Many people are confident that their dogs and cats can sense impending earthquakes. Could squid provide humans with the same service? Let's examine the "connections" that have been drawn between squid and earthquakes.

In La Jolla in 2009, a small stranding event occurred around the same time as an equally small earthquake. But the squid actually started stranding a few days before the earthquake, deflating the much-hyped idea that the earthquake caused the stranding.

This year in Japan,

I had a question posed to me last week; 'what was the first science experiment?'

Some books you read and forget about before you've even put it down. Some you cast aside midway through. Every now and then, though, you find a rare gift of a book that continues to move you days, weeks (and those really wonderful ones: years) later. Priscilla Gilman's book is certainly one of those rare ones with the power to move a person days and weeks later. It's too early to tell whether that will remain so, but I strongly suspect it will be one that remains a treasured book years from now for me. And sure, I'm biased: I sense a kindred spirit in Priscilla, a kindred love of words, of poets, of language in general, and for the majesty and transport that the specific melding of words by a skilled craftsman can bring a person.

You may suspect the beating of a dead horse by now, but the problem is actually that the animals in question are still alive. As was discussed, the alive cats expect to see something when the box opens.

If we interact with the Schrödinger cat superposition state inside the otherwise isolated box so that we will only have dead cats result, what do the alive cats see? There must be a place into which those cats can jump. However, it cannot be the room where the experimenter observes them, since the experimenter only observes dead cats after having applied the ‘rotation’.

This is a new title:

Gotta Get 11 Dirac Gamma Girls, Plus 5 Doing an Imaginary Twist

[Note: based on discussions below, I decided to alter the title from "Gotta Get 16 Gamma Girls". The core figure in the blog is not of the 16 gammas in the Dirac basis, but only 11 of them. 5 of them have an extra factor of i. I will have to consult a few articles on the subject to see how they handled this issue.]

I like to think I once led an eclectic, interesting life.  I have bribed police in the mid-East, outrun the Bulgarian mafia while driving to get my picture taken with Albanian rebels in Macedonia and searched for the spark true conviction in ancient monasteries.   I have generally thought there should be some type of D&D game about my life, or at least a TV movie of the week.

But I am not complete.  For example, I have never owned a nightclub, been on any Vanity Fair 'fabulous' list, had a Haitian drug gang put out a hit on me or...died of a drug overdose.   Drugs are nasty business, I am told, right  after being told how awesome they are, and always by the same people.

Industry does quite a lot of basic research today but government funds the majority.  Prior to and during World War II those ratios were inverted and the private sector funded most basic research in hopes that the next big thing would be invented by them.