ain’t that the truth

This marks the beginning of bqdc. Before this post you’ll have to go back to my myspace blog to see the wonder of my bloggin’. I have made moderate effort to turn this into the definitive version, but it didn’t pay off and there is still plenty there that isn’t here. But, now, here we are. Without further ado, the original post:

Why? you ask? Is it the fame, fortune, and the emminent respectability of blogging that draws me away from a myspace-centric blog? Well, yes. But also there are a variety of things about hosting my own blog that will make life easier for me and my readers, not least of which is wordpress’ ability to subscribe to a blog’s comments, so instead of having to visit my blog hundreds of times to see if anyone has said anything interesting, or if i have perhaps responded to your comment, you’ll be able to just subscribe to my comment feed and the information (and comments) will be delivered to you, as if by magic.

But what is this “subscribe” that i speak of? I’ve been meaning to write about this for awhile, since it is the biggest thing to happen to the internet since http, so here we go.

I’m going to start with an excellent video that is slightly out of date. There are a couple things in the last 30 seconds or so that i’m going to correct, but you can take it as gospel until you start reading again:

Got that? OK, now for the correction: the video makes it look like you’ve got 4 steps that you have to go through to start subscribing to blogs:

1. Sign up for or download a newsreader
2. Find some content that you’d like to subscribe to
3. Click on the orange “news” square
4. Copy the uri for the crazy-looking code page into your newsreader of choice

Ok, well, you don’t have to do all that. You still have to have an account, but if you’ve got a gmail accound then you’ve already got a gReader account. And, if you use firefox, opera, safari or even ie7 your job will be even easier, certainly there won’t be any crazy copy/pasting of code.

All four of the major browsers have the feed icon located somewhere inside or just outside of the location bar. The three good browsers have it inside the location bar. Look up right now and you should see it just to the right of the URI.

Firefox has a unique system for dealing with feeds: it basically re-directs you to an external feed reader or one of the many reader add-ons. So when you click on the feed icon for the first time it will give you a preview of the feed and ask you what you want to do with it. Just click what service you want from the drop-down and you’re on your way.

Safari, Opera, and IE7 all use internal readers, so if you click on the icon the feeds should just show up in your favorites list or homologue. I personally don’t like their implementations nearly as much as google reader’s, and a cursory glance around the websphere hasn’t revealed any way to change the default action in any of them. So, like i always say: you should use firefox. Of course if anybody knows a good way to change these settings let me know and i’ll change this paragraph.

What are you doing? Go subscribe to my blog, or its comments.

Technorati Tags: blog, meta, tech

If you’re wondering about this whole “end of history,” or so called “technological singularity” that some believe is probable within this century, you would do well to read this post about the quickening (it’s right underneath some weird comic) that doctor klomp hypothesized approximately 300,000 years ago. It bears remarkable resemblance to what is going on in our own hyper-technological world. A quote:

And it only gets better. Seriously, one of the most amazing things i have ever read.

Technorati Tags: futurism

Which is to say, i’m starting to get wrinkles. They’re most obvious when i’m smiling, which means, i think, that they’re laugh lines?

Anyway, i’m going to look so cool when i’m 60 it’s just not even funny.

Technorati Tags: egoism, observation

First, new scientist reported on an experiment that really very strongly suggests that in some cases it is possible for photons to travel faster than the speed of light. Completely aside from the apparent oxymoron of saying that light traveled faster than itself, (being as “photon” is a word that means “unit of light”) this is the first directly observed violation of relativity that has ever been documented. To really appreciate how big this is you have to understand that the speed of light is, according to relativity–the most accurate model of the large scale universe ever devised–, the absolute upper bound for the maximum speed of anything, ever. Nothing goes faster than than the speed of light, the speed of light is what everything is relative to!

I hope that my redundancy conveys my excitement in the absence of my wildly flailing arms.

OK, the second thing to be reported, this one on one of the blogs of one of the editors of scientific american, is that some observers at a gamma ray telescope noticed that light at two very different energy levels (approximately an order of magnitude apart at the TeV range) coming from a distant supernova arrived with an approximately 4 minute separation. That is to say, assuming they didn’t overlook something, light that started at the same place and time arrived here at different times. As i mentioned in the previous paragraph, light is the thing which everything else is relative to, it’s what gives relativity its name. Not only is the speed of light in a vacuum (almost 300million m/s) supposed to be the absolute maximum speed for everything in the universe, all light is supposed to travel at exactly that speed. It seems very likely that quantum mechanical effects affected the light. And, what’s more, if you look at the end of the SciAm article you’ll see that the energy difference of the photons correlates to the energy of a string. Or something. Frankly i don’t quite understand that part.

So what’s the big deal? you might be asking. Isn’t this what science does? Well, yes. We basically knew that something like this was coming: the massive inconsistencies between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics means that something’s got to give. Somewhere, somehow, somethings got to be wrong. But this is the first time that we’ve seen it. To give you a metaphor that compares science to parties: Remember that time that you went to that party that the girl you really like and hope to finally make some headway with is supposed to be at. Because every time you’ve seen her she’s been on the other escalator or something, but all your friends say you two would get along great and share interests in those obscure things that nobody cares about. But now you see the door open and there’s a silhouette and…

Well, that’s where this discovery puts us. We’ve now got a silhouette.
If these observations stand the weight of scientific scrutiny then we are seeing the first empirical evidence prodding us to go beyond relativity. The last time something this big happened in science was the famous experiment when astronomers saw the sun bend the light of a star in its gravity well.

Technorati Tags: physics, science

I’ve heard multiple times (from reputable and semi-reputable sources such as blogs and newspapers, respectively) that up to 20% of various populations (most commonly french or american) believe that the sun orbits the earth.

I’ve never really believed it, so i created a facebook poll for 200 people who listed “the bible” in their favorite books asking the simple question “does the earth orbit the sun?” with a plain yes or no response the only possible options.

It’s going to cost me $21. Do you think that’s a waste of money? Does it depend on the kinds of results i get? I don’t think that any results won’t be interesting.

What do you think the results are going to be, percentage-wise? I’ll link to it when it’s done running (in about 24 hours) or provide a picture if facebook doesn’t allow that kind of thing.

Update: The results are in.

Technorati Tags: science, skepticism