Vote ‘Yes’ on California referendum on redistricting

Congressional districts for the US House of Representatives are redrawn after every census that takes place every decade. The next census is due in 2030. Each state has its own rules for how to draw the maps but in many states, especially those controlled by Republicans, the lines are drawn in strange ways just so that it gives a big advantage to their party. As a result, the percentage of Republicans who are elected to Congress from each state well exceed the percentage of votes that they get.

But Republicans are jittery that their current razor-thin majority in Congress will be lost in the 2026 mid-term elections, so states like Texas and elsewhere abruptly decided to redraw their maps midway through the decade to give Republicans even more seats. In retaliation, California governor Gavin Newsom decided to do the same thing in California to offset the Texas move. Currently the state’s districts are drawn by an independent commission so as to have fairness.

As a result, on election day November 4th, California voters will vote Proposition 50, a referendum that seeks to do away with the existing congressional district maps and replace it with a new one that favors Democrats but will be in effect only until the next census in 2030 requires the drawing of new maps. The referendum asks voters to essentially take a regressive step and approve a gerrymandered map that favors Democrats.
[Read more…]

How stupid are Republicans?

That question, rhetorical of course, is prompted by the story about the leaked texts by members of the group known as Young Republicans that reveal them saying the most awful things, a story that keeps gaining steam.

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

[Read more…]

Can you tell on sight if someone is sleazy?

The book Nobody’s Girl: Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre has just been released.

She was the young woman who died by suicide in April of this year at the age of 41. Her memoir reveals a horrific life of abuse and exploitation that continued right up to the end. After being sexually abused as a child, starting as a teenager she was sexually abused and trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, passed around to their wealthy and influential friends, including the disgusting Price Andrew, like she was some kind of plaything with whom they could do as they liked. Epstein was a collector of famous people who, having no particular claim to distinction, used his considerable money (the origins of which remain obscure to this day) to buy the friendship of people whom he considered clever, famous , and influential, all this while having a coterie of attractive young single women hanging around his homes.

What is astonishing is that all these people claimed to not have sensed that there was anything amiss. But Emma Brockes, in a review of the book finds these claims of ignorance hard to believe.
[Read more…]

Massive protests against Trump

Yesterday saw massive protests against the Trump regime and its increasingly fascistic nature. Millions took part in over 2,700 locations in the US. This was a follow up to the June event that drew between two million and five million people across more than 2,000 locations.

In Chicago, at Grant Park’s Butler Field, at least 10,000 people assembled, many with signs opposing federal immigration agents or mocking Trump. TV stations with feeds from protests warned viewers they could not be responsible for the language used in the signage.

Some of them said “Hands Off Chicago”, a rallying cry that began when the president first announced his intent to send the national guard into the city. Others read “Resist Fascism”, but many others used language unsuitable for broadcast.

The crowd erupted in chants of “Fuck Donald Trump” when Illinois representative Jonathan Jackson took the stage.
…

More than 200,000 Washington DC-area residents rallied near the US Capitol. In many cities, protesters wore inflatable animal costumes – a Dada-esque theme created during immigration enforcement protests in Portland, Oregon, to counter the administration’s narrative of a city under the grip of lawlessness and chaos.

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, costumed characters included unicorns, chickens and frogs. “It’s about the absurdity of it all,” resident Amy Adler told the Santa Fe New Mexican while wearing a lobster suit she described as an ode to Portland.

[Read more…]

Consciousness, measurement, and quantum mechanics – Part 5

(See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. Also I am going to suspend the limit of three comments per post for this series of posts because it is a topic that benefits from back and forth discussions.)

It is time to finally get to the issue that triggered this series of posts and that is why some people think that consciousness plays a role in quantum mechanics.

When Einstein asked his friend Pascual Jordan whether he really believed that the moon exists only when he looked at it, he was undoubtedly being facetious. It is like asking if, when we enter a completely dark room and turn on the light and see all that is there, whether the furniture was not there before but only appeared because we observed it. It is not necessary that I must observe it, just that someone has observed it. In the case of macroscopic objects like the moon and room furnishings, the state had been observed before and thus it is no longer in a superposition of states. Thus the world of macroscopic objects is classical. The issue only arises when we talk about something that has not been observed before, such as the spin of a particle that has been created in a superposition of two states.

The big unanswered question is: What is it about a macroscopic object (the detector) that triggers the collapse of the wave function from a superposition of states to a single observable state? We have talked glibly about this interaction of the state with detectors somehow being the cause but we can also ask what makes something a detector. The detector could be something like a camera or a geiger counter or anything that macroscopically registers the state that the particle is found in so that we can know it. But if we believe that everything in the world is ultimately governed by the laws of quantum laws, which most physicists do, then the detector should also in principle be governed by quantum laws even if it is technically impossible to carry out the calculations.

This brings us unavoidably to the famous (or infamous) Schrodinger’s cat.

In Schrödinger's original formulation, a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal radiation monitor such as a Geiger counter detects radioactivity (a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. If no decaying atom triggers the monitor, the cat remains alive. Mathematically, the wave function that describes the contents of the box is a combination, or quantum superposition, of these two possibilities. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality resolves into one possibility or the other.

This cat is perhaps the most famous cat in history, heard of even by people who have no idea who Schrodinger is or what the cat is supposed to have done. I have never quite understood the fascination with this story. It was created by Schrodinger because he intensely disliked the idea of a states being in a superposition and he felt that by making the state macroscopic, the absurdity of the idea of a cat being in both dead and alive states would be manifest and people would reject it. But his cat is not an argument for or against superposition and is thus an irrelevancy.
[Read more…]

Film review: Bad Shabbos (2025)

In these days of relentlessly depressing news, a good comedy comes as a welcome relief and this is such a film.

It is about an observant Jewish family in New York who host a Sabbath dinner to meet the Midwestern Catholic parents of their son’s fiancée, when something happens that leads to the evening going completely awry.

The humor depends on some extent on the practices of observant Jews on the Sabbath, especially the many restrictions on what you can do, but I thought that it was not offensive. But then, I am not Jewish and hence not the best judge.

Here’s the trailer.

Consciousness, measurement, and quantum mechanics – Part 4

(See Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Also I am going to suspend the limit of three comments per post for this series of posts because it is a topic that benefits from back and forth discussions.)

Even if we decide to treat the microscopic and macroscopic worlds as separate and governed by different laws, they is one place where the two world collide that we cannot ignore. Recall that we said that in the quantum world, many results do not come into existence until they are measured. Any contact at all of a quantum superposition of states with a macroscopic object, however small, can cause the collapse of the wave function. But in order for it to be useful to us, we need to know what the final result was, and that means we need a measurement involving a measuring device whose results we can see, such as a detector like a fluorescent screen, photometer, bubble chamber, geiger counter, and so on. So when we measure (say) the spin or location of an electron, we unavoidably have an interaction of an object that belongs to the classical world (the detector) with an object that belongs to the quantum world and this leads to what is called the measurement problem.

To understand the measurement problem, recall that we start with a quantum system that is prepared so that a particle (say an electron or photon) is created such that we cannot predict which state (spin up or spin down) it will be found in upon measurement. We describe the wave function of this particle as being in a superposition of two states, one spin up and one spin down. (Such a superposition of states is said to be coherent.) This superposition will continue to exist as long as the particle does not interact with anything that can be considered macroscopic, however small. When it does, the wave function is said to abruptly shift from being in a superposition of the two states to just one of the states. (This process is referred to as decoherence.) We can’t predict with certainty which state it will collapse into but if we know the initial wave function (say because it is a solution of the Schrodinger equation that we are able to obtain), we can predict the probability of collapsing into each one.
[Read more…]

Consciousness, measurement, and quantum mechanics – Part 3

(See Part 1 and Part 2. Also I am going to suspend the limit of three comments per post for this series of posts because it is a topic that benefits from back and forth discussions.)

Einstein was a firm believer in what we call objective reality, the idea that objects have properties that exist independently of, and prior to, any observer measuring them. As fellow physicist Pascual Jordan recalled, “We often discussed his notions on objective reality. I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it.” In this case Einstein, who is so often associated with turning our views of space and time upside down, was firmly on the side of the ordinary person in the street in believing in objective reality. He felt that the nature of objective reality required the particle to be spin up or spin down even before any measurement on it and so a complete theory should give solutions that contain that information. The fact that quantum mechanics stopped short of doing so meant, he felt, not that it was wrong but that it must be incomplete, the stepping stone to a more comprehensive and better theory that encompasses it.

But after more than a century, no such theory has emerged and many (probably the overwhelming majority) of physicists have come to accept that the lack of more information than is provided by quantum mechanics is not a failure of the theory but is because there is no more information to be had. In short, there is no objective reality, at least in the quantum world. The theory is indeed telling us everything that we can know and so is complete.
[Read more…]

The Ventures play the theme from Hawaii Five-O

To take a break from the heavy-duty stuff about quantum mechanics, here is a clip of The Ventures playing the theme from the TV program Hawaii Five-O.

I never get tired of this clip. Apart from the fact that The Ventures are one of the great guitar instrumental groups, this one features not one but two drummers driving the beat. One is their regular drummer but here he is joined by the legendary Max Weinberg.

It is astonishing how the two drummers stay synchronized throughout the complex song, even the drum solo.

Consciousness, measurement, and quantum mechanics – Part 2

(See Part 1 here. Also I am going to suspend the limit of three comments per post for this series of posts because it is a topic that benefits from back and forth discussions.)

It looks like I may have not been sufficiently precise in my first post, leading to some confusion, so I am going to take a slight detour from my series of posts on this topic to address an issue that came up in the comments about the nature of the probability and statistics that is used in quantum theory and how it differs from what we use in everyday life, in particular, the nature of the uncertainty in predicting outcomes. (As always with quantum mechanics, since the phenomena involved are invisible to our senses and often counter-intuitive, we have to use analogies and metaphors to try and bring out the ideas, with the caveat that those never exactly represent the reality.)

Let’s start with classical statistics that we use in everyday life in a situation where the results of a measurement are binary. Suppose that we want to know what percentage of a population has heights less that five feet. If we measure the height of a single person, that will be either more or less than five feet. It will not give us a probability. How do we find that? We take a random sample of people and measure their heights. From those results, we can calculate the fraction of people less than five feet by dividing the number in that category by the size of the sample. That fraction also now represents the probability that if we pick any future person at random, that person will be shorter than five feet. When we pick a random person, we do not know which category they will fall into but we do know that it will be either one or the other. What we also believe is, that in the classical world, each person’s height was fixed before we measured it. We just did not know it beforehand.
[Read more…]