Month: June 2008

Leggett inequality

A team of physicists in Vienna has devised experiments that may answer one of the enduring riddles of science: Do we create the world just by looking at it? Leggett’s theory was more powerful than Bell’s because it required that light’s polarization be measured not just like the second hand on a clock face, but over an entire sphere. In essence, there were an infinite number of clock faces on which the second hand could point. For the experimenters this meant that they had to account for an infinite number of possible measurement settings. So Zeilinger’s group rederived Leggett’s theory for a finite number of measurements. There were certain directions the polarization would more likely face in quantum mechanics. This test was more stringent. In mid-2007 Fedrizzi found that the new realism model was violated by 80 orders of magnitude; the group was even more assured that quantum mechanics was correct.

TileStack

HyperCard is back. Now to find those old disks…

The good news for fans of HyperCard is that once we realized the similarities between what we were doing and what HyperCard had done, we decided to embrace the connection 100%. As a result, we’ve set out to have TileStack support and be compatible with HyperCard in as many ways as possible. That’s why we took the time to build an importer that can convert your old HyperCard stacks into TileStacks, and why, when it’s feasible, we model features of TileStack around the concepts found in HyperCard.

2022-04-22: TileStack didn’t last, but the Internet archive now has emulated stacks. I certainly remember the funky clip art in one of them.

Yahoo goes it alone

However, I have to lament yet more needless reinvention of contact schema. Why is this a problem? Well, as I pointed out about Facebook’s approach to developing their own platform methods and formats, having to write and debug against yet another contact schema makes the “tax” of adding support for contact syncing and export increasingly onerous for sites and web services that want to better serve their customers by letting them host and maintain their address book elsewhere.

why didn’t y! use opensocial instead?