Holy shit…
This is amazing and disturbing and… and… I laughed and laughed and laughed…
and then… HOLY SHIT!
and then they show the toast when he says “they were toast”… My sides hurt from laughing so hard…
Easy explanation…
Here’s what the ol’ Chen-meister is saying…
Non sequitur, Rahm Emanuel is a worthless Representative who moments after passing the current Iraq spending bill said,
The way I would view this, I view this as the beginning of the end of the President’s policy in Iraq in this way. It ends the blank check on more troops…
which is basically the opposite of what happened that day… Anyways, he is introducing an amendment to defund Cheney since he isn’t a part of the executive branch… I would say this is a big joke on all of us… But what do I know…
I’ve been arguing this for YEARS….
Discover magazine has an article up in which they talk to a philosopher of physics about time. I found it fascinating because, based on the Planck scale, the smallest interval of time possible to measure is 10-43 second, after which there is… well… nothing.
There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down.
Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality.
Now as interesting as this is… I’ve been arguing it for years and years… (Obligatory wiki link… ∞ although this will be more helpful)
I got diverted when I decided to look up who this “philosopher of physics” was and just what he thought he was talking about…
Simon Saunders.
Sorry… Dr. Simon Saunders… Bit rugged looking.. Not quite what I was expecting.. He is listed as Reader in Philosophy of Physics and University Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at the University of Oxford. Working off the University of Oxford site, I started digging…
Reader in Philosophy of Physics… Now what in the world is a Reader… A Reader is “a university title conferred on some dons who are not yet professors.”
No, not mafia… A don is “an Oxford academic. See also Fellow.”
A fellow “can take the form of a Professor, Reader, University lecturer, Research Fellow (e.g. a JRF) or a College appointee who sits on a College’s Governing Body. The Fellows are in effect the College’s trustees.”
Basically he is one of four people who run the Philosophy of Physics department at Oxford’s Philosophy Centre.
They also spoke to Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT…
Most of us tend to think of time the way Newton did: “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably, without regard to anything external.” But as Einstein proved, time is part of the fabric of the universe. Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks don’t measure something that’s independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all.
Fuck yeah… Now that’s what I’m talking about… Dr. Seth Lloyd, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Systems at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. He wasn’t gonna let these people with their precious time just sit around and enjoy it… No, he was gonna do something about it… Even if it killed him…
“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”
Humble?!? They define time and they’re humble… Fricking ridiculous man…
Now the NIST in Boulder is a place of science and reason willing to to admit that time is something man has made up to deal with things, and it’s still relevant. I strongly feel other “museums of science” need to start telling people the other side of the argument(”…we made some… ok basically all of this stuff up..”), we’d all be better for it I think…
By the way, best “museum” picture ever…
In other science we have already started making Manimals…
Alright, that was cheap and I apologize…
Separation? Between church and what?!?
The Supreme Court has barred the suit of a group of atheists who felt the “Faith Initiative” might be poking some holes in our separation of church and state… From the story:
“The Supreme Court ruled Monday that ordinary taxpayers cannot challenge a White House initiative that helps religious charities get a share of federal money…”
Well, alright… Or something…
What we seem willing to give up…..
DO NOT ENTER IRAN
A 411-2 vote in the House… On what you may ask?…
(Bonus points if you could tell me the 2 nays without following the vote link on the linked page…)
Bombing Iran is not the answer to anything facing this nation right now, and stories about the US moving a 3rd carrier group into the Persian Gulf doesn’t do my heart good…
