Adblock Plus

There are two types of people who browse the web: those who see adverts on the sites they visit, and those who don't.  The latter use Firefox with the Adblock Plus add-on installed. 

Recently, I was reminded of  how intrusive web advertising is when I had to use someone else's PC.  It is like having an idiot waving to attract your attention all the time.  I even find obnoxious the relatively subtle Google Ads that appear in the side-bar of this blog (especially when they are promoting some creationist pack of lies).

Other Firefox add-ons  I use are Flashblock, which prevents flash animations from running until you click on a button (this filters out a lot of the worst adverts), and the Adblock Filterset.G Updater, which makes sure your Adblock filter list is up-to-date. 

Exciting Mathematics

Last week I heard a government minister on the radio saying that maths lessons should be made more exciting.  Today I read this comment by Elise Conolly to a post at Overcoming Bias:

This reminds me of when I first started learning about topological spaces, and then we added a metric, suddenly all the theorems and lemmas we'd had to prove in fiddly ways with lots of epsilons and deltas in first year analysis were blindingly and beautifully obvious. The sheer glorious interconnectedness was so overwhelming that I very nearly orgasmed in the lecture theatre!
Posted by: Elise Conolly January 10, 2008 at 08:20 PM

"Ah", I thought, "That's what the minister meant."

Donald Knuth on the Presentation of Quantum Mechanics

Today is the 70th birthday of the famous computer scientist Donald Knuth and out on the web there are lots of blog posts about him.  A good one to start with is this by Scott Aaronson. From it I take the following two Knuth quotes on quantum mechanics:

Several years ago, I chanced to open Paul Dirac’s famous book on the subject and I was surprised to find out that Dirac was not only an extremely good writer but also that his book was not totally impossible to understand. The biggest surprise, however — actually a shock — was to learn that the things he talks about in that book were completely different from anything I had ever read in Scientific American or in any other popular account of the subject. Apparently when physicists talk to physicists, they talk about linear transformations of generalized Hilbert spaces over the complex numbers; observable quantities are eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of Hermitian linear operators. But when physicists talk to the general public they don’t dare mention such esoteric things, so they speak instead about particles and spins and such, which are much less than half the story. No wonder I could never really understand the popular articles.

...

The extra detail that gets suppressed when quantum mechanics gets popularized amounts to the fact that, according to quantum mechanics, the universe actually consists of much more data than could ever be observed.

Manage Your Electronic Environment

Via taw's blog, a couple of electronic devices to help you manage your electronic environment:

Wave Bubble - a mobile phone jammer.  Could be useful for those of us who like to sleep on trains.  Unfortunately this is just a design; you have to build it yourself (and apparently it is not easy).  Limor Fried, the designer, states: "This design is not for sale or available as a kit and never will be due to FCC regulations".  This is obviously why it is small enough hide in a cigarette box.

TV-B-Gone - A universal remote control TV off switch.   The homepage includes a video showing it being used to switch off a TV in a shop window.  This device does seem to be available commercially here (disguised as a key-fob).

Like a Hurricane

From a table of measured velocities in Motion Mountain by Christoph Schiller:

• Wind speed at 12 Beaufort (hurricane):   above 33m/s
• Speed of air in throat when sneezing:  42m/s