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All right, welcome to Arts and Ideas in the air, under the tent, and around Baltimore.
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Your daily news podcast for the goings ons here at Arts and Ideas.
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And I've got to say, today is a really lovely day.
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I say this a lot, but it's really been beautiful weather.
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I mean, I just can't get over how gorgeous this September has really been, and I am grateful
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to be able to have an office that is a big tent out in the field.
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You know, we don't really have any bug issues, you know, there's some, but pretty much nothing
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really bothersome.
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And it's just been very, very breezy and cool and warm and sunny and just all of them combined
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is just amazing.
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Anyway, the goings ons today.
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So our first JC team is now done.
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Yesterday we passed a rule saying that every day that we don't have a JC, the current team
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gets a half day served, and the first team has now been completed under that new regime.
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So tomorrow we'll start with the second team and we'll see if we have any JC cases.
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And let's see, what else?
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Still some more gaga pit playing today.
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I believe we might see some photos of that in the newsletter later this week.
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There's a structure that's slowly forming around a fallen tree right next to the gaga
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pit.
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So that's exciting to see just how that will turn out.
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At one o'clock and perhaps still going on, I'm not sure, it was a history session run
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by Josh.
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I believe the topic today was safety bicycles and how that interacted with feminism.
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On Friday we're going to have Article Club, I believe at 11am, and the article is a short
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story by Asimov called Profession.
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I've heard some glowing reviews from it from some school media members who have been reading
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it.
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So that's exciting.
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I hope we have a good turnout.
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And then another item of note is tomorrow night at 7pm is our assembly meeting.
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This is open to all students, staff, and parents of students.
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Staff are meeting today to kind of figure out a good agenda and that email should hopefully
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be going out today to remind everyone about the meeting.
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I believe that is all the goings ons that I am aware of.
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There are of course lots, oh, there was one more thing.
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We are starting to actually have our computer daily assignments starting.
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We collected all the preferences today of students and hopefully that process will go
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smoothly.
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If not, I'm sure we'll have some JC cases, which is always good.
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Anyway, so that concludes the daily news.
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It is wondrous Wednesday, so where either something that one ponders and wonders about
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or just something kind of wondrous.
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Today I thought I'd just mention something from my quantum mechanics experience, namely
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the double slit experiment.
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So for those who are not familiar, the idea is you have a wall or some kind of barrier
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with two slits and you aim something like electrons or photons at those slits and you
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see what happens.
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Basically what happens is if you just have one slit, you see this gathering like everything
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just goes through the slit.
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If you have two slits, all of a sudden you'll see interference patterns, meaning you'll
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have patterns of light and dark, let's say using photons, the particles of light.
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So you have this interference band and that's cool and you're like, okay, light's a wave.
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But then you can put detectors behind the slits to decide which slit something went
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through.
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Now a wave usually goes through both, but if you put these detectors on there, all of
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a sudden it's as if it was just one slit and so the interference pattern disappears.
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You still get sort of this gathering on the far wall or on your screen or whatever and
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so because we have measured it in the sense of a particle, it seems to have kind of collapsed
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and started to behave like a particle.
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That's sort of the general thinking.
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So that's kind of the double slit experiment.
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It's often considered like one of those mysterious things that leads to the idea of particle
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or electrons or photons being both a particle, something with a definite position and a wave
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which is just kind of spread out all over the place.
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And depending on what one is doing to it, you'll see one behavior or another.
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Now that's kind of a standard viewpoint.
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There's another viewpoint which I might bring up next week, but to think about it a bit,
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one clue as to what's going on is you can dial down the intensity and so that even with
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the two slits open, essentially kind of just one particle goes through.
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So you just see like one dot hit the screen and as you go over time, you can see the interference
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pattern build up.
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So there is an interference pattern, but it's always being conveyed by a single sort of
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dot at a time hitting the screen.
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So there's your clue.
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We'll see if we can resolve it next week.
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Hope everyone's having a great day.
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Hope everyone got to experience the wondrous weather and beautiful sunshine and stretch
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their legs and enjoy the open air.
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Have a good day and see y'all later.