Monthly Archives: July 2011

Boehner in the House

Posted on 2011-07-30 by TJ

(with apologies to Ernest Lawrence Thayer)    A Ballad of the Empire, Sung in the Year 2011 The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the GOP that day; The Senate was all Democrat, the House in disarray. And then when Cantor threw a … Continue reading →

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Some Notes on The Crisis

Posted on 2011-07-28 by TJ

We are as always facing a crisis, where by “we” I mean the nation, the world, the species, the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, quite probably even the universe. These things happen. The seeds of the current crisis were … Continue reading →

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A Bayesian Looks at the Bible

Posted on 2011-07-27 by TJ

The Bible is a large, frequently self-contradictory book that many people claim to use as the basis for their moral code. This is useful for people with more avarice than ethics, as it has created an enormous world-wide industry of … Continue reading →

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Some Notes on Government Debt

Posted on 2011-07-24 by TJ

I’m not sure how Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative Party won two successive majority governments in Canada in the 1980′s, because I am the only person who will admit to having voted PC back then. But they did, and country is … Continue reading →

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Changes

Posted on 2011-07-21 by TJ

People change. Not everyone, and not all the time, but most people over the course of their lives change. Being the centre of their own world, mind, they don’t often notice their own changes, attributing it all instead to the … Continue reading →

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A Criterion for Evaluating Local Hidden Variable Theories

Posted on 2011-07-17 by TJ

There is a fairly long-running dispute between Joy Christian and his many critics regarding the status of Christian’s “Disproof of Bell’s Theorem”. There is a simple way to solve this dispute, although undoubtedly not to everyone’s satisfaction. The disagreement is … Continue reading →

Posted in epistemology, mechanics, physics, probability, quantum, science, software | 4 Comments

Only YOU Can Save Locality!

Posted on 2011-07-14 by TJ

I’ve been digging around Joy Christian’s “disproof” of Bell’s Theorem a bit more and have to say I admire its conceptual audacity. It aims to replace quantum theory with a local realistic–that is to say, classical–description of reality, and it … Continue reading →

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Some Notes on Abstract Algebras

Posted on 2011-07-14 by TJ

This is where I finally get around to talking about Joy Christian’s take on Bell’s Theorem, although as he puts his argument in terms of Clifford-algebra-valued variables and I’m trying to write for a vaguely lay audience (you can’t tell, … Continue reading →

Posted in epistemology, god, mechanics, physics, probability, quantum, religion, science, thermodynamics | 4 Comments

Some Notes on Bell’s Theorem

Posted on 2011-07-13 by TJ

Bell’s Theorem changed my life. Like many young people going into physics with a Judeo-Christian background, I believed that quantum mechanics must be an incomplete theory of reality because “God does not play dice”, in Einstein’s famous phrase. Thirty years … Continue reading →

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The Unreasonable Inefficacy of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

Posted on 2011-07-12 by TJ

Before talking about Joy Christian’s unsuccessful run at Bell’s Theorem, I want to talk about the use of mathematics in the natural sciences. I’ve said some nice things about math previously as a tool for keeping our thinking constrained to … Continue reading →

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