Sunday, August 23, 2009

This message has been automagically posted by the wonders of the internet

Since it's not something you would be likely to glean from the stuff below or elswhere (unless you know me in facebook --- AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!) I thought I'd leave this scheduled post to announce my completion of 33 standardized terrestrial equinoctic cycles of air-breathing motility.

That is all; carry on.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

A moment's confusion should clear this up...

Dear Brilliant Physicists and Mathematicians,

So, there's this famous thing called the "EPR paradox", which now has oodles of experimental statistics to back it up. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the notion is some decay process emits two electrons with opposite spin in opposite dirrections (OR photons with the same polarization or whatever); so if experimenters at a space-like separation further along decide to filter said electrons by spin in PARALLEL (electron-beam transverse) magnetic fields, they'll get perfectly correlated measurements overall; and if instead they filter the electrons in PERPENDICULAR magnetic fields, they'll get perfectly UNcorrelated measurements. The thing that bugs me is that in the perpendicular case, the total spin angular momentum of the filtered electrons can't possibly be zero AFTER, so there must be some change-of-state in the total aparatus in this case. On the other hand, in the parallel case a similar change-of-state isn't necessary.

Obviously, we still expect that this doesn't permit tachyonic communication between the two experimenters; has anyone worked out the details of why we don't get a side-channel attack against the speed-limit this way?

A bemused theoretician who ought to be grading assignments

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

A mysterious note

Dear _________,

What a beauty! There are some sparse directions on the back, leading me to a slightly-defaced replica here, but you get the idea. I'm particularly intrigued by the many clearly pentagonal plates in his ventral armour, as well as the more hexagonal shapes meeting in "four-corners" fashion right at his middle.

I suppose it isn't that many years since I thought a "flying saucer" shape was a believable interstellar spacecraft geometry. These days "spherical" makes a lot more sense to me, from a self-preservation perspective, even though NASA et alia seem to prefer trees of cylinders. That said, this fellow is eerily reminiscent of flying saucer and makes a convincing argument from a submersibles point-of-view.

Anyways, I'm sorry I can't send a more direct reply, but thanks for the picture, anyway!

A bemused amateur of Creation and its Author