Recently on my mind is this question: Is the universe is ultimately continuous or discrete?

I will freely admit that I lack the knowledge and tools to have the answer, but I’m still curious about it. Here is what I’ve been considering, based on the Physics I’ve studied:

Matter was once thought of as continuous… Cut your gold into smaller and smaller pieces and it’s still gold. But then we learned about atoms, and found out that matter is comprised of individual, indivisible sub-elements. Any further divisions and it’s no longer gold. That’s discrete.

Consider electricity. You can talk about a current flowing through a wire as a continuous function in units of Amperes, but at the end of the day it’s really made up of an exact number of individual electrons moving around. That’s also discrete.

But then what about light and other electromagnetic waves? They’re one of those creepy things that apparently exhibits both discrete and continuous properties (particle and wave)… By my understanding, light is made up of photons, discrete mass-less particles produced by energy being released from electrons as they fall between discrete, calculable energy levels around an atom. So that seems to be discrete. But then I’ve also read about experiments where researchers will cut two slits in a piece of paper, and send photons through one-by-one. The photons create a diffraction (?) pattern on the wall behind the slits, as if they interacted with more photons passing through the other slit. This shouldn’t happen though, since the photons were actually released one-by-one and had nothing to interact with. Besides being creepy, that seems to be more like a continous thing.

Then how about ideas like time and distance? It seems to me that even if the particles in the universe are discrete, shouldn’t they still be moving through space that can be measured infinitely more precisely? That is, continuously? What is to say that I can’t measure 1/4 the length of a photon, or 1/10,000 the length of that?

And I don’t have the faintest clue what’s going on at the quantum scale… anybody know if that kind of stuff is continuous or discrete? After listening to Dr. Brian Greene’s presentation on String Theory a while back, it seems like quantum-sized strings might in fact be continuous again, seeing as they are little tiny waves. So if they are continuous, then are electrons and photons and other such “discrete” particles actually continuous in nature?

I don’t know if any of you have the answer for me, but by all means let me know if you do. I’m very curious.

Some Seal song came to mind when I read this headline on Slashdot tonight: “Near Light Speed Travel Possible After All?” Wouldn’t that be awesome? Only thing is, I didn’t think “near light speed” was ever impossible, only faster-than-light is impossible. Someone correct me if I’m wrong on that. Cool stuff nonetheless, and great comments:
Anonymous Coward: Can
Can’t
Can
Can’t
…
Wake me up when someone actually accomplishes something.
Ruff_ilb: Actually, I believe that they’re hoping the controversy will oscillate so quickly that never-before seen particles will emanate from the physicists in question.

🙂 Physics jokes = Awesome.

So today was one of the most productive Saturdays I’ve had since maybe back in the High School tech crew days. I got up at 7:40 (well… 7:50, kindof took a while), and did my laundry, a wildly exciting two-hour extravaganza. Then after some breakfast I headed down to ECB to meet Enlight at 11 to work on the C++ Fountain Server. Got some code written for that, which is always good, and then my parents arrived to take me shopping.

The primary objective was a suit. Working on the whole job search idea lately made me decide that it was time I finally got some decent formal attire. <sarcasm>Lucky for us that was a nice quick process. </sarcasm> It actually wasn’t that bad; it was kindof fun trying out all the different stuff, but it did take a long time. By the time we were done (7pm), we had been to Boston Store and JC Pennys at least twice each, to buy a suit/dress shirts/ties/belt, then off for a pair of shoes and blue “business casual” slacks, then back to find a suitable shirt to accompany said slacks. Afterward we went to Smokey Bones for ribs (I love spending time with my parents. Free food!), after discarding the Outback when the hostess told us the waiting time was “100 minutes.” A) who says it like that? and B) 100 minutes!? You could feed the whole restaraunt twice over in an hour:40. Or at least once-and-a-half over. There’s no way that many people were waiting in the entry way there.

So overall the day was really good, and I got to spend some time with my parents for the first time since I came back down here after Christmas break, which was awesome. The only downside to it all is that I got back to my room too late to catch Jeni’s invitation to a fiesta. 🙁 Sorry about that Jeni.

For the first Friday in a long time, I’m happy to report that I did not lose to Mason in racquetball. Diregarding the fact that he’s back in GB for the weekend, I feel pretty good about that.

I’m pretty excited about Enlight’s fountain coding project, unfortunately probably more so than I am about learning algorithms for the ICPC contest. I need to remember to prioritize.

Nothing particularly spectacular has happened this week, but I had some pretty good snow peapods with my supper tonight, so that’s good. Tomorrow my parents are coming down from Green Bay to take me suit shopping. We decided it was time for me to get some decent formal attire. Tomorrow we’re also going to be coding on the fountain server for a while. I’m hoping to get all the utility type stuff done tomorrow, and maybe start designing the logic for each of the threads. I’m realizing that this entire server is probably going to amount to only a few hundred lines of code… it’s getting those lines in the right order to create functionally perfect, robust operation that’s going to be the challenge. I’m looking forward to it.

To leave you with a humorous thought for the day:

“I don’t know what happened. He just ran up, said ‘d00dz, Windoze sux0rz,’ and then collapsed.”
[Source: http://www.nickscipio.com/funstuff/archive6/2005-01-15_linuxpenguins.html]

So at the Enlight meeting tonight, we were momentarily elated to read on Slashdot (the final word on everything that’s right and true in the world) that you can cook an egg with a pair of cell phones. Had it been April Fool’s day, we might have been more skeptical, but as it was, Jeni and Erin went back to their apartment and grabbed a couple eggs and a bowl.

The end result: Colin, Jon and (possibly) Tim get pwned. (I don’t remember whether Tim bought it or not)

Play by play:

* Somebody reads the article on Slashdot
* Erin and Jeni go home and get two eggs and a bowl
* Craig and Erin’s cell phones are selected for the attempt
* No signal in the conference room, so they and Jeni moved out into ECB somewhere to try.
* Several minutes go by
* Erin comes back in for the other egg
* Several more minutes go by
* The trio comes back with their two eggs, and insists on cracking them open just to see, despite the fact that we had meanwhile been reading how there’s barely enough energy to pull it off even if you were to short the battery out through the raw egg.
* The first egg is opened, and comes out partially whitened (cooked).
* Colin and Jon are amazed, and maybe Tim, who I didn’t really look at.
* The second (un-cellphone-zapped) egg is cracked open for comparison. Indeed the first one has been cooked.
* Completely missing the warning signs of the first egg being rather warm, Erin laughing uncontrollably, and Jeni looking at her like “shut up you’re ruining it”, Colin takes a picture of the “cellphone-cooked” egg next to its uncooked counterpart. (Reference Exhibit A).
* I realize we’ve been had, and the truth comes out.

Nice one guys.

Oh, and we also found out tonight that Jeni has a better (lower) Slashdot user ID than me, by like 13,000. And people call me a nerd. 😉

Exhibit A

Wow. So I haven’t posted anything in nearly two weeks. To anyone who actually attempts to read this, I apologize.

So what’s been up with me in the interim?

Well, I can barely even remember. I’m frankly rather shocked that it’s already Friday night again… last Friday seems like just a couple minutes ago, a couple days at most.

To start at the beginning, I posted last the Sunday last Sunday succeeded (If you work through that carefully, I think it actually makes sense. I hope). During that week my time magically disappeared into the Engineering Career Services Career Fair, as well as some homework assignments that I routinely forgot about until right before they were due. The career fair was a bit of a short-notice engagement that I didn’t really start preparing for until the day before. (Don’t ever do that.) Nonetheless, I think that it went pretty well. I’m definitely glad to have gone, for the experience even if nothing else comes of it for this summer. Since the fair, I’ve been learning just how involved a job search is, what with contacting prospective employers, arranging interviews, having interviews, retyping my resume more times than I can count, in more ways than I care to contemplate, etc. For details on what options might come out of said job search, drop me an email or IM sometime; I’m not sure that this is the appropriate forum for any sort of enumeration.

Other than the career fair, we had our first ECE 351 lab in the middle of not last week, but the week before, [which reminds me that I need to do the prelab for the next lab by the end of the weekend. Oops.] The lab was not precisely thrilling (measuring voltage transfer characteristics and propagation delays of inverters, anyone?), but it was good to be working with real circuits again, instead of just talking about them in class. Hopefully it will motivate me to take up my infrared decoder project for controlling my speaker system once I get time to breathe again.

Last Sunday my ACM ICPC team began our practices for the World Finals. We’ll be meeting every Sunday until the event, holding mock-contests from noon to 5pm. It was good to get back into coding for that as well, even though we’ll definitely be needing some work. We’re also meeting Tuesdays at 6 with our coaches to talk about strategy, problem-solving techniques, algorithms, etc.

Last weekend was also Khanna’s birthday on Thursday(?) with a delayed celebration, and Jeni’s birthday on Monday. I think it was Saturday night I ended up between Lathrop and the other side of the capitol with Jeni and Erin, which was an extremely welcome diversion from cleaning a desk that I seem to have a mental block against. (Needless to say, it still basks in unrepentant disorder.)

Since that point, it seems like I’ve had little for free time, between Enlight, an ece 353 tutorial, (and an HKN officers’ meeting I couldn’t go to because of those two), my ICPC team meeting (and an HKN-sponsored speaker and a TBP general meeting I couldn’t go to because of that), more job searching/email writing/stuff scheduling, a MKT social with Jared, and then all of a sudden it was today, two weeks later.

Of course, being Friday, I got my weekly ass-kicking in Racquetball delivered, as is the norm, by one Jared Mason, Jr. I think this time I lost roughly 15-9, 15-8, 15-13, or thereabouts… Sorry if those weren’t actually the numbers, Mason. I also got a cool-looking bright red temporary tattoo on the back of my hand, where I hit it so hard with a racquet that the capillaries popped, creating the image of the racquet strings. After that we stopped by Ians for supper and watched a seriously screwed up movie called Audition. Lesson of the night: Japanese movies are messed up.

I think that’s about all that’s happened in the last two weeks… it’s all that I have time to remember, at any rate.

And now I need to sleep.

Tim took me to the UW Mens Hockey game Friday night vs. Denver, which was an excellent time; I should look into hockey tix for next year. Unfortunately I think Tim was the only fan who walked out a winner, mostly because he couldn’t have lost. The Badgers did lose, 0-1.

Before the game, Tim gave me a free PC noise consultation for my Myth box. Besides reproaching my whiny 60mm CPU fan, he recommended suspending the hard drives, which had previously been screwed directly to a metal 3.5″ enclosure. By his direction, I now present my (significantly quieter) MythTV hard drive rig, complete with Singer elastic (available at your local Walgreens, near the shoe polish) shocks:

How many cables is too many?
I know I haven’t put anything up here in a while… Mostly that’s because I haven’t finished unpacking here in Madison yet. Here’s one of the reasons why I’m not done:

[click to enlarge]
That was taken at 12:30 the night before I came back. I didn’t get to bed ’til about 3:30, slept to 8:00, then got up and finished packing. After taking that picture, I went back up to my room, realized that I had forgotten, among other things, my good keyboard and mouse, my subwoofer, the towers for both my computers (rather important), and all my clothes. I had a bit of work to do. Start packing earlier than I, folks.

How many courses is too many?
I had my first and last CS 537 (Operating Systems) lecture of the semester today. I would love to take that class, because operating systems really interest me, but unfortunately I am not going to have time. With it, I would have 5 classes and a lab for 17 credits. Plus having to basically teach myself CS 577 (Algorithms) for the ACM ICPC. Not going to happen. Without it, I have 4 classes and a lab for 13 credits. A lighter load than what I can handle, but factoring in the programming competition, I think it’s the way I need to go. On the upshot, that leaves me with only two classes per day, plus a lab every other week. So I should have enough free time to make some progress on things like the fountain server.

I have more stuff I’d like to put up here, such as the picture below of an impressive design/marketing feat Ziploc thought up to decorate my ham & scalloped potatoes from Mom. Hopefully I’ll get around to that in the near future, but first I need to finish unpacking so it doesn’t take 3 weeks like it did last semester. . .

Apple unveiled their next generation of laptops today, based, for the first time, on Intel processors. The new “MacBook Pro” looks pretty slick. Upgraded features: 1.67 or 1.83 Ghz Intel “Core Duo” (what a dumb name) processor, dual core, 667 MHz FSB with matching DDR2, SATA hard drive, ATI X1600 Graphics chipset. New features: built-in iSight in the top bezel, Apple Front Row (think Windows Media Center Edition) with a builtin (infrared, i think) remote, iLife ’06. Very impressive package all around. Makes me wish I would have waited before buying this PowerBook.

So I had a dilemma tonight: I could drive down to Madison tomorrow and return this PowerBook, receiving back $1615 of the $1900 it cost me (15% restocking fee). Tomorrow’s the 30th day since I purchased this laptop. I could then wait until February, when the new laptops begin shipping from apple.com and buy a new one with Apple’s standard 10% education discount, at $1800. The net cost to me would then be $185 and a trip to Madison to upgrade my laptop in a couple weeks. (Also leaving me without laptop for a few weeks.) So I thought about it and bounced ideas off my roommate, and decided it wasn’t worth it. The rationale: A) This is definitely not the last word on Apple/Intel laptops. There will be more, and they’ll be even better later. B) Seeing as the Intel architecture is a major transistion for Apple, there’s bound to be hiccoughs in the next few months, as third-party developers have to start testing their applications against x86 and ppc. C) The primary purpose for my laptop is to be an “always-works” machine that I don’t ever have to mess with to use. That was a major headache for me with my desktop: I reinstalled OS’s so often that nothing ever just worked. So, though I have every confidence in Apple to release x86 software on par with their PPC versions, I don’t want to have to deal with third-party software issues while they work out their bugs. (Not on my laptop anyway.) Plus, for $185 I can buy some cool electronics stuff like a better soldering iron and multimeter. That and I probably shouldn’t spend the $185 anyway. And finally, there’s nothing wrong with the laptop I have.

So, tip of the hat to Apple for their Intel switch- from what I hear, Intel dominates the mobile chip market while AMD is leading the desktop. Now if they would just work together again, as I just learned from Tim tonight that they did once, long ago…

Here are some humorous or otherwise interesting tidbits from my inbox and aggregator this morning:

From the national headquarters of Tau Beta Pi, the Engineering honor society, in their Welcome email:

For job seeking assistance, post your resume anonymously and browse through hundreds of current engineering job listings at our job board

Uh… anonymously? My brain hurts.

From the Official Google Blog: Women and minorities entering their senior year of undergrad or any year of graduate school in technology are eligible to apply for a scholarship sponsored by Google. The scholarship is called, I kid you not, the Anita Borg Scholarship. How awesome is that?

From the New York Times: 1 in 8 New Yorkers is diabetic. Holy crap. That’s way higher than I had imagined, as well as way higher than the national average (7% according to The American Diabetes Association)

From Space.com:

CAPE CANAVERAL – About three dozen people assembled at the spaceport Saturday to protest this month’s planned launch of a plutonium-powered space probe bound for Pluto.

36 people? Are you kidding? The protest is over the use of nuclear power for spacecraft, which carries a 1 in 350 risk of distributing nuclear material in the event of a launch vehicle explosion during takeoff. I get that people are concerned, plutonium being released into the atmosphere is no light matter, but come on. 36? That probably isn’t even enough to form a picket line all the way across the gate they set up camp by. I don’t think NASA is going to be overly moved. Stay tuned Jan. 17 for the launch of the Pluto mission.

Hot off the presses:

Tired of installing all the essentials of a modern virus-free, spyware-free, multimedia-capable internet-connected PC every time you buy/set up one? Things like Ad-Aware, Acrobat Reader, Firefox, etc? Check out the Google pack, a prepackaged suite containing most of the essentials and a bunch of other neat software.

My take: Sounds pretty cool, and even gives you a free 6-month version of Symantec’s virus scanner (though the marketing implications of that are a little underhanded). I’m glad to see that it installs Firefox, though I could do without Trillian and have never heard of GalleryPlayer HD. I know Google Talk will soon connect with the AIM network, if it doesn’t already, thanks to the new Google-AOL partnership, and it’s made by Google so I get why it’s in the mix, but how about Gaim as an alternative to Trillian? Oh, and what’s with RealPlayer? Yes, I know you need it, but then why not QuickTime? You need that just about as often. Or better yet, include a stripped-down, legal-codecs-only version of VLC or something.

Still, looks like it could be pretty handy at getting a new installation off the ground in a hurry, and according to the website, you don’t have to install any parts that you don’t want.

Here’s the complete list of included programs:

Google Software

• Google Desktop
• Google Earth
• Google Pack Screensaver
• Google Talk
• Google Toolbar
• Picasa

Other Software

• Ad-Aware SE Personal
• Adobe Reader 7
• GalleryPlayer HD Images
• Mozilla Firefox
• Norton AntiVirus 2005 SE
• RealPlayer
• Trillian