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.