Someone wants to talk to you! I have a friend who’s working on a documentary on people in their 20s or 30s who haven’t left their parents’ home yet.

If that’s you and you’d like to share your story, please comment here or e-mail juliekgirard@gmail.com.

I’ve blinded myself with science.

Every time I read about physics, I get stuck at the whole Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle thing. I actually remember straining to understand it one night as a (very nerdy) teenager, and later on in science college, I would spew back the theory without ever really understanding it. Now I’ve finally picked up A Brief History of Time, and sure enough, nothing is more certain than my getting blocked at the Uncertainty Principle.

Here’s my problem:

Some believe that because everything in the universe is governed by a set of rules, if you know the state and velocity of everything in the universe at a given point, you could infer, by applying the rules of the universe, the state of everything at every other time. Hence everything can be said to be predictable. Let’s call this Determinism, which was at a time accepted by the scientific community. That makes sense to me.

But Heisenberg says that you can never measure the position of a particle perfectly, without changing its velocity (this is because you’d have to shed light on the particle to measure its position, and the light would alter the particle’s velocity). So, you can’t ever perfectly know the position AND velocity of a particle. Either you’re uncertain about its position, or about its velocity. Fair enough.

What’s always bugged me about this is that it seems to rest on nothing but an experimental limitation. Just because an experimental limitation introduces uncertainty, it doesn’t follow that uncertainty is a fundamental property of the universe. Yet Hawking explicity says it is; that this is the case no matter what experimental method you use to measure velocity or position. Why?

Hawking even says that some supernatural being could know all (ie. not be limited by experimental limitations), but “such models of the universe are not of much interest to us ordinary mortals”. Well, why wasn’t it a problem to accept Determinism, when there are also obvious experimental limitations to knowing the state and velocity of every particle in the universe?

More importantly, why must the very way the universe works be affected by our ability to measure it? It seems ballsy to suggest that the universe itself operates uncertainly, simply because we ordinary mortals can never know it perfectly. Sure, science must measure and predict, and the introduction of this principle increases the accuracy of our predictions. But why not say that’s the best science can do to be predictive? Why does it follow that this uncertainty is a property of the universe itself?

In other words, why assert that God plays dice with the universe? Why not say, “God doesn’t play dice, it just seems to our imperfect observational abilities that he does”?

Does anyone know of a good realtor in Montreal? (to help buy a place)

Thanks!

I have a friend who’s looking for a freelance designer to develop a logo and graphic templates (stationery, web design) for his company. Enquire within.

UPDATE: position filled, thanks.

Anyone know of any community or eco service that takes used furniture, and will pick it up, other than the Salvation Army and St-Vincent-de-Paul?

Thanks.

Update: Thanks for the suggestions, but this freecycle thing has proven fantabulous! I now have about 15 people wanting to come take my couch away. Great initiative, this site.

This has been nagging at me: the dog in the Viagra ad, is he real?

(bonus question: is he the reason the guy is singing? ew.)

Where can I find a good selection of inexpensive Halloween wigs? It seems everywhere I go, they’re sold out of the better ones.

Here’s a real long shot. Does anyone out there know where I could find the notational convention for “intersection”? I’m not talking about intersections in the Venn diagram sense, but in the civil engineering sense (like the intersection between two streets). I’m looking for the standard notation for that, and it should be an international standard.

Free coffee, beer or potable of your choice to whomever happens to know this.

What’s the best way to generate an RSS feed if I’m using Blogger, not Blogger Pro? Thanks.

How much of a nightmare is it to move on July 1st?

We don’t have to move on that day, so we’d rather not, but most apartments offered are, of course, for that day. We can’t really afford to cut July apartments out of our search. Should we?