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A friend of mine manages an apartment complex, and was complaining in email today about the insane amount of redundant phone calls the office receives:

I should make a sign:

-The pool will open on Monday next week
-The waiting list is a year to a year and a half
-Yes, that’s the real wait
-No, it doesn’t move faster
-Yes, you can have an air conditioner
-No, your new lease isn’t ready yet because we’re too busy kicking people out to take care of the ones who still live here
-No, I don’t know offhand how much your rent is
-I don’t care if you hate your neighbor
-Yes, we’ll send an exterminator
-Please don’t ring that goddamned doorbell

BibliOdyssey is displaying thirteen interesting engravings of late 16th century university life.

The trouble with the modern education system is that there is far too little attention paid to jousting and quarterstaff combat.

Agreed.  And I’m sure that somewhere in that set, you can see the varsity Footballe Teame giving a monster codpiece-wedgie to some poor freshman in tights.

Scout Tufankjian has posted a stunning gallery of her photographs of the Obama campaign, from the beginning to the present.

Particularly inspiring is the gallery of Obama supporters - Scout would hand a small chalkboard to a supporter, ask them to write a few words describing their support, and then photograph the result.

Joshua Roebke at Seed writes about Anton Zeilinger’s new experiments set up to test philosophical questions of locality vs. realism in quantum mechanics.  In other words, do we create what we observe through the act of our observations?

The reason we see our world as we do is because of what we use to observe it. The human body is a just barely adequate measuring device. Quantum mechanics does not always wash itself out, but to observe its effects for larger and larger objects we would need more and more accurate measurement devices. We just do not have the sensitivity to observe the quantum effects around us. In essence we do create the classical world we perceive, and as Brukner said, “There could be other classical worlds completely
different from ours.”

Zeilinger and his group have only just begun to consider the grand implications of all their work for reality and our world. Like others in their field, they had focused on entanglement and decoherence to construct our future information technology, such as quantum computers, and not for understanding reality. But the group’s work on these kinds of applications pushed up against quantum mechanics’ foundations. To repeat a famous dictum, “All information is physical.” How we get information from our world depends on how it is encoded. Quantum mechanics encodes information, and how we obtain this through measurement is how we study and construct our world.

It’s a great article, with a concise background history of quantum mechanics.

Vivacalaca is an incredible animation project by the Spanish artist Ritxi Ostáriz, with a great soundtrack piece by Voltaire.  Click the link and watch the video.

(via Andre Torrez)