I have decided to move the blog portion of Quantum Pie to Tumblr. All of the old posts are still available below, but any new content will be added to blog.quantumpie.com.
That is how you engage an audience.
Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the pentatonic scale at the 2009 World Science Festival.
(Via Neven Mrgan)
A succinct summary of the reasons behind the rot in our financial system.
Imagine also […] that the coach and his top assistants were hugely compensated, not on whether they won games, but rather by whether they covered the point spread. If they beat the point spread, they would receive massive bonuses. But if they missed covering the point spread a couple of times, the salary cap of the team could be cut and key players would have to be released, regardless of whether the team won or lost its games. […]
Suppose moreover that the whole league was rife with scandals of coaches “managing the score”, for instance, by deliberately losing games (“tanking”), players deliberately sacrificing points in order not to exceed the point spread (“point shaving”), “buying” key players on the opposing team or gaining access to their game plan. If this were the situation in the NFL, then everyone would realize that the “real game” of football had become utterly corrupted by the “expectations game” of gambling. Everyone would be calling on the NFL Commissioner to intervene and ban the coaches and players from ever being involved directly or indirectly in any form of gambling on the outcome of games, and get back to playing the game.
Steve Denning, writing for Forbes, provides a compelling review of Roger Martin's new book Fixing the Game. Sounds like a smart read.
(Via John Gruber)
I love the idea behind the Awesome Foundation. Jaime, Nancy, and Nyree took part in the Cardboard Fort Night this past April, and the Star mentions their cardboard candy house (emphasis added by me):
There were cardboard dinosaurs, a cardboard candy house, cardboard igloos and a cardboard TV that people could perform inside.
Here is a repost of the video I took of the event which was also used by Maclean's magazine:
Children skating at Uptown Waterloo during the first real snowfall this winter.
Shot with a Panasonic GH1 and Olympus 45mm f1.8 lens.
From Lindy Hop Variations for Followers:
Watch the first minute of this clip for inspiration on what to do with your left arm in side by side Charleston
I still remember when Angry Birds first came out. I spent a month playing the game obsessively trying to get all three stars on each level. I haven't kept up with any of the new incarnations, but it has developed into an impressive franchise. This time lapse is an awesome (and painstaking) Christmas tribute to the game.
This is the most festive our cat gets.
The annual XKCD Christmas comic is up:
Christmas is here! That must mean the infinite sum was successfully carried out. For those wondering what Zeno's paradox is, here is a great video from Open University that explains it.
Previous XKCD Christmas Comics
This made me tear up. What a great Christmas proposal.
Merry Christmas!
Shot with a Panasonic GH1 with 20 mm lens @ f1.8
Great coverage. Glad to see Yehoodi get a mention.
I like to keep my domain name registrar and web host separate. For the last couple of years I have used GoDaddy as my registrar because they are cheap and any changes I make to my nameserver settings are quickly picked up. The downside with GoDaddy is that they are a sleaze bucket company. Putting aside the horrific user interface that makes me want to stab my eyes with flaming icicles, earlier this year their CEO killed an elephant for sport and now they support SOPA1. Enough is enough. I am joining the GoDaddy boycott on December 29th.
For anyone else who is thinking about transitioning away form GoDaddy here is a helpful guide. The only remaining problem I have is that I am not sure who to switch to. Ideally they will be cheap, have a decent user interface, and not be in cahoots with the Beelzebub daemon. Some poking around the internet has turned up Namecheap and Dynadot. Anyone have experience with either of these registrars? Any other recommendations?
Thanks!
Update: Looks like GoDaddy just reversed their SOPA support. Good start, but not enough for me to change my mind about leaving.
- SOPA is a bill being discussed in the US that would destroy the internet as we know it. Or as @sschillace puts it "Under SOPA, you could get 5 years for uploading a Michael Jackson song, one year more than the doctor who killed him.". ↩
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) is right up there with XKCD and the Oatmeal as one of the best web comics. Clever and smart writing. Lots of science and philosophy jokes. What more could a nerd ask for.
Here are some other recent SMBC comics that rock:
Since Jaime and I have started using You Need a Budget, we have noticed how much we pay each month in bank fees. With Scotiabank we each have a personal account and a joint account plus Visa cards and lines of credit. Last month we spent over $60 in total bank fees. This is money the bank is charging us to leverage our money to make themselves more money. Fed up with this "double dipping" we have started to look for alternatives. The proverbial straw came tonight when we noticed a $50 service fee charged to one of our accounts. The account was formerly a student account, but has since switched over to a regular account (completely fair). The problem is that the bank did not inform us of this switch over. The response from the customer service agent was "You should periodically review your accounts for upcoming changes in the status of the account."
It is OK for Scotiabank to harass us with unwanted phone calls and junk mail trying get us to sign up for new services, but when it comes to informing us of important account changes that could involve hefty service fees the communications burden is too great. This horse must be in charge of Scotiabank's customer communications team.
After spending some time on the phone, Jaime managed to get the account type changed and the service fee reduced. The pile up of fees has left a bad taste though. We are definitely going to make the switch now. I have been a Scotiabank customer for thirty years continuously, but I don't think it is worth it anymore.
Any suggestions for better, more customer (and wallet) friendly banks would be greatly appreciated. Here is what we are looking for:
- No service fees of any kind. I should not have to pay a bank for the privilege of leveraging my money.
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Accessible ATMs.
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A good online banking interface that makes it easy to transfer and manage money.
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Some kind of physical presence so we have someone to talk to if need be.
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Simple account structure. ScotiaBank offers a byzantine labyrinth of account types for personal banking. There is the Scotia Moneyback, Scotia One, Basic Banking Plan, Powerchequing, Basic Banking, Scotia Power, Money Master, Scotia Daily Interest, Scotia Gain Plan, and many others. The only reason for such a complicated plan structure, most of which are only marginally different, is to confuse customers and charge more bank fees. This is a (profitable) mess that I expect most banks embrace. It would be refreshing to find one that aspired to more than this.
So far we are looking at PC Banking, and ING Direct. If anyone has experience with either of these or other banks post them in the comments below.
Thanks!
Twice at 526 114th St., and once at 556 114th St., the suspects demanded the victims hand over their iPhones, police said.
The first victim complied, but the second only had a Droid, according to police. The thieves apparently didn't want a Droid -- so they took cash instead. [...]
"It's insulting they don't want my BlackBerry," said a female student.
More bad news for RIM. Not only are investors dumping their stock, but even thieves don't want to carry their inventory.
(Via John Gruber)
Wow. Our double-slit experiment published earlier this year in Science has been voted as the top Physics breakthrough of 2011 by Physics World! We are in some good company considering all of the things that have happened this year. Congratulations to Aephraim, Sacha, Boris, Sylvain, Marty, Rich.
But after much debate among the Physics World editorial team, this year's honour goes to Aephraim Steinberg and colleagues from the University of Toronto in Canada for their experimental work on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. Using an emerging technique called "weak measurement", the team is the first to track the average paths of single photons passing through a Young's double-slit experiment – something that Steinberg says physicists had been "brainwashed" into thinking is impossible.
Honorable mention goes to Jeff Lundeen whose work on a similar experiment comes in second.
Here is a link to some of the coverage about our experiment.
Ken Murray, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC, writes:
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.
Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).
The article also contains an interesting comments thread worth reading through.
Several of my friends who are in the medical profession have said similar things to me. They do not want to be put on life support or die in an intensive care unit. This surprised me at first, but with two family members recently battling cancer I can better relate to their reasoning.
I would be interested to hear what other people think about this subject, especially nurses, doctors, and hospice workers.
I follow the NBA at arms length. One of the most exciting things to see is a player get a hot hand and make four or five shots in a row. This idea featured heavily in the game NBA Jam I used to play1 as a kid–make three shots in a row and your player catches on fire.
It turns out that the idea of a hot hand is a myth. According to a new paper in Nature Communications title Reinforcement learning in professional basketball players, two things happen when a player makes a three point shot:
- They player is likely to try and make another three-pointer the next time they get the ball.
- The player's chance of making the shot goes down.
I'll say that again. If you make a three-pointer your chances of making a second one go down2. Instead of heating up you are more likely to cool down. He's on ice isn't nearly as catchy though.
Humans have a hard time making sense of randomness. We often look for patterns when none are present or selectively filter out information that we do not agree with. In this case basketball players focus more on the shots they make not the ones they miss. This is why Kobe Bryant can throw up thirty shots a game, miss the majority of them, and still feel like he has a hot hand. The numbers say otherwise.
Using iBooks to read Walter Isaacson's book Steve Jobs left me with a healthy distaste for the program. As an eReader it is subpar compared to Amazon's Kindle App1. There are formatting bugs that occasionally pop up, and I find the interface too cluttered. The metaphor of a book is cute at first, but quickly becomes distracting. It constantly gets in your face and breaks your concentration. Instead of becoming immersed in the reading experience, iBooks constantly demands that you pay attention to how clever it is.
I have been wanting a full-screen mode that does away with the book metaphor, so I was pleasantly surprised when I check the App store tonight and found an iBooks update waiting. The main new feature is a distraction-free full-screen option!
This new option can be selected by first clicking on the text icon in the top right-hand corner as shown in the figure below.
At the bottom is a switch that enables the new full-screen view. Turn this on and the book background disappears. It's not perfect, but it is still a big improvement.
There is also a new night mode. This reverses the colours, making it easier on the eyes at night. I'll definitely be using this feature to read in bed.
A very welcome iBooks update. I hope that a future update will include an option to disable the page turning animation.
- I go into more detail about the Kindle app in my last apps roundup. ↩