In order to cover for my recent wrist injury (which is getting better, but slowly, thanks for asking), I’ve invited St. Scott Church to fill in a bit.

Scott is a frequent commenter; going out of his way to be helpful when explaining things to non-experts, but with little taste for nonsense from those who ought to know better.  He got an M.S. in Applied Physics from the University of Washington in 1988, and now works as a photographer in Seattle.  Here is his personal website.

Scott will be writing a series of at least 2 posts on the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (and maybe later on, some other topics).

Also, to all those who have left thoughtful questions, sorry that I can’t attend to them all right now.  But I still might respond to a few of them.  (I will of course continue to read and moderate the comments.)

For the past couple months my spam filter (Akismet) has falsely identified a rather large number of legitimate comments as spam.

(For those of you who arrived on the internet yesterday, “spam” is off-topic comments trying to get people to click on links to buy things.  Mostly it is left by “bots” that automatically scan the internet.   When I installed a second layer of protection called “Cookies for Comments” a few months ago, Akismet was processing over a million spam comments a month, causing a slowdown on the wall.org server!  The vast majority of these were caught and removed by the filter, but sometimes it gets it wrong and lets spam through (a “false negative”) or rejects legit comments (a “false positive”).

I’m periodically checking the spam filter to rescue these false positives (just did 2 today), but you can help me out by doing the following:

• Send me an email if you try to leave a legitimate comment and it does not appear on the website within a few comments.  You can find a working email for me on my personal website, which is linked to in the bar at the top of the page.
  .
• If convenient, go ahead and include a copy of your comment in the email.  (Generally it’s a good idea to save long comments on your home computer before submitting, but if you didn’t do this, you can often reclaim it by pressing the `back’ button on your browser.)
  .
  My spam filter keeps a copy of all comments flagged as spam for 15 days, so I probably don’t actually need this, but rarely there are other technical problems that cause comments to disappear.
  .
• Please don’t take it personally if your comment doesn’t appear.  The spam filtering is done automatically by a hidden algorithm, and I don’t have anything to do with it!
  .
  If you are an insecure person, please don’t waste time worrying that maybe you stepped over an invisible line and accidentally insulted me, and therefore I blocked your comments without telling you.   If you are a flesh-and-blood human being, your comment was probably legitimate.
  .
  While I do occasionally remove “by hand” comments that violate the rules, I generally try to notify the person by email, or in that comments section, except for the worst offenders.  So unless you went on a blasphemous tirade or are an obviously-insulting troll, that’s probably not you!  (And even if that is you, you are certainly entitled to respectfully ask by email—once, anyway—for an explanation of why your comment was deleted.)
  .
• All this assumes you left me a real email address.  Of course, if you violated the rules by leaving a fake email address, then you might not receive my explanation.  In that case, you deserve what you get, and I may also delete your comment!  (But sometimes, in the case of commenters otherwise engaging in good faith, I have looked the other way on this issue, in order to show mercy to the weak.)
  .
  Obviously, I promise not to give your email address to the spammers, or otherwise share this information without your permission!
  .
• It is also necessary for your web browser to accept “cookies” in order for you to successfully leave a comment.  If this happens to you, you will be redirected to a page with an explanation & instructions.  If you are wrongly redirected to this page, please send me an email saying so.  Also, if for some reason you don’t want to accept cookies from other websites, you can add an exception for Undivided Looking.

Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling down death by death,
And upon those in the tombs
Bestowing life!

–Paschal troparion

I haven’t been able to write much recently due to a recurrence of tendonitis in my wrist, a repetitive stress injury from writing and typing too much.  I expect this to be temporary; in the sense that it has always gone away before, with enough rest and ice.  (Which is like the smoker who said to an ex-smoker, you’ve only quit once; I’ve quit hundreds of times!)

On a brighter note, I’m also being distracted by job interviews for tenure-track faculty positions at two excellent UC schools (Berkeley & Santa Barbara).  I will not call these permanent positions since such permanence is to be found only in Heaven: life is short.  But it would still be nice to settle down for a few decades… Anyway, these are very exciting places for physics research, and I would be extremely pleased to get an offer from either of them!

I’ve still got plenty of the content you love planned, once I’m past these issues!  There’s a series on “Comparing Religions” that’s almost done, so I might be able to get that out without too much more typing.

I apologize to anyone whose questions I haven’t answered; I’ll email you if I ever get around to it.  But it was nice to see the conversation continue for a while without my needing to continually stoke it.  I will continue to read and moderate the discussion, so you are free to continue talking amongst yourselves…

I…I…I…I…I…  Is death really necessary, just for us to come to an end of our continual self-absorption?