“You’ve never been lost until you’ve been lost at Mach 3.”

– Paul F. Crickmore – test pilot

I work with a guy who went to an Ivy League school.

Recently, he had to take some classes at a local community college for a certification.

Now all I hear is him grumbling about (and I quote), “I can’t believe I wasted all that fucking money when I was young and dumb! The community college classes were better-taught, smaller and just all-around higher quality than the classes at my school. And that cost me $45,000 a year. I got ripped off.”

He’s not the first one I’ve heard say that, but he’s the first I’ve heard in person.

Nothing wrong with going to an Ivy, of course — but realize you’re probably buying a name and social networking, and not an education. And that name and social networking can be very expensive.

Why is it the fate of nearly all cities (particularly geography-constrained ones, but not only) to punish residents by having ever-rising housing costs?

Can just NIMBYism explain it? I mean, I am sure it is multi-causal.

But what’s odd is not that geography-constrained cities have high and rising rents. That’s at least somewhat explainable. What doesn’t make sense is that in any city — from very small to very large — housing costs vs. income have doubled and tripled as compared to 1960. (So in 1960 an apartment in 2016 dollars would’ve been, say, $500 a month and now it is $1500 a month.)

My pet theory is that the human tendency to arrange social organizations into hierarchical structures is exacerbated by urbanity, the hierarchical predisposition being greatly reinforced until it is reflected (via zoning laws, NIMBYism, redlining, etc) into housing prices.

With humans, if it can’t be explained by sociological considerations it probably can’t be explained at all. But I’m still thinking.

This is not a weird quantum effect!

Because neutrinos don’t readily react with baryons, this is exactly what is expected. Superposition is present until interaction occurs — in fact, it couldn’t really be any other way.

And of course the writer had to drag out Schrödinger’s damn cat without really understanding it.

The physicist Erwin Schrödinger highlighted some strange consequences of the idea of superposition more than 80 years ago, with a thought experiment that posed that a cat trapped in a box with a radioactive source could be in a superposition state, considered both alive and dead, according to the laws of quantum mechanics.

Actually, that summary is so poor I can’t tell what to make of that or what to conclude other than the writer probably didn’t comprehend the experiment or the point old Schrodie was attempting to make there.

Anyway, I didn’t read the paper because it’d have a lot of math I wouldn’t understand or want to spend the time on. But reading stories like this, one probably understands less than before.