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You are here: Home / Archives for Balloon Juice / Events

Events

Looks Like She Made It! Congratulations, lamh. (we all yell: Surprise!)

by WaterGirl|  May 13, 20206:05 pm| 174 Comments

This post is in: Balloon Juice, Celebrating Jackals, Events, Meetups and social events

Congratulations, lamh!   SURPRISE!

You thought you were done, but we have one last quiz for you:

Looks Like She Made It! Congratulations, lamh. (we all yell: Surprise!) 1Looks Like She Made It! Congratulations, lamh. (we all yell: Surprise!) 2

Cue the music, and then we have cake!

dmsilev baked this lovely cake for you – for real! – and extends his congratulations to you for making it through the grad school grind.  It’s a lot of work, and something to be proud of.

Technically it’s an orange chocolate ganache tart.  We talked it over, and we definitely think there’s enough to share.  I think this is one group activity we can all get behind.

*****

If there’s a song or a GIF or an image or a photo or a movie or anything that you’d like to add in your comment as  “gift” to lamh – and you’re not a front pager – if you send it to me by email or put the link in your comment, I can turn it into a real thing in your comment, rather than a link.

*****

Update:  I am very disappointed that no one spelled out “Happy Graduation!” or “you made it!” on squares of toilet paper with colored markers or sent lamh on a pretend vacation.

Oh, and because I screwed up the time zone, I will pin this post to the top at 8pm (blog time) which is the earliest lamh should get out of her final exam.  (Just for a couple of hours until, hopefully, lamh arrives.)

Looks Like She Made It! Congratulations, lamh. (we all yell: Surprise!)Post + Comments (174)

Gone For Now…

by Adam L Silverman|  December 26, 20196:40 pm| 32 Comments

This post is in: Absent Friends, Balloon Juice, Events, Open Threads, Silverman on Security

Due to technical difficulties with the site, I’ll be logged out of WordPress for ten days to two weeks. I’ve asked that someone send me an all clear email when (if?) they get the problem fixed. But for the next fortnight or however long it takes, I won’t be around as I’m not going to futz around with logging in, making separate journal entries about when I’m logged and what I was doing, logging out, entering that I’m logged out, etc, etc, etc. I expect I’ll be back, provided someone eventually notifies me that it is safe to log back in. It’s just much easier to log out once and stay that way until I get an all clear.

Everyone have a happy and healthy New Year.

Update at 9:15 PM EDT

Just a quick update to clarify in response to some comments. I am not quitting the blog! I am not quitting blogging here! I will be back either on January 5th or sooner if we get an all clear before then. To further clarify: if I can only be logged in when I’m drafting or editing a post or clearing a comment, then it will make posting and commenting difficulty as I have to log off once I hit publish, which means I won’t be logged in to comment. Just think of this as a short vacation.

Open thread!

Gone For Now…Post + Comments (32)

Seattle Meet Up Update: The Meet Upening!

by Adam L Silverman|  August 13, 201910:08 pm| 20 Comments

This post is in: Balloon Juice, Events, Meetups and social events, Open Threads

Despite the complete failure of the staff here at Balloon Juice Actual to get the initial post about a potential Seattle meet up posted in a timely manner, commenter CaseyL has reached out, informed me that a meet up will occur tomorrow night, and provided the details:

We managed to come up with a plan for tomorrow’s meetup, and would appreciate it much if you could do a post tonight so that more of the Seattle area BJers hear about it:

Reservation is at:
Saffron Grill
2132 N Northgate Way, Seattle, WA 98133
At 6:30
There is a FREE parking lot
For 8 people (I will call them and change it to 10)
Under the name: Casey.

Thanks much!

–CaseyL

Open thread!

Seattle Meet Up Update: The Meet Upening!Post + Comments (20)

A Couple of Matters for Your Consideration

by Adam L Silverman|  June 10, 20195:20 pm| 98 Comments

This post is in: Events, Media, Open Threads, Silverman on Security

Nothing too earth shaking, I hope, but there’s a couple of things I’d like to share. The first is that the article adapted from my keynote address at the US Army’s Psychological Operations Regiment’s 100th anniversary regimental dinner is now published. If you are interested, you can find it at this link or on page 26 of the pdf below.

Special_Warfare_32-1_JAN_MAR_2019_web

But wait, there’s more…

Thanks to one of our commenters, who I will let self identify, I have been honored with an invitation to give a keynote address at a digital media/digital news media conference in October 2019. I’ll also be giving the cocktail hour/party teaser talk on the first night and participating in a round table panel. The details on the conference are here. And it is my understanding that the organizers plan to stream this, and, if so, provided John doesn’t have a problem, I’ll put links up here so those so inclined can watch.

To build support for the conference, I’ve been asked to do a weekly column, entitled Thinking Security dealing with issues in the information domain  – information warfare, influence operations, etc – that are, or should be, major concerns for digital publishers, the digital news media, more traditional news media, and consumers of the news. The first column went up at the end of last week and the next one will be up next week. You can find that first column at this link.

Open thread!

A Couple of Matters for Your ConsiderationPost + Comments (98)

What We Left Behind: Only Tonight in Theaters!

by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)|  May 13, 20192:50 pm| 96 Comments

This post is in: Events, Open Threads

Folks,

In case you are a Deep Space Nine nut like myself, or even just a Trekker/ie/whatever you want to label yourself, tonight is an opportunity to see the new documentary on DS9  on the big screen. From my understanding, it’s a one-night special event, but who knows what happens if it proves popular.

I’ve got my tickets and plan to enjoy a nice adult beverage and semi-real food. Should be a lot of fun!

 

It’s being run by Fathom events, those wonderful folks who bring the Met Opera to theaters on select Saturdays.

For more info on the documentary: https://ds9documentary.com/

For more info on tickets or other Fathom events: https://www.fathomevents.com/

 

I do so love DS9 and consider it superior to Babylon 5 in most but not all ways – flame away! I’ve always admired the courage of both shows’ creative teams, along with Twin Peaks’, in setting up the future of quality narrative television. We so needed it, even if I’m not enthused by many popular current programs. For me, my preference grows from DS9’s focus on religion, belief, and identity, and many of the major characters have amazing character evolution.

 

Open Thread, feel free to discuss any and all things Trek-related.

 

What We Left Behind: Only Tonight in Theaters!Post + Comments (96)

For A Good Time In Cambridge This Evening (Tonight!)

by Tom Levenson|  January 9, 201912:44 pm| 50 Comments

This post is in: Events, Readership Capture, Science & Technology

Boston-area jackals:  there’s a cool event going on at MIT tonight.*  Sorry for the short notice, but they didn’t tell me until this a.m.

Anyway: PBS’s NOVA series will be broadcasting a new episode at 9 p.m. tonight.  It’s called “Einstein’s Quantum Riddle” and it will be screened in its entirety (not much pre- in this sneak preview) at MIT beginning at 7, with a discussion to follow.  Details are in the poster below.

The program focuses on an international collaboration to test whether or not quantum entanglement (violations of what is known as Bell’s inequality — an concept that states that quantum mechanics makes predictions that are incompatible with those based on a classical understanding of how events occur.

That understanding, BTW, often called local realism makes two claims: that cause and effect connections cannot occur faster than the speed of light, and that any particle being observed has a real “true” value that exists before any experiment is performed.

It gets significantly more subtle and complicated from there, and well above my pay grade to explain, (though not beyond that of several commenters here).  Most simply: ordinary experience and (more or less) all of physics before 1925 tells us that the world follows what seem like common sense rules:  things can’t happen more quickly than the top speed available to us, and it is possible to make always-consistent objective measurements of what’s going on around us.  Bell’s theorem —  again, this is a cartoon version — says that in quantum mechanics, (a theory that we know works for all kinds of reason, not least the behavior of a lot of the guts of the computer on which I type this), this kind of seemingly obvious experience doesn’t hold true.  Particles can be “entangled”:  connected in a way so that a measurement of one particle in a pair determines what will be observed of the other particle, even if they’re too far apart for one particle to “know” what the other particle has revealed, even if a signal passed between them at the speed of light.

This was exactly what Einstein and two colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, had pointed out in a famous paper in 1935, claiming that this clash between the classical view and the quantum one meant that quantum mechanics had to be incomplete, because “no reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this.”

Unfortunately for Einstein and his EPR colleagues, reality is under no obligation to be reasonable.

Beginning in the seventies, experiments — actual measurements, first on a table-top scale — showed that the quantum view was correct: entanglement does occur.  It violates the local constraint of the speed of light and the requirement that every chunk of a system must have a consistent pre-existing measurement value independent of the choice of what and when to measure it.

Those early experiments were highly suggestive, but not absolutely conclusive, and so, in 2016, an international team of researchers including, on the MIT side, Alan Guth and David Kaiser, devised a way to test entanglement on a galactic scale, using light from a distant star to set a crucial parameter of the experiment.  Using a signal from a far-away source shrunk one of the key remaining loopholes in Bell’s idea.  Since then the team has used light from increasingly distant objects to perform the same role.  Because distance in space is also distance in time — the hundreds, thousands, millions or billions of years it takes any given photon to travel all that way — these new measurements push any possible violation of quantum mechanics ever closer to the origins of our universe.

Anyway, all this will be described, much more clearly (or at least with visual aids) in the film, and then expanded on by the really sharp panel that will follow.

A personal aside: this is a kind of science I truly love:  it is at once fundamental — an exploration of how reality actually works on a deep level — and, at least mostly, purely beautiful.  Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement do have practical implications, especially for computing and cryptography.  But to a great extent, this is a case of human ingenuity performing at a very high level, producing knowledge that is an abstract form of the same kind of cultural achievement that endows us with Gothic cathedrals or a telescope in space that can reveal to us stars in the process of being born.

I’ll climb down from the pulpit now.

So, y’all — if you’ve got a couple of hours this evening — there’s a seat in a lecture theater in the heart of MIT’s campus that has your name on it.

As promised, the details…(to find the room, building 6, number 120, look for it on this interactive map):

*I can’t go, alas: a family obligation of long standing intervenes. I’d be there in spirit, except I keep the spirits in a cupboard in the kitchen.

Images:  NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI), Wide View of ‘Mystic Mountain’ (a star forming region within the CarinaNebula) 2010

William Blake, Isaac Newton, 1795.

 

 

For A Good Time In Cambridge This Evening (Tonight!)Post + Comments (50)

Cincinnati Meet Up Open Thread: Steve in the ATL Edition

by Adam L Silverman|  January 7, 20199:22 pm| 90 Comments

This post is in: Events, Open Threads

From commenter OhioMom:

Steve in the ATL is coming to the CVG on Monday, January 14 and Tuesday, January 15. How about welcoming him with a Cincinnati meet-up?

Steve will be in Blue Ash and Ohio Mom suggests we meet at Slatts Pub on Cooper near Kenwood because it’s relatively quiet for a bar restaurant. But any and all other suggestions welcomed. Leave your preferred day, time and location in the comments.

You all know what to do.

Open thread!

Cincinnati Meet Up Open Thread: Steve in the ATL EditionPost + Comments (90)

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