• (cs) in reply to chikinpotpi
    chikinpotpi:
    Charles400:
    Wait, there's a VB6? VB4 isn't the latest...?

    wait, there's a Vb now? i'm still on the Q variety... darn you QBasic....

    I remember in high school (1994-era) I wrote a program in QuickBasic 4.5 that was so large the linker couldn't finish compiling it. (Darn you 64KB limit.) Somehow we got VBDOS's linker and it could finish it. It was fancy and even used the mouse, though only certain versions of mouse.com worked well.

    On a related note (to TFA) I had a game in Prado-BASIC that I wanted to learn how it worked. I figured out how to print it but I everytime I saved it the .BAS file was unreadable. So I started to retype the code from the printout. It was a few days later I found the ,A option (IIRC) on the save command to save it as ASCII, which made me very happy. However there was another game which was a .BAS but didn't allow printing or saving as ASCII...

  • (cs) in reply to Great link for WTF source material buried in this article
    Great link for WTF source material buried in this article:
    Aaron:
    I hate to be "that guy"....

    but a parsec is a unit of distance, not time. :P

    I hate to be "that other guy," but Parsec is a TI-99 videogame, not a unit of distance.

    http://www.videogamehouse.net/parsec.html

    Oh, come on. There was only One True Game on the TI-99/4A, and that was Tunnels Of Doom. Cartridge AND about a half-hour of tape to load, about 18 hours to play to the end of the dungeon -- without, I might add, any of those newfangled gamer drinks the kids have these days. It took natural stamina to be a nerd in the Before Time.

  • (cs) in reply to Wyrd
    Wyrd:
    Someone You Know:
    Jake Vinson:
    The tab order was so bizarre and random that Joe had to either use his mouse or remember "ok, five tabs from here, then shift+tab twice, then three tabs" for the thirty-odd controls on the form, or click through with his mouse (making the process much slower than necessary).

    ${nitpicking}

    $nitpicking = 0;

    I respectfully disagree. Yeah, sure if it's some little VB frontend that you only use once a week and it's only got maybe six or fewer fields to tab through, then this would count as nitpicking.

    But when you're doing grand-scale laborious, boring-ass data entry and you've got ten to twenty different data entry fields per record... well now all of a sudden, it's not nitpicking. It's actually pretty important to be able to move through the fields as smoothly as possible. If you have to mouse-click from field to field every record will take a little bit longer, and since you're doing many records, that little bit gets compounded many times over.

    Or perhaps "${nitpicking}" is a tdwtf joke reference that I am unaware of? Oh well.

    The point you're missing is that using the mouse and clicking through with the mouse aren't really distinct options. It's like offering you a Ford in black, red, or black.
  • (cs) in reply to pink_fairy
    pink_fairy:
    fnord moco:
    The moneyed aristocracy is smarter than that.
    I'm guessing you didn't go to Oxford, Cambridge, or an Ivy League school, did you?

    And those people are theoretically the cream of the crop. They get good grades/degrees, way off the bell curve ... but, smart? No. There seems to be some sort of interesting interplay between regression to the mean, and in-bred psychosis; but not much of an evidential basis on which to base a conspiracy theory.

    I did go to Cambridge, but I didn't meet any moneyed aristocrats there so I haven't a clue what your point is.

  • rupert.h (unregistered)

    At my local pub I meet some accountants from a small section of a large company. They tell me management decided to move from accounting package Slowboat2.0 to Superslick8.8. Unfortunately, the only way they know to transfer data from old to new is by picking and putting, cell by cell. I'd help them out but...once upon a time most of an accountant's work involved copying numbers from one piece of paper to another. And as usual, there is funding to continue the ridiculously data transfer method, but none to write a simple script to migrate the data.

  • (cs) in reply to JamesQMurphy
    JamesQMurphy:
    Then Sam leapt into an orangutan.
    I've seen a website with stuff like that on it. *shudders*
  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    "After seeing a lot of late-night commercials that made data entry sound pretty lucrative..."

    Maybe I'm missing a joke, or maybe this occurred before my time, but WTF is this?

    It's called sarcasm.

    You must be American, right? <runs away>

  • (cs) in reply to pink_fairy
    pink_fairy:
    fnord moco:
    The moneyed aristocracy is smarter than that.
    I'm guessing you didn't go to Oxford, Cambridge, or an Ivy League school, did you?

    And those people are theoretically the cream of the crop.

    Yep. Thick, rich, and full of clots.
  • (cs) in reply to wintermute
    wintermute:
    ingenium:
    I should also note that the speed of light is 1, not 299,792,458 or 186,000. 299,792,458 m/s or 186,000 miles / are conversion factors, the same as 60 seconds / minute or 1000 meters / kilometer.

    No, it's not really a conversion in the same way as going from inches to meters is; it doesn't make sense in the same way to say that 3,000,000 meters is equal to 1 second. Yes, time and space are the same thing, but we can't rotate the universe through 90 degrees and measure a ruler with a stopwatch.

    No, we can't, but if we could, then a 1 light-second ruler rotated by a factor of i absolutely /would/ be the same length as a second rotated the other way, or, to put it another and more obviously undeniable way: the distance between two events in spacetime that we measure as simultaneous and 3x10^8 meters apart is exactly the same as the distance between two events in spacetime that we measure as occuring in the exact same spot one second apart.

    It is in fact entirely bizarre, as if we used megamiles for measuring horizontal distances and millimeters for measuring vertical distances, but that is what we do: we use one measuring rod for time-like separations, and another for space-like separations. The distances are measured in units related by the equation d=sqrt(dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2 - (ct)^2)

    Ok, remember how I said we couldn't rotate the universe by 90°? Well hang on to your head, because actually it turns out we can. Well, not quite, but we can get as arbitrarily close to it as you like: and that's because you can never travel at the speed of light, but you can keep getting closer to it.

    As you approach the speed of light, light-cones fixed in the frame relative to which you're moving become tilted, from the space-like toward the time-like axis. Remember those two events a second apart? Remember time-dilation? Well, the overall spacetime distance between them doesn't change, that's a universal fact of the structure of 4-dimensional spacetime. So where does that extra distance go to when the time-like separation becomes less? Yep, that's right: it becomes space-like. That's why you always get both time-dilation and length-extension occurring simultaneously in relativistic travel, right? Because distances and times aren't so much changing as it is a constant-length 4-d vector rotating, so that the ratios of the various components projected onto the axes shift.

    As you get closer and closer to the speed of light, you do indeed rotate the entire universe, and those two events that you formerly measured as occuring at the same place a second apart suddenly, it seems to you, become closer and closer to simultaneous events, and the distance between them closer and closer to 3x10^8m. If you could hop on a photon and travel at the speed of light, all the light cones would finally rotate that last little bit to a full ninety degrees, 'horizontal' in time, and the entire history of the universe would seem to be one infinitesimal instant covering a vast expanse of space.

    And that's not even the weirdest of it.

    This is because reality is, of course, fucked. And at the very lowest lowest layers it is simply made out of the same stuff as dreams and insanity.

  • (cs) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    Somewhat relevant--

    [image]

    That poster always makes me wonder. The kind robots will be doing what, exactly, soon?

    Maybe they're some kind of char-bots.

    It's That 'bot Again! (ITBA):
    > "*bleep* *klick *whir* Can I do you now, sir?"
    > "Oh fuck off, Char-3PO."

    Actually, come to think of it, the light programme was probably somewhat more genteel. <wanders off on a tangent>

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to DaveK

    The kind (of job that) Robots will be doing soon

  • Ana (unregistered) in reply to Bappi
    Bappi:
    This reminds me of my first job out of university. A few months into it, management came up with a "skills survey," which would result in a grand database of every employee and their skillset. This was a consulting company, so this database would make it much easier to allocate people to projects.

    It was very, very urgent that we all fill it out and send it in, because it was the basis for a very, very valuable management tool that was going to save us a lot of money and give us an important competitive advantage. The skills survey had five possible values for every skill, so that you could indicate whether you didn't know something, had read about it, were familiar with it, had worked with it, or were an expert in it. We all spent a lot of time making sure we got the skill level just right, because it was important.

    Six months later, I was on the bench, and I was asked to help with entering the data from the skills survey into a computer. Not only had the very, very important survey been languishing for half a year, but the data entry program allowed for only three values for every skill. Oh, and this data entry task was very, very urgent because it was the basis for a very, very valuable management tool that was going to save us a lot of money and give us an important competitive advantage.

    Yeah, right.

    Sounds just like my first job. Down to the task and behavior of management. Are you from Melbourne by any chance?

  • Data-Entry Drone (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward

    Gee, I like data-entry :(

    Every day I go in, transfer a small portion of my brainpower directly into my ten-key hand, and listen to music or podcasts on my MP3 player. I don't take my work home with me, it's easy to assess and meet goals (thus management is never on my ass), and when I get home I can hang out with my girlfriend and fiddle with my code. Pretty sweet gig, if you ask me.

    Of course, I have grad school on the horizon, so maybe if this was pretty much what I'd be doing my whole life, it'd be a lot worse.

  • (cs) in reply to iToad
    iToad:
    This story points out why most technical types are failures as managers.

    Your average programmer or engineer is a member of the reality-based community. They tend to develop solutions to technical problems based on logic and reason. On the other hand, management is mostly politics, and politics is not always rational.

    If you move from a technical specialty to management, you have to reset your brain. A lot of techies can't do that.

    So that's why all the managers I've seen seem retarded! They're still booting!

  • oheso (unregistered) in reply to Voodoo Coder
    Voodoo Coder:
    Wyrd:
    And remember, that beam o' light is actually made out of photons, and btw is it a particle or a wave or what? C'mon, c'mon we're waiting for an answer...

    Neither. And the cat has a 50/50 shot at living, unless you're in the box with it....at least, in Denmark, that is...

    Come on people. How many times do we have to go over this? The cat is both alive AND dead!

    Seriously, how can I expected to achieve genius when I'm surrounded by amateurs?

    (Turns head and flounces from room.)

  • (cs) in reply to Misha
    Misha:
    My reading is that he didn't have sufficient knowledge or access privs to just write the import script himself. As a data entry monkey, he'd probably only have been able to access the DB through the icky VB frontend. And likewise, he probably didn't have access to the source data, except through the hard copy dumps provided by the print guy.

    Surely he has everything he needs right there; his computer is presumably on a wooden table of some sort and surely he has his own camera. He can go straight to step 4: "?".

  • (cs) in reply to pink_fairy
    pink_fairy:
    fnord moco:
    The moneyed aristocracy is smarter than that.
    I'm guessing you didn't go to Oxford, Cambridge, or an Ivy League school, did you?

    And those people are theoretically the cream of the crop. They get good grades/degrees, way off the bell curve ... but, smart? No. There seems to be some sort of interesting interplay between regression to the mean, and in-bred psychosis; but not much of an evidential basis on which to base a conspiracy theory.

    If those who are supposed to be the smartest don't seem that clever to you, consider the possibility that YOU are pretty much as clever. Judging the intelligence of others tends to be relative to your own.

    And Oxbridge isn't 'the moneyed aristocracy'. It probably has a higher average family income than for the whole country, but there are those from every background.

  • Jurgen (unregistered)

    I once was asked to manually alter a file with names. They were all in uppercase and I had to capitalize them instead.

    They gave me a week to do it. I wrote a macro and did it in half an hour.

    After half a day I asked for more work ...

  • Pup (unregistered)

    It's possible that redundancy pay would have been an issue, assuming the possibility that one or more of the data entry team were permenant staff.

  • Nick (unregistered)
    Article:
    They were able to coordinate a fix for this one by adding escaping before the frontend (that is, training the users to type "&&" instead of "&")
    Great so now your database has 'Papadimoulis && Sons' saved in it. That's going to look just great when it gets sent to any system other than a VB6 label control like maybe a mail merge to send them a letter?
  • wombat (unregistered)

    "you'd be putting them all out of a job!"

    God damn it! What would happen if people started writing software that put data entry people our of jobs?

  • (cs)
    izuka01:
    oe didn't really know what to expect. He figured that it was a telco, so there would be supergeniuses wandering the halls, discussing cool stuff like 100 gigabit hubometers capable of transfer speeds up to 5 quantumleaps a parsec. In actuality, he was seated with five college-age gentlemen that sat in a zombielike trance in front of their computers, slowly whittling away at reams of paper as they entered the data into the new interface.

    Wait a minute! I think I've heard that somewhere before!

  • GARY O (unregistered) in reply to DaveK
    wintermute:
    ingenium:
    I should also note that the speed of light is 1, not 299,792,458 or 186,000. 299,792,458 m/s or 186,000 miles / are conversion factors, the same as 60 seconds / minute or 1000 meters / kilometer.

    No, it's not really a conversion in the same way as going from inches to meters is; it doesn't make sense in the same way to say that 3,000,000 meters is equal to 1 second. Yes, time and space are the same thing, but we can't rotate the universe through 90 degrees and measure a ruler with a stopwatch.

    299,792,458 m/s is not a conversion factor similar to 60 s/min. It is a quantity expressed using specific unit system. Yes we can take the speed of light to be 1 which makes things easier depending on the problems we are looking at but it still has units of distance/time.

  • (cs) in reply to oheso
    oheso:
    Voodoo Coder:
    Wyrd:
    And remember, that beam o' light is actually made out of photons, and btw is it a particle or a wave or what? C'mon, c'mon we're waiting for an answer...

    Neither. And the cat has a 50/50 shot at living, unless you're in the box with it....at least, in Denmark, that is...

    Come on people. How many times do we have to go over this? The cat is both alive AND dead!

    Seriously, how can I expected to achieve genius when I'm surrounded by amateurs?

    (Turns head and flounces from room.)

    Hey genius! Come back!

    You missed my inference to the Copenhagen Interpretation...in which the cat "being" both alive and dead is simply a representation of our knowledge of the system...the "reality", if there is such a thing in quantum mechanics, is that the cat has a 50/50 chance of being dead or alive.

    Now I know what you're thinking (especially if you're a genius!): The whole POINT of Schrödinger shoving a cat in a box was to point out how pathetically flawed the Copenhagen interpretation is. But even then, in the Objective Collapse interpretation the cat's state may have been decided long ago (as far back as the creation of the universe...), and the idea that the cat is in multiple states at once is just a way for humans to comprehend the complex nature of quantum mechanics (seems ironic, doesn't it?).

    So to say with absolute certainty that the cat is in two states at once, well that kinda misses the whole point of having a cat in the first place.

  • Misha (unregistered) in reply to Voodoo Coder
    Voodoo Coder:
    You missed my inference to the Copenhagen Interpretation...in which the cat "being" both alive and dead is simply a representation of our knowledge of the system...the "reality", if there is such a thing in quantum mechanics, is that the cat has a 50/50 chance of being dead or alive.
    I thought the point of the Copenhagen interpretation was that there is no objective, observer independent reality... "our knowledge about the system" is all there is, there is in fact, no "system"?

    Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about QM, except for having just finished Manjit Kumar's /Quantum/.

  • The Real What the Holy F! (unregistered) in reply to mitzoe
    mitzoe:
    I've done this. Unfortunately, one time, it was my wife. I'd gotten her the job because I was chummy with my client, but the automated system I wrote for them eliminated her position about two months after rollout. Relations have been frosty since.

    Funny. That's about the time things started heating up with her and me.

  • (cs) in reply to Technical Thug
    Technical Thug:

    As I've always said/heard. Technology doesn't kill jobs it merely transfers them from unskilled fields to skilled ones.

  • (cs) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    The kind (of job that) Robots will be doing soon
    Errrr.... may I just point out, "Woooooosh"?
  • (cs) in reply to Voodoo Coder
    Voodoo Coder:
    You missed my inference to the Copenhagen Interpretation...
    Well, everyone missed it actually, since no such thing exists. You see, the speaker implies; only the listener infers....</cerebus>
  • Lousy Fisherman (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    When I graduated HS/Started college (circa 2000), the one bit of advise I was given from all sides while looking for PT work was to avoid data-entry like the plague.

    Funny, we never hire junior programmers who don't have data entry experience. Two reasons, the first is they have a much better attitude towards data entry clerks and others who make the company money, and second, they don't design stupid UI's like the one in the article.

  • Jon (unregistered) in reply to Misha
    Misha:

    I never got the whole Schrodingers cat thing; how come the cat doesn't count as an observer? Surely the moggy knows (albeit briefly) if it is being gassed, shouldn't this "collapse the waveform" or whatever?

    For me you just hit the nail on the head, noone really knows what an observer is. I happen to agree that the cat should be an observer.

    A while ago I saw a rather nice talk by Roger Penrose who was working on this. The decisive principle being that to have a superposition (i.e. your half alive/half dead cat) you have to have IDENTICAL energies of both wave functions.

    So what he did was introduce gravitational self energy. I.e. your half alive/half dead cats gravitaional pull on itself. As soon as you do that you get an energy difference between the two states, and therefore a finite lifetime.

    So an observer becomes something with enough mass, so that the gravitational self energy is high enough for the lifetime of the superpostition to be short. Hence we get something I have said for years, the cat is an observer :D.

    Hopefully someone will sort all this out properly soon and claim their Nobel Prize.

  • Noob (unregistered) in reply to Charles400
    Charles400:
    Wait, there's a VB6? VB4 isn't the latest...?

    Ah, but the real question is "Which flavor of VB4, 16-bit or 32?".

  • Buddy (unregistered) in reply to Jon
    Jon:
    ...A while ago I saw a rather nice talk by Roger Penrose who was working on this. The decisive principle being that to have a superposition (i.e. your half alive/half dead cat) you have to have IDENTICAL energies of both wave functions.

    So what he did was introduce gravitational self energy. I.e. your half alive/half dead cats gravitaional pull on itself. As soon as you do that you get an energy difference between the two states, and therefore a finite lifetime.

    So an observer becomes something with enough mass, so that the gravitational self energy is high enough for the lifetime of the superpostition to be short. Hence we get something I have said for years, the cat is an observer...

    I like cats.

  • (cs) in reply to Jurgen
    Jurgen:
    I once was asked to manually alter a file with names. They were all in uppercase and I had to capitalize them instead.

    They gave me a week to do it. I wrote a macro and did it in half an hour.

    After half a day I asked for more work ...

    Why write a macro?

    [image]
  • Jay (unregistered)

    One day two men were walking past a construction site where a huge bull-dozer was at work, moving mountains of dirt in minutes.

    One man pointed at this and said, "That's terrible. If it wasn't for that machine, there could be a hundred men employed out there working with shovels."

    "You're absolutely right!" the other said. "Or better yet, there could be a million men working with spoons."

    Hundreds of years ago it took something like 90% of the population working as farmers to produce enough food for everyone. About twenty years ago I read that in the United States at that time only 6% of the population were farmers. It's probably less now, but let's go with that. So farmers have automated to the extent that it now takes only 6% of the population to feed the rest instead of 90%. Does that mean that the other 84% are now unemployed? Obviously not: unemployment is not 84%. Therefore, there is not a fixed amount of work to be done. QED. When automation improves productivity, people shift to producing other things, and we are all richer for it. Because the number of farms has fallen by 84 percentage points, those people are now able to produce other things that the people 500 years ago simply did not have the resources to produce.

    I've never seen someone lose his job because of automation. If someone's job has truly been eliminated, the company moves him to some other task. Oh, I'm sure it happens sometimes, and in those cases I'm sure it's very unpleasant in the short term for the person who is layed off. But in most cases, the person quickly gets another job, and all this automation and efficiency means that, statistically, his new job will pay more than the old job that he lost.

    Easy for me to say when I'm not unemployed, but nevertheless provably true. "Provably" because unemployment is not 90% and never has been in America or any place else on Earth that I know of.

  • Nick (unregistered)
    Jay:
    Easy for me to say when I'm not unemployed, but nevertheless provably true. "Provably" because unemployment is not 90% and never has been in America or any place else on Earth that I know of.
    Checked the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe recently?
  • robthebloke (unregistered)

    I once had exactly the same situation a few years back for a certain large UK based ice cream manufacturer (the joys of summer jobs). Every morning, collect your stack of print-outs that you entered in 1 excel sheet the night before, then re-copy all the values into a second spread sheet the day after.

    Within 10 minutes of starting the job, I'd written an excel macro that did it in five mins, went back to ask for my next task and they were like 'uhm, that's your whole departments work for the whole day'. The department consisted of 4 full timers, a 2 temps, and I was told that I had to make the script vanish somehow for the sake of the full-timers.

    In the end, i just ran the macro every morning, piled the printouts around my desk so no one could see what I was doing, and would spend the rest of the day doing my A-Level art coursework. Got an A in the end, and got to eat ice cream all day...

  • (cs) in reply to Nick
    Nick:
    Jay:
    Easy for me to say when I'm not unemployed, but nevertheless provably true. "Provably" because unemployment is not 90% and never has been in America or any place else on Earth that I know of.
    Checked the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe recently?
    Yes, but it's not because the whole place has been computerized.
  • Sam Spacey (unregistered) in reply to Kevin Dean
    Kevin Dean:
    (P.S. Paula, I still think of you from time to time.)

    Was she.. brillant?

  • (cs) in reply to wintermute
    wintermute:
    No, it's not really a conversion in the same way as going from inches to meters is; it doesn't make sense in the same way to say that 3,000,000 meters is equal to 1 second. Yes, time and space are the same thing, but we can't rotate the universe through 90 degrees and measure a ruler with a stopwatch.

    You can't rotate it through 90 degrees, but you can rotate it through any angle up to 90 degrees. For example if you are going at half the speed of light you have rotated it through an angle of 45 degrees [relative to the frame of reference that you're moving at that speed relative to]

  • (cs) in reply to pjt33
    pjt33:
    pink_fairy:
    fnord moco:
    The moneyed aristocracy is smarter than that.
    I'm guessing you didn't go to Oxford, Cambridge, or an Ivy League school, did you?

    And those people are theoretically the cream of the crop. They get good grades/degrees, way off the bell curve ... but, smart? No. There seems to be some sort of interesting interplay between regression to the mean, and in-bred psychosis; but not much of an evidential basis on which to base a conspiracy theory.

    I did go to Cambridge, but I didn't meet any moneyed aristocrats there so I haven't a clue what your point is.
    You don't "meet" them. These places aren't like the Buckingham Palace Garden Parties, y'know. Clubs, Huntin'shootin'n'fishin' trips, even select trashed restaurants (cf the Sainsburys at Oxford -- students, not supermarket) are strictly off-limits to us plebs. Across the Atlantic, I understand that the mere possession of a skull and bones does not, ipso facto, qualify you for membership of the Skull and Bones.

    It's difficult not to be aware that these parasites exist on the premises, however. I commiserate with you, either for a staggering degree of autism, or for having picked Churchill as your college of choice. (In Oxford, it would be St Peters, which is actually quite a pleasant college. Blessedly free of aristocratic dimwits in the vicinity, at least.)

  • please help that guy (unregistered)

    http://www.geocities.com/jaskajokunen27/front

  • (cs) in reply to dpm
    dpm:
    Code Dependent:
    Don't forget the classic line by Sally Struthers: "Or, get your degree!" Note that type of degree goes unspecified.
    Yep. Right up there with the line I've seen so often in spam: "Our Diplomas are from Prestigious non-accredited universities." Now _there's_ an oxymoron.
    Actually, it's two oxymorons; I think we can let "Diplomas" slide. The original, δίπλωµα, means something folded in two (something, not "a piece of paper," as several "references" would have it).

    This is one of the few good cases I can see for verbing a noun. Apparently, you can "diploma" somebody.

    Which might just mean that you hit them over the head with a folded copy of the Washington Post (don't tempt me, don't tempt me), but is at least a hell of a lot better than the logical alternative:

    "Diplomatize."

  • (cs) in reply to D-Coder
    D-Coder:
    Nick:
    Jay:
    Easy for me to say when I'm not unemployed, but nevertheless provably true. "Provably" because unemployment is not 90% and never has been in America or any place else on Earth that I know of.
    Checked the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe recently?
    Yes, but it's not because the whole place has been computerized.
    Don't be silly -- of course it has.

    The whole country is in bits.

  • (cs) in reply to Jon
    Jon:
    Misha:

    I never got the whole Schrodingers cat thing; how come the cat doesn't count as an observer? Surely the moggy knows (albeit briefly) if it is being gassed, shouldn't this "collapse the waveform" or whatever?

    For me you just hit the nail on the head, noone really knows what an observer is. I happen to agree that the cat should be an observer.

    A while ago I saw a rather nice talk by Roger Penrose who was working on this. The decisive principle being that to have a superposition (i.e. your half alive/half dead cat) you have to have IDENTICAL energies of both wave functions.

    So what he did was introduce gravitational self energy. I.e. your half alive/half dead cats gravitaional pull on itself. As soon as you do that you get an energy difference between the two states, and therefore a finite lifetime.

    So an observer becomes something with enough mass, so that the gravitational self energy is high enough for the lifetime of the superpostition to be short. Hence we get something I have said for years, the cat is an observer :D.

    Hopefully someone will sort all this out properly soon and claim their Nobel Prize.

    Don'tcha just hate anecdotes on the Web with no hyperlink?

    Here's another one:

    "But Penrose is an honourable man, and, like a good scientist, proposes an experiment to test his non-standard predictions. The idea of the experiment is to create a "Schrödinger's cat" by placing a massive object - a mirror in an interferometer - in a superposition of two places at the same time. Penrose's prediction is that gravity will introduce decoherence and spoil the interference pattern."

    It's part of a review of Penrose's 2004 book, now in paperback, which I am now going to buy.

    Around twenty five years ago, Penrose stated (rather obviously, I would have thought) that there is nothing in the formalism of quantum mechanics to prevent both a dead cat and a live cat being "observers." It's a silly argument, anyhoo. The use of the term "observer" in this case is nothing more than a metaphor to simplify the presentation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, as any fule no.

    I mean, how the hell are you going to "observe" a quantum effect without affecting it? Internal cat, external human, super-coiled string in the 27th dimension ... it's difficult to imagine a formalism that makes sense of this proposition. But don't let me stop you trying.

  • (cs) in reply to pink_fairy
    pink_fairy:
    The original, δίπλωµα, means something folded in two (something, not "a piece of paper," as several "references" would have it).
    It's all Greek to me.
  • (cs) in reply to Voodoo Coder
    Voodoo Coder:
    So to say with absolute certainty that the cat is in two states at once, well that kinda misses the whole point of having a cat in the first place.
    My bad -- once again guilty of not reading the entire (and these days interminable) thread. Hope the url was useful to someone though.
  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    pink_fairy:
    The original, δίπλωµα, means something folded in two (something, not "a piece of paper," as several "references" would have it).
    It's all Greek to me.
    You say ελληνική γλώσσα, I say woodwork.

    We're gonna have to work on this potato thing, aren't we?

  • (cs) in reply to pink_fairy
    pink_fairy:
    The use of the term "observer" in this case is nothing more than a metaphor to simplify the presentation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, as any fule no.
    Or perhaps, an instance of the "observer" pattern.
    pink_fairy:
    I mean, how the hell are you going to "observe" a quantum effect without affecting it? Internal cat, external human, super-coiled string in the 27th dimension ... it's difficult to imagine a formalism that makes sense of this proposition. But don't let me stop you trying.
    Wheels within wheels in spiral array A pattern so grand and complex Time after time we lose sight of the way; Our causes can't see their effects
  • (cs) in reply to pink_fairy
    pink_fairy:
    We're gonna have to work on this potato thing, aren't we?
    you say potato, I say tuber. Preferably, down the Guadalupe.

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