Why Quantum Entanglement Scares Me

There have been drastic advances over the past few years in the study of quantum computing. Scientists have been able to entangle particles and have instantaneous communication between two places at once -- key word being instantaneous.

Data already moves fast. My room mate came home tonight and showed me a picture on her phone of her great nephew that was born less than an hour ago over two hundred miles away. That's quick, but not instantaneous. I had a real time chat with a friend of mine today at lunch through instant messaging. It was perceivably fast. He would type something and as he was typing it, I would see that he was in the process of composing his next statement, then I would receive it. That was fast, but not instantaneous. I've been to a shooting range and seen guns being fired and heard the shot less than a second later. Also fast, but not instantaneous. I've gone outside and looked at the sun and the stars and my hand in front of my face. All of those things were perceived by my brain as having happened at that moment because that is when I saw the light reflect off of my hand and shine into my eye. That's light speed, but again, not instantaneous.
Light moves at roughly 186,300 miles per second; a speed we always thought was the universal speed limit. There is no way to know/see/perceive something faster than the time it took the light from the thing being observed to travel to the observer. With quantum entanglement that is thrown out the door.
If my hand in front of my face wanted to tell me something, the fastest way for me to know it would be to see it, light reflecting off of it travels faster than the impulses sent through my nervous system. With quantum entanglement, it is possible for my hand to tell something to my brain faster than light could conduct it. Take that to the next level, two systems could communicate across space faster than the speed of light if they had correspondingly entangled particles -- a sort of f.t.l. Morse Code.

Instantaneous is faster than the speed of light. We aren't yet able to send a signal before the sending happens. That is not physically possible yet, but is something that should be considered seriously. What are the philosophical implications of backwards in time communication?

It would mean that time is something permeable that can be pierced and traversed like space. It would effectively put all of existence at our fingertips. It would also mean that if we can send a message back in time, someone in the future can send one back to us as well, which is what scares me the most.

If a message from the future (however far in advance that future may be) that means one of two things:

1. Our future is destined (at least up until the moment the signal was sent) and that nothing can be changed to that point. Calvin was right and we are predestined to live out our lives and there is no changing it. Our decisions have been made and our lives are simply rail cars on the tracks of time. Bringing into question our level of influence. If all of our decisions have been made and our future is written, where does the responsibility for anything and everything lie?
2. The other is that the future as we are communicating is simply one possibility of how things could be. We are not destined to live up to that future, but that it is one possibility of what could happen. That would bring into question the validity of the data being transmitted and would then take on a more "Sliders" approach to the universe and all its dimensions and alternate realities. 

I have problems with the second possibility. It means that every decision that is made, anything at all that can change the outcome of any event would lead to an alternate reality being spawned. That takes the butterfly effect to new levels. That means that everything that has any permanent effect on the world as it could be perceived has the necessarily requires the same amount of energy as was contained in the Big Bang to be expended at every moment.

I don't think the second outcome is likely, but I don't like the moral implications the first one has either. So while I am excited for the possibilities that traversing time has to offer, I am terrified at what it would necessarily mean.

The Great Eight-Lens Comparison of 2012, Everything at 50mm and one 35mm Zeiss

As you can probably tell I like to nerd out on various things and camera lenses are definitely a thing.
Last weekend I rented a 35mm f1.4 Zeiss Distagon T ZE lens for Canon from BorrowLenses.com
I knew it was going to be a fantastic lens, but I didn't know how much so. Being a total spec whore I thought it would be the best thing since "git cherry-pick" but I didn't want to (and straight up can't afford) to spend nearly two thousand dollars on a lens based solely on its reputation.
After spending a couple of evenings with it I decided that it is a good lens with AMAZINGLY creamy bokeh and is pretty darn quick, but I feel like there wasn't anything I got that I couldn't have gotten with my Tamron 18-270mm with VC (what Tamron calls image stabilization). "Sacrilege!", I can hear you shouting it from here. That may be so, but I feel more comfortable hand-holding an 1/8th second exposure at ~30mm using my Tamron with IS than I did hand-holding the Zeiss without any stabilization.
As a quick aside, the Zeiss is manual focus only, which many cite as a negative, but it didn't bother me one bit as I always (always) shoot everything in manual focus mode in all of my lenses.

After returning the lens, I realized that I took one shot of this chair that is always sitting in the corner of the room, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to actually compare it to the rest of my lenses. The only modifications applied was a uniform white balance applied to all of them in Photoshop CS5.5 (Pixel peepers click for a full resolution image).
So, without further adieu I give you eight of (almost) the same shot with seven different lenses on my Canon EOS Rebel XSi and one shot with my Canon PowerShot SD4500IS.

Canon 50mm f1.8 mk 2 (the nifty fifty)

Canon 50mm f1.8 FD old skool lens with an FD-EF adapter
(I could not for the life of me get it to focus correctly)

Yashica / Auto Yashinon-DX 50mm f1.7 m42 with EF adapter (currently my favorite lens)

Tamron 18-270mm f3.5-6.3 at 50mm (my go-to lens)

Canon 35-80mm f4-5.6 at 51mm

Canon EFs 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 at 50mm

Canon PowerShot SD4500 (Added for shits and giggles)

And the much awaited

Zeiss 35mm f/1.4 Distagon T Lens for Canon EF

The cropping was a little different because I was standing a little closer and it is a different lens; its not identical, but you'll take what I give you.

They are all underexposed because I keep my camera set to under expose by 1 stop because it seems to always blow out the highlights if I let it do what it wants.

BASH Batch Folder Underscore Batch Rename Script

I have a NAS where I backup all my years of photos, but unfortunately I haven't always been consistent with the way I named the folders.
I have always named them year month day and some descriptive name, but the delimiters are what have changed. Sometimes I used underscore "_" sometimes I used dashes "-".
So I spent some time on the interwebs tonight to figure out how to rename them all at once; I wanted to go from underscores to dashes. Here's what I came up with.

for F in *; do if [[ "$F" =  *_* ]]; then mv -v "$F" "`echo "$F" | tr '_' '-'`"; fi; done

This will check all the files or folders in a folder, check to see if it contains an "_" underscore, then rename that file to the same thing but replace the _ with a -.
You can modify this for your own purposes by changing the '_' after tr to 'whateveryouwanttoreplace' and the '-' with 'whateveryouwantthethingreplacedtobe', with all standard disclaimers; YMMV. 
Hope that helps.
If nothing else, now it is somewhere on the internet that I can search for it.