So this is really a miscellaneous post about several things and just an excuse to keep my site from going stale. The animated image is just there so you won’t think this is a complete waste of your time. You have to click the image in order to see the animation. This wonderous animation was [...]
So, after two years, I’ve nearly cut all ties to Facebook. I say “nearly” because I haven’t deactivated my account and do plan to check it occasionally to see what my friends there are doing. What I mean is that I’m no longer going to post anything there nor am I going to respond to [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Yeah, I’ve ranted about this before. I think it bears repeating. What is Thanksgiving for? Really? If it’s supposed to celebrate national identity, we’ve already got a zillion holidays for that, Veteran’s Day and Independence Day for starts–and some that some of you out there wouldn’t consider as days of national pride like MLK Day [...]
Some guy went and built himself a giant robot suit to cruise around in! I mean, think of the legions and legions of ten year olds and former ten year olds who’ve always wanted to do something like this! What kid hasn’t dreamed up building something so terrifying that they’d have to call in the [...]
So I’m quoted, or rather my alter-ego is quoted, talking about drugs that boost certain limited aspects of intelligence. This, in all things, in Spin Magazine–tsk, tsk. Ah me, famous at last. DARPA researchers develop a method to accelerate our ability to sift through visual data. If you’re caught on video, they will find you [...]
I suppose I should say something about what has been happening on the Gulf Coast these last 7 days. A Randy Newman song, which this post is titled after, has been surfacing in my head over and over again these last few days. I don’t know what else to say. The whole thing is FUBAR [...]
Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the use of nuclear weapons on Japan in World War II. Rather than go into the justification or lack of justification for those events, I’d rather point to the fact that there are still about 20,000 of these weapons in the world today. And just remind us how horrifying [...]