This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state." No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive. These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in perfect synchrony.

I have a history of being strongly in favor of civil rights. I can't imagine anybody important would be upset about passive radiation monitoring if it wasn't a way to Get BushTM. If there were some legitimate reason to own large quantities of radioactive materials without government knowledge or control, maybe I'd be more concerned. But I can't think of any. Under the circumstances, I'd be upset if they weren't monitoring.

If you want to say, "I hate you, but I'm culturally obligated to give you a Christmas present", is there a better gift than an Arch card?

The Belmont Club asks: One of the questions I'm interested in exploring is whether politics somehow prevented environmentalists from reaching the conclusions described by the NYT years earlier; and if the answer is yes, whether there is any way, in principle, one can detect whether politics is twisting a current public policy debate away from its rational path. I wanted to highlight this comment by "meme chose", which I though was wonderful:

What worries me most about the riots is not the riots themselves; it is their disturbing similarity to the trigger events of the previous two World Wars, along with all the political and economic dry powder lying around. All the reading from various blogs I've done and I've only seen hints of this point here and here. The continental Europeans have a history of denying problems and taking the easy way out until things are absolutely out of hand, and then suddenly solving the problem by turning it over to a fascist dictator.

Been really busy with my new job. It's a dot-com, and I tend to spend spare time working on that in a push for First Release, rather than blogging. Plus my net connection during weekdays is basically non-existant. But I had to comment on this; normally I don't do these, in fact I think this is the first time I've posted one of these, but I find this interesting. (I slightly tweaked the HTML they gave me to also display the Bush/Kerry vote chart too.

According to Federal Law, you must be able to request a free credit report once a year from the major credit agencies. The companies were required to roll this out in 4 phases. I remember the annoucements, but either I missed the news reports that they were now available in my area, or the stories were not run. (Either are quite plausible.) For everyone except "the Eastern States and All US Territories"

If an adjective is in a statement, but the statement is just as true without the adjective, with its opposite, or with a generalization, then the statement fails my adjective test. Examples: Opposite: "Democrats prey on the weak-minded." <-> "Republicans prey on the weak-minded." Both are demonstrably true; I had a senile great-aunt that was preyed on by both, quite without shame. Generalization (by dropping the adjective): "A New Computer from ComputerCompany will speed up your photo processing!

So now a lawyer is trying to convince a court that a having a cached file on your hard drive doesn't constitute possession. (Slashdot article.) Good luck with that. The real problem is the "possession" isn't the real issue; it's the distribution and viewing, i.e., the human-experienced message. I wonder how long it will take us to figure out that the whole idea of possession is fatally flawed in the Internet era?

This is the final posting of the Government Myths series. As you might imagine, the urgency of the series decreased as we left the election season. Unfortunately, I have already seen the first glimmerings that we are entering the next one (ugh!), as I've already seen stories about who is considering running. Things seem right on track so that by the 2012 election, 2016 at the latest, the campaign for the next election will immediately start after the swearing-in ceremony.