Meador Manor

What the BLEEP!?

Posted on March 28, 2008 by Granger Meador

This clip is a fun illustration of the quantum weirdness of the double-slit experiment. Be warned, however! The movie this is from, Quantum Weirdness! What the BLEEP Do We Know!?, is a mélange of pseudoscience and quantum physics. This clip holds together pretty well until the end, when it starts to posit that a conscious observer alters reality.

The “observer” here need not be conscious – it is the act of measurement that collapses the wave function. The physics of measurement, of actually determining which slit the electron went through, causes quantum decoherence in which the vastly entangled quantum system assumes a given state. When you don’t have the “observer” present the quantum state remains entangled and superposition can occur and create an interference pattern.

And if all of that sounds like mumbo jumbo, well, what the BLEEP do we know?

What the Bleep Do We Know!? at Amazon

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Mascot Tree

Posted on March 27, 2008 by Granger Meador

The College High Class of 1957 came up with an interesting project: carving the stump of the old elm tree north of the BHS Science Wing into the school’s former and current mascots. They paid to have Clayton Coss sculpt one portion into a Wildcat and BHS alums paid to have the rest formed into a Bruin.

Bill Miller, the BHS Safety Guy, used one of the campus security cameras to compile a time-lapse video of the sculpting process, which I then edited for time, color, and contrast and I threw in a soundtrack. He and I collaborated previously on a similar project when they demolished the old BHS skybridge.

You can read more about the tree at the BHS website.

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On the Hunt for a Fast Browser

Posted on March 20, 2008 by Granger Meador

Safari Safari is fast…really fast. Recently I downloaded Apple’s Safari web browser for my Windows XP machine, and I’m surprised at how much I like it. Knowing that it would lack all of the nifty add-ons that I use with Firefox, I didn’t expect to like Safari. But its speed in loading and displaying web pages is quite impressive. The other striking thing about Safari is its font-smoothing technology, but I have mixed feelings about that.

Safari has the same tabbed browsing features as the latest Firefox and Internet Explorer releases and so far I haven’t noticed any problematic page displays. I do miss some of the Firefox add-ons, most notably thus far how AdBlock Plus can wipe out ads on web pages, how Googlepedia shows a related Wikipedia entry display on a Google search, and how Foxmarks keeps my bookmarks synchronized on multiple machines.

What I certainly don’t miss is Firefox’s glacial startup (worsened by the plethora of add-ons I’ve thrown in) and its more plodding display of various web pages. And don’t get me started on the hideous menu and toolbar system in Internet Explorer 7!

I’ll make good use of Safari on my laptop, since its slow hard disk and aging microprocessor will likely make the snappy Safari experience quite alluring. But those Firefox add-ons will likely keep drawing me back. I look forward to the release of Firefox 3, but I have a feeling Safari will retain the speed crown.

CNET has a good comparison of Safari and Firefox in the Windoze environment.

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The Last Grand Master has Died

Posted on March 18, 2008 by Granger Meador

We lost a true hero of science, engineering, and science fiction this week with the death of the final Grand Master of Science Fiction, Sir Arthur C. Clarke. The original three Grand Masters were Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Clarke.

Clarke was probably most renowned for 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I enjoyed each and every one of his books and stories, and own them all. The novel I would recommend to a newcomer would be the mysterious and ambiguous Rendezvous with Rama, although I am also very fond of the inventive The Fountains of Paradise, Childhood’s End is justifiably famous, and the little-known A Fall of Moondust is a great engineering adventure.

Clarke was an extremely intelligent and funny man who helped bring awareness and understanding of the Space Age to the public. He was a featured commentator on television for the moon shots. He invented the concept of communications satellite, although he did not patent the concept. A sign of his humor was his 1965 essay about this: How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time.

You can see his farewell video, recorded three months ago as he approached his 90th birthday, at YouTube. Rest in peace, Sir Arthur.

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Wonders of the Milky Way

Posted on March 17, 2008 by Granger Meador

Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy has a fun post called “Ten things you don’t know about the Milky Way Galaxy.” He presumes, of course. I knew six of the ten things, but that meant I learned four new things today. Just call me a lifelong learner. And if you want a good read on astronomy, I recommend Timothy Ferris’ Coming of Age in the Milky Way.