LN2 Ice Cream

Once, years ago, a girlfriend was visiting me at the semiconductor test equipment mfg company I was consulting to while I was stuck late finishing some experiments. She grew restless and hungry, not being geek enough to find the test gear in and of itself interesting. The kitchenette was stocked with only the usual bad coffee gear--ultra-pasteurized cream cups, sugar packets, and bad coffee. I asked if she wanted some ice cream and she thought I was teasing.

I took one of the vacuum insulated coffee carafes from the kitchenette and filled it dramatically with LN2 from a roll-around 160 liter dewar in the lab (any time you crack the liquid feed on one of those things it's pretty dramatic with the hissing and the steam and the gurgling and the spattering, dancing beads of LN2). As an aside, vacuum insulated coffee carafes filled with LN2 will hold it for more than a day.

I carried it boiling and fogging back to the kitchenette as she followed at a more than safe distance. I found a plastic bowl in the sink and filled it with the contents of about 100 of those little ultra-pasteurized coffee creamers and about 100 packets of sugar, brewed up a fresh pot of coffee and skimmed the first few seconds worth off--when it actually has some flavor--and added it to the bowl. She looked mighty dubious, but the glass liner had cooled enough that the carafe didn't seem dangerous any more so she moved in to watch.

Then while I stirred the mixture with a plastic spoon (and, don't forget - while wearing the bright blue cryogenic safety gloves and full face shields) she poured in the LN2 which filled the bowl with dense fog that poured out, over the counter, and down around our ankles, spreading out across the floor, looking for all the world like a bad sci-fi movie.

In about 30 seconds we had a bowl of half decent coffee ice cream to share.
And, for just a little while, she thought being a geek was really cool...

This past weekend, I got to recreate the experiment, but with two gorgeous and technically oriented women who were were entirely up for dangerous fun in the kitchen. The updated recipe Carolyn, Joanne, and I came up with is:

1.5 cups 0.5 & 0.5
0.75 cups fine sugar
1.0 cup hot coffee (chilling it would reduce LN2 usage)
2.0 TSP ultra-fine ground coffee (turkish grind)
24oz (roughly) LN2 added from vacuum insulated all-stainless cups.

Mix ingredients for a while in the mixer, then slowly add the LN2. Don't add it too fast or it floats on the mixture and freezes the top solid. As it mixes in, the bowl will chill and soon the mixer will be straining against the ice cream, which is light and fluffy and has no detectable ice crystals.

kill dash nine

Bob Berger sent me this very funny song:
graphics.stanford.edu/~monzy/...Nine.mp3
www.smallworks.com/archives/00000485.htm

I guess I'll have to shut you down for good this time,
Already tried a SIGQUIT, so now it's KILL DASH 9.
You gotta learn when it's time for your thread to yield;
It shoulda slept; instead you stepped and now your fate is sealed.
I'll take your process off the run queue without even asking
'Cause my flow is like reentrant and preemptive multitasking.
Your sad rhymes are spinnin' like you're in a deadlock,
You're like a synchronous sock that don't know when to block;
So I pull out my keyboard and I pull out my glock,
And I dismount your girl and I mount /proc
And I've got your fuckin pid and the bottom line
Is that you best not front or else it's KILL DASH NINE.

Netfinity 5500 M20

I've been bringing up a surplus Netfinity 5500 M20 I got on ebay really cheap. The guy probably lost $100 on shipping, the machine is huge. It's entirely impractical for a home server, but who can resist that many blinky lights.

I'm running FreeBSD 6.2. There have been some hiccups and I thought I'd put any solutions into some searchable text somewhere... like here... just in case anyone else is scrounging surplus big iron.

The basic configuration is a quad xeon 500 machine with 2GB of ram and 6x36GB Ultra 160 drives in RAID 5 with a hot swap spare installed, so there's roughly 136GB of main (fast) storage, and in the IDE bays I wedged 2 500GB Hitachi drives on a Promise FastTrack 100 TX2 for /media.

Useful note 1: The Netfinity doesn't like the Adaptec 1200A controller, it just doesn't recognize it in any slot. The FastTrack works fine and you can configure the array using the BIOS drivers, which I first flashed to current. Also, you need 24" IDE cables, which are hard to find. Don't get ATA-33 cables the first time.... The cables fit more easily if they are single device cables (2 connectors total, rather than 3 for a master and slave configuration).

I had some network problems. The system is connected to a Gigafast EE2400SV switch (a great bargain! but not actually "giga," rather mega as in 10/100, not 10/100/1000). The switch has an address table that updates every 5 minutes... who knew? So if you move a device from one port to another it disappears until the address table updates. This is not a problem with the NIC. But anyway, out went the Linksys LNE100TX based NICs (2x) an in went a pair of 3Com 3C980C-TXM NICs, which are compatible with the hot swap PCI channels at least, even if they won't do much else for me.

An oddity is that my display shows the words "REV" in the background, no matter what. I changed video cards from an old ATI Rage 8MB card (the built-in video only has 2MB) to a Nvidia TNT 16MB card, but the bizarre background text remains. Could be BIOS problem. We'll see if it's still there in xwindows later.

For now, I'm reinstalling BSD 6.2 over FTP. I did a full install from CD and CVSUPed to RELENG_6_2 and did a buildworld and got a barf at IOCTL.C, tried the STABLE branch with no improvement. Since I had very little invested in configuration (make.conf, kernel.config, cvusup config only) it seemed more expedient to just start over.

Old and now largely irrelevant.

Some time ago John Allen Paulos wrote a review (abcnews.go.com/Technology/story of an entertaining article examining the economics of prostitution (www.iies.su.se/seminars/p...dlund.pdf). The article sparked outrage amongst certain self-appointed social commentators, an outrage only supported by misreading Paulos' ABC article and not taking the time to read the original article. I thought that was a little unfair, and wrote the following:

The original paper is rather wonderful and though the premises are simplified, and admittedly absurdly so (these are called "stylized facts" in the business), the conclusions stem logically (and mathematically correctly) from the assumptions. Those who consider themselves sympathetic to sex workers would likely be amused and in general agreement. One must apply the traditional admonition so commonly warranted by articles released without the benefit of an editor: RTFA.

First, the Paulos (ABC) article summarizes the original paper accurately while fairly pointing out the (few) unacknowledged flaws in the original article: specifically citing sampling problems with prostitutes that have been busted and failing to consider abusive or problematic marriages which impose costs on the wife not considered by the article, which may be substantive enough to alter the conclusions, or require additional balancing considerations otherwise ignored.

That Paulos is a review of Edlund and Korn makes a review of Paulos an absence of fully understanding the Edlund and Korn article a mere ad hominem attack. If one were to read the paper, one would find Paulos that gives an accurate and reasonable summary though by necessity does not delve into every detail the article presents.

Neither Paulos nor Edlund and Korn make the mistake of assuming all prostitutes fall into the same socio-economic class, as suggested by the critics of Paulos' review, rather the paper considers the simple case where incomes for prostitution are homogeneous and where they are heterogeneous, and likewise makes the same assumptions for male incomes and for women's incomes, and finally adds to the model "housewives." The economic distributions they make for the incomes of prostitutes are derived from 13 cited studies (of 58 references) including mid-15th century France, 1934 Japan, 1947-72 Germany, 1973 Nevada, early 1980's Thailand, 1981 Munich, 1990-91 Los Angeles, 1993 Montreal, mid-1990's Indonesia, 1995 Barcelona, 1997 German, 1997 Brazil, and late 1990's Malaysia. The article describes the market structure as:

"At the bottom we find street prostitution, followed by brothels, bars and clubs. Call girls and escort agencies occupy the middle to high slots, and kept women the top rungs."

Paulos briefly mentions and Edlund and Korn go into some detail regarding the "ugly side." It would seem that one of the critics (Ray) might take issue with the characterization of section 4.4 of the paper, titled "Voluntary?" but the paper certainly address the issue. The conclusion of the authors is that there is no question of victimization: "[i]n times and places where forced labor has been used, prostitution was no exception." But the authors suggest that "Poor conditions or riskiness are by themselves not sufficient to establish bondage or slavery as the alternative could be worse." That is, the authors do not support the concept of "economic slavery" as such, acknowledging that "economic realities seem to play into how willingly women are thus victimized," but this is not slavery - it is a rational choice in confronting a difficult situation. Sex workers are not mindless victims.

The workers written about in both the ABC article and the paper are in no way "recreational sex workers," as suggested by the critics, indeed that concept is only briefly acknowledged as being largely irrelevant to the economic theory they are deriving. They admit that such dismissal of "recreational sex workers" undermines the validity of the theory to the extant that some women might find economic value in the pleasure of the occupation of being a prostitute, rather it is a common but false assumption that women "abhor sex" (and also the equally problematic assumption that "women were suspected of being overly sexual and willing adulteresses.")

One of the worst examples of how embarrassing it can be to not RTFA before expounding on a misinterpretation of it is the argument that the authors failed to do their homework on income levels. Aside from the summary of sources used as reference, to support the contention that prostitution as a profession commands _some_ premium over other employment available to women of similar qualifications, the article specifically cites in section 2.3 Pay, the following "For a probability sample of 1,024 female street prostitutes in LA interviewed in 1990 and 1991, the annual average total earnings were USD 23,845 for prostitutes, while working women averaged USD 20,197 and female service workers only USD 17,192." The article backs this assertion up with data from Montreal, Indonesia, and Malaysia. If one had residual doubt as to the validity of the assumption, one can review the 13 references cited in table 1.

As to the argument that the article is remiss in positing that ex-prostitutes cannot marry, it is not. The entire point of the economic argument is predicated on the _assumption_ specifically spelled out as such by both the article and the ABC review that prostitutes cannot marry and married women are not prostitutes. The degree to which that assumption is valid is specially addressed in 4.5 Wife and prostitute? The authors state (and one of the critics (Ray) backs up) that "It is a fair guess that to the extent former prostitutes marry, on average they do so on worse terms than they would have had in the absence of their past." That is, having been a prostitute is a liability in the marriage market. You might find some men who love it, some who don't care, but on _average_ it is a liability. That one of the critics (Ray) argues that young women may fail to make the calculation they are trading marriage for high income is utterly irrelevant to the economic argument presented, as even a cursory read of the article would reveal.

Critical dismissal of the competing commodities argument is also an embarrassing admission of a failure to RTFA. The article does get all Madonna-whore: "The prostitute serves men in a way that would be scandalous if done by a wife. The Madonna ­ Whore dichotomy may have risen from the need to keep the two separate. Consistent with the premise of this paper, the wife was pigeon-holed at the high end of the social spectrum, and the harlot at respectable distance." The article goes into great detail about the comparative services of the prostitute and wife, how both have value and why, and what it means. The stylized fact is not about the mutually exclusive condition of men, rather the stylized fact is to create a mutually exclusive choice for women. It is merely essential to the premise that the woman choose to be a prostitute or a wife (though footnote 27 admits "The alternative formulation that women choose neither, but are sold into either marriage or prostitution, would also work.")

As for ignoring homosexual prostitution, the article does not, nor does it ignore the critic's (Blue's) supposed counter example of "renting a stud." Male stud services are not economically relevant to the model being developed. Again, a quick RTFA will make the reasons clear: directly addressing homosexual prostitution the authors state: "Females outnumber males as sellers, but that is not the primary reason we do not discuss homosexual prostitution. The premise of this paper is that female heterosexual prostitution is conditioned by the following realities of reproduction: fecund women are scarce; a child has by default only one known parent ­ the mother; and marriage gives a man parental rights to the children borne by his wife."

Overall an excellent paper and a good review of it, done a disservice by reactive critique.

Jesus takes the Shortbus to Camp

Carolyn and I saw Shortbus a few days ago, and Jesus Camp not long before that; what a double feature...

Two groups that seem to think they've found the keys to happiness, to nirvana, to social and spiritual fulfillment. One does so by a radical devotion to Christianity, the other by a devotion to a radical sexuality. Each is outside the mainstream, each amusing when viewed from the outside.

But only one is scary: the radical fundamentalists in Jesus Camp see their life's work to change the world, willing or not, avowing activist if not violent proselytizing. The adherents of radical sexuality attempt to convert by example, by putting on a happy face, by showing the bliss they believe comes from their enlightenment.

Jesus Camp feels a bit weak for being neutral. The model follows one familiar to all media portrayals of arguments between liberal and conservative: on the conservative side charismatic prize fighters on an Evangelical roll; on the liberal side wheezy, halting intellectuals monotoning a nasal appeal to reason. It is no surprise Becky Fisher sees it as an excellent recruiting tool. Children are sure to be impressed by and somewhat attracted to the enthusiasm and devotion expressed by the brainwashed kids in the movie. Nobody will be impressed or convinced by the neo-Unitarian liberal radio personality's emotionless commentary.

Shortbus feels a little weak in the end for the uniformly happy endings everyone achieves in the final climactic windup. It comes off as a bit too glib and a bit too obvious. It is remarkable and valuable that the fornicators were not punished, for once, for the sin of enjoying sex. Even women were allowed to enjoy sex escape repentance, punishment, or damnation; something we learned in "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" the resident priests on the MPAA find an abhorrent offense to decency.

Civilian Deaths

There is some controversy over the methods used in the latest study published in the Lancet of civilian deaths, particularly among conservatives that are worried that 500,000 civilian deaths will be considered "bad." On the other hand, 50,000 civilian deaths would be a pathetically inefficient use of funds.

The methods used in the Lancet study are standard epidemiological methods that are not questioned in less political events like famine, disease, and hurricanes. They are, in fact, the same basic methods used for estimating deaths from Katrina. The method is scientifically and statistically sound, a cross population sample extrapolated across the population sampled.

The contrary numbers come from news reports and morgue reports. The 10X disparity suggests:

1) That deaths are under reported in Iraq--given that the news media is effectively confined to the green zone, this is neither surprising nor unexpected.

2) That most bodies do not come to the morgue. While this would be unlikely in western countries, it is consistent with the Islamic requirements that the body be buried as quickly as possible and that postmortem examinations are sacrilege. It is therefore not surprising or unexpected that 9 of 10 or more Muslim dead would not be taken to morgues.

Given the sociological factors at work and the privations of an ongoing war, direct polling, as conducted by the study in the Lancet, is the only plausible way to get an accurate number.

Fiscal conservatives (if not evangelical conservatives) should applaud the higher number. According to the UN, as quoted by Danzig, under secretary of the Navy, it costs $2,000 (1969 dollars, $11,035 in 2006 dollars according to the FRB of Minneapolis) to pacify a square kilometer with conventional weapons ($5.52 in 2006 dollars per square kilometer for biologic weapons--what a bargain!). Iraq is 437,072 square kilometers, with a pre-war population of 26,074,906 or 60 people per square km. According to the DOD, about 10% of the $226 billion to fund the war thus far went to munitions and weapons, according to the CBO, 41% of that went to munitions themselves: roughly $9,000,000,000 worth. That should be enough to pacify 815,586 square kilometers or kill 49 million people at Iraq's average population density.

It would therefore have taken $18,000 worth of ammunition to kill each of 500,000 Iraqis, or $180,000 each if the number of dead is only 50,000. (The all-in cost is at least 20x higher than that per Iraqi killed, they should be honored we value their non-lives so highly!)

Compare that to the Vietnam war where we had no smart weapons and we were not taking advantage of out sourcing: estimates are that we killed 900,000 NVA/VC, and 200,000 North Vietnamese civilians. The Vietnam war cost $132.7 billion, assuming a blended 1970 dollar basis, or $692 billion on 2006 dollars, of which $28 billion or so went to munitions assuming the same ratio of expenditures, or $25,000 per Vietnamese killed in 2006 dollars.

Therefore, if the total Iraqi deaths are 500,000, our munitions have only become 38% more cost efficient since 1970, a plausible number. If the total Iraqi deaths is 50,000, then our munitions are only 14% as efficient as they were in 1970, which would be an utter fiasco, especially given the lack of ground cover and open terrain in Iraq.

These statistics cause a bit of a conundrum for right wingers: either the war has caused horrific carnage or our army can't shoot straight anymore.

Yay.

Good relaunch. Good interface. Why is some legal content still prohibited? Isn't the puritan gone?

Four days in Toronto

The Toronto film festival isn't nearly as homey or sweet as the telluride festival. But it's very nicely run and active. Go Leafs.

- The Magic Flute
Kenneth Branagh's fanciful adaptation of the opera, in opera form. The music was beautiful and the singing amazing. The story was fun and funny and whimsically adapted as set in world war one style trenches. The cinematography looked beautiful at times, but it was projected in a Christie digital projector, which has unpleasantly visible pixels (screen door effect) and in this particular screening at least, very bad quantization and noise in the dark regions, which was bad enough to be distracting. Digital projectors are a disappointment in large venues compared to film.

- 10 Canoes
An offscreen aboriginal in the present narrates a story of ancient ancestors going on a hunt to collect geese and eggs from the swamp and telling a story of their ancient ancestors meant to teach how to live right. All past and past - past ancestors spoke in aboriginal, yet the story came across, as did lessons on aboriginal skills in building canoes, hunting, and surviving in swamps. With entirely believable characters, beautiful scenery, and very funny.

- Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (excellent)
Sold out, some people waiting on line for last minute tickets for 9 hours managed to get in. We saw Borat himself heading out to the stage before coming home. Probably the most anticipated screening in the festival.

The first try failed due to technical problems with the projector. The second try was more successful, and was absolutely hilarious. Probably the first time I've found a highly anticipated movie to exceed even the best expectations. While much of the schticks are replays of concepts already tested in the BBC and HBO series, these are almost all premium and tied together with a story about going across America. Truly some of the funniest moments on film. Children do not think bears are good ice cream vendors.

- To Get to Heaven First You Have To Die (very good)
Tajik movie about a young man's quest to reach manhood. With his nose as his cherry, he stalks every pretty woman he sees, some pleasant, some to far more complexity than he bargained for. Cute, slowly paced, but charming and engaging.

- Lights in the Dusk
A very slow Finish movie about a not very lovable looser's inability to overcome his inadequacies. His only assets are inextinguishable hope and the pity of his few friends, of which only the latter has much value.

- Bamako
A mock trial between the World Bank and the people of Africa with some very stirring and passionate speeches about the evils of neolibralism and the consequences of privatization and some loosely related story lines that are woven back and forth. Ultimately, unfortunately for the material, the speeches don't do the subject justice and the story line isn't cohesive enough to be compelling.

-The Way I Spent the End of the World
A funny, lively Romanian movie about the fall of Ceausecscu. Cute and very interesting. Very sparsely edited so that it was hard, at times, to follow the story, but it all held together in the end. The use of child actors in Eastern European films is interesting and compelling, unlike US movies which make them so saccharine snarky you want to either puke on them or kill them. These are kids one could believe as kids and actually enjoy spending time with.

- Palimpsest
A polish movie about a cop trying to find out who killed a good friend of his. The scenery is dark and complex, the story hard to follow but compelling and suspenseful. The lead is the narrative view, and he becomes more and more obviously compromised as a rational observer. Unfortunately the conclusion fails to deliver on the audience's work in trying to understand the plot and apparently disconnected events that build up to the conclusion.

- Retrieval
Another Polish movie, this about a young man's assumption of responsibility for a refugee Ukrainian woman and her child. His skills as a boxer are his entree into the world of petty thugs, and he ultimately does well, despite a sterling conscious that seems always about to prove his undoing. The conclusion seemed abrupt and left the story in a very unsatisfactory state, sadly given that the characters are well developed through the film and go through a believable transformation. Like Palimpsest, one can't help thinking that the movie was on the verge of being so much more than it came out as.

Four days in telluride

- Little Children
Another biting and really uplifting comedy about child molestation. Seriously. The movie takes the position, if perhaps a bit unsubtly, that everyone is strange. People who seem the most normal are masturbating with panties over their heads and cruising for anonymous gay sex at truck stops. In this milieu of oddity and pretense and secrets, a child molesters direct acceptance of his psychosexual disturbance makes him genuine and, in a creepy way, likable. As in Happiness, Jane Adams is brilliant.

- Fur
Billed as an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, it's more a vehicle for Nicole Kidman in the title role. She's captivating, as always. The movie shares some of the sexual tension of Secretary, but ventures off into more bizarre pastures. There's some effort to make the subjects of Arbus portraits come alive, but in an odd way it seems to share an aesthetic with HBO's ill-fated Carnivale (as well as a period).

- Babble
An amazingly international story, it weaves plots across the San Diego/Mexico boarder, Morocco, and Tokyo into a coherent whole. The interleaved stories are not temporally synchronized, which can be a bit confusing, but overall there is a good payoff for paying attention. The known stars (Pitt, Blanchett, etc) put in great performances, but the Moroccan kids (apparently non-actors) steal the show.

- Charmed Lives
A nice overview of the history of Kordas, made special by the Q&A with Michael Korda who's recollections were stronger than the film.

- Severence
A brilliant spoof of a slasher film that sustains the genre while making fun of it. The Shaun of the Dead of slasher films. Enjoyable, light hearted, entertaining. Good gore, good suspense and surprises, jokes and characters never went too far into intolerable.

- The Italian
A Russian film about orphans and child prostitutes who live in abject misery and yet, in a brutal way, care deeply for and support each other. The story follows one orphan's amazing journey to find his mother. The child was brilliant - just exceptional - with amazing facial expressions seemingly beyond his years.

- Volver
As part of a tribute to Penelope Cruz, who was on hand to get her medal, Volver was screened. Perhaps one of Almodovar's best, and the furthest he's departed from his sexy, funny roots; about multi-generational child abuse. Cruz is quite wonderful in the film, putting in an excellent performance that convinced me her medal was warranted. The movie is, as is Almodovar's tendency, filled with powerful, interesting, well conceived women, yet not above a good fart joke.

- The Last King of Scotland (excellent)
The story of Idi Amin's unlikely friendship with a somewhat adrift young Scottish physician and his decent into madness. Forest Whitaker is one of my favorite actors ever - always a pleasure to watch, usually demonstrating a calm cool that's just captivating. In this movie he is quite frightening. His performance is astonishing - Academy Award-Worthy. So far, I think the best movie I've seen here.

- Passio
An experimental film, a visual rhythm piece, meant to be accompanied by 21 live musicians. A bit of an endurance test without the live music. Though beautiful, and somewhat hyptnotic, it ran too long unaccompanied.

- The U.S. vs. John Lennon
A strong documentary that creates a vision of Lennon as a social activist coming to an awakening, fighting the good fight, and getting stomped by a heavy-handed Nixon government. Lots of great footage and excellent interviews, but a reliance on Geraldo Rivera somewhat taints the film. Any Geraldo is too much, but he acts as if he is sympathetic to Lennon's goals and tribulations, a position entirely at odds with his position in Fox news as a cheerleader for the right attacking Jon Stewart. G. Gordon Liddy, also absurd but genuinely so, is more apropos.

- Catch a Fire (excellent)
Philip Noyes really amazing and powerful story of Patrick Chamusso, a solid working class guy who keeps his nose clean and supports his family well, and the villiage soccer team, and his girlfriend and son. Until a poorly timed attack on the gas plant where he works brings the full evil of Apartheid down on him and his family and he rises to the challenge. Tim Robbins plays the Afrikaans police chief in a surprisingly human way and together they do an excellent job of showing a slice of the complexity of South Africa.

- The Lives of Others (excellent)
Another excellent film about dictators and repression, this time a story of a bureaucratic hero of the Stasi who risks life and career to help a playwright who's become at risk as his beautiful girlfriend caught the eye of a high-ranking Stasi official. The characters are well-formed and believable and the story complex, interesting, compelling and suspenseful.

- Civic Life
Seven short films about civic life, apparently created to showcase different towns. Some were surreal and funny, others fairly tedious. One or two at a time would be fun. 7 was more challenge than we were up to.

- 12:08 East of Bucharest
A sweet, funny character study revolving around a small town talk show's theme on the anniversary of the revolution that overthrew Ceausecscu. The host got a drunken professor and a quirky old man to tell their stories. Callers disputed them. Hilarity ensued. Very funny in the ironic, Eastern European way.

- Ghosts of Cite Soleil
An amazing documentary of two gang chiefs of the most dangerous place on Earth, the slums of Cite Soleil in Haiti, on the eve of the overthrow of Aristide. Unbelievably lucky documentary film makers happened to pick two men who ended up being important in the flow of events around Aristide's last months. The bravery of the film makers is almost unthinkable, surrounded by constant violence and gunfire with very little footage of feet running in terror.

- Page Turner
A story of revenge served cold. A talented pianist is crushed by the careless and callous act. She gets even. And then some. Wonderful acting and very compelling and subtle performances create real tension, sexual and otherwise.

- Indigenes
The story of the first French troops to reach Alsace, who happened to be North Africans. The were treated like second class citizens by colonial France, an injustice that continues to this day as the pensions of the brave men who served are still frozen. A good war movie, with a lot of character development, and successfully exploring the consequences of prejudice.

What the bleep.

The movie What the bleep do we know is a pseudo-scientific exploration of using quantum mechanics to justify a human potential-like pseudo-religious concept. I have an undergraduate degree in physics from MIT, and so I recognized a lot of the arguments as absurd immediately, but I reached the limits of my depth, particularly on the history of QM in this argument. Most, but not all of the concepts could be easily refuted from an undergraduate understanding such as mine, some seem to require more depth. But the practicing physists I reviewed my answers with seemed to think they had nothing useful to add to the discussion, in part I suspect out of the still-somewhat-in-vogue idea that the best way ton confront anti-scientific ideas is to ignore them, viz the debate over intelligent design (which I think, personally, the flying spaghetti monster setttled.)

I never did answer his last message because I wasn't sure how to go about simply contradicting him--he's just wrong. Not like a difference of opinion wrong, but like fundamentally in error on the matter of whether consciousness is necessary to collapse the wavefunction to create reality. One must ask: did reality exist before humans? Is there no reality outside the range of detection of humans? At what point in the evolution of humans, did reality start to exist? What drove evolution before there was reality?

Reductio ad absurdum, the discussion devolves to the somewhat infantile philosophical question of whether anyone can know whether the world actually exists outside themselves. Making the statement "no, not really" is just so uselessly open ended. Most people who want to start a pseudo-religion around metaphysics try not to make testable claims. The Boxers didn't really have much luck at it, but the Scientologists seem to be able to continue extracting money from people for Engram removal even though even John Travolta continues to buy planes he shouldn't need anymore.

Anyway, the test for whether a quantum state needs human observation to collapse is an easy one. The un-collapsed state is the basis of quantum computers, the accidental, unobserved collapse is the primary limitation of quantum computers, that and the number of quantum particles in coherence. If (among a lot of other tests) the world was as coherent as FAWe's hypothesis requires, quantum computers simply wouldn't work or would work perfectly. They do neither - they do work, but only for a sort period of time.

It seems he's mixed the Many Worlds Interpretation and the Consciousness Causes Collapse Interpretation with the Copenhagen Interpretation. Copenhagen does not require consciousness, quite the contrary - it says that the waveform does not correspond to reality, but is merely a probability calculus that has no meaning outside the experiment in question.

A detailed counter argument is a bit of a challenge to formulate and probably irrelevant without being able to re-watch the film. My memory of the various arguments presented is fading, and the counter arguments here are predicated on a fairly deep understanding of QM and the arguments in the film, and so may be in error. I'll try to address Mr. FAW's arguments in-line directly, as much as I can, without getting either completely out of my own depth or drifting aimlessly across too much Quantum history.

There are many interpretations of the fundamental nature of Quantum Mechanics and differentiation seems to come to head over the concept of "measurement." QM has been incredibly successful at predicting the physical properties of real materials and so it is considered useful, yet has not been proven complete. It stands on par with Relativity as the “micro” to Einstein's “macro” and between the two theories most of the universe's observed behavior to date seems explicable... or at least to fit fairly closely to derived equations that fit one or the other of those two theories.

But not both.

And that's a critical point which shows a fundamental flaw: either Quantum Mechanics or Relativity or both are either incomplete or wrong. (If history is a guide, the bet is both).

It is therefore risky to argue a special insight into the structure of the universe, consciousness and the nature of god based on a theory with known issues.

But at the root of this argument, I think, is the position of some special power granted the act of measurement by a conscious entity to cause a furcation in the state of the universe. The movie seems to favor a view that multiple universes exist simultaneously, that there are a near infinity of such universes each embodying the possible outcome of every measurement. This is a slippery term in itself, and without the introduction of consciousness as a necessary step, would seem to imply a multiplication of universes on the order of every particle in the universe to the power of every possible state to the power of the number of plank-time units since the start of the universe, a rather huge number. Positing a metaphysical property of consciousness dramatically reduces that value, but perhaps too dramatically:

How did the state of the Universe evolve before the evolution of consciousness?

QM suggests that there is a wave function for every entity, particles and aggregates thereof. The wave function of the Universe can be calculated: does it have a reality if there is no observer outside the universe to collapse it's wavefunction? Does a conscious entity self-collapse all entrained wavefunctions?

Copenhagen (and the Extended Probability and Consistent Histories theories of QM) do not speak of collapsing the wavefunction. They say there is no physical relevance to the wavefunction. It's a mathematical definition that has no meaning beyond the calculus itself.

If this makes it back to Mr. FAW, I'd be curious as to how he finds the Conscious Observer of Many Worlds consistent with EPR with a moving reference frame (which is generally felt to introduce a temporality inconsistency with many worlds, wherein the moment of universe selection is indeterminate between two relativistically consistent "nows").

But lastly, and I think most fundamentally, I have a pseudo-religious disagreement. I say pseudo religious because I'm not sure it's a testable disagreement, just as the existence of God is not disprovable if one accepts the tenant that He will offer no proof of His existence.

I am not aware of any experiment that can disprove the Conscious Observer hypothesis, that is one can argue that experiments like the two slit experiment that show behavior associated with wave particle duality, which can be collapsed by "measurement" by tagging the particles by polarization and would seem to prove that the waveform can be collapsed mechanically, but the counter argument is that the collapse isn't known until a conscious observer interprets the results, and it is that interpretation that collapses the aggregate waveform of the particles being measured and the waveform of the measuring apparatus itself retroactively in time.

This argument seems a bit tautological to me. And it is fundamentally predicated on a special, metaphysical status for consciousness itself. While I readily admit that I do not understand what Consciousness is exactly, nor can I recreate it in a test tube or with a computer, I do not believe it is "special." There is nothing about consciousness (of which I am aware) that defies the bounds of the normal rules of classical physics and chemistry let alone that suggests it merits a special place above Quantum Mechanics. While it is impossible to prove that reality isn't a dream, and my sense of awake not actually a dream from which I will awake into reality tonight when I think I go to sleep; nor can it be proven to me that I do not exist alone and all others merely figments of my imagination or creations of some meta-entitty sent to study my response. But why bother trying? So too it seems impossible to disprove the Conscious Observer (though a less metaphysical interpretation seems fatally challenged by EPR's moving frames).

The film seems to make an additional suggestion that I suspect goes a step too far for most: that consciousness is so powerful that it can influence the path "reality" takes through the many worlds simultaneous extant. I am unaware of any scientific proof of this sort of connection, nor of any particular reason to believe it I can find other than an abiding belief in the special status of consciousness. There is a suggestion that Masaru Emoto's pretty photographs show some deep proof of the power of thought to influence the development of ice crystals. It does not appear that Mr. Emoto's work has been peer reviewed by any prestigious journals, nor have his experiments been repeated by other labs. Nor does it seem that he has managed to consistently repeat his own experiments.

In the end, it would be unscientific to deny the possibility that consciousness has some special status in the workings of the universe, and it may will turn out to be true that the human brain is in some way connected to the underlying structure of the universe and even able to manipulate it, but I see no particular reason to embrace this belief, to choose it from an infinity of equally unprovable possibilities without some evidence that points directly to it--some evidence other than wishful thinking. I would apply Ockham's Razor: does not the simplest explanation argue against the unnecessary multiplication of entities to include a supra-natural power of the brain? What anomaly, what otherwise inexplicable phenomenon does this theory, and only this theory, satisfactorily resolve?




____________________________
I went off to see what the bleep. It was entertaining, though I found it unintentionally so... I hope not too much to the dismay of the more committed viewers around us. It's getting diametric reviews, which doesn't surprise me.

I'm not terribly sympathetic to the spiritual connections to quantum physics here and there proposed, despite having occasionally (in the distant past) used the line "quantum physics tells us not just that we're everywhere simultaneously, but everywhen simultaneously..." to try to pick up women.

My feeling about the movie was that it was trying too hard. Though I did not recognize any of the technically oriented speakers, their qualifications sounded impressive. Yet there was a fundamental misunderstanding of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory that seemed to be the foundation of the many beliefs: that a conscious observer collapses superposition.

In English: Quantum does describe a "superposition" of states, for example that Shrodinger's Cat is neither alive nor dead (or both alive and dead) until someone checks to see if ate the poison, or that the protagonist could go to the movie alone and with a date simultaneously. More practically than supernatural cats, the principle underlays what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" wherein, for example two entangled photons, can measurably effect each other instantaneously (faster than the speed of light) over great distances via a mechanism which can not physically be related to electricity, magnetism, or the physical transfer of information, as if the "particle" were some metaphysical entity that was not literally constrained to the bounds of space and time. Spooky indeed.

Entanglement and superposition are real, measurable, and practically underlay quantum computers (which actually work at demonstration level) and quantum cryptographic key distribution (which is a commercial product).

They're real. They're not perfectly understood, and yet regularly exploited. That is this spooky action isn't theory, it's product.

But there's one deep error in the movie (that was, in fairness, acknowledged early then apparently forgotten "it could be a person or it could be rock" someone said): the "observer" that collapses the superposition and converts the spookily entangled universe of interrelated probabilities into the tangible state with which we normally interact is not conscious, indeed has absolutely zero connection to human consciousness whatsoever. The "observer" is a term of convenience, it is technically a perturbation energy of a magnitude sufficient to test the state of the entangled system that the outcome would uniquely discriminate between possible states. It appears to have been a poor word choice that did not anticipate new age co option of quantum theory.

>>>FAW : There is no way that any "object"collapses the quantum wave function. Also Satinover had it wrong in the film. In fact there is nothing in the theory itself to suggest collapse. It is one of the reason that the parallel universes model was invented in 1957 which provides a good way to understand quantum computers. (See work of David Deutsch). I would suggest rereading von Neumann or read HP Stapp who writes about this "problem" of collapse with considerable clarity. There is no consistent way to even put the collapse into quantum physics without doing injustice to experimental facts. Many have tried and the latest is called I believe decoherent histories. But the basic assumption is that sufficiently complex alternative possibility decohere for some mysterious reason that is called the "environmental" influence. That is also pure speculation and attempts to draw a line between where and when collapse occurs and does not occur.

The term "observer" comes from thought experiments from the 1920's that were used to explore the counterintuitive nature of quantum physics and were not meant to imply a cosmic interrelation between human consciousness and the real state of the universe.

>>>FAW : Straw dog set up: cosmic interrelation between human consciousness and the real state of the universe." Consciousness need not be human. If collapse occurs then accordingly nothing mechanical caused it. For me that suggests consciousness because the role of consciousness is ascertain what's happening with certainty. Hence those that follow the von Neumann, Stapp, Josephson, Goswami, Wigner, and earlier London+Bauer positions posit that since no machine seems to cause collapse, and mind does observe a "real" world, then it is consciousness that collapses the quantum wave function.

That is if someone were to put a real cat into a box with some poison and wait it would definitely start to smell shortly after it ate the poison whether or not any human checked on it. Likewise quantum computers which rely on the entanglement of their bits to "solve" all possible conditions of a problem simultaneously will come to an incomplete solution of a stray source of perturbation energy happens to come into the system (radiation, cosmic ray, etc). The system has to be sufficiently isolated from ALL energy, not human consciousness, in order to work.

>>>FAW : The reader assumes that the proposed cat and poison set up is not already entangled with many other systems and the stray bit did the dirty work. But even there was a stray bit, according to quantum physics the universe would split into two separate universes. In one the box would stink and in the other it would not. The probability would be 50% you (observer) were in one of those. It was just as likely that the stray bit didn't effect anything as it was that it did, so this proves nothing. In parallel universes both universes split apart and co-exist. In Copenhagen Interpretation the quantum wave function collapses and the cat is either dead or alive. In Copenhagen one universe exists and the other vanishes in puff of collapsed probability. In parallel universes both version of reality exist together with an observer who sees the cat one way or the other and therefore think collapse. In Copenhagen consciousness does the deed. In parallel universes consciousness is a byproduct of the interaction but it exists in an infinity of ever multiplying universes. Which is right? The answer is: I speculate here, they both are and they are saying the same thing.

The movie What the bleep do we know is a pseudo-scientific exploration of using quantum mechanics to justify a human potential-like pseudo-religious concept. I have an undergraduate degree in physics from MIT, and so I recognized a lot of the arguments as absurd immediately, but I reached the limits of my depth, particularly on the history of QM in this argument. Most, but not all of the concepts could be easily refuted from an undergraduate understanding such as mine, some seem to require more depth. But the practicing physists I reviewed my answers with seemed to think they had nothing useful to add to the discussion, in part I suspect out of the still-somewhat-in-vogue idea that the best way ton confront anti-scientific ideas is to ignore them, viz the debate over intelligent design (which I think, personally, the flying spaghetti monster setttled.)

I never did answer his last message because I wasn't sure how to go about simply contradicting him--he's just wrong. Not like a difference of opinion wrong, but like fundamentally in error on the matter of whether consciousness is necessary to collapse the wavefunction to create reality. One must ask: did reality exist before humans? Is there no reality outside the range of detection of humans? At what point in the evolution of humans, did reality start to exist? What drove evolution before there was reality?

Reductio ad absurdum, the discussion devolves to the somewhat infantile philosophical question of whether anyone can know whether the world actually exists outside themselves. Making the statement "no, not really" is just so uselessly open ended. Most people who want to start a pseudo-religion around metaphysics try not to make testable claims. The Boxers didn't really have much luck at it, but the Scientologists seem to be able to continue extracting money from people for Engram removal even though even John Travolta continues to buy planes he shouldn't need anymore.

Anyway, the test for whether a quantum state needs human observation to collapse is an easy one. The un-collapsed state is the basis of quantum computers, the accidental, unobserved collapse is the primary limitation of quantum computers, that and the number of quantum particles in coherence. If (among a lot of other tests) the world was as coherent as FAWe's hypothesis requires, quantum computers simply wouldn't work or would work perfectly. They do neither - they do work, but only for a sort period of time.

It seems he's mixed the Many Worlds Interpretation and the Consciousness Causes Collapse Interpretation with the Copenhagen Interpretation. Copenhagen does not require consciousness, quite the contrary - it says that the waveform does not correspond to reality, but is merely a probability calculus that has no meaning outside the experiment in question.

A detailed counter argument is a bit of a challenge to formulate and probably irrelevant without being able to re-watch the film. My memory of the various arguments presented is fading, and the counter arguments here are predicated on a fairly deep understanding of QM and the arguments in the film, and so may be in error. I'll try to address Mr. FAW's arguments in-line directly, as much as I can, without getting either completely out of my own depth or drifting aimlessly across too much Quantum history.

There are many interpretations of the fundamental nature of Quantum Mechanics and differentiation seems to come to head over the concept of "measurement." QM has been incredibly successful at predicting the physical properties of real materials and so it is considered useful, yet has not been proven complete. It stands on par with Relativity as the “micro” to Einstein's “macro” and between the two theories most of the universe's observed behavior to date seems explicable... or at least to fit fairly closely to derived equations that fit one or the other of those two theories.

But not both.

And that's a critical point which shows a fundamental flaw: either Quantum Mechanics or Relativity or both are either incomplete or wrong. (If history is a guide, the bet is both).

It is therefore risky to argue a special insight into the structure of the universe, consciousness and the nature of god based on a theory with known issues.

But at the root of this argument, I think, is the position of some special power granted the act of measurement by a conscious entity to cause a furcation in the state of the universe. The movie seems to favor a view that multiple universes exist simultaneously, that there are a near infinity of such universes each embodying the possible outcome of every measurement. This is a slippery term in itself, and without the introduction of consciousness as a necessary step, would seem to imply a multiplication of universes on the order of every particle in the universe to the power of every possible state to the power of the number of plank-time units since the start of the universe, a rather huge number. Positing a metaphysical property of consciousness dramatically reduces that value, but perhaps too dramatically:

How did the state of the Universe evolve before the evolution of consciousness?

QM suggests that there is a wave function for every entity, particles and aggregates thereof. The wave function of the Universe can be calculated: does it have a reality if there is no observer outside the universe to collapse it's wavefunction? Does a conscious entity self-collapse all entrained wavefunctions?

Copenhagen (and the Extended Probability and Consistent Histories theories of QM) do not speak of collapsing the wavefunction. They say there is no physical relevance to the wavefunction. It's a mathematical definition that has no meaning beyond the calculus itself.

If this makes it back to Mr. FAW, I'd be curious as to how he finds the Conscious Observer of Many Worlds consistent with EPR with a moving reference frame (which is generally felt to introduce a temporality inconsistency with many worlds, wherein the moment of universe selection is indeterminate between two relativistically consistent "nows").

But lastly, and I think most fundamentally, I have a pseudo-religious disagreement. I say pseudo religious because I'm not sure it's a testable disagreement, just as the existence of God is not disprovable if one accepts the tenant that He will offer no proof of His existence.

I am not aware of any experiment that can disprove the Conscious Observer hypothesis, that is one can argue that experiments like the two slit experiment that show behavior associated with wave particle duality, which can be collapsed by "measurement" by tagging the particles by polarization and would seem to prove that the waveform can be collapsed mechanically, but the counter argument is that the collapse isn't known until a conscious observer interprets the results, and it is that interpretation that collapses the aggregate waveform of the particles being measured and the waveform of the measuring apparatus itself retroactively in time.

This argument seems a bit tautological to me. And it is fundamentally predicated on a special, metaphysical status for consciousness itself. While I readily admit that I do not understand what Consciousness is exactly, nor can I recreate it in a test tube or with a computer, I do not believe it is "special." There is nothing about consciousness (of which I am aware) that defies the bounds of the normal rules of classical physics and chemistry let alone that suggests it merits a special place above Quantum Mechanics. While it is impossible to prove that reality isn't a dream, and my sense of awake not actually a dream from which I will awake into reality tonight when I think I go to sleep; nor can it be proven to me that I do not exist alone and all others merely figments of my imagination or creations of some meta-entitty sent to study my response. But why bother trying? So too it seems impossible to disprove the Conscious Observer (though a less metaphysical interpretation seems fatally challenged by EPR's moving frames).

The film seems to make an additional suggestion that I suspect goes a step too far for most: that consciousness is so powerful that it can influence the path "reality" takes through the many worlds simultaneous extant. I am unaware of any scientific proof of this sort of connection, nor of any particular reason to believe it I can find other than an abiding belief in the special status of consciousness. There is a suggestion that Masaru Emoto's pretty photographs show some deep proof of the power of thought to influence the development of ice crystals. It does not appear that Mr. Emoto's work has been peer reviewed by any prestigious journals, nor have his experiments been repeated by other labs. Nor does it seem that he has managed to consistently repeat his own experiments.

In the end, it would be unscientific to deny the possibility that consciousness has some special status in the workings of the universe, and it may will turn out to be true that the human brain is in some way connected to the underlying structure of the universe and even able to manipulate it, but I see no particular reason to embrace this belief, to choose it from an infinity of equally unprovable possibilities without some evidence that points directly to it--some evidence other than wishful thinking. I would apply Ockham's Razor: does not the simplest explanation argue against the unnecessary multiplication of entities to include a supra-natural power of the brain? What anomaly, what otherwise inexplicable phenomenon does this theory, and only this theory, satisfactorily resolve?




____________________________
I went off to see what the bleep. It was entertaining, though I found it unintentionally so... I hope not too much to the dismay of the more committed viewers around us. It's getting diametric reviews, which doesn't surprise me.

I'm not terribly sympathetic to the spiritual connections to quantum physics here and there proposed, despite having occasionally (in the distant past) used the line "quantum physics tells us not just that we're everywhere simultaneously, but everywhen simultaneously..." to try to pick up women.

My feeling about the movie was that it was trying too hard. Though I did not recognize any of the technically oriented speakers, their qualifications sounded impressive. Yet there was a fundamental misunderstanding of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory that seemed to be the foundation of the many beliefs: that a conscious observer collapses superposition.

In English: Quantum does describe a "superposition" of states, for example that Shrodinger's Cat is neither alive nor dead (or both alive and dead) until someone checks to see if ate the poison, or that the protagonist could go to the movie alone and with a date simultaneously. More practically than supernatural cats, the principle underlays what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" wherein, for example two entangled photons, can measurably effect each other instantaneously (faster than the speed of light) over great distances via a mechanism which can not physically be related to electricity, magnetism, or the physical transfer of information, as if the "particle" were some metaphysical entity that was not literally constrained to the bounds of space and time. Spooky indeed.

Entanglement and superposition are real, measurable, and practically underlay quantum computers (which actually work at demonstration level) and quantum cryptographic key distribution (which is a commercial product).

They're real. They're not perfectly understood, and yet regularly exploited. That is this spooky action isn't theory, it's product.

But there's one deep error in the movie (that was, in fairness, acknowledged early then apparently forgotten "it could be a person or it could be rock" someone said): the "observer" that collapses the superposition and converts the spookily entangled universe of interrelated probabilities into the tangible state with which we normally interact is not conscious, indeed has absolutely zero connection to human consciousness whatsoever. The "observer" is a term of convenience, it is technically a perturbation energy of a magnitude sufficient to test the state of the entangled system that the outcome would uniquely discriminate between possible states. It appears to have been a poor word choice that did not anticipate new age co option of quantum theory.

>>>FAW : There is no way that any "object"collapses the quantum wave function. Also Satinover had it wrong in the film. In fact there is nothing in the theory itself to suggest collapse. It is one of the reason that the parallel universes model was invented in 1957 which provides a good way to understand quantum computers. (See work of David Deutsch). I would suggest rereading von Neumann or read HP Stapp who writes about this "problem" of collapse with considerable clarity. There is no consistent way to even put the collapse into quantum physics without doing injustice to experimental facts. Many have tried and the latest is called I believe decoherent histories. But the basic assumption is that sufficiently complex alternative possibility decohere for some mysterious reason that is called the "environmental" influence. That is also pure speculation and attempts to draw a line between where and when collapse occurs and does not occur.

The term "observer" comes from thought experiments from the 1920's that were used to explore the counterintuitive nature of quantum physics and were not meant to imply a cosmic interrelation between human consciousness and the real state of the universe.

>>>FAW : Straw dog set up: cosmic interrelation between human consciousness and the real state of the universe." Consciousness need not be human. If collapse occurs then accordingly nothing mechanical caused it. For me that suggests consciousness because the role of consciousness is ascertain what's happening with certainty. Hence those that follow the von Neumann, Stapp, Josephson, Goswami, Wigner, and earlier London+Bauer positions posit that since no machine seems to cause collapse, and mind does observe a "real" world, then it is consciousness that collapses the quantum wave function.

That is if someone were to put a real cat into a box with some poison and wait it would definitely start to smell shortly after it ate the poison whether or not any human checked on it. Likewise quantum computers which rely on the entanglement of their bits to "solve" all possible conditions of a problem simultaneously will come to an incomplete solution of a stray source of perturbation energy happens to come into the system (radiation, cosmic ray, etc). The system has to be sufficiently isolated from ALL energy, not human consciousness, in order to work.

>>>FAW : The reader assumes that the proposed cat and poison set up is not already entangled with many other systems and the stray bit did the dirty work. But even there was a stray bit, according to quantum physics the universe would split into two separate universes. In one the box would stink and in the other it would not. The probability would be 50% you (observer) were in one of those. It was just as likely that the stray bit didn't effect anything as it was that it did, so this proves nothing. In parallel universes both universes split apart and co-exist. In Copenhagen Interpretation the quantum wave function collapses and the cat is either dead or alive. In Copenhagen one universe exists and the other vanishes in puff of collapsed probability. In parallel universes both version of reality exist together with an observer who sees the cat one way or the other and therefore think collapse. In Copenhagen consciousness does the deed. In parallel universes consciousness is a byproduct of the interaction but it exists in an infinity of ever multiplying universes. Which is right? The answer is: I speculate here, they both are and they are saying the same thing.