Steve Lodefink returned to a parking garage and found his car mashed by some hit and run jerk. What did he do? He got all CSI on their asses.

Who knew that hubcaps.org existed?

Dan bookmarked this site on how to use the Terraserver so he could remember it later, so I’m doing the same. Other things of interest are Jef P’s Acme Mapper, now with color images.

Soren Ragsdale added some interesting Google satellite images to the wikipedia, including an overall view of the Kennedy Space Center. Here is a much tighter view of the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is the building where Saturn V rockets were assembled, and now houses space shuttles as they are being fitted for launch.

Totally blows away my previous experimentation with the Terraserver.

On a mailing list I subscribe to, Tom Duff pointed me at Conway’s Proof of the Free Will Theorem.

From the background:

In mid-2004, John Conway and Simon Kochen of Princeton University proved the Free-will Theorem. This theorem states “If there exist experimenters with (some) free will, then elementary particles also have (some) free will.” In other words, if some experimenters are able to behave in a way that is not completely predetermined, then the behavior of elementary particles is also not a function of their prior history. This is a very strong “no hidden variable” theorem.

I’m not sure I can wrap my head around this, being a Friday, but it is very, very strange. The idea of free will is something which I had decided was more or less unassailable by the methods of science (it wasn’t even clear to me that the phenomena had any real meaning whatsoever) but apparently someone with the intellect of Conway thought that it was worthy of study, so perhaps I was mistaken.

One of my personal regrets is that I didn’t drop in on John Conway while I was working in the Applied Math department at Princeton. I have little doubt that if I had, I’d have met the smartest person I’ve ever encountered so far.

Need a fun book by Conway? Try ::amazon(“038797993X”, “The Book of Numbers“):: that he coauthored with Richard Guy. Very entertaining, and quite accessable.

Note: “entertaining” here is used in the usual brainwagon sense of the word.

Addendum: Here is Tom’s take on it:

The proof, of course, depends on the underlying physics. What is remarkable is that they only require three physical axioms, which, in typical Conway style, they call SPIN, FIN and TWIN.

SPIN:

spins have the 101 property, i.e. the measured (squared) spins of a spin-1 particle in 3 perpendicular directions will be two 1’s and a zero in some order.

FIN:

there is a finite upper bound on the speed at which information travels.

TWIN:

if a pair of particles has total angular momentum 0 then one has
angular momentum s and the other -s.

SPIN and TWIN are fairly well-confirmed experimentally, and while most physicists believe FIN, it’s not the sort of statement that experiments can confirm. (Conway says: “We do not know if some unknown method allows for instantaneous transfer of information, almost by definition.”)

It’s interesting to me that SPIN and TWIN are quantum-mechanical statements and FIN is true in General Relativity. It’s fairly widely held that QM and GR are inconsistent, which might lead you to believe that Conway and Kochen are skating on thin ice. But there may be other SPIN/FIN/TWIN models that aren’t as problematic.

My head hurts.

The Voidspace Techie Blog has a brief review of Panda3D, an interactive graphics environment based on Python created by Disney and CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center. Looks cool. Haven’t done anything with it, but I thought I’d put in this link to remind me to have a look at it later.

EpiaWiki.org is trying to become the primary source of information on using the EPIA motherboards produced by VIA.

This website currently runs on just such a motherboard, using FreeBSD. They are cool, capable, and run with very little power. All in all, a very good deal.

Google just added satellite imagery to their map services. Check out their view of Pixar. Too cool.

Apparently, goofing around with programming his cell phone.

It’s cool that someone with such impressive skills chooses to waste his time doing things like I like to do. 🙂

Damn! That is one big catfish!

Courtesy of Boing Boing.

Microsoft will be releasing six new fonts in 2006, and this preview shows some type specimens. I’m actually a big fan of Georgia and Verdana, and these seem to be similarly attractive. I’m even willing to overlook the creation of MS Comic Sans…

Slashdot has an interesting thread on the sources for interesting stuff to fill your iPod with. Some are podcasts, and some of them are more conventional audio sources, but there are some that I hadn’t considered before, and I suspect you’ll find something interesting in there too.

Check it out.

Courtesy of the MAKE: Blog, check out Jeremy Wagstaff’s list of programs that can be run from USB thumb drives. Good stuff, including operating systems, mail, browsers and instant messaging.