MikeLigalig.com

Quote from: Lorenzo on February 04, 2014, 01:18:46 AM
o wow. the darker the berry ..the sweeter the juice.

Ah, I see. How about "the darker the eater..."

Here's more from the great soul...

Ang "no" kay shotgun approach...

Quote from: chicogon on February 04, 2014, 02:13:40 AM
Kusog pod mokilaw

Puya sashimi...

Di lang kay crispy, crunchy pa jud!

Kini nga billatun bord, gusto lang nig ottention...

Madame Islander, don't click link!

http://i1.trekearth.com/photos/11286/crw_8281_dog_meat.jpg

Hala! Wa lagi kuhaa ang sulod sa ginhawaan. Apilon galing og kaon...

Quote from: bugsay on February 02, 2014, 10:28:10 PM
wakwak sa TB?

Hmm... Kadtong naay daghang binuhi?

Kini cruelty pood...

CEBU. Devotees of the Sto. Niño have flocked to the Sto. Niño de Cebu parish in Barangay Mactan, Lapu-Lapu City to take photos of Niño Palaboy, believed to be a talking and, at times, moving Niño. (Alan Tangcawan)

For the past five months, Indonesians have become accustomed to eruptions from Sinabung.



A woman covers her nose and mouth from volcanic ash from the eruption of Mount Sinabung in Sibintun, North Sumatra, Indonesia, Sunday, Jan. 19

When the volcano erupted in 2010, at least two people were killed and 30,000 others were displaced.

Before 2010, Sinabung had not erupted in 400 years.

It is one of about 130 active volcanoes in Indonesia.

Experts say Sinabung has been studied less than more active volcanoes, making it more difficult to predict.



A tourist rides a horse as Sinabung spews volcanic materials in Gundaling, January 21

Saturday's eruption was the worst since Sinabung came back to life in 2010, after 400 years dormancy.



Long-exposure photograph taken on January 27, 2014 from Karo district of Mount Sinabung volcano during an eruption

A giant cloud of hot volcanic ash clouds engulfs villages in Karo district during the eruption of Mount Sinabung volcano located in Sumatra on February 1

1 February 2014 Last updated at 15:03



A villager run as Mount Sinabung erupt at Sigarang-Garang village in Karo district, Indonesia's North Sumatra province, February 1


A volcano has erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, engulfing villages in ash and killing at least 14 people.

Mount Sinabung spewed hot gas, ash and rocks 2km (1.5 miles) into the air in a series of eruptions during the morning.

Emergency official Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said three schoolchildren and a teacher were among the dead.

Thousands were evacuated in September when Sinabung erupted after being dormant for three years. Many were allowed back to their homes on Friday.

Officials fear there may have been more casualties, but they cannot get closer because of the heat from the eruption.

Pictures taken at the scene showed rescue workers recovering bodies that were buried in ash.

Kini kay mas kumpleto...

Quote from: chicogon on February 02, 2014, 03:04:08 AM

Tinuod ning manananggal. Niay usa, ay, nga nabuntagan, nakodakan hinuon...

Si Bugsay maoy atong himoong trainer...

Quote from: islander on January 29, 2014, 03:24:18 PM
aw, hehe, guwapa man diay koh.

Mo lang. Misteryoso ra bag tinan-awan...

Both sides agreed to use a 2012 document known as the Geneva Communique as a basis for discussions, and agreed to meet in the same room.

But neither side could agree on the focus, with the opposition insisting that political transition was the focus, and the government wanting to talk about terrorism.

Diplomats described the atmosphere between the two sides as extremely tense all the way through the conference.

And the talks were further hampered by the lack of representation of some of the rebel fighting groups, including the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front.

Diplomats have said that a top priority in Geneva is to keep the talks process going, in the hope that hard-line positions can be modified over time.

"There have been moments when one side has even acknowledged the concerns and difficulties of the other side," he said.

The first round of talks between the government and the opposition National Coalition began last week.



A UN-backed meeting in 2012 issued the document and urged Syria to:

Form transitional governing body
Start national dialogue
Review constitution and legal system
Hold free and fair elections

As talks came to an end in Geneva, activists accused government forces of an air strike in Aleppo

But she said that, so far, an agreed ceasefire in the besieged city of Homs had not had any effect, and no aid has got through.

Parts of Homs have been under government siege for more than 18 months. Some residents have told the BBC that they are eating grass to survive.

More than 100,000 people have died in Syria since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011.

Mr Brahimi said: "Progress is very slow indeed, but the sides have engaged in an acceptable manner. This is a very modest beginning, but it is a beginning on which we can build."

Though the gap between the two sides was "wide", they had become used to sitting in the same room, he said.

Mr Safi said the opposition would not sit in talks "endlessly", and urged the government to "talk seriously about transferring power".

Opposition leader Ahmed Jarba said he and his colleagues had "stood up to the regime, a regime that only knows blood and death".

The two sides discussed humanitarian issues and possible ways to end the violence.

They made some agreements on local ceasefires to allow access for humanitarian workers.

UN aid chief Valerie Amos said the deals had allowed some aid to get through to a few thousand families.

"We represent the concerns and interests of our people. If we find that [another meeting] is their demand, then we will come back," he told reporters.

The only obvious success from these talks is that a second round is planned. There's been no breakdown. Even that small achievement was not guaranteed when this process was launched by Ban Ki-moon 10 days ago.

The lack of concrete results, however disappointing, is not surprising. Levels of anger, even hatred between the two delegations, were very apparent in Geneva. Civil war is usually even harder to end than war between states.

In this case, it's not just that the core divides are so stark over ending the violence and discussing the possibility of sharing power. The order in which those issues are dealt with is disputed too. Expect a lot of focus at international meetings over the next few days on failure to achieve any agreement on humanitarian issues too.

He railed at the opposition, saying they had tried to "implode the conference" by insisting that the government hands power over.

31 January 2014 Last updated at 21:19



Lakhdar Brahimi said the gap was wide but there had been some progress


The Syrian government and opposition have traded insults after a week-long peace conference in Geneva ended with no firm agreement.

Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said the opposition were immature, while the opposition's Louay Safi said the regime had no desire to stop the bloodshed.

However, UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said he had seen some "common ground", and scheduled more talks for 10 February.

The opposition has agreed to take part, but Mr Muallem refused to commit.

He he, luoy Insik Islander mingaw Ininsik...

More effective alcohol policy is needed

"Because some who said they were light drinkers later became heavy drinkers, and vice-versa," says co-author Dr. Paul Brennan, "the differences in mortality that we observed must substantially under-estimate the real hazards of persistent heavy drinking."

Commenting on the study, Dr. Jürgen Rehm, from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada, says, however, that the overall volume of alcohol consumed in Russia cannot explain on its own the high mortality rates.

"It is the combination of high overall volume with the specific pattern of episodic binges that is necessary to explain the high level and fluctuating trends of total and alcohol-attributed mortality in Russia," he says.

"Since the average life expectancy from birth for men in Russia is still only 64 years, ranking among the lowest 50 countries in the world, more effective alcohol and tobacco policy measures are urgently needed."

In 2012, Medical News Today reported on a study comparing the health implications of drinking vodka with drinking wine.

Risk tied to drinking three or more bottles of vodka a week

However, the risks of early death are still substantial. The new study, which is published in The Lancet, recorded for up to a decade the vodka-drinking habits of 151,00 Russians. By the end of the study period, 8,000 of the participants had died.

The study found that men who drank three or more bottles of vodka a week were much more likely to die than men who drank less than one bottle each week.

The risk of death for men aged between 35 and 54 who drank three or more half-liter bottles of vodka a week was 35%. Men who drank less than one bottle in the same age group had a risk of death of 16%.

Between the ages of 55 and 74, the risk of death for the heavier drinkers was 64%, and 50% for the men who drank less than one bottle a week.

The main causes of death among the heavy drinkers were alcohol poisoning, accidents, violence, suicide, throat cancer, liver cancer, tuberculosis, pneumonia, pancreatitis, liver disease and heart disease.

Prof. Peto and his colleagues note that under Mikhail Gorbachev's alcohol restrictions in the mid-1980s, alcohol consumption and death rates both fell by 25%.

Following the collapse of communism there was a steep rise again in both alcohol consumption and death rates. More recently, there has been a drop in consumption of spirits as a result of Russia's 2006 alcohol policy reforms. Again, the death rates have corresponded, with a fall in risk of death before age 55.

Study leader Prof. David Zaridze, from the Russian Cancer Research Centre in Moscow, says:

"The significant decline in Russian mortality rates following the introduction of moderate alcohol controls in 2006 demonstrates the reversibility of the health crisis from hazardous drinking. People who drink spirits in hazardous ways greatly reduce their risk of premature death as soon as they stop."

Vodka confirmed as major factor in early death of Russian men
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/
Written by David McNamee
Friday 31 January 2014 - 12am PST


A large study shows that alcohol - and, in particular, vodka - is responsible for Russia's high and sharply fluctuating death rates. Russia currently has an abnormally high early death rate in men - 25% of all Russian men will die before the age of 55.

One of the authors of the new study, Prof. Sir Richard Peto, explains:

"Russian death rates have fluctuated wildly over the past 30 years as alcohol restrictions and social stability varied under Presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin, and the main thing driving these wild fluctuations in death was vodka. This has been shown in retrospective studies, and now we've confirmed it in a big, reliable prospective study."

SuperBalita Davao
Thursday, January 30, 2014


STA. CRUZ, Davao del Sur -- Naaktuhan sa kapulisan ang duha ka mga lalaki nga ilegal nga namutol og kahoy atol sa ilang pagresponde sa taho sa molupyo didto sa Purok Dalisay, Barangay Bato, alas 4:00 sa hapon, Miyerkules.

Giila ang mga suspek nga sila si Renato Lasarte Loyola, 65, ulitawo, ug Dominador Cabatan Estremos, 49, minyo, pulos molupyo sa Barangay Sinawilan ug Badiang, siyudad sa Digos.

Sumala pa nga gigabas sa mga suspek ang mga punoan sa Alom nga kahoy didto sa lugar apan sa pagsuta sa kapulisan wa silay lisensiya ug permit gikan sa Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).

Nakumpiska gikan sa ilang posisyon ang usa ka chainsaw machine nga ilang gigamit sa pagabas sa mga punoan sa kahoy.

Apan, gitudlo sa mga suspek ang usa ka Teting Formentera, molupyo sa Badiang, nga maoy nagsugo kanila sa pagputol sa kahoy apan wa maabti sa kapulisan.

Sa kasamtangan, gihikay na sa kapulisan ang kasong paglapas sa Presidential Decree 705 kun illegal cutting of trees. (Orlando B. Dinoy)

Hmm, OK ra baya unta. But on the other hand, lisod pud tuod, basin drowingan sa non-believers og bungot, o kaha sungay.

Quote from: islander on January 31, 2014, 09:49:21 AM
warning: graphic image in next post.

Bad girl man ka, Islander.

Quote from: hubag bohol on January 31, 2014, 02:51:19 PM

Kontrabida jud hinuon kaayog nawong ning tawhana...

Leung has not specified other sanctions it will impose on the Philippines over the tragedy and whether or not this will include economic restrictions.

On August 23, 2010, eight tourists from Hong Kong died after they were hostaged by disgruntled policeman Rolando Mendoza.

The Manila bus hostage crisis lasted for 10 hours and was aired live in major news outfits around the world.

Separate probes have since been launched by both Hong Kong and Philippine governments, with Hong Kong demanding a formal apology from President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III.

Recently, Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada issued an apology for the bus crisis.

Government data show that more than 160,000 Filipinos are now in Hong Kong, most of them workers.

Total trade between the two countries meanwhile amounted to some $6.2 million in 2012.

The new sanction comes after talks over a Philippine apology to relatives of Hong Kong citizens killed in the 2010 fiasco broke down, Leung said.

Leung laments that “the Philippine side is still unable to meet the demand of the victims and their families for a formal apology.”

“The victims and their families and the SAR government agree the response is unacceptable,” Leung added, noting that the sanction is just the first phase.

Under the erstwhile agreement, holders of official and diplomatic Philippine passports may stay in Hong Kong for 14 days without a visa.

“The sanctions that we have announced are just and justified. We welcome the continuation of dialogue between Hong Kong and the Philippines to bring the matter to a final conclusion,” Leung said further.

Prior to the travel sanctions, Hong Kong lawmakers have urged their government to impose limits tighter rules on hiring Filipino workers.

There is also a long-standing warning to Hong Kong citizens looking to travel to the Philippines.

By Kim Arveen Patria | Yahoo Southeast Asia Newsroom â€" Wed, Jan 29, 2014



Hong Kong's Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying attends the Asian Financial Forum in Hong Kong January 13, 2014. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu



(UPDATE5) Hong Kong will suspend visa-free travel for Filipinos holding diplomatic and official passports starting February 5, amid political tensions over the Manila bus hostage crisis.

Regular passport holders are not affected for now.

An official passport is issued to government officials and those who hold diplomatic posts abroad while a diplomatic passport is issued to Philippine diplomatic service members, Cabinet officials, service attachés and Filipino delegates to international institutions.

“To visit Hong Kong, holders of these passport will have to apply for a visa beforehand in accordance with normal procedures in the immigration department of Hong Kong or Chinese and consular missions overseas,” Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying said in a press briefing.

Quote from: islander on January 30, 2014, 08:51:45 PM
But Drilon admitted that aside from a senator’s P90,000 salary, he or she was also entitled to a confidential budget of up to P280,000.

Mao lagi ni ron, confidential kunohay...

Quote from: islander on January 30, 2014, 08:39:50 PM
wallop.

Hmm, which side are you on?

Quote from: islander on January 30, 2014, 07:44:29 PM
Could he have considered the possibility that the supposed rapist was instead the victim of a frame-up?  If he did entertain such thoughts, chances are they would have been quickly dispelled by the earnest request of a seemingly contrite Navarro that the incident be kept out of the media.

Hmm, di ba kaha naglikay si Navarro sa media tungod sa kauwaw kay siya diay maoy gi-rape?

Quote from: islander on January 31, 2014, 09:39:05 AM
manananggal tingali nga sirena kay nahibuwag man ang lower part sa upper part ni ariel aning winning photo ni hubag.

Wa mahimuwag, oi. Taas lang jud ang iyang lawas. Kon nairo pa ni siya, ingon ani:

Kini siya ang supirkyut.

Ang ikog maoy gigamit pagkawot sa katol...

Maayo na lang kay wa magbikini...

The plot thickens...

Paet...

That is not surprising. Banks are always wary of promoting critical investment calls, especially when important, fee-generating nations like Brazil and Turkey are concerned.

But more skeptical investors remain less inclined to view currency-stabilizing steps taken by Turkey and other Fragile Five members in such a sanguine light.

“People made mistakes investing in these markets just because of the headline G.D.P. and demographics,” said Stephen L. Jen, a former economist for the International Monetary Fund who now manages a hedge fund based in London. Important issues like corruption and governance, not to mention excessive lending in urban areas that favored the political and economic elites, have been ignored, he pointed out.

“Istanbul does not need 100 malls,” he said. “There is a reason these people are poor.”

Mr. Jen did make a stab at crafting his own catchphrase and considered adding Russia to transform the Fragile Five into the Sorry Six, before ditching the notion.

Better to keep it simple, he said, and steer clear of currencies with four letters: the Mexican peso, the South African rand, the Brazilian real and, of course, the Turkish lira.

Food shopping in São Paulo, Brazil. Nacho Doce/Reuters


Turkey, more than any of the others, has been the primary target. Since May, foreign investors have sold, in net terms, $3.9 billion worth of lira-denominated bonds, according to data from the Institute of International Finance, a substantial amount for such a short period.

Although Mr. O’Neill, while at Goldman, aggressively marketed his BRICs notion, Mr. Lord and his team at Morgan Stanley have been more circumspect, avoiding for the most part public statements in the news media.

In response to questions about his Fragile Five thesis, Mr. Lord, who this year was promoted from vice president to a more senior position, asked that he be quoted playing down his original thesis.

“We have been using the term less and less in our research,” he said, explaining that responses by policy makers in these countries have to some extent addressed the issues he raised.

Yield-starved investors began pouring into Mr. O’Neill’s markets and their economies. Since 2010, annual net inflows into these markets have averaged a little over $1 trillion a year.

As a result, Mr. O’Neill became quite the global man about town. He has been celebrated by investors and the BRIC nations themselves, which even formed a BRIC-development bank.

All this changed last summer, when the Fed’s announcement that it would eventually reverse its bond-buying program panicked giddy emerging-market investors. Other concerns, like a slowdown of growth in China, political uncertainty in Russia and Turkey and most crucially, vulnerable currencies in Brazil and South Africa, spurred concerns over the possibility of a broader market panic.

So in early August, when James K. Lord, a fairly junior currency analyst at Morgan Stanley sent out a research note warning of the risks within the “fragile five,” the name spread quickly, especially among investors already nervous about their emerging-market holdings.

“I still believe these are the best investment opportunities in the world,” said Mr. O’Neill, who acknowledges being irritated at having to defend his thesis every time there is an emerging market wobble.

Mr. O’Neill, who recently left Goldman and now works independently, has just come up with yet another, similarly dynamic club. This one, of populous countries with high growth potential, he calls MINTs, for Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey.

When Mr. O’Neill coined the BRICs phrase, foreign capital inflows into emerging markets were about $190 billion a year, according to data from the Institute of International Finance, the trade group for international banks.

His timing could not have been better: The Federal Reserve was moving to a policy of very low interest rates and China’s growth engine was revving up, driving what would become a long-running commodity boom.

A miner in Indonesia. Mercury is used to process ore from small-scale mines, which carries risks to the miners and the environment. Yusuf Ahmad/Reuters

Investment analysts love to come up with catchy names that simplify their views and, ideally, capture the market spirit of the moment. During the early period of the euro crisis, PIGS, unkindly, came to describe Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain. And when the focus turned to Greece and its future in the euro zone, Grexit became the term of art.

Not all of them catch on. In September, Deutsche Bank analysts came up with Biits, which covers the same countries as the Fragile Five, but it graced hardly any analysts’ reports.

The countries in the Asian financial crisis of 1997 never got saddled with a nickname. As in that and other emerging market blowups, foreign investors and lenders pulled their money out because of broader concerns about political and economic uncertainty.

And while there have been sharp outflows from Turkey and some of the other members of the Fragile Five, broadly speaking, foreign investors have retreated from the asset class as a whole.

None of which surprises Jim O’Neill, who, as an economist at Goldman Sachs in late 2001, came up with the phrase BRICs as a way to highlight the long-term growth potential of large emerging market economies.

The Morgan Stanley report came out in August, when there were reports that the Federal Reserve would soon reduce its bond-buying program. The term that report coined became a quick and easy way for investors to give voice to fears of a broader emerging markets rout, propelled by runs on the Turkish lira, Brazilian real and South African rand.

These fears were realized this week when Turkey, seen by most investors as the most fragile of the Fragile Five, raised interest rates 4.25 percentage points on Tuesday.

The sharper-than-expected increase by the country’s central bank â€" which previously took a fairly passive approach to defending its currency â€" was intended to persuade foreign investors, as well as corporate and household savers, to hold on to their lira instead of exchanging them for dollars.

As with other members of the Fragile Five, Turkey relies heavily on fickle short-term investment from foreigners to finance gaping current account deficits â€" the result of which has been a currency that many investors say is overvalued.

http://www.nytimes.com/
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.JAN. 28, 2014



Winnowing crops in India. Jayanta Dey/Reuters


The long-running boom in emerging markets came to be identified, if not propped up, by wide acceptance of the term BRICs, shorthand for the fast-growing countries Brazil, Russia, India and China. Recent turmoil in these and similar markets has produced a rival expression: the Fragile Five.

The new name, as coined by a little-known research analyst at Morgan Stanley last summer, identifies Turkey, Brazil, India, South Africa and Indonesia as economies that have become too dependent on skittish foreign investment to finance their growth ambitions.

The term has caught on in large degree because it highlights the strains that occur when countries place too much emphasis on stoking fast rates of economic growth. The new catchphrase also raises pressing questions about not just the BRICs but about emerging markets in general.

Quote from: chicogon on January 30, 2014, 12:25:21 AM


Kini ako geluto kay tugnaw

Hmm, for Botoy, a food for thought...

Gremlins

A new interpretation, presented for the first time here, is that there are little green gremlins hovering around, going backwards and forwards in time, shaking hands and collapsing with mirth as they poke and prod subatomic particles in a way they calculate most likely to confuse us. This explains all of the observed experimental results, but it does introduce gremlins, and the need for a further theory about why they should want to confuse us. Using the principle of Ockham's razor, this interpretation will probably not find much popularity among the scientific community although it may be the basis for a new religion. Watch this space.

What happens to the Cat? Depends on what the gremlins think will confuse us most.

http://www.higgo.com/quantum/laymans.htm

Transactional Interpretation

Like Stenger's, John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation relies on the fundamental time-symmetry of the universe. He argues that particles perform a kind of 'handshake' in the course of interacting. One sends out a wave forward in time, and another sends one out backwards in time.

What happens to the Cat? Ermm...

Time Reversibility

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was a genius who developed a new approach to quantum mechanics. He formalised its crowning achievement, Quantum Electrodynamics, which is the most accurate scientific theory ever devised. He also developed the Feynman Diagram, which represents the interaction of two particles as the exchange of a third particle. This diagram has time on one axis and space on the other and the interaction can be viewed as happening both in forward and in reverse time.

An electron, on its way from point A to point B, can bump into a photon. In the diagram this can be drawn as sending it backwards not just in space, but also in time. Then it bumps into another photon, which sends it forward in time again, but in a different direction in space. In this way, it can be in two places at once.

There is little doubt that a Feynman diagram offers the easiest way to predict the results of a subatomic experiment. Many physicists have seen the power of this tool and taken the next step, arguing that reverse time travel is what actually happens in reality. Victor Stenger of the University of Hawaii argues strongly for this ontology in his forthcoming book. Of course, for a layman, it is hard to understand why a photon bounces around in such a way that it appears in two slits at once.

What happens to the Cat? It is both dead and alive simultaneously. We don't see this because of the macroscopic 'measurement problem'.

Alternate Histories

The Alternate Histories Interpretation is quite different, being similar to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, but with the insistence that only the actual outcome is the real world and the ones we're not in don't actually exist. Unfortunately this gets us right back to their being some kind of 'collapse'.

What happens to the cat? Again, you're not supposed to ask.

Consistent Histories

The Consistent Histories interpretation, put forward by Robert Griffiths in 1984, works backwards from the result of an experiment, arguing that only a few possible histories are consistent with the rules of quantum mechanics. It's an interesting idea but not very popular because it still doesn't explain how a particle can go through two slits and interfere with itself. Roland Omns, in The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (1994) wrote down 80 equations in a single chapter and came to the conclusion that the 'consistent histories' interpretation was pretty much the same as Copenhagen, with a few knobs on.

What happens to the Cat? Again, you're not supposed to ask.

Pilot Waves, Hidden Variables and the Implicate Order

David Bohm (1917-1992) was a very brilliant physicist and that's why people went along with him when he came up with an elegant but more complicated theory to explain the same set of phenomena (normally, more complicated theories are disqualified by the principle known as Ockham's Razor).

Bohm's theory follows on some original insights by Prince Louis de Broglie (1892-1987), who first studied the wave-like properties of the behaviour of particles in 1924. De Broglie suggested that, in addition to the normal wavefunction of the Copenhagen Interpretation, there is a second wave that determines a precise position for the particle at any particular time. In this theory, there is some 'hidden variable' that determines the precise position of the photon.

Sadly, John von Neumann (1903-1957) wrote a paper in 1932 proving that this theory was impossible. Von Neumann was such a great mathematician that nobody bothered to check his maths until 1966, when John Bell (1928-1990) proved he'd bodged it and there could be hidden variables after all -- but only if particles could communicate faster than light (this is called 'nonlocality'). In 1982 Alain Aspect demonstrated that this superluminal signaling did appear to exist, although David Mermin then showed that you could not actually signal anything. There is still some argument about whether this means very much.

Bohm's theory was that the second wave was indeed faster than light, and moreover it did not get weaker with distance but instantly permeated the entire universe, acting as a guide for the movement of the photon. This is why it is called a 'pilot wave'.

This theory explains the paradoxes of quantum physics perfectly. But it introduces a new faster-than-light wave and some hidden mechanism for deciding where it goes -- to create an 'implicate order'. That's quite a lot of extra baggage, and scientists like to travel light. Worse still, Bohm went on to become a mystic, identifying his 'implicate order' with Eastern spirituality and spawning books like Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics . That's heretical behaviour in the eyes of any decent physicist.

What happens to the cat? It's either dead or alive, of course!

Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI)

The various paradoxes that the Copenhagen Interpretation gave rise to (famously Schroedinger's cat, and Einstein's dislike of "spooky action at a distance") led others to keep on trying to find a better interpretation.

The simplest was put forward by a student, Hugh Everett, in 1957. He simply said that the Schroedinger equation does not collapse. Of course, everyone laughed at him, because they could see that the photon, for example, was in just one place when they looked, not in all possible places. But after a couple of decades, this issue was resolved with the concept of decoherence - the idea that different universes can very quickly branch apart, so that there is very little relationship between them after a tiny fraction of a second.

This has led to what should strictly be called the 'post-Everett' Interpretation, but is still usually called MWI. It is now one of the most popular interpretations and has won some impromptu beauty contests at physics conferences. Unfortunately it means that billions of you are splitting off every fraction of a second into discrete universes and it implies that everything possible exists in one universe or another. This comes up with its own set of hard-to-digest concepts, such as the fact that a 500-year-old you exists in some universes, whereas in others you died at birth.

In 1997, Max Tegmark at Princeton University proposed an experiment to prove that MWI was correct. It involved pointing a loaded gun at your head and pulling the trigger. Of course, you will only survive in those universes where the gun, for whatever reason, fails to go off. If you get a misfire every time, you can satisfy yourself -- with an arbitrarily high level of confidence -- that MWI is true. Of course, in most universes your family will be weeping at your funeral (or possibly just shaking their heads and muttering).

What happens to the cat? It's dead in half the subsequent universes and alive in the other half.

Copenhagen Interpretation (CI)

This is the granddaddy of interpretations, championed by the formidable Niels Bohr of Copenhagen university. He browbeat all dissenters into submission (with the notable exception of Einstein) at a Brussels conference sponsored by a man called Solvay in 1927. Bohr thereby stifled the debate for a generation or two.

The CI has a bit of a cheek calling itself an interpretation, because it essentially says "thou shalt not ask what happens before ye look". He pointed out that the Schroedinger equation worked as a tool for calculating where the particle would be, except that it 'collapsed' as soon as you took a peek. If anyone asked why this was, he would say, "shut up and calculate" (or he might as well have done).

When you do try to take Copenhagen seriously you come to the conclusion that consciousness and particle physics are inter-related, and you rush off to write a book called The Dancing Wu-Li Masters.

More recently, Henry Stapp at the University of California has written papers such as On Quantum Theories of the Mind (1997). Stapp's central thesis is that the synapses in your brain are so small that quantum effects are significant. This means that there is quantum uncertainty about whether a neuron will fire or not - and this degree of freedom that nature has allows for the interaction of mind and matter.

What happens to the cat? You're not allowed to ask.

These are the results of the different interpretations of quantum physics. The interpretations all compete with each other. Otherwise respectable physicists can get quite heated about how sensible their pet interpretation is and how crazy all the others are. At the moment, there's about one new interpretation every three months, but most of them fit into these categories.

What does it mean?

The meaning of quantum physics is a bit of a taboo subject, but everyone thinks about it. To make it all a bit more respectable, it is better to say 'ontology' than 'meaning' -- it's the same thing. There are several competing interpretations and the one thing they all have in common is that each of them explains all the facts and predicts every experiment's outcome correctly.

If you dare to think about it (you're not really supposed to), you have to believe one of the following things:


MENU

Your consciousness affects the behaviour of subatomic particles

- or -

Particles move backwards as well as forwards in time and appear in all possible places at once

- or -

The universe is splitting, every Planck-time (10 E-43 seconds) into billions of parallel universes

- or -

The universe is interconnected with faster-than-light transfers of information

----

Full English Breakfast

Coffee or Tea

A Lazy Layman's Guide to Quantum Physics
James Higgo 1999


What is Quantum Physics?

That's an easy one: it's the science of things so small that the quantum nature of reality has an effect. Quantum means 'discrete amount' or 'portion'. Max Planck discovered in 1900 that you couldn't get smaller than a certain minimum amount of anything. This minimum amount is now called the Planck unit.

Why is it weird?

Niels Bohr, the father of the orthodox 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum physics once said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it".

To understand the weirdness completely, you just need to know about three experiments: Light Bulb, Two Slits, Schroedinger's Cat.

Two Slits

The simplest experiment to demonstrate quantum weirdness involves shining a light through two parallel slits and looking at the screen. It can be shown that a single photon (particle of light) can interfere with itself, as if it travelled through both slits at once.

Light Bulb

Imagine a light bulb filament gives out a photon, seemingly in a random direction. Erwin Schroedinger came up with a nine-letter-long equation that correctly predicts the chances of finding that photon at any given point. He envisaged a kind of wave, like a ripple from a pebble dropped into a pond, spreading out from the filament. Once you look at the photon, this 'wavefunction' collapses into the single point at which the photon really is.

Schroedinger's Cat

In this experiment, we take your pet cat and put it in a box with a bottle of cyanide. We rig it up so that a detector looks at an isolated electron and determines whether it is 'spin up' or 'spin down' (it can have either characteristic, seemingly at random). If it is 'spin up', then the bottle is opened and the cat gets it. Ten minutes later we open the box and see if the cat is alive or dead. The question is: what state is the cat in between the detector being activated and you opening the box. Nobody has actually done this experiment (to my knowledge) but it does show up a paradox that arises in certain interpretations.

Niels Bohr with Albert Einstein at Paul Ehrenfest's home in Leiden (December 1925)

Bohrâ€"Einstein debates

The Bohrâ€"Einstein debates were a series of public disputes about quantum mechanics between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, who were two of its founders. Their debates are remembered because of their importance to the philosophy of science. An account of the debates has been written by Bohr in an article titled "Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics". Despite their differences of opinion regarding quantum mechanics, Bohr and Einstein had a mutual admiration that was to last the rest of their lives.

Magbantay lang sa ginuntingan kay medyo hait, labi na kon baga ang plastik. Nasamad ang akong tudlo sa una nakong paggamit og ingon ani. Pero OK kaayo ni.

P.S. Unya ang pinutlan nga bahin mahimong himoon nga tagayanan sa bahal...