OK, now they're making me mad!

You may have heard that there's trouble at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They've lost a few disk drives, among other things. Maybe they had bomb blueprints on 'em, I dunno.

In a unrelated development, oil prices have passed $45 per barrel.

I thought you ought to know:

1. The Bush Administration has proposed a replacement for the University of California as the manager of Los Alamos. The company they propose is Haliburton.
2. With oil prices at an all-time-high, the administration has resumed buying oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
   

As the Bolsheviks used to say: the worse, the better.

Physicist Discovers Bogon

Shahriar S. Afshar claims to have performed an experiment which contradicts Bohr's Principle of Complementarity, that is: light behaves as a either a wave or a particle depending on what sort of experimental apparatus you have — it is impossible to do an experiment which observes wave and particle properties of light simultaneously. I was taught that Complementarity was the bedrock of Quantum Mechanics, which is, as we all know, "the most well tested and successful theory in the history of physics".

Except it is apparently quite possible to perform such an experiment, and Afshar has done it.

Great edifices of philosophy have been built based on Complementarity and Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation. My father must have been very impressed by Bohr's arguments, because he described these ideas to me when I was very young^*, I suppose to impress upon me how mind-expanding science could be.

My favorite suggestion on how to adapt to the new result is to agree that there's no such thing as a Photon.

There was a brief discussion of the experiment and what it may mean on the July 30th episode of NPR's Science Friday. The July 24th issue of New Scientist magazine had a cover story on the topic, but registration is required to read it.

[*] "Light is both made up of things that are like rocks and is like the ripples a rock makes when you throw it in the lake — how could light be like both of those?", he'd say.

Reduction to a previously-unsolved problem

Ed Felton blogging from the Meltdown Conference:

The security session descended into a series of rants about the evil of spam. Lately this seems to happen often in conference panels about security. This strikes me as odd, since spam is far from the worst security problem we face online. Don’t get me wrong; spam annoys me, just like everybody else. But I don’t think we’ll make much progress on the spam problem until we get a handle on more fundamental problems, such as how to protect ordinary machines from hijacking, and how to produce higher-quality commercial software.

Tell it, brother.

Happy Second Anniversary!

Recondite is two months old. Gosh, it seems more like sixty days!

High School on Mars

I'm going to an "all class years" reunion of my high school, weekend after next. I've never been to a high school reunion before (although I've seen the movie) — I'm a little apprehensive.¹

My high school was kind of unusual and this explains why the class sizes are too small to have a normal reunion of a single graduating class: I graduated in 1970 from the International School of Bangkok ("ISB"). When I tell people that, I typically get one of two reactions:

1. What were you doing in Bangkok? I tell the questioner I went originally on a sex tour but lost my passport.
2. No kidding, I went there too! Believe it or not, I've met several other people who went to ISB. One guy is a friend of mine in Tahoe. Another ended-up working for me. Nice to know: no matter how wierd you are, there's always company for you.²

I was there because my parents were, of course, and my parents were there because my Dad worked there. My Dad worked there because he was a civil engineer and there was a lot of work in Thailand during the Vietnam War — designing bases for the US military. We had a lot of fun, we scions of the colonizers of Asia. Essentially immune from Thai law, we were unusually liberated 12 year-olds: driving motorcycles, buying dope from street vendors and hanging-out in bars.³

Anyway, if you went to ISB too, it's not too late to register for the reunion. See you there!

[1] I'm worried the seniors are going to beat me up again behind the teen club.

[2] Would this be a good time to mention that I was the first person to be Bar Mitzvah'ed in Thailand?

[3] I haven't really researched the matter, but my understanding is that the Status of Forces agreement between the Thais and the US Military made arresting an American dependent too problematic for the Thais to attempt.