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Second Life Banks

Second Life, the virtual community, bans banks which aren’t banks in the real world.

Since the collapse of Ginko Financial in August 2007, Linden Lab has received complaints about several in-world “banks” defaulting on their promises. These banks often promise unusually high rates of L$ return, reaching 20, 40, or even 60 percent annualized.

Second Life imitating the first?

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The Contextuality of Quantum Theory in Ten Minutes

Through my computer science “information is king” eyeglasses, there are really only two notions which thoroughly distinguish quantum theory from classical theories of how the world works: the nonlocal nature of quantum correlations as exemplified by Bell’s theorem and the much less well known contextual nature of quantum measurements as exemplified by the Bell-Kochen-Specker theorem. While the former is well known (and hence, to paraphrase Gell-Mann, what you’ve heard about it is mostly wrong), the later is less well known. Is that because it is a complicated idea? I don’t think so! Indeed I think you can learn what quantum contextuality means in less than ten minutes. Yep, it’s another edition of “explain quantum theory in ten minutes!”
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Aliens and Photos

What else am I to conclude from recent UFO reports out of Texas, except that no one in the entire town had a cell phone with a camera? Or a digital camera? Do the aliens use data from cell phone usage and digital camera usage when they decide where to do their joy riding?
Oh, and I will be happy to update this post when photos emerge! (I grew up reading UFO books, by the way. I credit them with developing an idea for what science is and is not.)