This article is terrible. Just atrocious. How did this get published in Scientific American?

In theory and to some extent in practice its tenets demand that a particle can appear to be in two places at once—a paradoxical phenomenon known as superposition….

That is not what “superposition” means. Not what it means at all. Not even close — either the formal interpretation of the informal (but equally correct) one. A trip to Wikipedia will clear that right up.

Applying the superposition principle to a quantum mechanical particle, the configurations of the particle are all positions, so the superpositions make a complex wave in space. The coefficients of the linear superposition are a wave which describes the particle as best as is possible, and whose amplitude interferes according to the Huygens principle.

That is what superposition means. There’s no two damn particles anywhere.

[A]nd that two particles can become “entangled,” sharing information across arbitrarily large distances through some still-unknown mechanism.

That is also not what “entanglement” means. There is no information-sharing in this sense going on here. There is only mutual information where the quantum state of the system cannot be described without the other particle (or whatever), no matter how far away it might be. So, no, they do not share information across any distances. But they do share a quantum state which experiences a wavefunction collapse on observation of either of the pair of particles. (Which is, you know, cool enough in itself.)

And Schrödinger’s cat again. I shake my head in shame and despair. That cat is the most abused feline in the entire universe, quantum or otherwise.

I could go on. Quantum mechanics is weird enough without being absolutely wrong about the actual facts of it. I mean it’s a 100% scientific truth that local realism is not preserved in this universe. Isn’t that weird enough, rather than writing all that crappy pap and pappy crap?

From now on, my pronouns are “legend” and “yeehaw.” Just FYI.

I have a really fucking big office at my new job with a door that closes and locks, and I can tell you that it’s so incomparably better than an open office plan that it’s almost like not working in comparison. And the reality is, I get more done. Much more. It’s vastly more productive. I’m skeptical that open office plans save money anywhere but on paper.

Alas, saving money on paper is what MBAs care about so I guess we are stuck with them. But I’m not, and all I have to say about that is hell yeah.

I think of myself as like Hemingway. Except I can actually write. And without the raging misogyny. And I’m not a mega-jerk all the time.

Ok, I’m just grumpy. Hemingway was grumpy. I’m grumpy. We’re practically brothers. Except all that other stuff.

Every time I lift a heavy weight, I think about the anger it’d inspire in a Fat Acceptance nutter and that gives me even more motivation. Getting strong again is the primary motivator, but I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t give me a nice power boost.

Holy hell, this is a bad design. I love how people like to portray themselves as the smartest engineers in the world and all that and design some laughable bullshit like this.

How can you not have any solution that doesn’t disallow any traffic to a data center if it’s under maintenance? What the shit? And how can you have a failover state set up that cannot possibly function? That’s like having a rocket and the failover is “just blow up.”

GitHub, I don’t want to work for you or for Microsoft, but you need me. You really need me.

We're screaming about identity politics, while the planet is starting the convulsions which will lead to billions of deaths, with a non-trivial chance of human extinction.

OK.

— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) October 30, 2018

We are gender neutrally totally and irreversibly fucked.

I had never thought about the fact that many young people don’t vote because they have no idea how to use a post office or send mail as they’ve never had to do it.

When I was at the post office to register, this poor girl, clearly also a college student like me, didn’t know what “postmarked” meant and had no idea how to send an important document by mail. Most people my age have zero need to go to the post office and may have never stepped into one before.

I know how to use a post office but even I rarely send mail. Someone who’s 20? They’ve had the internet and online bill payment their entire life. Why would they need to know any of that? To them, it sounds like sending a telegram sounds to us. When they must do this for voter registrations and absentee balloting it must seem an anachronistic, impossible task.

If that makes you laugh, send any telegrams lately? If not, how would you do it? It wasn’t at all hard but it sure seems that way when you have no clue at all how to even start. Your grandparents would’ve had no problem with this task at all.

Such a fun song and reminds me so much of where and when I grew up.

I am still angry at Katie M. for writing such a great bit of poetry:

I met a man twice my age
Half joking, he said ‘I should warn you.
You’re a fish on the line, and the lines pulling in, and there’s a frying pan coming to warm you’.
And while I smiled, it occurred to me
I’m just gristle and blood
And I’ve spent half my life with the sun in my eyes
Chasing rainbows through the mud

OK, I am not mad at her. Who could be mad at Kate? I just wish I’d written it. I like her brain. I like it a lot.

My guess on what happened to the Lion Air Flight JT610 is that the IRS malfunctioned and the pilot attempted to turn around, did not have adequate attitude information, thought he was climbing but was descending, and crashed into the ocean at 400mph.

This is the only thing that makes sense given the data I’ve seen. It was overcast in Jakarta when this crash occurred, which matches with my above theory.

On a plane like the 737 Max the GPS only provides position information, not attitude. If you lose IRS and are in clouds and are a bad pilot, you are screwed.