Actually, if you would have read past that point, you'd have seen that the process is actually very rigorously defined. It's when whatever particle you use to observe the system interacts with the system. So if you bounce a photon of an electron, that's the observation, not when the photon comes back to hit the photo receptor.
The problem is that this rigorous definition is way past what you want to go into in a beginners guide. A good place to start is looking up quantum decoherence. But the short version is that without an observation, all quantum states are superimposed and we don't know which one the particle or system is in. To get this information, we need to probe it, and since all the possible probes we have are other elementary particles, there is going to be some interaction and the system drops into an Eigenstate with the energy or momentum you wanted to observe (obviously not at the same time, see the uncertainty principle.

In your example, the bat doesn't observe the system directly, the "observation" happens when the photon that hit the bat's eye bounced off whatever it bounced off to get there. Or when the sonar pulse sent by the bat hit whatever it bounced off off.

(and yeah, I know this is so not mathematically rigorous, or correct to the 10th order)

Nice polemic, and echoed widely. On the other hand, California leads the entire US by "value added by manufacturing" and on its own dwarfs the entirety of the Southern states the authors hold up as an example. For example, according to the US Census Bureau, California created $254bln in added manufacturing value with 1.3 million workers in 2008, South Carolina: $37bln with 230000 workers. If you crunch the numbers, you'll also see that California produces more value per worker than most other states. And until the meltdown last year, one of the primary car factories in the US was Nuumi in Fremont, CA, actually the Toyota plant Tesla bought.

Yes, once prices come down and everyone can do it, it'll probably electric car manufacturing will probably move to other states and California will get started on the next thing. But to get this off the ground initially, Silicon Valley is a great spot, because all the expertise you need to debug the process is within a two hour drive.

And by the way, Porsche, Mercedes, Audi, and BMW main factories are in Germany's most expensive areas, very few are in the more depressed parts (although Wolfsburg is really depressing).

2nd World? My iPhone worked better in the Masai Mara National Park in Kenya than here in San Francisco.

So, IRTFOPMA (I Read The Fine Original PLoS Med Article), and it seems the problem is going to solve itself. According to this graph, we'll run out of Republicans if health reform doesn't get passed.

Bada Bing

Weirdly, this article about saline face modification in Bizarre magazine. Makes me want to reread Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic (but definitely not watch the movie again)

I don't remember that the US carpet bombed every large North Vietnamese city. Even Rolling Thunder had lots of restrictions what the USAF, Navy and Marines could hit.

Wow, bad astronomy indeed. For the odds of a meteorite striking one of many airplanes, the speed of the airplane is pretty much irrelevant. His calculation is sort-of correct(ish) for a single airplane and a single meteorite. But since we have thousands of airplanes and hundreds (or thousands)of meteorites in the atmosphere at any point in time, it evens out to the relative surface area of all planes.

A simple picture of it: all planes fly in a shell around the earth between 10000 and 13000 meters, all meteorites that don't break up in the upper atmosphere go through that shell. So the ones in the fraction covered by the combined surface area of planes hit planes. Strictly speaking, it would be the fraction of volumes in a shell that's as thick as the average plane is high, but would actually increase with slower meteorites, not decrease.

I hope the "Buy American" guy with his Hummer never walks into a Walmart. He might have a coronary.

Yes, I was also disappointed that they use bioelectricity as a euphemism for "burning crops in a power plant". Wiring together a huge field of cucumbers stuffed with zinc and copper disks would have been so much cooler.

Star Wars makes so much more sense now.

That this got modded Insightful is the best argument yet for adding tags to /.

...calculations to come up with "Oh, I'll bet you do, you Canadian ponch."?

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stupid subject character limit

I mean MLB even outlawed aluminum bats. So now they are going to allow Seattle to use lasers and stuff? And why only against Pittsburgh? They aren't even in the same league.