I ain't buying it

A great-grandfather was left shaken after he was bombarded with porn when he looked for help with a crossword clue on the internet. Retired engineer Jack Sedgewick, 89, typed “Wild Asian ass” into a search engine and was given links to dozens of images of naked women.

The probable answer to the puzzle is onager if you're interested.

Maker Faire 2010

Carnival Day

Carnival today in the Mission. Billed as 'colors of sound, splashes of culture', with a holistic, Earth friendly whatever, it's really the day when scantily clad ladies (or men, depending on your viewpoint) do the shimmy-shake in public. (CARN-ival pace: your Latin dictionary) For whatever reason, Telemundo, the Spanish end of NBC, isn't broadcasting it this year, but I'm sure a few clips will be on the net. As is always the case, the professional contingents, floats and food vendors are decked to the nines, but the real stars are the kids that have been practicing all year and the Church ladies who bring out the secret family recipes to share. The Pac Bell floats and the Bay Guardian pat ourselves on the back-a-thon just can't match the real deal. I know I've become something of a broken record with the local vs. corporate schtick, but there was a time when it was literally a family, Church, local school, and bands from the neighborhood celebration. (i.e. they weren't trying to sell you a phone plan, stock deal or political persuasion) On the other hand, they did keep the scantily clad dancers. It's the future, what can you do?

The first part of today's link-dump relates to our legal system:

• The Scourge of Juristocracy: The United States may not be the world’s indispensable nation, as its secretary of state famously claimed a dozen years ago, but it has certainly been the indispensable inspiration in the global spread of democracy. The irony is that while this has not led to a great deal of imitation of American institutions such as the presidency, the single most widely replicated feature of the American political system is also its most undemocratic one.
• Scalia - Don't bother me with details: This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged ‘actual innocence’ is constitutionally cognizable.
• Pot Raid: When the government has the right to bust into tens of thousands of homes in the middle of the night, unannounced, with guns drawn and in full military armor, to take the life of beloved family members, and to menace 6-year old children, all because the homeowner is believed to possess a few grams of a plant or a non-explosive substance, tyranny cannot be said to be on the way. It’s already here.
• The Tea Party Jacobins: Many Americans, a vocal and varied segment of the public at large, have now convinced themselves that educated elites—politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers—are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop. They say they are tired of being told what counts as news or what they should think about global warming; tired of being told what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seatbelts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink…the list is long.

Next, a bit of science, with its attendant culture clash. Plus a bit of civil war history your inner steampunk might enjoy.

• Ever since Steven Spielberg's 2002 sci-fi movie Minority Report, in which a black-clad Tom Cruise stands in front of a transparent screen manipulating a host of video images simply by waving his hands, the idea of gesture-based computer interfaces has captured the imagination of technophiles.
• Science Daily (May 21, 2010) — The hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy may also be its shortest-lived world. The doomed planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS).
• Via: Bruce Sterling, one of the more obvious augmented reality applications, done elegantly: historical archive images overlaid onto the real. The older I get, the more I become fascinated with history; if someone did up layers like this for the whole country, I’d probably never switch it off.
• Air War over Virginia: On April 20, 1861, just eight days after South Carolina secessionists fired the first shots on Fort Sumter, an enormous apparition descended gently upon a sparsely populated village nine miles west of Unionville, South Carolina. A cautious, well-armed group of men carefully ventured out to the open field where the 50-foot-high monstrosity had landed, fully expecting to meet the devil himself.

And last, things that don't quite fit into an easy slot.

• America’s Changeable Civil War: As the Civil War Sesquicentennial approaches cruising speed, North and South look a great deal more alike than they did on the eve of the war’s last great anniversary just 50 years ago. That much-heralded celebration coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement with a precision that was almost too good to be true.
• Joe Bageant: It goes without saying there are many occasions when I have been obnoxious, bullet proof drunk. I'd say that calling the city councilman's wife a "money loving power slut," and a "shit-for-brains Republican hose beast" is some barometer of obnoxiousness, if not bullet-proofness. Hypertension, COPD and diabetes eventually fixed that problem.
• Charles Tan: The latest of Charles’ projects is the Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2009 anthology, whose title is probably self-explanatory and which follows on from 2008's Philippine Speculative Fiction sampler. All the stories are free to read online, and downloadable as PDF or EPUB files...… so bang goes your accessibility excuse for not reading any non-Western spec fic, eh?
• Saviors & Sovereigns: The Rise and Fall of Humanitarianism But after the Berlin Wall came down, freedom’s crusaders increasingly set their eyes not so much on Communism as on violators of human rights in general. They unfurled the banner of humanitarianism and, righteously, scorned the cowards and skeptics who wanted to keep America’s powder dry.

Walking across the US

Matt Green is a 30-year old man who decided to walk across the United States. He’s not doing this to raise funds for a charity or to call attention to a cause; it’s a “for the heck of it” adventure. He intends to walk 3,000 miles, from Rockaway Beach, New York to Rockaway Beach, Oregon, pushing a cart which carries (among other items) his food, clothing, basic camping equipment, two books, pepper spray, and duct tape.

Via: Neatorama

I got your ethics right here

The Home Page
of the MMS Ethics Office

Why do they spend bandwidth on this ethics theory, when things like this and this keep up year after year? You can only use the deeply shocked and outraged line so many times.

Amber Ale

The dish contains a variant of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, known in culinary circles as baker’s or brewer’s yeast. But (Raul Cano, microbiologist at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo) didn’t get this from Whole Foods. Back in 1995, he extracted it from a 45 million-year-old fossil. The microorganisms had lain dormant since the Eocene epoch, a time when Australia split off from Antarctica and modern mammals first appeared.

Via: Erin Biba

Captain Obvious now working at a hotel

Via: Tywkiwdb

Swimmimg Buddies

Rajan, a 60-year-old elephant, and his 58-year-old driver Nasru going for their morning swim off of Havelock Island in the Bay of Bengal.

Via: Io9

Blood Falls

Taylor Glacier in Antarctica has been known for the blood-like liquid that pours from it since the "Blood Falls" was discovered in 1911. The eerie waterfall cascades into one of Antarctica's dry valleys—snowless, barren wastes where almost nothing lives. It gets its color from the dietary habits of microbes, which live in ancient seawater trapped beneath the glacier. They draw their energy from iron deposits leeched from the rocks the slowly moving glacier grinds to dust—leaving the water streaked rust red.

Via: BoingBoing

A day late, but...

It's past time for a link-dump. Perhaps this rainy morning will give me a chance to catch up on all the things I ignored on the (sunny) weekend. I'll start with an article about Dali and some Music

• It wasn’t long after this that his unique painting style, which seamlessly blended classic influences like Raphael with modern avant garde styles like those of Joan Miro, started to garner him quite a bit of attention in the art community. Not to be outdone by his own artwork, Dali promptly started to grow his trademark moustache, which was influenced by the seventeenth-century painter Diego Velazquez.
• Avett Brothers: Let me just put it bluntly: money kills good music. Or, rather, too much money kills good music. This is not always the case, but it is more often than not the case.
• One venal and one crazy? Will Eichmann and Wallace be controlled? Disch was not optimistic: A review of Thomas Disch's works.
• Review: On Evil by Terry Eagleton. Compare: a pharmaceutical company tells us that we are all born with a disease that requires that we buy their product all our lives long, and that if we do it will cure us after death. This reminds me of the joke about Bernie Madoff, that his big mistake was promising returns in this life; he should have taken his cue from the religion.

Next, a rather involved article on the disparity between matter and anti-matter.

• Link Studies of particle production and decay under reversal of discrete symmetries (charge, parity, and time reversal) have yielded considerable insight on the structure of the theories that describe high energy phenomena. Of particular interest is the observation of CP violation, a phenomenon well established in the K^o and B^o_d systems, but not yet observed for the B^o_s system, where all CP violation effects are expected to be small in the standard model. (PDF file)

And finally the Money makes the world go round list:

• The future will be China, and the new world order. That arrangement is deadly realist about the incompatibility of Stratification and Equality. It has embraced a future of Prosperity without a sentimental glance at the worn bride, Equality.
• The German press is saturated with reports intended to verify the myth of the slovenly, lazy and corrupt Southern European countries which virtuous and hard-working northern European countries mistakenly admitted to the European Union.
• All three times William Jennings Bryan ran for president, his campaigns were woefully under funded. According to one estimate, Bryan’s campaign in 1896 spent $425,000 while McKinley had $16,500,000 with which to work.
• On the eve of Rand Paul’s likely primary victory over Trey Grayson, I want to make a few observations about the importance of Paul’s candidacy and the apparent failure of party and movement establishment figures to defeat him. First of all, Paul is one of a very few Republican candidates in the country who is truly serious in his desire for fiscal responsibility.
• In the wake of nation-wide demonstrations calling for stronger government regulation of banks and investment firms, draft legislation was introduced in the House on Tuesday that targets a less conspicuous multi-billion dollar industry that still affects everyday Americans: the collection and distribution of personal information.
• Earlier this week, the Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, irked US authorities by pointing out that even the world’s economic superpowerhas a major fiscal problem -“even the United States, the world’s largest economy, has a very large fiscal deficit” were his words.

Three Heads, Six Arms

Yesterday I was walking past the library and saw this when I turned the corner. I don't want to date myself, but the monkey mind's first thought was "Dang, it's the guardian from the dark dimension" (Dr. Strange - '69) Brylcreem boy must be in more political trouble then we thought.

In our more mundane reality, It's Three Heads, Six Arms by Zhang Huan. Most likely, the paperwork and loan was expedited by the Shanghai exhibit at the Asian Art Museum. The whole thing was hauled in, set up and dedicated inside of a week; out of town planning for sure. But all is not lost for our progressive politicians. Due to the statue's Buddhist provanance, someone is bound to take up the seperation clause. This provides our representatives ample air-time to natter about "striking a blow for the freedom of people everywhere" and fortuitously obviates the chopping wood, carrying water (or repairing potholes) portion of the job. This is not so much a cynical view as an observation based on past performance. At least the rest of us get to spend some time with the statue itself.

R.I.P. Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner died yesterday in Norman, Oklahoma at the age of 95. He was a pioneer in modern recreational mathematics, inventor of popular math games, and a long time columnist in Scientific American.

Wolf Product

Auto-Tune and a lot of compression are the reasons that a prepubescent on the Disney product show can suddenly sound like a full out seasoned singer when they break out into spontaneous song. It's a sort of Photoshop for voice. So if nuance, dynamic range,and anything other than equal tempered harmony aren't your cup of tea, here you are. The Japanese, as usual, have taken this to its logical conclusion. Replace the performer, their bathroom breaks and backstage riders, with an Idolin. Just think, replacing the whole entourage with someone carring a software package. Roadie heaven.

Tulip Farm

Via: Book of Joe

So That's Why

Oh boy, I've got a metacognitive bias named after myself. (no Dianne, it doesn't have an acronym) Well not myself exactly. More precisely, a cognitive researcher from Cornell with the same family name.( David Dunning) In this case we'll just mumble something about close enough for blogging and cross our metaphorical fingers. Can the Dunning-Kruger effect be the reason for our current spate of problems? In my own mind it sure explains a few things about local politics. (and a few jobs I've had in the past) Too bad onomancy isn't a practical in this case.

When asked, most individuals will describe themselves as better-than-average in areas such as leadership, social skills, written expression, or just about any flavor of savvy where the individual has an interest.

• Wiki
• Article
• Scribd Visuals
  On the Scribd site, they've gone to HTML. There's a page button in the bottom of the image.

Signifies Something, I Guess

I'm sure a professional sociologist or art critic could do at least 15 minutes on this one. Personally, I got nothing.

R.I.P. Frank Franzetta (1928 2010) As you can see from the above,you will be missed.

Those Darn Borg

The music is the Sailors' Dance from the ballet "The Red Poppy" by Gliere. Made by SoyuzDetFilm in 1946 (Soyuz Children's Films) a studio that specialized in films for Russian children. It's rather tame at the start, but at about 1:39 the vodka starts drinking you. It would appear that surrealism is in fact an analog concept and even the best computer imagery can't quite get the spirit of it.(more suited to hyper-realism?)

Via: Io9

Geopolitics

And if you really want to scare the pants off yourself, click this Link

Moonglow

Tony Bennett and k.d.lang will be playing at the Black and White ball this year. (among others, of course)

Marathon Day

It's Sunday morning. I went downstairs to get my usual expresso from May's shop and was greeted by a line of dalmations. Well to be more precise, a group of people who had ignored the sun over the yardarm rule, blackened one eye with kohl, and dressed in b&w spotted pajamas with a fuzzy dog's ear hat. It must be S.F. marathon day. A group of German tourists were in the corner, their little girl zipping in and out the door and giving updates to everyone. Conan and a princess, with a ray gun! Poor Albert got so busy serving everyone that he drew me three cups before he realized he was done, handed me the results, and returned more change than I'd paid in the first place.(yes, we'll sort it when he's had a chance to sit down) I followed a group dressed as watermelon slices back to my door and now it's time for a link-list. I'll start with culture and places.

• Starting Friday, Walgreens will begin selling Insight personal genetic testing kits, becoming the first major retail chain in the U.S. to offer home tests that say they assess the risk of developing one of dozens of different health conditions. (Hypochondriac alert)
• Cadillac Ranch was created in 1974 by the Ant Farm and installed on land owned by Stanley Marsh 3 (it was relocated to a more remote location in 1997).
• In 1917, William Bowers Bourn II and his wife, Agnes, stepped across the threshold of the Georgian manor he had built 30 miles south of San Francisco. Bourn, heir to California’s Empire Mine gold fortune, had sited the estate on 654 acres and surrounded it with 16 acres of formal gardens. (I did a jazz series at Fioli for JK sound. The place was beautiful)
• Good lord, it’s all just sort of sitting there publicly available on the Internet as an actual no-kidding “planetary data system.” Y’know, what the planetary instruments actually and factually showed about actual planets.

And now the money, honey portion of the show. If you like your economics on the dark side, consider the idea that last week's stock market hiccup wasn't the result of a fat finger, but was a denial of service attack by a player that wants something in return: i.e. go investigate the janitor's union, not me. It is the future, after all and I have no doubt that the system is riddled with backdoors, left slightly ajar, for those special side deals that insiders like so much. William Gibson may have another notch on his prediction gun.

• News on Thursday that New York State prosecutors are examining whether eight banks hoodwinked credit ratings agencies opened yet another front in what is fast becoming the legal battle of a decade for the big names of finance.
• Wacko as some of the theories were, the impetus to search desperately for a mistake is understandable. Much better to find a flaw in the math or a problem with the computers than to confront the far more troubling possibility that fear and greed worked exactly as they have always worked, except that their effects were amplified by a jittery and fast-moving marketplace.

And of course politics. As a sidenote, in the kitchen, the cook is responsible if he or she burns the toast. If you write a check for more than you've deposited, you get the penalty. In government, nobody knows nothin, or if pressed, it's that darn janitor's union again. Is it any suprise that both major parties are having an anti-incumbent year?

• For Jack Matlock, Giulio Gallarotti, and Christopher Preble, the authors of three new books about power and U.S. foreign policy, the essence of "the power problem" is that the United States has too much of it.
• Red Tories are really “red” only in that they believe we have obligations to all of our countrymen, and they hold that social solidarity is a vital part of love of one’s country. They regard the landscape as part of the nation’s heritage no less than its customs and institutions.
• Try convincing the world that U.S. technology companies are your new ambassadors, out on a noble mission to spread freedom and democracy around the globe (things not to mention: oil, Iraq, Dick Cheney). Send their CEOs to Siberia, have them play beerpong with the locals. Don't dare mentioning how these very companies abuse freedom and privacy at home, on their own sites.
• Clemens August Count von Galen, the bishop of Münster, was a "perfectly ordinary fellow, with quite a limited intellectual endowment, who therefore had not until very recently seen where things were going, and therefore was always inclined to come to terms."

Crater Plume Gassing

DeepwaterHorizonJIC — May 12, 2010 — ROBERT, La. -- Oil and gas stream from the riser of the Deepwater Horizon well May 11, 2010. This video is from the larger of two existing leaks on the riser. This leak is located approximately 460 feet from the top of the blowout preventer and rests on the sea floor at a depth of about 5,000 feet.

The Russians had several blowouts off their coast a few years ago. It might be worth the long distance toll to call their head engineer and find out what they did. Constant updates regarding BP's grave concern sent to the tweet-o-sphere don't seem to be slowing the plume. I did see something I found telling: a rather portly politician, straight out of central casting (big daddy accent, quivering in indignation, hair slicked) crying where-o-where were the regulators. (jeez, I don't know. Laid off a few years back maybe?) Almost as sad are the talking head panels, containing carefully coiffed and manicured expert journalists, seated comfortably in a studio on the forty third floor, using that damnable omniscient newsroom voice to explain what they would have done had they deigned to get their hands dirty. (yes, yes Jon, but as our audience knows, mine is bigger) My question is, since the initial collection tower was plagued by ice and freezing oil, could that very thing be turned to an advantage? That is to say restricting the flow, than letting it expand to create a frozen plug to buy some time. It wouldn't be permanent, but it might allow divers enough space to attach something that was.

Blue Pepper

The blue pepper only grows on Pududu Island, and tastes just like a traditional green pepper. The only difference is its otherworldly complexion. Don’t expect to see these at the local grocery store anytime soon; prices for “the pepper of the black island” are through the stratosphere.

One of the reasons blue band-aids are standard for kitchen first aid kits is that they are easy to see if they land in the food. The idea is that there is no blue food. Here in the future, we've changed that.

Via: 13 Alien Vegetables

Poll Results

Click to Enlarge

Via: Rue the Day

Bimbo's Initiation

Yes, I called her.

I realize Mother's Day is a commercial event, hence uncool.. yada-yada. Snap out of it, it's your Mom. Make that call, send that card, honor your mother. That's how it's done.

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's day to those of you who are Moms, and the rest: call her. The Radiance (cruse ship) is at pier 30-32 and must be attended to, so I'm going to run through this week's linkdump in a straight forward manner. In other words, cut, paste, and get my touchis to work. The first one is a three part post, by Larison, on Intervention and International Order.

India is a democracy and most will agree that India is an important U.S. ally. It is also a country that suffers from many tribal, ideological and separatist conflicts, one of which is the rebellion of the spreading Maoist Naxalite movement mostly in eastern and southern India.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Next are the political opinions. I try to get some without catch-phrases or marketing slogans, because they're free (like it or not) on any channel.

• Former Vice President Dick Cheney popped up yesterday in Saudi Arabia, where he met with King Abdullah. Accompanying him was former State Department diplomat and its top translator, Gamal Helal, who recently left the government to form a consulting firm, Helal Associates.
• As we follow the NPT Review Conference in New York and the enormous salience of the Iranian nuclear issue there, it is useful to consider some recent observations about the Iranian case by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s former Director General, Mohammed ElBaradei.
• ...something akin to Singapore with a suzerainty and guarantor of laws that doesn't interfere with internal affairs--and in the process allowing the rest of the world to learn from experimentation in the field. It's the "laboratory of the states idea" on steroids.
• Chances are that unless you’re a total financial wonk, you’ve never heard the term “seigniorage.” But you should, because doing the right thing with it could help solve several major, interrelated problems.

Next, as usual, are the culture and make items. The first one, an ice printer, might have a number of more technical uses, But I can see it in the kitchen of a large hotel, making ice decorations for the banquet table. The last is more astronomy pictures, again reminding us that the universe is bigger than this week's flapadoodle.

• Computer-controlled techniques for constructing objects at varying scales out of ice.
• Windsor Executive Solutions :Short story by Nakashima Brown and Bruce Sterling.
• Shing-Tung Yau is a force of nature. He is best known for conceiving the math behind string theory—which holds that, at the deepest level of reality, our universe is built out of 10-dimensional, subatomic vibrating strings.
• Viruses, spam, Trojans and rootkits have added up to create an ugly picture. But, the good news is that the desktop security battle may be over. The less-than-good news, however, is that we may have lost it.
• Seems like we don’t pay much attention to the 7th planet.  We know it’s out there, and it’s blue (but not as blue as Neptune).  We know it’s cold, and a gas giant, and … well … it’s cold, and blue, and it’s the 7th planet…

Glenn Palin

Via: Dangerous Minds

Deeper Than it Looked

Via: foundshit.com

At Least I'm In Show Business

Peek A Boo

For whatever reason, this song reminds me of tuning the PA at The Last Day Saloon. An odd juxtaposition, but there it is.

That darn ironic distance

It's a well known and long established fact that every social ill can be attributed to their existence.

Via: Neatorama

Coulrophobia: Fear of Clown

From: Neatorama

Wattles Waggling

This weeks link-dump starts with a hot times in the legal industry section. Long story short, the Prosecutor and Presiding Judge were sleeping together (well, not sleeping, but you get the gist) during the adjudication of a capital case. I have a few thoughts that aren't covered by the press. Everyone nods and says that the verdict isn't in doubt. Not mentioned is that they're reporting on their own reporting, which was pretty much stenography of the prosecution's position. A review of evidence admitted and not admitted, and motions sustained or not, might be in order. The family's wait for justice is often waved about like a bloody shirt. The subtext, of course, is that we should just dummy-up, overlook the monkeyshines of the industry, and off the obviously guilty party. This stance depends on the assumption that it will never be your butt being played for gain by industry insiders. I like reasonable doubt better.

• The facts of Hood's case look very bad. That's why his appeal to the Supreme Court was supported by 30 top legal ethicists and an array of high-profile judges and prosecutors, including former FBI Director William Sessions and former Texas Governor and Attorney General Mark White, who supports capital punishment.
• Because Hood failed to raise the claim in earlier pleadings, as he could not substantiate the "rumors" of the affair with sufficient proof and, therefore, according to the Texas appellate court, was procedurally barred from raising the claim now. The Texas prosecutor hailed the decision as a significant procedural victory.
• The trial judge and the prosecuting attorney's affair breaches every standard of fairness that you would expect a defendant to receive during a capital case or, for that matter, a noncapital case. Hood could not have gotten a fair trial under these circumstances. His trial was infected with an incurable conflict of interest.

This one is sure to raise the grain. It gets no traction in mainstream, not even a refutation. Was the South Park threat real, or just a handy knob to hang various publicity campaigns on? Something similar is happening this morning, in Times Square. A car full of fireworks has been upgraded by the talking heads into a threat to The United States of America. Lists of foreign orgs deemed a menace to our way of life have been pressed up against the camera lens and wattles have waggled with promises to get our honor back, etc. All we need do is vote a certain way, or give money to someone, or shut-up while another layer of officialdom accretes. Why golly, corporations have sales kiosks in the square and people from the sacred heartland had to interrupt their shopping. (yes,I have had my morning expresso, thank-you for asking)

• A radical group known as “Revolution Muslim”–based out of New York–issued thinly veiled threats against the South Park creators, hinting that their misdeed would result in their untimely deaths. The founder of the group goes by the name of Yousef al-Khattab, but his real name is Joseph Cohen. He was born and raised in the United States as a Jew, and holds both American and Israeli citizenship.

Next are the various business related ones.

• Wal Mart declined to comment.
• I have been watching with a mixture of awe and dismay some of the really bad analysis, sloppy reporting, and just unsupported commentary about the GS case.
• We live in an age of regulation. But surprisingly, there are very few principles of regulation. As Karl Polyanyi said, “Laissez-faire was planed; planning was not.”
• In January Facebook Chief Executive, Mark Zuckerberg, declared the age of privacy to be over. A month earlier, Google Chief Eric Schmidt expressed a similar sentiment.

The remaining ones are the fun stash. With the astronomy photos, be sure to click them for enlargement. I'm going to put them last, because they provide a bit of prospective on everything else.

• If you are a fan,(Dr.Who) then hopefully this bit of trivia about the show and The Doctor will help hold you over until the next episode comes on.
• Can your microwave oven really measure the speed of light? Yes. And since many of the suggested experiments also involve chocolate....
• The images of the Pillars of Creation, taken by the Hubble ST April 2, 1995, are considered one of the top 10 most beautiful images Hubble has given us.

Collapse A Wave Function

Io9

Regarding collapse of a wave function - a quote in a Grant Callin book has the aliens saying to us "So you have developed an entire physics based on the premise that a sentient observer is required to collapse a wave function? How delightfully egotistical! How amusing!"