It's a wave...it's a particle...it's been SEEN

Dig it ...

Physicists Expose Light’s Weird Quantum Nature

For the first time, physicists have observed in photons one of the weirdest and most basic phenomena in quantum mechanics: that field of physics where subatomic objects follow strange, unfamiliar laws. In the quantum world, particles like photons spend most of their time in a bizarre condition called a superposition, meaning the particles exist in several possible states at once. The superposition collapses into one of its component states only when the particle is measured. Amazingly, physicist Serge Haroche and his team at École Normale Supérieure in Paris reported in August that they were able to watch the process of this collapse as it happened in a photon, one of the most difficult—and most useful—particles to work with in experimental physics. Read the whole thing.

Let's Golf

Welcome to Lee Carvallo's putting challenge, I'm Carvallo...

You have chosen a three wood. May I suggest a putter? ["beep"]

Three wood. Now enter the force of your swing. I suggest feather touch. ["beep beep beep"]

You have entered "power drive". Now, push seven eight seven to swing. ["beep beep beep"]

Ball is in: parking lot. Would you like to play again? ["beep"]

You have selected "no".

Too farking funny

Reds

When it comes to redheads, what more needs saying?

Joe Btflspk wants to share the gloom

Surely all this happiness can't be for real. How can so many people be happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe?

An environmental catastrophist, drowning in his own malaise, uses a full box of tissue lamenting the protestations of others that they are actually happy. All this is mere scaffolding for his main edifice ... the wonderfulness of suffering. The Chronicle of Higher Education ... smell the Goth.

"All I wanted is for you to be happy."

"But Momma, I *am* happy."

"Living the way you're living, how could *anybody* be happy?"

One Yale degree in history to go, please.

Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site

"Condi, why didn't we bomb Auschwitz?" "Uh...I don't know, Mr. President. The State Dept wasn't..." "Well, why don't you know? Laura, why didn't we...?" "George, why are you asking this now?" "What do you mean?" "You seem to think the rest of us should be walking history books, but it never occurred to you until now that Auschwitz wasn't particularly addressed by the Allied powers. What this says is you've never given the Holocaust two second's thought until someone dragged you there, and now you're like, all up in arms." "Laura, I... Look! A squirrel!" "There are no squirrels on Air Force One, George. Well, maybe one."

Debra LaFave, Please Go Now

"The court finds that you are in violation of your community control," Padgett said. "The court finds that the violation is neither willful nor substantial, and the court will not revoke your community control but will continue you on the same. Please don't come back, OK?" See the other Debra Lafave posts herein for pictoral goodness.

• Pinky-promise love - Latourneau, LaFave, and Huggins
• Debra LaFave - Epilogue
• Debra LaFave -- Not the only one
• Debra LaFave Redux
• Karen Ellis
• Severina Vuckovic

Blogger, in it's infinite wisdom, in addition to taking forever to load, now requires the clicking of a nonexistent 'done' button to finish uploading images. So words will have to suffice.

Reality Insists

Europe and the United States acting in concert can best deal with China and Russia's advance, and the instability brought by radical Islam. Reality insists that alone, the Americans and Europeans have growing disadvantages in a world where the rule of law and democracy are not serving as controls over newly distributed economic and political power.

It's a tenet of Psych 101 that our environment is in our heads, that we don't react to reality but rather to the reality that we perceive, and since our perceptions are colored by preconception and expectation, one man's reality isn't necessarily the same as another's. Taking on faith that most adult humans are not schizophrenic, I believe that we share a common reality at root, one that is empirically demonstrable in its physics at bottom. For someone to assert their reality as being universal without qualm should slow down one's clue train akin to light waves in a Bose-Einsten condensate. That is to say, "Whoa." In this case a journalist writing in a mouthpiece for the left, the International Herald Tribune being patch-up of the NYT and the Washington Post, can be assumed to be of the community-based reality, AKA reality-based community. His slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am grounding of the situation at hand as required by dictates of reality-as-the-left-sees-it is flaccid beyond Viagran resurrection. The issue requires more examination that allowed in "reality insists." As to this...

in a world where the rule of law and democracy are not serving as controls over newly distributed economic and political power.

I felt the same despair when the USSR shot down the South Korean airliner in the 1980s. How could we prevail against a nation with neither scruples nor a care for humanity? How could we compete with a centrally planned economy? As it turned out, the USSR's internal deformations capped their ability to compete and the edifice was not far from being collapsed. What we see from China today is little different. The irony here is that, in the face of what looked a difficult fight at the time, Gaullist France pulled out of NATO and tried to make separate peace with the bear. This French ex-prime minister sees the need for a new NATO (what's wrong with the old one?) and chokes a distant chicken. As for Islam, uniting with the EU, as Mark Steyn noted, would "consign the last functioning part of western civilization to the pathologies that have doomed most of the rest. "

If she loved you, she Swanee'ed it

New information has been released regarding the sperm whale that came into the mouth of Tampa Bay over the weekend.

"Don't worry, honey, I won't...oh....damn that tidal wave!"

Usenet of old

Brought forward from Usenet ACECW
May 13, 1998
Written by myself

Hasn't the Foggiest

David G. Martin, fervor alit,
Got on his soapbox,
(Copied alt.bird),
Decreed that the unwashed,
"Harken my word!"

"Billy and Hillary, each without flaw, "Are only the ghosts
"Of Ruddy's and Sprunt's,
"And mainstream media's
"Phony witch hunts."

Charlotte Corday with a knife to Marat,
Would save the King,
Bring liberty dead,
"Avenge many victims."
Paid with her head.

Don Quixote, misguided twit,
Jousting at windmills,
With servant and dog,
Served his quest better than
Jousting with fog.

My god, the simplicity of it!

"The beauty of Social Security to me is that all the money (that goes to retirees) goes right back into the economy," says Stephanie Sue Stein, director of the Milwaukee County Department on Aging. "It's money that is being spent, which is why we're never going to have another Depression."

It's perpetual prosperity. Stephy Sue says so.