14 November 09 (noon)

Workout notes Perfect conditions; walked 1 loop of McNaughton in 2:54. My right leg barked just a little bit (ok, more “yapped”; it was dull but there) and I took no pain killers.

I got home and put on the Texas versus Baylor game; it was 40-0 AT THE HALF. Texas is too strong, fast, etc. for Baylor; this really looks like a division I versus as division II team at the moment.

McNaughton notes:

Just for the heck of it, I tallied my McNaughton miles:

2003: 47 (31 during a race)
2004: 60 (50 mile race)
2005: 120 (100 during a race)
2006: 159 (70 in one race; DNF 100)
2007: 120 miles (injured so couldn’t do the race)
2008: 122 miles (52 for a race; finished a 50 but added 2 miles due to dropping out and reentering)
2009: 193 miles (100 for one race, 30 for another)

Total: 821 miles, 433 for 7 races.

14 Nov 09 (am)

I am getting ready to hike 3-4 hours at McNaughton Park…hmmm..maybe 5?

Posts

Posts

Here is Jon Stewart watching Sean Hannity’s apology.

Hat tip to Sister Norma Jean.

Politics

Yes, we can afford to spend enough stimulus to reduce unemployment.

You might hear about Republican lead filibusters of judicial nominees. Remember that these people were offering “principled” opposition to filibusters when they were in power.

Science
Here is a map which shows the geographic spread of the swine flu (Nate Silver).

Quackery

You’ve seen stuff like this (can you count the number of basic mistakes this woman makes in her talk?)

(no, we humans don’t have an infinitesimal amount of mass; what this quack means is that the volume of atoms consist of mostly space).

You sometimes see quackery talked about in the mainstream media as well:

The opposition to science doesn’t seem to know any party bounds. On the right, global-warming skepticism is the rule, evolution a minority ‘opinion’, and if WorldNetDaily is to be believed, soy turns your kids gay.

On the left, we’ve now got the Huffington Post, recently lending their voice to Deepak Chopra, who in his latest contributions to the site expounded his philosophy of the mind (or whatever you want to call it), apparently seeking to justify it in quantum mechanics. Which gives it unwarranted legitimacy and worse, spreads disinformation about the science. Being somewhat qualified to rebut this, I thought I would try.

* BluePlatypus’s diary :: ::
*

Now it’s far from the first time the Huffington Post has gone off promoting bad science, pseudoscience or outright crankery, having for instance lent its voice to Jim Carrey (in his latest role as an immunologist) preaching the ‘dangers’ of vaccines. I’m not the only one around here who seems to think they’ve grown increasingly sensationalist as well as anti-science (although this is more in the realm of ‘bad science’). [...]

This is the one quantum-mechanical property that’s relevant to this discussion, which is that in quantum mechanics, things can exist in several states at once. (called a superposition) Objects don’t have definite locations; rather they’re ’smeared out’ over space. The lighter they are, and the faster they move, the more ’smeared out’ they can be. (those who’ve read about QM before know I’m referring to the famous Uncertainty Principle)

But if a measurement is carried out on the object, it will have a certain value. Which is part of the ‘weirdness’. QM cannot predict what value will be measured, but it can predict the probability of all the possible measurement results. It can predict the average of a large number of measurements. For instance, the electron of a hydrogen atom is most likely to be 53 picometers away from the nucleus. But a single measurement could give any result from zero to infinity.

Heavier, bigger, things on the other hand, get less and less ’smeared out’, and you end up with the ‘classical’ situation, where things assume definite values for their location and speed and other things.

Chopra (and many, many others) misinterprets what ‘measurement’ means here, assuming that it has something to do with human activity, drawing not only the erroneous conclusion that human (or sentient) perception is what’s meant by ‘measurement’, but indeed that things don’t even exist if they’re not being ‘measured’. Stating: “In fact, everything you are looking at right now depends upon you to exist.”

This is a basic misconception which has been debunked repeatedly (no doubt several times a week on physics newsgroups and message boards). Quantum mechanical measurements have nothing to do with ‘measurement’ per se, and especially not with human activity. It’s also at the basis of the Schrödinger’s cat ‘paradox’, as well as many of the early confusion about quantum mechanics.

In short, it’s a process known as decoherence. It’s not fully understood yet (although a lot of progress has been made since the early days and early confusion of QM). Decoherence is the process whereby quantum systems go from a superposition of different states to a single, definite state, through interactions with their environment. It’s ‘locked’ into this state because there’s an increase in entropy (disorder) associated with that change, making it irreversible (2nd law). It’s not fully understood yet, but it certainly doesn’t resemble the Berkleyian idea Chopra seems to have adopted.

This is an excellent article; if you like science and debunking quackery, read it!