No car and snowboarder? What do you do? Take your bike up to Tahoe (hopefully it's motorized) with your gear and your snowboard strapped on your back? Comes in handy when going downhill, you can use the board as your wings and fly above the crowd waiting in that giant parking lot that is I-80 on a Sunday evening.

So far, I had three options: rent a car, go with friends that are willing to drive, or hitch a ride with unknown strangers on craigslist or one of the carshare sites. Each of the three came with advantages and disadvantages:

• renting a car definitely wins points for being the most independent way to get to Tahoe. You can even rent the car and then look for friends or strangers to go with you, share the cost, and maybe even drive some of the time. The drawback is mostly that it's expensive (since you don't have a car, you have to get insurance) and that most rental car agencies don't have snowboarder-friendly policies. For instance, most agencies in town close on the weekend, so that you'd have to rent your car on Friday to return it on Monday even if you just need it on Sunday
• going with friends the funnest way of going anywhere on earth, is dependent on everybody's schedule. If you have friends like mine, who are constantly on the move, it's hard to do anything short notice. They'll have planned the weekend already by the time you call and say there is going to be snow in the mountains (yes, I know, another sign you are growing old is when your friends pre-plan their weekends)
• random car shares is theoretically a wonderful idea: you pay a moderate amount of money (typically gas/part of the gas), you can arrange for a pickup, you can choose the type of people you are going to meet and, best of all, you actually get to meet people that might become friends! The downside? Would you really want to make your snowboarding day depend on some random stranger? Imagine they don't show up at all, show up late, show up drunk and stoned, show up drinking and smoking pot, and are not willing to share?

There is no topic in elementary physics as odd as quantum mechanics. Once you learn the formalism, it is easy to apply (although the mathematics required can be daunting). The experimenters say, on the other hand, that the results you get from quantum mechanical computations are accurate within the limits of measurement.

Problem is, there is no reason for that. We are all a little surprised by how accurately QM models the world. It's as if God in his or her infinite wisdom had decided to choose QM as the infinitesimal model of the world on a whim.

The problem, you see, is that there is absolutely nothing necessary about QM. It certainly suffices the requirement to make sense in the everyday realm, but in the microscopic it sounds and feels just like one of many possible descriptions of physical reality.