Plants and animals use quantum mechanics?

Quantum mechanics, which Einstein once referred to as "spooky action at a distance", is a set of laws that govern how tiny (atomic & sub-atomic) things interact with one another. The laws are very different from classical physics, and really quite surprising, but nevertheless appear to be true (there's been much experimental validation).

Using quantum mechanics, it's possible to build a quantum computer, and indeed many research labs and at least one startup, have built simple ones. Quantum computers can do some amazing things, such as factoring integers very quickly, something classical computers can only do very slowly as the number gets bigger (as best we know, so far).

Most recently, a simplistic quantum computer was used to compute a discrete fourier transform using a single iodine molecule. Someday quantum computers will be all over the place...

But, isn't it possible that plants and animals have evolved to take advantage of quantum mechanics? Indeed there is evidence that we have!

The process of photosynthesis looks to be based on quantum entanglement.

And, one leading theory about how animals can smell so well is based on quantum vibrations. Luca Turin, who created this theory, has a good quote in that article:

Most people would probably feel that if it can be done at all, evolution has managed to make use of it.

And this makes sense - evolution is relentless at trying to find good ways to create plants and animals. Since quantum mechanics is real, evolution should have tapped into it.

This is also the reason I would expect Lamarckian inheritance to in fact be true. Any animal that can alter the traits of its offspring based on experiences in its own lifetime would clearly have a big advantage, so, evolution really should have found a way.

In fact, it sort of did, in a non-biological manner: language. We can pass on all sorts of life lessons to our kids, through language, and we get to stand on the shoulders of past giants, as we take for granted the knowledge created by the generations before us, passed on through language.

Lots of problems these days...

I try to keep my kids roughly informed about what's going on in the world; I think it's important they grow up with at least a basic world view.

Last night, my 7 year old son observed "you know there are alot of problems right now", and he's right! He then rattled off the Iceland volcano eruption, the ruptured water main in our state, forcing us to boil water before drinking it, and the disastrous oil rig explosion and subsequent and ongoing oil geyser.

Concord bans sale of bottled water

Fabulous! The town of Concord, MA has banned the sale of bottled water because of the wretched environmental impact these bottles have.

The environmental cost of such trash is stunning. We know this fills up our landfills, but have you heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? This is one of 5 spots in the oceans where garbage collects and kills marine life.

Of course you really shouldn't drink bottled water in the first place.

Your ideas and your name

I love this quote:

Your ideas will go further if you don't insist on going with them.

It's very true (note that I didn't tell you who said it)!

I find it especially applies to healthy open source projects. In Apache, the individuals (contributors, committers) who work on a given project are fleeting, transient. We will come and go. Our names are not attached to the code we commit.

Sinister search engine de-optimization

There's a large recall going on right now for many popular over-the-counter infant's and children's medicines, such as Motrin, Tylenol, and Zyrtec.

But if you look at the recall details page, posted by the company that manufactures these medicines (McNeil), you'll see that the table is actually a single JPEG image instead of an HTML table. If you don't believe me, try searching in your browser for the words you see in that table!

At first I thought "how strange -- why would they use an image instead of a normal HTML table?". But then a more sinister plot came to mind: perhaps they want to make it as hard as possible for future web searches to find this page. After all, they must now be in major damage control mode. It's the exact opposite problem of the more common search engine optimization.

Hiding text into a JPEG image to avoid searches finding you is a rather nasty practice, in my opinion (hmm, I see there's even this service to help you do it!). Google could prevent such sneakiness by running OCR on the image (perhaps they do this already -- anyone know?), but then I suppose the war would escalate and we'd start seeing barely readable tables like this that look like the dreaded Captcha tests. To workaround such companies, if we all link to this page with some real text (as I've done above) then Google will still find it!

It's also possible there's a more reasonable explanation for this maybe the good old saying "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by something else" somehow applies?

Safe Chemicals Act

Finally, there's been a bill introduced to congress, called the Safe Chemicals Act, to better regulate the chemicals we all are exposed to in day to day products.

The current law (from 1976) is ancient, and assumes any chemical is safe until proven otherwise -- innocent until proven guilty -- a dangerously lax approach which has resulted in the potentially dangerous chemicals we all have heard about, such as bisphenol A in certain plastics, brominated flame retardents, numerous phthalates released by vinyl (this causes that awful new shower curtain smell), etc.

There are 80,000 chemicals in use today and the EPA has only required testing for 200 of them. There are surely additional dangerous chemicals lurking, undetected.

Refreshingly, the new bill takes the opposite approach, the same I approach I take with my family: a chemical is guilty until proven innocent! This is why I use no pesticides on my life support grass.

If this bill becomes law, manufacturers must prove a chemical is safe before they can use it in their products. The burden of proof moves to the manufacturers. Here's a good writeup of the bill.

Lobbyists will undoubtedly fight this bill tooth and nail... so we need to push our congressional representatives!! You can use this site to do so.

Disagreements are healthy!

Another great quote, this time from Henry Ford:

If two people always agree, one if them is unnecessary.

The quote applies very well to open source development -- what makes open source so strong is that such wildly diverse people, with different backgrounds, ideas, approaches, languages, IDEs, interests, itches, sleeping habits, coffee addictions, etc., come together and work on the same problems.

And lots of disagreement ensues.

As long as the resulting discussions are driven by technical merit and not personal attacks (ie, The Apache Way), and consensus is eventually reached, then the disagreements are very powerful.

Serenity, courage and wisdom

I love this quote:

Strive for the serenity to accept the things you cannot change;

courage to change the things you can; and wisdom to know the

difference.

It's the opening to the Serenity Prayer (from the Bible), but I've taken the liberty of replacing God grant with strive for.

The idiom "pick your battles" means the same thing as the 3rd goal.

This great quote from George Bernard Shaw relates closely to the 2nd goal:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him...

The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself...

Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man

Think about these goals. You'll likely find that each goal is distinct, very important, and somewhat surprisingly often applies in your day to day life.

Why do people vote against their own interests?

I found this article very interesting.

The first thing that struck me is its detached tone -- sort of like the curious look a child gives when looking inside a cage at an exotic animal. Probably this was written by someone who lives in Great Brittain, looking over the Atlantic ocean with mild curiosity at how crazy the US health care situation is.

The second thing that struck me is that the observation is very true. A huge majority of the population in this country would benefit from health care reform, including the public option. Those who cannot afford health insurance now, those with pre-existing conditions, etc.

Yet, many people who stand to benefit angrily fight reform. It's just plain weird. Here are two quotes from the article:

• Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?
  
  
• In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%.

Finally, the two books referenced by the article certainly look relevant, roughly concluding that the average American doesn't really make decisions based on facts. (This also means "trial by a jury of your peers" is not a very comforting approach.) While I haven't read these books, I have come to the same depressing conclusion.

A democracy is only as effective as its population is at making rational decisions.

Why not create a public bank?

Why don't we have a public bank already? I mean a bank run by the federal government that competes with private banks, keeping them honest.

Let's recap what's happened in the past few years. First, the financial world collapsed (the risky sub-prime loans, CDOs, etc.). So, the federal gov't was forced to loan insane amounts of taxpayer's (and our children's future) money to the banks, just to barely keep them afloat. By and large, that worked: the banks have survived and recovered.

Yet, today they still pay out insane bonuses to their top employees, still fly around in private jets, throw lavish parties, travel to exotic places, etc. They are not extending the loans to small businesses that are required for our economy to really recover. And they are now spending lots of money, fighting the legislation that would regulate things to prevent a future collapse from happening again. In short, they have not changed.

Something has gone terribly wrong!

See, these banks don't contribute directly to economic progress. They don't build houses, invent new products, grow food, create more fuel efficient cars, etc. Really they are just the "lubrication" to enable all the real progress in our economy. They are not suposed to make tons of money, yet they do. And they most certainly shouldn't be given the power to hold our economy hostage, as they are today.

So why not create a public bank, run by the federal government, that would extend legitimate loans with reasonable terms, today? This would put a strong competitive pressure on the existing banks to lend, as the public bank would otherwise take customers away. It would be a much more direct way to stimulate the economy, than the "give lots of money to the banks and hope they loan it out instead of paying themselves fat bonuses" approach that is clearly not working very well today.

It could be a temporary creation, only around until the private banks start behaving well again. Or it could remain indefinitely, keeping the banks honest over time.

Harmony is stuck in my head!

I often get songs stuck in my head, but I've noticed a curious thing: I'm especially proned to getting songs with a harmony stuck in my head. It's a puzzle and my brain won't stoup until it's teased apart the primary melody and harmony. Literally it just keeps playing over and over, even as I type this.

This is the song stuck in my head right now. It's a great rendition of Michael Jackson's beat it. I especially love the Xylophone -- it's partially syncopated (plays, sometimes, on the off beat). The harmony starts at 1:14. Warning: it's addictive -- your brain, too, may not stop until it's figured out the harmony!

Direct Democracy

I think this is a great idea, to allow the US population to vote, directly, on whether a bill should become law, instead of the indirect process we now use, trusting our congresspeople to vote on our behalf.

Everyone in the US knows how lobbyists, hired by corporations or other groups with lots of money, sway how our congresspeople vote by simply bribing them. It's a disgusting situation, yet, somehow we all complacently accept it as normal. I'm sure our founding fathers had no idea this would happen nor how much technology would advance.

Congress does other things, of course, like holding public hearings on important topics, etc., so I don't think it'll really be as simple as outright abolishing it.

Unfortunately it seems very unlikely that the US will ever switch to a direct democracy. But I for one would sure love to see it.