The image macro meme Confession Bear is mostly used to bare one's soul concerning trivial matters such as loving the smell of one's own balls. More »

clubkayden:

Until I turn sideways. Done with body reflections for the week now.

theswinginsixties:

Sly Stone 

Kinda like the Grand Canyon, actually.

To the naked eye, a vinyl record looks like this. A big black disc.

Source: img.deadformat.net

If you get a bit, closer, you can get a better look at the ridges...

Source: businessweek.com

...but if you zoom in 1000x with a microscope, this is what those ridges look like.

Source: topdesignmag.com

LINK: Check out this article on Top Design Magazine's site for microscopic images of human hair, dust, butterfly eggs, and a silicon microchip.

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1. one who is people oriented, or social.

2. a customer service employee.

3. a customer.

the right to choose one’s carrot.

Warning: this post contains graphic imagery of pricks, cunts and assholes.

I have a new favorite douchebag profile pic: Enthralling My Fucking Audience. This one is phenomenal; you’ve probably seen it somewhere amongst your fucking friends. It’s where a Very Important Dbag (VIDb) is captivating above-mentioned audience solely through the power of his personal presence.

Jesus Christ, the fucking hubris. The fucking insane, idiotic hubris.

Examples culled from an eleven-second scrub of Facebook:

These are actual profile pictures intentionally uploaded by actual humans.

The above were retrieved from a single individual’s Facebook friends, which is totally unsurprising. Profile photo douchebags — not unlike regular douchebags because they are regular douchebags — stick together.

(Note: groups of dbags can be described using a few commonly accepted terms: “flock of cocks,” “kindling of fucksticks,” or “those stupid cunts who think their online game/to-do list/social-media-monitoring tool is changing the world.”)

What in holy hell motivates someone to upload this type of picture as a representative photo? LinkedIn I conceivably get as an unsubtle attempt at resume-bolstering — “I am competent enough to speak to a crowd of idiots; love/hire me.” — but popping this on Facebook, where your “friends” are, exudes such look-at-me desperation I almost feel as sorry for these jackholes as I do anyone who has to come into direct human contact with them.

—

Prior to EMFA my favorite cocktard profile pic was the Thoughtful Humanist. The TH captures a VIDb lost in thought about the perils and possibilities of our world:

“Goddamn, I am so pensive in sepia. Also don’t forget to crop the Starbucks so people think I’m drinking Philz.”

The Brothers Cockamazov

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful. There are more legitimate reasons.”

You can heighten the dbaggery of the Thoughtful Humanist with the variant Cut-Off Thoughtful Humanist (COTH), which indicates a level of profile picture curation that belies any claim of modesty, before or ever again, in a VIDb’s life:

Uninterestingly, cut-off but looking at camera elicits a milder amount of vomitus:

But then you keep cropping, and, suddenly, fuck you:

I’ve yet to – and never will care to – determine the algorithm, but there is a mathematical relationship between one’s douchebaggery and facial angle from camera. I’m sure some Big Data asshole will Hadoop that shit up for me and then end up in YCombinator, but generally it peaks between 45 and 90 degrees, reducing as the stupid douchebag face gets less prominent:

Left: 110-degree partial-douchebag who’s never surfed in his life. Center: 90-degree Euro mugshot douchebag. Right: 195-degree saggy-ass douchebag gazing at his private airport or some other ridiculous shit.

There are so many ways to express your inner douchebag… by expressing your outer douchebag. The Valley never ceases to amaze with its creative ways of being a cunt.

I've a huge list – from Me and My Hot Wife, to Young Me (Fat), to Me and My Ugly Wife – but I’ll highlight just a couple additional ‘faves’ before I pop an aneurysm.

Caricature / Drawing / Pixel Art

Christ, get over your fucking virtual self. These taint-grazers somehow think a Nintendo Mii or Farmville avatar is (a) novel in the least, (b) cute, or © the new-media equivalent of a Journal hedcut. It’s actually: (d) the new-media equivalent of the teenager at Great America who draws your ass on a T-shirt.

My favorite of these are the out-of-the-box Photoshop filters. These – I guess? – are meant to demonstrate a combination of new-media proficiency and artistic flair, but instead convey that you are able to successfully torrent Photoshop (and edit your 'hosts’ file to bypass Adobe’s shit copy-protection) or steal the license key from a prior employer, and then click some random shit.

Left: Filter > Sharpen > Enhance Douchestroke. Right: Filter > Artistic > “I’m Feeling Cunty!”

Life of the Fucking Party

This is the intermarried cousin of the Thoughtful Humanist (not unlike most actual parents of Thoughtful Humanists), intent on driving home the inexhaustible, ejaculatory zeal of our VIDb.

“Not only do I enjoy creating and/or experiencing humor, I have photographic proof. I am funny, I love life, children fucking love me, by God. Oh, sweet existence!”

(Note: if you write “children fucking love me” 20 or so times, at least once you will accidentally write “children love fucking me.”)

The irony here, of course, is that you don't tell someone you’re funny, just as you don’t tell someone you’re a stupid arrogant prick. You show them. Like these nozzles.

“My Amazing Douchebag Life”

MADbL finds the douchebag in incredible places: aboard the Vomit Comet, in a cockpit mid-flight, atop Mount Everest, jacking off a thoroughbred, whatever.

Look ma, no tact!

In a few years these will be equivalent to “me on a Segway” pics, i.e., nonexistent.

I’ll make an exception and name one of my subjects, because he is such a tremendous cockdog — seriously, read this pompous motherfucker’s profile about his fucking iPhone, then look me in the eye and tell me his mother is proud, really. Anyway, it’s Dave Morin again, and his MADbL has him carving through 47 inches of “pow-pow” or whatever he surely calls it:

That’s from Facebook, where by all accounts it’s acceptable to be a showoffy cuntbag. Fine. But while we’re here, let’s look at the pic he uses on his own photo-sharing app, Path – which is Facebook but for your “real” friends/family/fellow sack-sniffing jackholes:

That’s right! The goddamn Thoughtful Humanist. And he looks to be in the midst of an on-stage interview, so it’s an improbable (and yet, somehow, all too probable) Thoughtful Humanist Entertaining His Fucking Audience. Jesus. Even for his ostensible actual friends he can’t just pick a snapshot of him smiling at a fucking camera. Is this a new kind of Valley allergy? Are these nad-rags carrying around Epi-Pens to jam into their thighs in case they accidentally stare directly into a lens?

Fuck me. A lesson for you petty, self-obsessed cowards:

What’s interesting — well, “interesting” is stretching it, but you’re a flock of thoughtless, jock-sniffing, lucre-chasing technosheep, so it’s probably interesting to you — is that the least amount of profile picture douchebaggery accompanies the most successful (which is to say, the richest) people.

This is largely due to the delta between one’s wealth and the relative insignificance of a fucking profile picture — when you have a billion dollars the bar for douchebag is set a little higher — but it’s also because these people really don’t have to give an ounce of shit about you. And the “you” here is ANY FUCKING PERSON ALIVE OR DEAD. So they upload whatever the fuck they want.

And what is that? Smiling at the fucking camera… like a regular fucking human being.

You conceited fucks, even though you can’t change your shitbag ways – pretend to have a modicum of discretion and self-restraint. Follow your rich idols in at least this one legitimate area:

• Bill’s photo is probably staged, but still — it’s a near-candid, and he’s looking at camera, and he’s got that fucking goofy autistic smile, and it’s about as normal as that guy gets.
• Reid’s got a pro headshot, but it’s not even in goddamn focus. Moreover, Jesus, he’s just so enormous that it removes any sheen of professional bluster whatsoever. 
• Sheryl runs the fucking company and can’t be bothered to upload a picture with high enough resolution to hit the 168 pixel-width of the New Profile. And she picks of all things a random shot cropped from a group photo. Why? Because she doesn’t need you to love her for her profile pic.

That said, it’s one with someone else’s shoulder Photoshopped out — so she clearly cares more than these other guys.

(Probably something to do with being a chick.)

A censura judicial anda tendo trabalho. Praticamente ao mesmo tempo em que os responsáveis pelo livro Privataria Tucana são condenados por terem publicado a  obra num momento inconveniente para o candidato derrotado à Prefeitura de São Paulo, José Serra, o blog Viomundo é penalizado -- ao ponto, parece, da inviabilidade econômica -- por ofender o jornalista Ali Kamel, do Grupo Globo. Casos notórios anteriores são o do Jornal Pessoal, condenado por chamar um latifundiário de... latifundiário, e o das duas censuras impostas ao Estadão, a envolvendo o filho de José Sarney e outra, o blog de João Bosco.

Em todos esses casos, o que mais me estupidifica -- como cidadão pagador de impostos, jornalista e escritor ingenuamente leigo nos labirintos kafkianos do Judiciário -- é o absoluto desprezo, em cada decisão censória, pelo simples e comezinho conceito de "verdade".

Nos dois casos envolvendo o Estadão, a informação censurada era comprovadamente verdadeira; no da Privataria Tucana, o próprio juiz afirma que o mérito do livro não estava em questão. Nos do Jornal Pessoal e de Viomundo, parece haver uma mistura de opinião e informação envolvidos no conceito, um tanto quanto nebuloso, de "ofensa".

Em seu livro You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom, o jornalista britânico Nick Cohen mostra como os conceitos de "ofensa" e  de"ofensivo" foram transformados numa espécie de arma moral/judicial de destruição em massa, usada por indivíduos poderosos -- e grupos com lobbies organizados -- para calar a boca de desafetos e sufocar o debate público. Ele chama atenção para o fato de que os supostos "crimes contra a honra" estão entre os poucos onde o ônus da prova recai sobre o acusado -- que tem de provar que o que disse não é mentira, não foi dito com intuito ofensivo, etc. -- e não sobre o queixoso. Escrevendo sobre o sistema judiciário britânico, diz:

"A crença de que 'Quem diz a verdade não merece castigo' não se aplica na Inglaterra (...) [Os tribunais] dizem ao queixoso que ele não precisa provar ter sofrido dano ou prejuízo. Não analisam se o queixoso tinha uma boa reputação que a lei fosse obrigada a defender. São presididos por juízes de classe média alta sem nenhum respeito instintivo pela liberdade de expressão, ou entendimento fundamental de sua importância."

Cohen escreve sobre a Inglaterra, mas poderia estar escrevendo sobre o Brasil. Em outro trecho do livro, ele lamenta o fato de a esquerda ter assimilado a ideia de "ofensa" como arma moral dentro das chamadas "políticas de identidade", o que vê como um desenvolvimento recente: na luta contra a segregação racial na África do Sul, nota, não ocorreu a ninguém chamar as críticas ao apartheid de "afrikaanofóbicas", da mesma forma que as críticas à misoginia das leis de países islâmicos hoje são chamadas, muitas vezes, de islamofóbicas. A denúncia e a invectiva contra a noção de que grupos e ideias -- não só indivíduos -- podem ser ofendidos e, portanto, merecem reparação ocupa boa parte do livro.

Mas, voltando à questão judiciária: Cohen lembra um fato pouco mencionado hoje em dia, o de que a primeira grande campanha orquestrada para usar leis de defesa da honra, a fim de calar a imprensa, foi desencadeada por políticos racistas do sul dos EUA, com o intuito de inviabilizar a cobertura da repressão aos atos de desobediência civil dos negros inspirados por Martin Luther King, nos anos 60. O New York Times chegou a ser multado por "ofender" um político do Alabama.

A questão foi parar na Suprema Corte, que decidiu que o debate público deveria ser "desinibido, robusto e aberto". Segundo o tribunal, sofrer ataques "veementes, cáusticos e desagradáveis" era, na paráfrase feita por Cohen,  o preço do exercício do poder numa democracia. Políticos e autoridades tinham de "aprender a viver com isso".

Políticos a autoridades, certo. E quanto aos cidadãos privados? A Suprema Corte decidiu que, uma vez engajado num debate de interesse público, não basta ao cidadão provar que o que um jornalista escreveu é falso ou difamatório, mas também que o autor da declaração foi "negligente" -- isto é, contou a mentira deliberadamente, ou não se esforçou para confirmar a veracidade do que dizia.

Sobre a circulação de opiniões, em 1974 o tribunal constitucional dos EUA determinou que "não importa o quanto uma opinião possa parecer perniciosa, dependemos, para corrigi-la, não da opinião de juízes, mas da competição com outras ideias". Uma afirmação de humildade que cairia bem em outras jurisdições, para além do Rio Grande.

 Voltando ao Brasil, é importante notar que o apelo ao tacape da censura judicial ou, de modo mais genérico, o uso do Judiciário para intimidar vozes discordantes, seja com base na noção subjetiva de "ofensa" ou com desprezo olímpico pela veracidade do que se divulga, é largamente ecumênico.

Jornalistas processam-se uns aos outros; a ATEA (da qual, aliás, sou membro) processa o Datena; a Folha de S. Paulo, ela própria vítima de bullying jurídico por parte da Igreja Universal, segue firme e forte em sua perseguição ao blog Falha de São Paulo. E assim por diante.

Falei do processo da ATEA, o que nos traz à questão da proteção das minorias contra discursos de preconceito. Eu, pessoalmente, sou um liberal à la Stuart Mill: o único discurso que merece repressão é o que incita diretamente à violência. Mas, tá, isso pode soar radical demais, só que: é fácil simpatizar com o uso do Judiciário para calar a boca de racistas e homofóbicos, até o momento em que as pessoas denunciadas comecem a recorrer à Justiça para se dizer "ofendidas" com os rótulos de "racista" e "homofóbico".

Voltando a Cohen, ele descreve como a assimilação das políticas de identidade pela maioria, na Índia, levou o  maior artista plástico do país ao exílio, porque radicais hinduístas declararam-se "ofendidos" por sua obra.

O que não quer dizer que toda demanda por reparação, retratação e direito de resposta seja, a priori, ilegítima. Mas o mundo seria um lugar muito melhor se houvesse a adoção de critérios para evitar uma espécie de corrida armamentista jurídica onde supostos "ofensores" e queixosos "ofendidos" ficam trocando de lugar, como uma dança maluca, onde o critério da veracidade é jogado ao vento e onde a sociedade como um todo sofre com a restrição da circulação de informações e ideias.

E esses critérios nem são tão difíceis de achar assim: veracidade primeiro e, depois, a presença de malícia ou negligência. A correta alocação do ônus da prova na hora de determinar se algum dano foi, de fato, provocado. Respeito à liberdade de expressão como valor fundamental da democracia. Aceitar que juízes de Direito não são juízes de opinião. É assim tão difícil?

then all news is bad news. That's because news is fact, what happened, not hope, and the truth can't possibly be as good as the hope was.

The problem with marketing promises that spin out of control, that pile expectations on top of dreams, is that when reality appears, when the quarterly numbers or the new policies or the final product arrives, it will inevitably disappoint.

This is the challenge of the Kickstarter artist, the growth stock CEO and the well-published author. Dreams are irresistible, but they will never match reality when it finally appears.

Guest blog by the man who is Shtetl-Optimized

It's an exquisite, delicious, life-changing honor to be invited to guest-blog on Luboš Motl's Reference Frame. In terms of The Big Bang Theory, imagine Sheldon (to whom Luboš likes to compare himself) inviting Howard Wolowitz to guest-post. Lo, how far the brilliant string theorist has condescended!

On the other hand, I confess that finding myself on Luboš's blog, with the freedom to write whatever I please, feels a little like finding myself in front of an open mic at the Republican National Convention. One part of me feels a moral obligation to seize this rare opportunity and say something like the following:

CONSERVATIVE LUBOŠ FANS: GET OUT OF YOUR BUBBLE! GLOBAL WARMING IS A REAL PROBLEM! IT'S HAPPENING, HUMAN ACTIVITY IS A MAJOR CAUSE, AND THE CONSEQUENCES ARE SERIOUS! EVEN LUBOŠ'S OWN STRING-THEORIST HEROES, LIKE ED WITTEN AND BRIAN GREENE, BELIEVE SO! VIRTUALLY EVERY SERIOUS SCIENTIST DOES — AT SOME LEVEL, ONE SUSPECTS, EVEN LUBOŠ HIMSELF! BUT HE CAN'T ADMIT IT, BECAUSE HE ASSOCIATES CONCERN ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING – OR ANY OTHER "LEFTY" CAUSE – WITH THE EVIL COMMUNISTS WHO OPPRESSED CZECHOSLOVAKIA IN HIS CHILDHOOD! BUT SOME US DESPISE COMMUNISTS EVERY BIT AS MUCH AS LUBOŠ DOES, BUT ALSO RECOGNIZE THAT THEY'RE NOT THE ONLY EVIL THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN! ONE HOPES LUBOŠ WILL EVENTUALLY COME TO THAT REALIZATION AS WELL!

But enough of this. I don't want to abuse my host's hospitality. Luboš invited me here, not to dispute his views on climate change, but rather to promote my new book Quantum Computing Since Democritus (published by Cambridge University Press and available now in Europe, on April 30^th in North America, and wherever and whenever on Kindle). So promoting my book is exactly what I'll do—by first telling you the story (such as it is) of my interaction with Luboš, and then explaining how that story relates to the book.




While I've never had the privilege of meeting Luboš in person (those who have tell me he's a perfect gentleman), he and I have ... exchanged pleasantries online. Regulars on the science blogosphere might remember that six years ago, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek blog post recounting my visit to the string theory group at Stanford, and claiming that my "allegiances" in the battle between string theory and loop quantum gravity were now open for sale to the highest bidder. ("Fly me to an exotic enough location, put me up in a swank enough hotel, and the number of spacetime dimensions can be anything you want it to be...")

Luboš, either oblivious to my post's lack of seriousness or deliberately ignoring it (it can be hard to tell), offered up the following wonderful Lubošian response:

It is absolutely impossible for me to hide how intensely I despise people like Scott Aaronson ... He's the ultimate example of a complete moral breakdown of a scientist. It is astonishing that the situation became so bad that the people are not only corrupt and dishonest but they proudly announce this fact on their blogs ... [Scott is] a corrupt piece of moral trash. My anger may be quiet but it is unyielding. It's not just him: the Academia is literally flooded by intellectual prostitutes.

Fortunately, Luboš's opinion of me seemed gradually to improve in the ensuing years (I guess it would be hard for it to worsen). For example, in his comments disputing my take on the so-called "PBR Theorem"—I considered the theorem simple and unsurprising but still well worth knowing, while Luboš considered it "garbage" and "crackpot"—Luboš at least upgraded me from "moral trash" to a "mad engineer." (Once again, the irony seemed lost on Luboš: I've never met a real engineer who considered me anything other than a hyper-abstract pure mathematician. I guess if you live in Manhattan, Brooklyn seems like a primitive wilderness.)




Later, Luboš and I discovered that we shared a common enemy, in the countless armchair physicists who notice the profound conflict between their intuitions about how the world should work, and quantum mechanics' description of how it does work—and immediately conclude that the problem must lie with quantum mechanics. Luboš and I were united against the entanglement-denier Joy Christian, and again against the trivial errors of Ross Anderson and Robert Brady. The latter alliance even led Luboš to compliment me, to which I responded as follows:

Luboš says he’s sure my "thinking engines" are good enough to see eye-to-eye with him! Callooh! Callay! This might be the single greatest compliment I’ve ever received.

And Luboš, in return for your generous compliment, I have some good news. As a result of major life changes—getting married, having a baby, etc.—I have abandoned my previous materialistic, money-grubbing ways. I’m now strictly a man of principle. And as such, no amount of money could ever induce me to abandon my total, principled commitment to Loop Quantum Gravity.

OK, OK, I’m kidding about the last part. In fact, I have a much better appreciation now for the achievements of string theory than I did back in 2006, partly due to a meeting in Florence where Brian Greene spent 4 hours explaining them to me and others. I came away genuinely impressed, convinced that string theory and especially AdS/CFT are unequivocally a step forward in our understanding of the universe, even though we have a great deal more to learn. I’m not ready to say that alternative ideas like LQG are garbage and have nothing worthwhile to contribute, let alone that global warming is a sham, but maybe Lubošification is a process that will happen to me one step at a time.

Granted, I'm not quite as radical (or rather, conservative) as Luboš on the quantum mechanics issue. I believe we still have a great deal to understand about ordinary, nonrelativistic QM in finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces—and as strong evidence for that claim, I cite the half-century that elapsed after QM's discovery before anyone asked the simple, profound question of whether or not it requires exponential resources to simulate on a digital computer. I believe it's at least possible that QM is only an approximation to a deeper theory, and that even wild speculations along those lines could deserve a hearing. I believe that philosophical arguments about the "meaning" of QM can be fun in moderation, and that mathematical theorems seeking to clarify QM's meaning can be illuminating—even if those theorems "merely make rigorous what we should've known all along." On all these questions, my impression is that Luboš disagrees.

On one crucial point, though, I stand shoulder to shoulder with Luboš. I believe that in science, the ratchet of progress only turns in one direction. If quantum mechanics is ever superseded, there's every reason to expect that its successor will be even more alien to human concepts, and less acceptable to the world's a-priori thinkers. (Has it ever been otherwise in the history of physics?) Likewise, if future generations do achieve a deeper understanding of QM than ours has managed, the path to that understanding will have to go "all the way through QM and out the other end." It certainly won't come from people suffering from infantile delusions about Bell's Theorem being wrong, or quantum phenomena being explainable by some doofus classical model that somehow escaped everyone's notice for the last century. Nor will it come from the aggressive ignoramuses whose interest in quantum-mechanical experiments starts and ends with the question of how to explain the experiments away. Instead progress will come, as it always has, from the scientists trying as hard as possible to turn the ratchet forward—maybe by pushing the known laws of physics up to Planck-scale energies (like Luboš and the other string theorists), or maybe by pushing the frontier of knowledge in other directions (like the ultimate limits of computation, to pick one random example).

And that, finally, brings me to my book. If one likes, Quantum Computing Since Democritus is my 400-page answer to a claim Luboš often makes: that nonrelativistic quantum mechanics has been completely understood since the 1920s, that all that's left is some grunt-work for engineers. To anyone who thinks that quantum computing is "merely" a cool application of century-old physics, that it doesn't raise any new questions about how our universe works—Quantum Computing Since Democritus is my answer.

In my book, quantum computing emerges as a particular kind of gadfly: one that doesn't challenge any aspect of quantum mechanics as (say) Luboš understands it, but that does spur us to ask a whole new set of questions about it. What kinds of questions? Well, here's a small sampling of what the book addresses:

1. "Why is quantum mechanics the way it is?" More precisely: what goes wrong if we try to base QM (say) on real numbers or quaternions rather than complex numbers, or conservation of 3-norm rather than conservation of 2-norm?
2. Can quantum computers solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time? Conversely, can quantum computers be simulated in the class NP? In other words, even assuming it's hard to simulate a quantum computer classically, is there at least a short classical proof that a QC produces such-and-such an output, which can be verified in classical polynomial time? Pending breakthroughs in theoretical computer science (like a proof of P≠NP), what kind of evidence can we give for or against these possibilities?
3. Is there anything "beyond" quantum computing? More precisely: is there any natural class of problems that generalizes what a quantum computer can do, but only "slightly" rather than "dramatically"? If there is, then can we find a hypothetical framework for physics that "slightly" generalizes quantum mechanics, and which would let us solve the problems in that class?
4. Can mathematical tools from quantum computing be used to solve problems about classical computing—much as complex numbers are often indispensable even for proving theorems solely about integers or real numbers?
5. Read anything written about quantum computing for a popular audience (or sometimes even a technical audience), and you'll probably find some claim of the flavor that a mere n qubits can store a whopping ~2ⁿ classical bits. In what sense is that actually true? How should we even define the "amount of information" in a quantum state? If we require that the information be "accessible via measurement," or "available to do useful computational work" (whatever that means), do we still find that the amount of information increases exponentially with the number of qubits? Are there problems that we can solve, or are there mathematical truths that we can verify, with help from a reasonable-sized quantum state but not with help from a reasonable-sized classical string? (Assuming we have a quantum computer available in both cases?)
6. Why does David Deutsch (one of the originators of QC) think that a scalable quantum computer would be a powerful demonstration of the truth of the many-worlds interpretation? What are the counterarguments to Deutsch's position?
7. How powerful would a quantum computer become if we augmented it with a closed timelike curve? Or what about "postselection" (the ability to measure a qubit and simply condition on the outcome being, say, |1〉)? Would a quantum computer interact with these sorts of powers differently than a classical computer would?

But the book is about much more than the above questions—indeed, half of it isn't even about quantum computing per se, but about what I view as the broad intellectual backdrop to QC. Among other things, the book covers set theory, first-order logic, Gödel's Theorem, Turing machines and computability, the P versus NP problem, modern cryptography, computational learning theory, interactive proofs, and all sorts of philosophical debates. In the last two chapters, I even venture ever-so-slightly onto Luboš's turf, sharing some thoughts about cosmology, holography, the black hole information problem, and firewalls, especially as they relate to quantum computing.

(The unusually-wide scope what I was trying to suggest with the strange title. Democritus, with whom the book really does start, was a Greek atomist known to his contemporaries as "the Laughing Philosopher"; he might have been the first human being to articulate what we'd recognize today as a scientific worldview.)

In terms of level, Quantum Computing Since Democritus has way too much math to be a "popular" book, but it's also too breezy and informal to be a textbook. So who's the intended audience? Basically, the sort of person who reads this blog! (Or my blog, or books like Lenny Susskind's The Theoretical Minimum or Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality.) I wrote the book for people who want to see part of the current scientific landscape from one researcher's heavily-biased vantage point—and who want that researcher to talk to them the same way he'd talk to a colleague in a different field.

So, I hope I've convinced you to give Quantum Computing Since Democritus a try. If I haven't, then maybe effusive reviews from three of the world's top quantum computing theorists will help seal the deal.

"Scott Aaronson has written a beautiful and highly original synthesis of what we know about some of the most fundamental questions in science: What is information? What does it mean to compute? What is the nature of mind and of free will? Highly recommended."

Michael Nielsen, Author of Reinventing Discovery, (Princeton University Press, 2011)"

I laughed, I cried, I fell off my chair - and that was just reading the chapter on Computational Complexity. Aaronson is a tornado of intellectual activity: he rips our brains from their intellectual foundations; twists them through a tour of physics, mathematics, computer science, and philosophy; stuffs them full of facts and theorems; tickles them until they cry `Uncle'; and then drops them, quivering, back into our skulls. Aaronson raises deep questions of how the physical universe is put together and why it is put together the way it is. While we read his lucid explanations we can believe - at least while we hold the book in our hands - that we understand the answers, too."

Seth Lloyd, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Author of Programming the Universe, (Vintage, 2007)

"Not since Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics has there been a set of lecture notes as brilliant and as entertaining. Aaronson leads the reader on a wild romp through the most important intellectual achievements in computing and physics, weaving these seemingly disparate fields into a captivating narrative for our modern age of information. Aaronson wildly runs through the fields of physics and computers, showing us how they are connected, how to understand our computational universe, and what questions exist on the borders of these fields that we still don't understand. This book is a poem disguised as a set of lecture notes. The lectures are on computing and physics, complexity theory and mathematical logic and quantum physics. The poem is made up of proofs, jokes, stories, and revelations, synthesizing the two towering fields of computer science and physics into a coherent tapestry of sheer intellectual awesomeness."

Dave Bacon, Google

In summary, I hope to have written a book from which anyone can learn something new about quantum mechanics—from my mom, to a precocious high-school student, to my computer-science colleagues, to (yes) my gracious host LM. Speaking of which: as a burying-the-hatchet gesture, I hereby offer Luboš a complimentary copy of my book, if he gives me an address to send it to. No letter-bombs, I promise.

Organic semi-conductors could revolutionise electronics in various areas. Nowadays, components put out such high performances that they are used in small devices like mobile phones. With larger devices, however, the organic components heat up in such an uncontrollable manner that they break down or conduct electricity in an irregular way. Physicists of the TU Dresden (Dresden University of Technology) and mathematicians of the WIAS have collaborated to analyse the typical feedback effects and they describe them for organic semi-conductors in the Physical Review Letters.

(Phys.org) —One of the cornerstones of quantum physics is the Schrödinger equation, which describes what a system of quantum objects such as atoms and subatomic particles will do in the future based on its current state. The classical analogies are Newton's second law and Hamiltonian mechanics, which predict what a classical system will do in the future given its current configuration. Although the Schrödinger equation was published in 1926, the authors of a new study explain that the equation's origins are still not fully appreciated by many physicists.

Fox may no longer operate as a free over-the-air channel if Aereo is allowed to continue operating, warns News Corp COO Chase Carey. In comments recorded by Bloomberg, Carey said that Fox and all its affiliate stations will stop broadcasting and move to cable in the event that Aereo is not shut down by the courts. "We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content," Carey told other executives. "This is not an ideal path we look to pursue, but we can’t sit idly by and let an entity steal our signal. We will move to a subscription model if that’s our only recourse."

Aereo collects broadcast television and streams it to the web for a monthly subscription fee, something networks have unanimously said infringes their...

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The US Navy has been pursuing solid-state laser weapons capable of setting other vessels on fire for years, but now one is almost ready to actually be put out to sea. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) today announced that it is aiming to "field and test a solid-state laser prototype" in early 2014 aboard the USS Ponce. The Ponce is a transport vessel from the 1970s that was recently upgraded into a hi-tech floating base and is stationed in the Persian Gulf, in range of Iranian attack boats.

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Em uma noite do começo do verão de 1981, acordado e deitado em minha cama no topo de uma casa em Manchester, eu encontrei umas luzes brilhantes piscando na parede. Tudo o que eu conseguia ver através da janela no lado oposto da sala era um pedaço do céu nublado. A luz piscante estava vindo de dentro, ou talvez por trás de um grupo de nuvens. Continuei observando e um objeto se materializou de dentro da nuvem, avançando até parar em uma visão plana do céu noturno.

Era algum tipo de nave surpreendentemente grande, achatada e com bordas arredondadas, como uma frigideira antiga, ou quem sabe um enorme muffin inglês. Era um prateado cintilante coberto por um padrão de luzes brancas piscantes. Após pairar por alguns segundos, começou a se mover pelo céu, e assim que chegou ao lado direito da minha janela, eu me inclinei para o lado da cama para continuar vendo. Em um certo momento ela parou seu progresso e, no mesmo ritmo calmo, rezes a rota de volta ao ponto de partida. Lá permaneceu por mais alguns segundos antes de se retirar para as nuvens até que suas efêmeras luzes piscantes tinham inteiramente desaparecido de vista.

Eu não estava bebendo nem usando drogas, não tinha cochilado e reacordado, e não estava em um estado de agitação. Era uma noite perfeitamente normal: eu tinha ido para a cama e estava esperando para cair no sono. Nada remotamente similar tinha acontecido antes, nem aconteceu depois. Se todo mundo pode passar por pelo menos uma experiência inexplicável ou paranormal, esta foi a minha.

Avistamento de OVNIs, assim como todas as outras formas de atividades paranormais, eram bem comuns ao redor do mundo. Stuart Walton, da Aeon Magazine, explica porque eles não acontecem mais.

Avistamentos de OVNIs atingiram seu ápice aproximadamente após uma década do lançamento do fascinante filme Contatos Imediatos do Terceiro Grau (1977), de Steven Spielberg. Um bom motivo para acreditar que nunca existiu nenhum OVNI é que mais ninguém viu nenhum. Antes, os céus eram cheios de naves alienígenas, e agora eles voltaram a ser um vazio, retornando apenas estática para telescópios de rádio, e oferecendo chuvas de meteoro esporádicas para os olhos.

Não são apenas os discos voadores que sumiram na história. Eles foram acompanhados, mais gradualmente, por um declínio nas aparições de fantasmas, relatos de assombrações, afirmações de psicocinese e todo o resto. Muitas pessoas com interesse na indústria do supernatural resistem a admitir isso, mas existe menos credulidade entre o público para contos do extraordinário do que existia há algumas gerações. A explicação padrão atribui isso ao crescimento do ceticismo. Mas, como é apropriado para o paranormal, pode ter muitas forças misteriosas por trás disso.

Filmar agora é algo que está ao alcance de todos com smartphones. Circuito fechado de televisão (CFTV) agora observa o nada que está para acontecer em ruas desertas durante a noite. Câmeras de vídeo eram usadas para eventos significativos da vida (casamentos, aniversários), mas agora não são nada com o YouTube. No auge das histórias de fantasmas, o cálice elusivo era uma fotografia ou um filme com alguma emanação espectral. Não deve haver nenhum obstáculo técnico para oferecer isso, e ainda assim tudo o que vemos é um borrão estranho branco que pode ser uma marca na tela.

A dignidade das histórias assustadoras era que, diferentemente de mentiras comuns, elas conseguiam cruzar a linha que divide o altamente improvável com o crível. Se não podiam ser provadas, também não podiam ser desmentidas – exceto ao apontar as leis da física, em linguagem alienadora dita por especialistas que não conseguiam esconder o desprezo pela ingenuidade comum. Agora que muito da cultura do espetáculo evoca a mesma resposta, as leis da física não têm mais direito de dar um ponto final a vídeos mal produzidos no YouTube.

As câmeras de programas de história natural não perdem nada, nem mesmo a nível celular, mesmo na escuridão, e ainda assim tudo parece que é culpa do vídeo. Existem aqueles que continuam acreditando que a chegada do homem na Lua foi falsa só porque a evidência em filme parece fake, e poderia facilmente ser produzida em um estúdio. Em contraste, as imagens em preto-e-branco da autópsia de um alienígena em Roswell, Novo México, são uma fraude óbvia e ofensiva, e pessoas educadas tranquilizaram outras quando o filme surgiu em 1995, esquecendo por um momento que o absurdo não está na cinematografia, e sim na ideia de uma criatura espacial humanoide.

Na era da mídia de massa eletrônica, com tantos flashes ao redor do mundo instantaneamente, quando vídeos, em uma palavra comum, “se tornam virais”, não deve haver dúvida sobre o que é real e o que não é. Ainda assim a massa crítica não é mais crítica. Há um ar de aparência, de “facticidade”, sobre o que nos fazem olhar. O fato de gritar por atenção pública tende a se voltar contra ele.

Alguns anos atrás, eu vi um documentário sobre o declínio dos avistamentos de OVNIs no Reino Unido. Várias pessoas que relataram eles no passado foram convidadas para reviverem as experiências, frequentemente indo aos lugares onde os incidentes ocorreram. Alguns dos entrevistados ainda estavam convencidos da realidade concreta do que viram como estavam na época, embora a orientação do programa era para as explicações prováveis contra um fascínio cultural geral que existiu no passado na ideia de civilizações alienígenas. Um homem viu um misterioso objeto no céu, em algum momento dos anos 1980. Ele desenhou um rascunho logo depois. Por incrível que pareça, era idêntico ao meu.

Crédito da imagem: Getty.
Este artigo foi reproduzido parcialmente com permissão da Aeon Magazine. Para ler a versão completa, clique aqui.

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Aeon é uma nova revista digital de ideias e cultura, publicando uma versão original a cada dia da semana. Ela visa dinamizar conversas sobre visões do mundo, com bons escritores em vários gêneros, incluindo memórias, ciência e reportagens sociais.

The search for ways to use megatons of carbon dioxide that may be removed from industrial smokestacks during efforts to curb global warming has led to a process for converting that major greenhouse gas back into the fuel that released it in the first place.

International Journal of Astrobiology dedica edição para artigos baseados nas conferências proferidas na Escola São Paulo de Ciência Avançada de Astrobiologia, realizada com apoio da FAPESP

Filo Loco

Dica de Juliano Pinheiro