What does quantum theory and SETI have in common?

And no, I’m not looking for the answer: They’re both expensive branches of science.

Here’s the thing. Everyone’s been looking for a way to unify quantum mechanics with gravity, a so called quantum theory of gravity.

There are numerous theories all trying to explain a way to unify them, often involving reasons why we haven’t found a theory yet. For example, the laboratories at Cern is looking for the Higgs boson. To find it, a new super collider is being built, that can accelerate particles to even higher energies than has been achieved before.
And even while this is being built, some theorist are saying that it won’t be able to achieve the energy level required to detect the Higgs boson.

Each experiment to find a new particle, or examine the structure of space-time in greater detail almost always require more powerful or more sensitive experiments. And sometimes it’s not even necessary. A twin satellite system called Gravity Probe B was launched recently to detect the distortion of space-time that occurs near a large, rotating body (like the Earth). And yet, the data to prove their case already existed from the Mars Global Surveyor in polar orbit around Mars.

This is exactly the same argument that has been levied at SETI. The argument goes something like this:

If we spend the next 100 years searching with every radio telescope on Earth, looking for signals from intelligent aliens, we still might not find anything. And yet, there’s always another way to search, different fequencies, different methods, another reason we haven’t found the alien signal, another reason to change the way we’re searching.

Since we don’t know in advance if there are intelligent signals to detect, we can’t be sure that it’s worth searching at all. Compare that with clearing a minefield, for example. You can be certain there are mines there, and you can be certain that you’ve got them all after you’re done.

The search for a unified theory might have the same problem. There’s no proof that such a unification is even possible. In fact, the reason we’re searching in the first place is that we know that both theories are correct (they’ve been obsevered working), except that they contradict each other.

So we have a choice:

• Continue searching for a way to unify the two branches of science or,
• Learn to live with the contradiction.

It’s something of a conundrum for humans. We can’t resist a good mystery.

And so, we search.

Year of the….?

So (if my calculations are correct) tomorrow was the Chinese New Year in 2006. This year, the new year begins on February 18th.

2005 was the year of the rooster.
2006 was the year of the dog.
and by the look of things 2007 is the year of the racist.
(actually it’s the year of the pig, which makes me giggle).

All I can remember thinking when I heard about the racism row in Celebrity Big Brother was “Yet another reason I’m glad I’m not watching.”

However, I do find it…perplexing, that this starts to happen after bosses at Channel 4 admit that this was shaping up to be the most boring Big Brother ever.

I’m not being paranoid, they really are out to get me.

Don’t DO that!

Oh my aching heart!

Windows got to the loading screen today and just froze!

Thankfully, one quick reboot later and all appears well, but oh god that gave me a shock!

There’s never a defibrilator nearby when you need one….

Federal Way schools restrict Gore film

Federal Way schools restrict Gore film

“Condoms don’t belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He’s not a schoolteacher,” said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. “The information that’s being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. … The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn’t in the DVD.”

You know, I rarely say this, but: what a dick.

This guy, Frosty Hardison, is the reason that no action is being taken on global warming. He objected to Al Gore’s film being shown because part of the message is that America is largely responsible for the global crisis.

As for him saying he deosn’t want sex education in schools: does he understand why we had a baby boom in the ’60s? It wasn’t that people were having more sex (in fact the birth rate should have dropped since contraception was more widely available). It was because people in the ’40s were never told how to have sex. Married couples went literally years before consumating their marriages!

There is hope though, one senior at the school is reported as saying that although she hasn’t seen Al Gore’s film, she wants to, since it explains how humans are affecting the planet, and what we can do to avert the crisis.

“Watching a movie doesn’t mean that you have to believe everything you see in it,” she said.

However, I read a brilliant joke in New Scientist magazine a few weeks ago. It was about how creationism has become intelligent design, which is now sponsoring science to gain acceptance as a ‘real science’. The quote was:

“It is ironic that a belief that Darwinian evolution is wrong, is itself forced to continually evolve in an attempt to gain popular support.”

Priceless…

TV Movie Editing

Can anyone explain this to me?

I was watching Star Trek: First Contact on Channel 4, and I couldn’t help noticing the very bad and inconsistent editing job they’d done. Removing certain lines that contain mild swearing, presumably due to the broadcast time (19:05-21:05). Examples of missing lines are:

• Lily Sloan’s “Bullshit!” and “You son of a bitch!”
• Zefram Cochrane’s “Sweet Jesus!” when he sees the Enterprise.

Yet they keep in:

• Scenes involving violence and death.
• Picard being poked in the eye with a drill (yeuch!).
• The Borg drilling into Data’s head.
• Worf hacking a Borg to pieces (they did cut out the bloody neck part).
• And probably worse of all: the flesh being eviscerated from the Borg Queen’s face.

So it’s OK to show scenes of violence before the watershed, but it’s not OK to swear.

This is very worrying, because it’s exactly the same slippery slope that American TV went down a few years ago, so that now they can show the most extreme violence and it’s OK, but throw in a naughty word (or a nipple shot) and suddenly everyone’s up in arms!

For the record, Star Trek: First Contact has a 12 certificate, the highest any Star Trek movie currently has.

Churches unite over adoption row

BBC NEWS | Politics | Churches unite over adoption row

Urgh! Again with the religion.

The problem with this arguement is that the people with strong religious feels about homosexual couples adopting have no common ground with the people who believe any stable family unit should be able to adopt. It’s like trying to teach someone calculus when they don’t understand basic maths.

I always find reversing the question helps in these matters. Currently the question is:

Why should church run adoption agencies be forced to go against their conscience and place children with homosexual couples?

It should be:

Why should a child be denied loving parents by a church run adoption agency just because of their prospective parents’ sexual orientation?

The problem is tradition (and the associated traditional values). People think that tradition means “We do this, because we’ve always done this.” But it really is only the last generation’s way of thinking. The current generation always have their own take on the world, and they need to come to their own conclusions about what traditions they keep and which they throw away.

“Ah, but is it not also true that times must and do change…”

-Eddie Murphy (Coming To America)

Religion has been proclaiming that homosexuality is wrong. This is based on some very shaky and controversial parts of historical religious documents (parts of the bible), while ignoring other rules in those same parts. Even then the documents only usually they only refer to men (since they were written by men and they didn’t really care about women got up to).

in the past, this rule against homosexual males made some sort of sense, since the human population was very small and any activity that didn’t produce more babies was likely to be harmful to the local population.

But today, we have over 6 billion people on the planet. In my lifetime, that’s likely to rise to over 9 billion. Every model of the world says that even at 6 billion people, we have roughly twice as many people as the planet can support, longterm.

So the question really becomes: Why isn;t religion moving with the times? Why does it still stick to a few rules in the bible that support it’s bigotry, and I’m sorry to use that word, but it is the word that best describes the situation, and prejudiced view?

If anyone can answer that question, you’re smarter than me, because I’ve been trying to understand this all my adult life.

Home Office Reforms

BBC NEWS | Politics | Home Office split ‘within months’

The news that after the unforgivable screw-ups of the home office and its failure to record offences of Britons overseas on the police database, they’re now talking about splitting the largest civil service department into two parts. One to deal with justice and one for public protection.

I’d like to make a few predictions:

1. This will have no effect on efficiency. In fact it will probably make it worse, because there will be an increased amount of communication between departments.
2. The increased communication will probably require a new office to co-ordinate between the two departments.
3. Someone will accuse us of copying the Americans, since the two departments will have similar mandates of the US Department of Justice and US Department of Homeland Security.
4. It will only be a matter of time before some criminal uses it to his/her advantage by claiming that his/her human rights were violated when information is passed between the two departments.

PS3 Fails To Impress - My Take On Things

The problem (as I see it) was including the Blue-Ray DVD player in the machine. There’s no call for it as there’s little demand to have a next gen DVD player in the house at present.

It was suggested that Sony should release the PS3 with a standard DVD player, and later the next version of the machine could include the Blue-Ray.

Including the Blue-Ray has:

• Delayed the PS3 several times from its original release date.
• Vastly increased the RRP.
• Been seen as un-necessary by industry analysts.
• and been accused of Sony forcing their format on the world (there was a rumour that the Blue-Ray was included in the PS3 to increase the overall sales figures of Blue-Ray drives, thus allowing Sony to claim market ownership and crush HD-DVD)

Without the Blue-Ray, it’d be retailing at about the same price as the 360 when it first launched. This would allow consumers to make a direct pound for pound comparison with the features of the machines, give them a indication of how it would drop in price over time, and enable buyers to make an informed decision of what to do with their money: ie “I’ve got £330, so I can either buy the 360, 2 controllers and 3 games, or the PS3, one controller and 2 games.” (Or something similar to this.)

It’s got a lot going against it.

• It’s last to market.
• It’s most expensive.
• It’s got equipment that many users won’t be able to take advantage of.

A lot of people who are were PS2 owners might be put off by a perceived lack of support for the product from Sony.

They’ve had to put up with a less than brilliant online gaming system for the PS2, a cancelled hard drive for the PS2, a withdrawn from market network adapter for the big PS2, so only the little ones could go online, a blatant lack of support for the PSP and the worry of a repeat of the problem with the UMD films, where Sony tried to push it’s own format on the market and failed.

They might (as I do) worry that Blue-Ray will fail as a format, and then they’re stuck with a console that was sold as a DVD player/Console combo, that can’t play any new DVDs that come out because they’re all in HD-DVD format now.

PS3 Fails To Impress

A friend of mine sent me this.
—————————————-

There are a lot of reports lately about PS3s sitting in piles on the shelves in the U.S.. Many were returned in the initial month after purchase when speculators failed to realise any profit. Ebay shows a number of PS3 sales at shop prices or just below, as people try to make their money back. Silly money for PS3s on Ebay lasted only for a couple of days.

Wii prices, however, are between 125 and 150% of RRP on Ebay, and most major shops still report selling out of any Wii console stock within an hour or two of delivery.

The PS3 has not been the major success that Sony were hoping for. So far the PS3 is only selling to early-adopter die-hard Sony fans with sufficient disposable income – not as big a slice of the market as Sony thought. Many reports (on Slashdot, Digg etc.) seem to suggest that almost all video-gamers already have a good gaming PC, or a recent console. Few people seem desperate to upgrade, except the early adopters, who’ve already done so. The PS3 is very expensive, and there’s one good game for it (Resistance). Motorstorm was a big buzz title pre-launch, but it’s now been revealed that the impressive scenes shown at game shows were pre-rendered cinematics. Software sells hardware, and there’s nothing so amazing that people will buy the hardware just to play the game (as happened with GTA3 on PS2).

By all accounts (from reading comments on several developer blogs) the PS3 is a complete pig to program well. The 360 is quite straightforward, being a multi-cored PC-in-a-box, and the Wii is a Gamecube v1.5 (which could well mean that a number of games for the Cube, which were shelved in development as the machine didn’t sell too well, could be polished up and released for the Wii, which is selling very nicely indeed).

True, Sony have deep pockets, and could support an unprofitable system for some time, but so did Sega, and their failure to market the Dreamcast pushed them out of the hardware business altogether. The cycle is fast, and vicious – console doesn’t sell well, so fewer developers release games for it – with less software available, the console is even less appealing to consumers, so doesn’t sell well…

Given that you already have a next-gen console, the question you’ll need to ask yourself is this: Is the small handful of platform-unique titles on the PS3 worth laying out £500 for?

Router Problems

A friend of mine, who currently has his broadband through a company in the UK starting with the letter “T”, shall we say, has had a rather unpleasant experience with them

Recently purchasing an Xbox 360, he wanted to hook it up to the internet for online gaming. This requires a router to share the internet connection, and he wanted to buy a wireless router, so he doesn’t have to trail cable all over the house.

So, knowing that some routers don’t work well with certain internet providers (my old one AOL for example can’t work with most Belkin routers), my friend called his provider to ask their advice.

They happily transferred him to their sales department, advising him that they could get the right router for him.

He bought it, and it arrived promptly.

Unfortunately, it’s an ethernet/cable router. It only works with either cable broadband, or with telephone broadband that uses an ethernet ADSL modem (a rare thing indeed).
He has a USB ADSL modem. There’s no way on this green earth that these two devices will talk to each other. They don’t even have a compatible socket.

So he called his provider, and asked to return it for a refund or exchange it for one that works.

They refused.

He was a little taken back at this, so he asked if they would provide him with an ethernet ADSL modem, so he could get it to work.

They refused.

He asked why they would sell him a router that couldn’t possibly work with his internet set-up, and their responce was basically:

“It’s your fault as the customer for ordering the wrong router from us, even though it was you (the customer) taking our advice (which was wrong) on which router to buy.”

Sorry, hang on a second.

Their excuse is basically “we’re too stupid to sell you the correct router, but we’re not going to replace it because it’s in good working order.”

In what world is this acceptable behaviour?

If you took your car for a service and the mechanic called you at work and said

“The brake pads need replacing. Do you want to 720s or the 380s?”
“What’s the difference?”
“The 720s are a bit more expensive but they last longer.”
“OK, I’ll take the 720s then.”

And later that day, you had a car accident because the brakes failed to work, the mechanic could not turn around and say “Oh it’s not my fault. I asked him which ones he wanted fitted, and he said the 720s, but they’re not made for his car. They don’t fit.”

No! This is not on.

Luckily for him, I’m going to try it out at home and if it works, I’ll buy it off him.

But boy is he pissed…