The Quantum Mechanic

A friend coined this term to refer either (both?) the current dressing style amongst female teens and pre-teens or those who dress that way: prostitot

From a mailing list:

Jesus said unto them, “Whom do you say I am?”
They replied, “You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed.”
And Jesus replied, “What?”

…be aware that the new IKEA in Stoughton will be opening on 9 November.

Diamonds? No. Hallmark cards? No. It’s our favorite bit of edible pinkness.

While trying to figure out the name of the nameless toy mentioned in my previous post (still no luck with that), I discovered that Hasbro has done an incredible favor for nostalgia freaks, retro-toy enthusiasts (and anthropologists? :) It has placed many (I’m not going to claim all) of its manuals to board games, electr(on)ic toys, etc. online. I’ve seen some going back to the 1940s. This is fabulous!

I never had anything as interesting as CARDIAC, but I do have fond memories of a few old computer-y things I’ve owned.

• A Radio Shack 4-bit microcomputer trainerwith around 64 bytes of RAM. Oddly, it had the usual springs-and-wires of a typical RS electronics kit, even though there was only one way to wire it up. Input was a hex keypad in the form of a matrix of cheap pushkey switches and output was some LED dots and an 8-segment display. The manual was pretty interesting and was not very dumbed-down. You really could learn some good assembly language concepts from it.
• I had another computer-y toy whose name has sadly completely slipped my mind. It was pre-fabricated and like the one above also had a simple keyboard — pushswitch keys (so a step up :-) that were at least a hex keypad, but maybe more additional keys. Output was a speaker, either one or two 8-segment LEDs and, fascinatingly, a 4×4 (or maybe 5×5 or 6×6) LED dot array. The keypad was on the main body of the thing and the output unit (speaker, array, 8-seg displays) was a separate piece that attached to the main body via a short stalk. I don’t recall the manual being as technical as the Radio Shack trainer was (this one was marketed more as a toy than as a trainer). I don’t even remember if it gave you enough information to write your own programs. But because of the LED array, the programs that the manual had you key in were much more interesting :-). There were programs that would draw moving patterns. I think there was a “don’t let the snake eat its tail” game. There was even an animation program — you could “draw” (by using keys to set/reset dots) five or six or so animation frames. I really loved this toy and wish I could just remember the name of it.
• Somewhere over the years I picked up an AMD microcontroller trainer. It has a 1969-era microcontroller on it, a few hundred bytes of RAM, some LEDs, and a set of toggle switches for toggling in bytes, single-stepping, etc. It’s all mounted on a one-foot-square PCB. You have to supply the 5VDC yourself. The manual even comes with instruction coding sheets so you can hand-assemble your program.
• I had the Radio Shack Digital Computer Kit which was a set of eight quintuple-pole double-throw switches and eight light bulbs, each in its own compartment. There was a set of opaques (well, they weren’t transparent :-) generally organized with input labels to the left and output labels to the right that would slide into place in front of the bulbs. The idea was that you’d slide the switches that lined up with the inputs to light up the inputs you wanted to activate, the “computation” would be performed courtesy of the particular wiring pattern you had been instructed to wire up for that particular “opaque”. Ironically, the kit really was more of an analog computer. The manual/opaques had instructions for the basic logic gates and then a bunch of trivia, etc. quizzes. You couldn’t do any real programming since it had no state at all (other than the state of the switches).

The other day I got a brochure from the Nashoba Valley Ski Area.

One of the pages in the brochure was plugging a “ski-and-stay” package. At a Marriot Residence Inn two miles from the “ski area”. For a “ski area” all of 25 miles from Boston. With a max vertical drop of a couple hundred feet or so.

What’s next? A “ski-and-stay” package at a by-the-hour motel a few miles from the Blue Hill Ski Area?

Cribbed from Volokh, I know, but you have got to see this illusion!

What do you know? transparent aluminum.

http://www.cathnews.com/news/510/56.php

A pocket-sized book published by the Catholic Truth Society in the UK addresses Catholic attitudes to extra-terrestrial life. Independent Catholic News reports that with increasing numbers of people believing not only in the possibility of intelligent life on other planets, but even claiming encounters with aliens, it is not surprising that the Catholic Church is beginning to explore what effect the discovery of sentient ETs might have on Christian theology.

In: Intelligent Life in the Universe? Catholic belief and the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life, author Guy Consolmagno SJ, asks:

• Would humans recognise intelligent life if we saw it?
• Could we communicate with it? Should we even try?
• Is Original Sin something that affects all intelligent beings?
• Is Jesus Christ’s redemption valid for intelligent beings throughout the universe?
• or would other worlds have their own version of Jesus?
• Would the Church send missionaries to ET planets?

[snip]

Brother Guy has advanced degrees in planetary science from MIT and the University of Arizona. He spends his time observing comets and asteroids, and does experiments with the Vatican’s vast collection of meteorites one of the largest in the world.

And just what is the Vatican doing with those meteorites, anyways? :-)

But seriously — those are eminently reasonable questions for an organization like the RCC to be pondering.