The Quantum Mechanic

While you are obsessed with over-intellectualized issues like eminent domain abuse and over-regulation of small businesses, these guys are dealing with things that the average American can relate to, straight from the gut. Like a man’s God-given right to fight a duel, and then eat the loser. Now that’s libertarianism!

Yes, it’s a funny. But when you look at the (*cough*) high-quality people who are often the face of Libertarianism and the LP to others, it sadly hits close to home.

(from a comment at this thread)

And another comment from that same thread:

Jack:

If you want to change the LP, then become active in it, go to the party meetings, get your friends/relatives/co-workers and other people you consider sane to join, etc.

I have been active. Candidate 3 times, an the state convention, some other stuff.

By discretion I mean tossing out the wackos when they expose themselves, and without weasle words like, ‘we abhore their desire to fight duels and eat people, though we do support their right to voluntarily contract to do so”.

Please.

While I think libertarianism as a political philosophy fits best with both the good and bad aspects of human nature, I also think, as with every other philosophy, when you take it to the extreme it ceases make any sense.

Nut jobs advocating duels, incest and canibalism need to be publically ejcted from any local LP they belong to, and their affiliation loudly rejected should they claim it.

I am wondering if a new party is needed. Libertarian leaning, but with rational application to real human nature, not to some sort of idealized cyber-logical version of human nature.

Just as socialism treats people as mechanistic insects that can be used and disposed of at need, (especially when taken to it’s logical extremes of communism and fascism), libertarianism treats people as programmable boolean logic gates, that will automatically behave in certain ways when the correct initial environment is set up.

Both are irrational at the fringes. One by treating people as insects and machines, the other by treating them as computers.

Here’s something pretty cool…

Put a particle into an excited state. Then in a time very short compared to the lifetime of the excited state (i.e. so the probability of having decayed back to the ground state is very, very low) check to see if the particle is still in the excited state. This will collapse the wavefunction and (almost always, because you picked the timing that way) guarantee the particle is in the excited state. Rinse, lather, repeat, and you can keep the particle in the excited state indefinitely.

But what’s really cool is that you don’t have to do an active test (i.e. see if the particle is in the excited state) — a passive test works just as well. For example, you can send in a photon that can only be absorbed if the particle is in the ground state.

So you can basically keep the particle in the excited state by doing almost literally nothing — after all, in theory you could use photons that you were planning to use for something else. And since almost none of them will ever be absorbed, you can still use the photons for whatever else you were doing, but with the side-effect of keeping the particle excited.

Pretty neat.

Interesting post at Marginal Revolution on how eBay-bidders will prefer a $6 item with $5 shipping over a $10 item with free shipping.

Why am I not surprised?

…the wizard of Hollywood.