not starbucks

Your friendly nieghborhood Anti-Corporate cafe locator.

AOL Lamp

I came accross this ingenius little timesuck today. Now accepting spare AOL cd's from anyone who has them to give.

Free Press?

The US ranked #44 in the index of free press.

project censored

When I was 16 almost 17, Bubba was running for president. I was aware, even at that age while working and going to school and being a teenage mom, of the sins of dessert storm. I had a year or so previous been in the protests, and I really did care what happened to those people.
I was, however, still a minor, unable to vote(don't you love how they make you believe that voting is your only recourse a caring citizen?) so I did the next best thing. I canvassed for the democratic party(at the time I thought they were wildly different from the gop). I walked door to door and talked to voters about issues, and connected with people in order to contribute. And I also spent many hours filing, sorting, stuffing envelopes,etc...
When dubya was elected I hated it, I was outraged. But I guess I got apathetic. But I was a wife, mother of 3, a business owner, really heavy into school volunteering, and a student myself. And it didn't seem to me at the time that our political situation could get much worse.
How wrong was I?
Anyone who has paid attention to the media has an idea of the neglect that the people of New Orleans have faced. It is similar to how we have treated the Iraqi people, and many other people along the way in our history.
However there is a difference, and it is a difference of degree, not a difference of kind. Why do I say this? It is a racial, economic, and cultural bias that led to this particular atrocity.
A politician I am not. That is why I have never in my 6 years of blogging been political. But damn. How can you not be right now?
If you really do care, read independent media. I want to cry sometimes when I do. The nature of our government is one of absolute contempt and hatred.

insane anglo warlord

Did you know that Ronald Wilson Reagan is an exact anagram of Insane Anglo Warlord?

The Reagan (y)ears...

construction with copper disks

Construction with copper disks.

yelling

Evil Genius Chronicles.

The Evil Genius Chronicles.

DOW

dirty old women

Darth Tater

Darth Tater.

here kitty kitty...

Schrödinger's cat is a seemingly paradoxical thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger that attempts to illustrate the incompleteness of the theory of quantum mechanics when going from subatomic to macroscopic systems. The experiment proposes:

A cat is placed in a sealed box. Attached to the box is an apparatus containing a radioactive nucleus and a canister of poison gas. The experiment is set up so that there is a 50% chance of the nucleus decaying in one hour. If the nucleus decays, it will emit a particle that triggers the apparatus, which opens the canister and kills the cat. According to quantum mechanics, the unobserved nucleus is described as a superposition (mixture) of "decayed nucleus" and "undecayed nucleus". However, when the box is opened the experimenter sees only a "decayed nucleus/dead cat" or a "undecayed nucleus/living cat."

The question is: when does the system stop existing as a mixture of states and become one or the other? The purpose of the experiment is to illustrate that quantum mechanics is incomplete without some rules to describe when the wavefunction collapses and the cat becomes dead or remains alive instead of a mixture of both.

Contrary to popular belief, Schrödinger did not intend this thought experiment to indicate that he believed that the dead-alive cat would actually exist; rather he considered the quantum mechanical theory to be incomplete and not representative of reality in this case. Since a cat clearly must either be alive or dead (there is no state between alive and dead, e.g. half-dead) surely the same must be true of the nucleus. It must be either decayed or not decayed.

The original article appeared in the German magazine Naturwissenschaften ("Natural Sciences") in 1935: E. Schrödinger: "Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik" ("The present situation in quantum mechanics"), Naturwissenschaften, 48, 807, 49, 823, 50, 844 (November 1935). It was intended as a discussion of the EPR article published by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in the same year.