Two Places At Once
Magic is now visible for all to see.
Does Schrödinger's cat really exist? You bet. The first ever quantum superposition in an object visible to the naked eye has been observed.
Aaron O'Connell and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, did not actually produce a cat that was dead and alive at the same time, as Erwin Schrödinger proposed in a notorious thought experiment 75 years ago. But they did show that a tiny resonating strip of metal – only 60 micrometres long, but big enough to be seen without a microscope – can both oscillate and not oscillate at the same time. Alas, you couldn't actually see the effect happening, because that very act of observation would take it out of superposition.
"We talk about quantum weirdness and things being in two places at once, but it all involves atoms and molecules, stuff we don't normally interact with."
Via Warren Ellis.
Meeting Inspiration
I had the rare opportunity to meet Dave Eggers today, one of the great writers and advocates of my generation.
More directly, Eggers was the first person I'd ever known who found a way to express the daily frustration, anger, despair and isolation associated with being part of a challenging family.
He was signing copies of his latest book, Zeitoun, at Green Apple Books and, because he only advertised via the McSweeney's newsletter, there were only a few people there.
As the line was short, Dave took the time to chat with just about everyone, and he was as humble and open as his writing leads one to expect.
Wisdom From The Wire (Part 1)
Presenting: Like Some Grown Fuckin' Men
Until then, Mr. Charles, we gonna handle this shit like businessmen. Sell the shit, make the profit, and later for that gangsta bullshit. Yeah?Do The Chair know we gonna look like some punk ass bitches out there?
MuthafuckaIwill punk ya ass for saying some shit --
Yo, yo String... String!
WHAT!
Yo. Pooh did have the floor...
Faith-based Hate Mail
Sir David Attenborough
They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.
[Via Kottke and Jack Shedd Image by ethe.]
Bleeping Blagojevich
Subtitles for recordings played during Day 2 of the Blagojevich impeachment trial.
William Safire catches grammatical fire discussing the terms used by the media in censoring Illinois' favorite embattled governor.
Today we are going to deal with the media coverage of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, epithets and imprecations, nouns often lumped together by the Bluenose Generation as coarseness, crudeness, bawdiness, scatology or swearing. But roundheeled readers should stop smacking their lips and rubbing their hands because the deliberately shocking subject can be treated with decorum, in plain words, without the titillating examples of “dirty words.” (Titillating, from the Latintitillare, “to tickle,” is clean.)
If you want to fulminate about such prissiness about prurience in print, feel free to rattle your jowls, blow your stack and otherwise express your outrage with the typographical device to which cartoonists have resorted for generations: !#*&%@%!!!
The need for today’s review is the coverage given to the participial modifier employed with great frequency and immortalized on recordings of telephone conversations made by the F.B.I. as its shocked — shocked! — agents eavesdropped on Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor. His favorite intensifier was reproduced in many newspapers and Internet sites with dashes as “----ing” or with asterisks as “****ing” and was substituted in broadcasts, telecasts and Netcasts as a word descriptive of the sound called bleep. The Wall Street Journal went almost all the way, using both the first letter and three dashes in the participle before “golden,” the word it modified.
Be sure to read on till the end -- some his best jabs are also his shortest.
[Image via BuzzFeed.]
A Tour of Contemporary India
Do you want to better understand the Mumbai siege? Would you like to increase your understanding of contemporary India? Have you wondered how this whole "outsourcing" thing has come to pass? Then pick up this page-turning Man Booker Prize winner.
The White Tiger is part A Confederacy of Dunces and part Life of Pi, with a touch of Machiavelli's The Prince and a little bit of Atlas Shrugged thrown in for good measure.
Our tale is dictated and recorded by the protagonist, Balram Halwai. Given no name but "boy" because his family worked too hard to think up a real name, Balram is the prototypical Indian entrepreneur.
Upon hearing on the radio that Mr. Jiabao, the Premier of China, will be visiting India to learn about the sub-continent's tremendous entrepreneurial spirit, Balram decides that, for the Premier's sake, he must intervene. Knowing that the official guides will give China's Premier a false account of what is happening in India, Balram takes it upon himself to record his own life story as a means toward understanding the true India.
Told as a collection of spoken recordings, made each night for a week in the wee hours of the morning and addressed directly to Mr. Jiabao, our Bangalore entrepreneur guides the reader, along with the Premier, through modern India as experienced by someone who started out among the poorest of the poor and wound up a wealthy man.
Inspired wit and ignorance, lust and greed, corruption and murder, reason and pride, cunning and madness, luck and careful planning. All play a role in this allegorical work.
The Grid System
I haven't been a professional web developer for three years, but this website still makes me all sorts of happy. It's like seeing a rainbow after a storm, or flowers after a long winter.
Made popular by the International Typographic Style movement and pioneered by legends like Josef Müller-Brockmann and Wim Crouwel, the grid is the foundation of any solid design. The Grid System is an ever-growing resource where graphic designers can learn about grid systems, the golden ratio and baseline grids.
I implemented a grid system using XHTML + CSS while I worked at Yale, and that decision saved me more time than I can even fathom. Long live The Grid!
Favorite Brand Names On The Wire
One of my favorite things about The Wire is how it's tied in so completely to contemporary Baltimore and then to the rest of the wider world. Over the course of the show's five seasons, the hoppers on the corners updated the brand name to fit with recent world events. The more ferocious the name, the more potent the drug. Just cause kids drop outta school and deal doesn't mean they're dumb. My favorites:
- WMD
- Pandemic
- Bird Flu
- Greenhouse Gas
- Mistletoe
- Sheed Wallace
- Brokeback
- Bin Laden
For more, read a discussion about Blue Tops at The Wire's forums. Even better, dealers in Philly have a brand of heroin called The Wire.
Did I miss any good ones? Let me know...
Obama Will Lower Taxes; $250K = Rich
Tax plans drawn to scale.
I've gotten into a few debates recently with friends who oppose Obama's tax plan for two main reasons: (1) they feel that raising the capital gains tax will hurt the national economy by discouraging investment and removing liquidity from the market; and (2) taxes are going up for those households making over $250,000 per year. That's not much money, they argue -- a good chunk of my friends have advanced degrees (with associated debt) and live in S.F. and NYC. If they want to even dream of owning their own apartment in a decent neighborhood, making that kind of money is a necessity.
If you agree with point number two, first take a look at the chart above, which shows how the tax plans of McCain and Obama will directly impact different segments of the population.*
Clear? Good. Welcome back. Next, Daniel Gross takes apart the second argument in his Slate article "The deluded Obama critics who think $250,000 is a middle-class salary."
Barack Obama's tax plan, . . . promises to improve the nation's fiscal standing by scaling back tax cuts for people making more than $250,000. Since then, the business pundit class has been griping that people who make $250,000 a year aren't really wealthy, especially if they live in and around New York; San Francisco; or Washington, D.C. . . . On Wednesday afternoon, CNBC's unscientific online poll found that (surprise!) only 35 percent of respondents believed an income of $250,000 qualified a household for elite rich status.
I have two pieces of bad news for the over-$250,000 crowd. First, the reversal of some of the temporary Bush tax cuts is probably inevitable, given the Republican fiscal clown show of the past eight years. Second, I regret to inform you that you are indeed rich. . . . [I]ncome data can surely tell us something. And they tell us that $250,000 puts you in pretty fancy company. The Census Bureau earlier this week reported that the median household income was $50,223 in 2007—up slightly from the last year but still below the 1999 peak. So a household that earned $250,000 made five times the median. In fact, as this chart shows, only 2.245 million U.S. households, the top 1.9 percent, had income greater than $250,000 in 2007. (About 20 percent of households make more than $100,000.)
In dealing with aggregate nationwide numbers, we should of course take account of the significant differences in the cost of living from state to state. . . . But even in wealthy states, $250,000 ain't bad—it's nearly four times the median income in wealthy states like Maryland and Connecticut. And even if you look at the wealthiest metropolitan areas—Washington, D.C. ($83,200); San Francisco ($73,851); Boston ($68,142); and New York ($61,554)—$250,000 a year dwarfs the median income.
Still feel that $250,000 isn't much money? Let me know why -- I'd love to discuss.
[Update -- According to this 1997 paper put out by the Fed [pdf], 1% of the population owns 82% of the stock market.]
* Looking at tax policy alone can be misleading, especially because of the radical differences in proposed health care plans.
My Gal
Tina Fey strikes a pro-NRA Palin pose.
Cutting piece in this week's New Yorker on Palin as veep candidate.
In summary: Because my candidate, unlike your winking/blinking Vice-Presidential candidate, who, though, yes, he did run as the running mate when the one asking him to run did ask him to run, which that I admire, one thing he did not do, with his bare hands or otherwise, is, did he ever kill a moose? No, but ours did. And I would. Please bring a moose to me, over by me, and down that moose will go, and, if I had a kid, I would take a picture of me showing my kid that dead moose, going, like, Uh, sweetie, no, he is not resting, he is dead, due to I shot him, and now I am going to eat him, and so are you, oh yes you are, which is responsible, as God put this moose here for us to shoot and eat and take a photo of, although I did not, at that time, know why God did, but in years to come, God’s will was revealed, which is: Hey, that is a cool photo for hunters about to vote to see, plus what an honor for that moose, to be on the Internet.
Brings a grin to the faces of the snarky and well-educated, and witty and funny in its own right ... but really -- isn't this just mocking people who support Palin because they have trouble relating to or understanding the other candidates?
Sure, maybe that's worth mocking -- the last 8 years certainly point to a need for increased mockery -- but Obama is saying that he wants to be a unifying force in America. Taking Obama at his word, this is the sort of article that those on the Left need to stop writing. Then again, maybe sarcasm, inside jokes and poking fun at blue-collar America and those who didn't have an opportunity for much of an education is still fair game. For that, all well-heeled citizens can do is offer thanks to McCain's irresponsible nomination of an under-qualified running mate, intentionally-scribbled signs at the RNC, attack ads by McCain that even Karl Rove, the Sith Lord himself, says are irresponsible and go too far. While we on the Left tremble at the thought of losing the election in November, at least we can share a laugh today.
For his part, comedic genius Chevy Chase weighed in on Tina Fey's spot-on portrayal of Palin on last Saturday's SNL:
I thought it was extraordinary how well she played her and much she looked like her. . . Personally, I felt we didn't need the Hillary stuff -- I'd like her to go even harder. I want her to decimate this woman. This woman, I can't believe there hasn't been more about it... It's just unbelievable to me this woman is actually running for Vice President!
Good talk, Chevy. Now don't let your mother smell that beer on your breath.