too. Certainly a spectacular situation, and if you read their writings, I think you will agree that they think it is spectacular too, and they are quite proud of their discovery.
The theorem does not assert that we have free will whatsoever. But if we do then we would not be so free as to withhold the same from those elementary particles; Conway and Kochen’s operative keywords are SPIN, FIN and TWIN. Earlier this year, they announced the which came to my attention and puzzled me quite a lot.
In my experience, it is very hard to cross from science or mathematics to philosophy or metaphysics; in many ways, philosophy and metaphysics are a lot more difficult. In the case of this Free Will Theorem, one might like to perform an experiment to make sure the mathematics corresponds to reality. At the end of section 9, “Historical remarks”, on page 21 of the (earlier) article, Conway and Kochen discuss possibilities of such an implementation.
This is because our Free Will assumption requires decisions by a human observer, which current physiology tells us takes a minimum of 1/10 of a second. During such a time interval light will travel almost 20,000 miles, so the experiment cannot be done on Earth.
This is were the following gedanken experiment commences: namely, despite those difficulties, some scientists apply for grants, devise an experiment that can be carried out on Earth, design the equipment, and soon realize that the average person’s free will does not elicit a measurable amount of free will on the part of the elementary particles, at least within their budgetary constraints. They perform some back-of-the-envelope calculations and happily notice a gap: one person in a billion will have sufficient free will.
Jimi Hendrix.
So they call him up and explain the situation, and ask him whether he wants to participate. Jimi reluctantly agrees after some hesitation. They arrange a time, tell him where the lab his, he arrives, and they show him their machine, explain how it works. They tell him that they regret it is loud and noisy, after all it is the first of its kind. When one of its lamps turns from orange to green, he is to push away at the three buttons that they point out, any way he wants to. They will then compare his choices with the elementary particle’s, and graph the results to correlate the free will. He nods, sits down at the chair that is provided, and they start the final preparations. Finally, the lamp turns to green.
Jimi is not pushing any buttons.
They cancel the experiment, and ask him (quite annoyed), why he didn’t follow the instructions. To which he responds, “Well, I wanted to increase volume of your machine, but I couldn’t find the control.”
Joined today, you can look up my (future) public software at
Added a little project which should make Rails development a little easier when it comes to working with the database directly. For now only for mysql. See my_sql.rb under
I’ve been learning the piano over the last few years, off and on; probably less than 1 hour a month on average. Recently it has become a bit more and for the last month or so I’ve been practicing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. I feel it is a good piece for beginners. I’m lucky to have an above average reach, so one note more than an octave is not a stretch for me.
I find it helps a lot to listen to the piece on youtube, and replay certain sections over and over. This got me quite far; but when I got to the 40th bar (of the 1st Movement) I thought it would be good to get some feedback and see what to improve and what’s ok, and if I’m on the right track in general.
So I asked my friend, Andrea, who has been playing a lot longer than me, and she agreed to meet. Because I am not totally happy with our piano, and to make it easier for her, I asked to play at her place. Our piano seems overly sensitive, so that it is not easy to play softly, and consistently so. Sometimes I even think that I hit a key, but no sound resulted (not easy to reproduce either).
What follows only covers how far I know the piece at the moment: the 1st Movement up to bar 42 (where a repetition of an earlier phrase occurs.)
Of course, the way she played it – on the same piano – was a lot better. The way it was better, was, first of all, much more consistency in the right hand: even rhythm, even volume. It was obvious to me that this is important for the piece, but it wasn’t clear to me how much more consistency is possible.
On top of that she applied the pedal almost throughout the whole piece. I had heared that the pedal is important, but not to that extent. Pushing the pedal down is the easiest of course, however, this piece is so delicate that that will not do. The trick is to push the pedal not all the way, but a little more than half-way and, to release the pedal with each chord change, and each time a melody note changes. Once you know, that makes a lot of sense, and it works. But I find that extremely difficult to do. Some scores indicate when to apply, when to release.
The third thing, and I was aware of this, was to bring out the melody notes (“the ones with the stems sticking up”) by playing them louder, compared to the other notes that are played at the same time. I find it pleasing enough to play the piece without this; I think that is also very difficult. Related, around bar 14, where there are two F# half-notes in the right-hand, I was neglecting the second one.
Around bar 28, when a new theme is introduced, she explained to me the meaning of “phrasing”, of how to control the volume, and that the A in the right hand should be the loudest; equally bars 32 to 40 have phrasing hints; I knew I had ignored those, but now I know how to read them and what they mean. (She also explained that Horowitz manages to regulate the tempo at this part of the piece, by slowing down and speeding up, but such that the total time is still as it should be)
One of the other difficult aspects of the piece is the polyrhythmic motif. (Apparently I’m not doing that badly in that respect.) Apparently, much more advanced players take liberties with this one;
Got the (MEC) catalog in the mail today (actually one of my roommates).
The catalogue has a funny sidebar on one page about how a couple won a prize in the MEC 2008 video competition. They sent over a $1,000 gift card, and discovered that the winners are more than half-way through a one year project ofnot buying any “stuff”.
“The goal is zero landfill waste. For one year we will not buy any material goods. We will buy only consumables, and everything we buy must come in recyclable or compostable packaging.”
Their explains how they got into this and also that they are making a video about the year.
A bit of a funny story about Windows Vista, or Microsoft systems in general. My friend’s laptop would not boot up anymore, so I took it to another friend who knows more about fixing laptops (I don’t use one myself, so I don’t have much experience).
Since there was an indication of hard drive problems when running BIOS system checks, we removed the (SATA) hard drive from the laptop, and connected it to his Vista PC. When it recognized it, it showed up as “F:” under “My Computer.” Right-click → Tools, and we got an option to “check the volume for errors”.
We selected “Automatically fix file system errors” (but not “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors”). After clicking the “Check Now” button we waited for a while.
Then this message popped up
Some problems were found and fixed.
Any files that were affected by these problems were moved to a folder named “Found”.
We spent quite some time looking for this folder named “Found”. (Since it was his PC I didn’t want to get too involved in the search). We never found it. Was it supposed to be on his PC, or on the laptop’s harddrive? Why wouldn’t the message say explicitly just were that folder is?
(With the harddrive placed back in the laptop, it booted again. So that was good.)
Each result has a warning under its link “This site may harm your computer”:
Clicking on the link doesn’t take your browser to the page as usual, but brings up an error message.
Clicking on the “This site may harm your computer link” produces a help page with the title “Concerns About Web Search Results: Results labeled ‘This site may harm your computer’”:
So now I search Google for “‘”. The first result is a Google support page at
But accessing that page leads to another error (no screen shot):
We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.
What a mess!
Questions
Should visiting any web page really “harm your computer”?
On what basis would Google think that a web page is going to “harm your computer”? Does it take into account or even know what kind of computer you are using?
If Google had reason to believe a web page were to “harm your computer”, should the page be really listed as a search result? (Less is more?)
If a search result page is not marked with the warning, would you blame Google if you then visited the search result page and your computer came out “harmed”?
Are these search result page getting too crowded altogether? has barely changed their listing format and they’re doing just fine.
Update
Of course, this was a temporary glitch. According to , “the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m. [PST]“. (So I ran into this just towards the end, around 7:20). The problem’s root cause is given as:
“Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in [to a list of bad URL's] as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs”.
And it wasn’t list as Google had originally posted. (The two organizations work together on this list). Well, mistakes happen …
The whole family went to Hornby Island for the weekend, where we have a little house. The weather forecast had been “sun”, but instead it was foggy. Usually one thinks of fog as obscuring the view, but I found it actually makes it easier to see! That’s because so much is blended out.
But fog also produces real effects. Here is a photo of the trees next to our lot. I tried to reproduce . (Richard is a professional painter and used to live on the next block on Adanac Street in Vancouver – his son and our daughters are friends).
Trees in the neighbour's lot
Then here is a photo of birds gathering on poles stuck in the water (a dock that didn’t last). I managed to catch one while in the air, which isn’t that easy with these modern digitial cameras, since they need quite a while from click to capture. The grass is green in the foreground – but everything else is black and grey.
Birds on poles
And finally, a series of photos showing the ferry approaching out of the dark:
