Yesterday I subjected myself to the SciFi Channel minseries “5ive Days to Midnight.” Why would I subject myself to five hours of such torture? Well, the main character is a physicist and the plot involves time travel! That withstanding it was not a pretty site. First, because the dialogue was atrocious, but second because the main character is a physicist who lives in Washington (the state, that is!) Even the T.V. taunts me now.
Shasta Bound
Patrick Hayden, Luis de la Fuente, and I are going to attempt to climb Mt. Shasta next week. Please do a weather dance in our honor next Friday and Saturday. Here is a picture of current conditions on Shasta courtesy of the fine ShastaCam
The route we will take to climb Shasta goes up Avalanche Gulch which is to the right of the ridge in the middle of the picture. The route goes to the left of Thumb Rock which is the silhouetted feature at the top on the right of the picture which, well, looks like a thumb. To the left of Thumb Rock is a big long line of rocks called the Red Banks (in summer they really show up as a stark red line.) Below the Red Banks is a big bare spot. This is The Heart and is remarkably free of snow year round. The route you take is to the right of The Heart and goes through the right side of the Red Banks and then up to the Summit. The plan is to climb from Bunny Flats to Lake Helen on Friday (6860 ft to 10440 ft), camp at Lake Helen (below The Heart) and then attempt to summit on Saturday morning (10440 ft to 14162 ft).
A New Doctor
Congrats are due to Doctor Luis de la Fuente. Ph.D. UCSF 2004!
Here we see Luis (middle) thinking while everyone else swills beer:
What exactly is he thinking? I think he is thinking “what happened to the left side of my body in this photo?”
Move Over Moveable Type
I’ve switched blogging software to WordPress from MoveableType. Upgrade and transfer were pretty painless. Let me know if anyone is having crazy problems with this new setup.
Over In Nonlocality World
Nonlocal determinism implies local indeterminism.
In a universe which evolves nonlocally, a localized observor does not have access to enough information to correctly predict his deterministic evolution. This ignorance will lead to local laws which are probabilistic due to the ignorance of the nonlocal information. In such a universe there are two mysteries: (1) why no signaling? and (2) why quantum theory is a good description of the probabilities arising from the ignorance of nonlocal information? Further, this interpretation amounts to an untestable hypothesis, unless the answers to (1) and (2) are not exact.
Mistaken Identity
For those of you who keep not recognizing me at conferences.
Old Dave:
New Dave:
Notice that the key difference is the necklace.
Crazy Dave:
Homer Jay Simpson Redux
After reading the comments for the Homer Jay Simpson puzzle and getting an email from Ken Brown, I realized that the real puzzle I was thinking of was “into how many pieces can one cut a torus using three planes.”
The Superphysicist Myth
Physicist like to boast that a main benefit of their curriculum is that it teaches “problem solving skills” and that this means that a physicist can jump into just about any field and quickly get up to speed, cut to the heart of the problem, and then solve the problem. So why do so many theoretical physicists become so specialized?
Those Pesky Quantum Circuits
Homer Jay Simpson's Puzzle
Into how many pieces can one cut a torus using two planes?