This was news I meant to post here months ago so, it’s kind of stale but, to keep a personal site fresh you gotta start somewhere. So several months ago, towards the beginning of a summer, I saved up the money and bought a bunch of new hardware to assemble into two new desktop boxes. [...]
In science fiction movies, games and television, I’ve seen lots of attempts to depict spatial wormholes and “portals to other universes.” In nearly every case they get the geometry wrong. It doesn’t look like this nor does it look like this. Even a recent image from Scientific American got it wrong. The ex-mathematics and physics [...]
So I read today that scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have received death threats. The LHC death threats are example of ignorance out of control. The risk from the LHC is minimal. How do we know that for certain? Because we know that cosmic rays routinely slam through our planet at energies much higher [...]
There’s an idea that’s been plaguing me for a number of years since I read Max Tegmark’s article in Scientific American. What if there are infinitely many universes that have existed for all eternity? Doesn’t that imply that everything is ultimately meaningless? From a human perspective, I mean. Think about it. If all Hubble volumes [...]
I can find no rational reason for aliens to invade the Earth. If they need energy, water, metals or radioactives there are plenty in space to mined or harvested without dealing with pesky natives. If some super-civilization needed all the metals, silicates and carbon from our asteroid belt, they could just haul it all away [...]
[I think this happened on February 24 of 2008. Toby had returned from his travels in Southeast Asia. The players in attendance were Ralph (Dwalor and Telwyn), Ian (Hilda), Jerry (Chingara), Toby (Stirge and Thalin) and Victor (Mandark). This session ran later than most Toby was the last to leave. Experience rewards were given out [...]
When I was in college back in the middle Eighties, I had a Casio calculator watch. This was the expensive apotheosis of nerdery back then. In the Eighties Japan was kicking everyone’s ass in consumer electronics. At the time microchips had become so cheap that towards the end of the decade, they were giving away [...]
So I haven’t wrote anything here for all of January and most of December. Actually I’ve been writing up tentative entries on the bus to and from work but nothing has jelled up into a good article to post here. It’s the digital equivalent of the horror of the blank page that all authors must [...]