"The Book of Love is long and boring / no one can lift the damn thing"

[larryhammer]

It's full of charts and facts and figures / and instructions for dancing / but I love it when you read to me:

• How to still get Windows XP after June 30th and testing realism and the meaning of quantum mechanics. Or, arguably, the meaning of realism and testing quantum mechanics. (via)
  
  
• Bacteria observed evolving a complex trait out of smaller mutations. (via)
  
  
• The 10-worst paying jobs in the States. Compare to the official poverty threshold, especially for households of more than one person. (via)
  
  
• Top 5 tourist destinations Americans (and often others) can't visit. (via)
  
  
• Life on the streets: a primer for writers part 1, part 2.

And in conclusion, hang-gliding with penguins.

ETA: The 2008 Lyttle Lytton winners. (also via) Read 'em and weep.

---L.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Hah. I made more as a waitress than I ever did as a teacher. So did my daughter as a barrista at Starbucks. Her paychecks were better than mine, and she worked half my hours.

[larryhammer]

*wry grimace*

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Re the quantum realism article: what, exactly, is wrong with the many-worlds interpretation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation)? I suppose they might have made the weakest tangential allusion to it I've ever seen towards the end, but only barely.

[larryhammer]

Untestable, is my understanding.

---L.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't bet on it. Not because MWI has any special property that I can think of, but because the observer-dependent theories they seem to be talking about (the no-realism ones) are implicitly dualist. Even if MWI doesn't explain the origins of the Born probabilities, our knowledge of biology would seem to throw several million wrenches into theories where human beings are some ontologically-special kind of "detectors".

[sharonskinner.livejournal.com]

Farmworkers earn even less than food service employees, which is why most farmworkers are often undocumented immigrants.

Gee, I wonder why they left that one off the list?

Maybe the headline should to read: Top 10 Worst Paying Jobs that Americans are Willing to Work

[larryhammer]

Word.

---L.