Notes and Jottings

According to “Kathryn Cramer”:http://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/archives/000530.html, Shahriar S. Afshar (a physicist from Harvard) has implemented a variant of the two-pin-hole test which appears to invalidates the two most popular ways of interpreting quantum mechanics in a real-world way (those being the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many-Worlds Interpretation). Kathryn points out that her father’s theory, “Transactional Interpretation”:http://mist.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/tiqm/TI_toc.html, may be the only current theory which survives the experiment. I wait with interest for further comments from the Physics community.

Hello everybody! I will try and be more available to posts and discussion (if any) and suchlike here. Ahem. What will I talk about on this fine (and wine-filled) evening?

Firstly, when Debian GNU/Linux checks an ext3 partition, why does it say “check after next mount” on *every* boot?

Secondly, udev, hald, hotplug, g-v-m form a very dynamic foursome in the quest for a usable desktop. You can get some of those from Debian unstable, some from Debian experimental; the combination as a whole gives a feeling of a nicely designed system that will *work* in the future.

Thirdly, I’m sure everybody knows that totem is the up-and-coming GNOME app for viewing multimedia (DivX, DVDs, VCDs, etc.). It’s a very well designed program which beats almost everything else available for the GNOME platform into non-existence. What some people may not be aware of is muine. It’s a competitor with rhythmbox as a sound organiser/player (MP3, Ogg, FLAC, WAV, etc.), but it just feels *right* as a UI. Try it out. It’ll require fairly recent Mono packages, as well as gtk-sharp. But it’s worth installing and running.

Fourthly, the US president seems to have made a right muck-up of his speech/conference on prime time TV yesterday. Yay
Fifthly, what the hell does the Irish government think they’re doing, trying to get a really restrictive software patenting regime installed in the EU??? This is the #1 thing which might make me consider never voting for Fianna Fail again. Yeah, that’s a selfish reason for choosing why to vote for a party or not. But really, it does emphasize their stupidity to a degree which wasn’t quite as clear before. Bah.

According to “this page from the Economist”:http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=2424049, the prairie vole has a chemical addiction to vasopressin and oxytocin, which causes them to recognize and be rewarded (in a chemical-in-brain sense) for having close relations with a particular recognized female.

bq. Helen Fisher, a researcher at Rutgers University, and the author of a new book on love, suggests it comes in three flavours: lust, romantic love and long-term attachment. There is some overlap but, in essence, these are separate phenomena, with their own emotional and motivational systems, and accompanying chemicals. These systems have evolved to enable, respectively, mating, pair-bonding and parenting.

bq. Because they are independent, these three systems can work simultaneously–with dangerous results. As Dr Fisher explains, “you can feel deep attachment for a long-term spouse, while you feel romantic love for someone else, while you feel the sex drive in situations unrelated to either partner.” This independence means it is possible to love more than one person at a time, a situation that leads to jealousy, adultery and divorce–though also to the possibilities of promiscuity and polygamy, with the likelihood of extra children, and thus a bigger stake in the genetic future, that those behaviours bring. As Dr Fisher observes, “We were not built to be happy but to reproduce.”

bq. And although both men and women express romantic love with the same intensity, and are attracted to partners who are dependable, kind, healthy, smart and educated, there are some notable differences in their choices. Men are more attracted to youth and beauty, while women are more attracted to money, education and position.

Scary stuff in this article about “a possible link between underarm deodorants and breast tumours”:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994555. Summary: be wary of deodorants (though it seems that they may have changed to a potentially safer form recently), read the article, and keep an eye out for further information.

Recently a survey (the “Gemini Deep Deep Survey”:http://www.gemini.edu/gdds/) was made with the 8-meter Hawaii telescope of the Gemini Observatory, of a period 3–6 billion years after the Big Bang, and discovered many large galaxies up to 3 billion years old. The results were reported at this week’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society, and are surprising as that leaves very little time in the early history of the universe for such large-scale galaxial formations to come into being. Another mystery is that the survey shows a large amount of heavier atoms, and you know what that means… curiouser and curiouser.

In addition, “a large-scale structure was observed”:http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2004/0107filament.html, spread across 300 million light years, at a redshift of close to 2.38. According to standard models, such a structure should not have arisen so quickly.