Monthly Archives: December 2014
No doubt those who regard quantum physics or Einstein’s relativity or even just trigonometry as an impenetrable thicket of unknowable terms and ideas have a hard time believing science could be easy. The lingo alone seems to create an exclusive “members only” club.
The trick is: easy (or difficult) compared to what? Many scientists now disdain philosophy (apparently forgetting what we now call science was once called natural philosophy). They point to the advances of science in the last 500 (or whatever) years and then say that philosophy hasn’t been nearly as successful in 2000 years.
But that’s because science is easy. It’s philosophy that’s hard!
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54 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, CERN, epistemology, fireworks, Galileo Galilei, JFK Rice University speech, John F. Kennedy, Karl Popper, Large Hadron Collider, LHC, rockets | posted in Science
When, oh when, will I learn to keep my mouth shut! After going on about the unseasonably warm weather — three straight days with the temperature locked at 46-ish — and even posting pictures of the vanishing snow…
I wake to what you see here, plus a 25-degree drop in temperature. My (currently still working) indoor-outdoor digital temperature gizmo tells me it’s currently 21 (point nine) outside. Said gizmo also tells me the high today was 32 (point whatever), which was probably at midnight.
So, Hello Winter, I see you found us again. Now go away!
11 Comments | tags: cold, grey skies, snow, temperature, winter | posted in Life
You, dear reader, might wonder about the #2 in today’s title. Obviously, it signifies a second, so you may wonder wither the first. That one wasn’t in the normal catalog, but in Brain Bubbles, and it is, in fact, misfiled due to my own historical lack of precision about what belongs in that catalog. Full-length articles about movies do not.
So today’s post, another meander through three (recommended) movies, two TV shows (one recommended, one not), and a commemoration of the end of a great (cable) TV show, goes in the main catalog where it belongs.
Truth be told, I just couldn’t come up with a better title.
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4 Comments | tags: Aaron Sorkin, Babylon 5, Castle (TV series), Forever (TV series), Johannes Vermeer, Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, Saving Mr. Banks, State of Affairs (TV series), The Newsroom (TV series), Tim Jenison, Tim's Vermeer, Video Toaster, Walt Disney, Whatever Works, Woody Allen | posted in Movies, TV
Sometimes, when discussing the possible existence of God (or Gods), there is the question: “Where is the evidence God exists?” One problem with that question is that different groups (believers and non-believers) are seeking different kinds of evidence. It’s a bit like how different groups — often the same two groups — get stuck on meanings of the word “theory.”
Evidence can be probative, circumstantial or even merely suggestive. When it comes to the question of God, some require probative evidence to prove God’s existence. Others, believing faith is central to belief, require only circumstantial or suggestive evidence.
Here are some thoughts about evidence I find suggestive.
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28 Comments | tags: awe, beauty, belief, Cape Canaveral, circumstantial evidence, Death Valley, evolution, God, Mallory Square, Mt. Everest, North Pole, probative evidence, South Pole, starry sky, suggestive evidence | posted in Music, Religion
Today is a date most folks living in the USA write as 12-13-14, and for anyone who loves numbers a date like that demands a post of some sort. I’d planned to goof off today, maybe catch up on some movies, but there’s just no way I won’t post on a date with a sequence like that.
Of course, others write today’s date as 13-12-14, but they’re not from around here. And there’s just no helping those who insist on writing 2014. The real error is putting the year last — the sensible way is 14-12-13, which allows proper sorting of dates chronologically. We should all change to that immediately.
If it’s not obvious yet, today is just a meandering ramble.
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2 Comments | tags: Cirocco Jones, climate change, female characters, fitted sheets, folded sheets, girl power, global warming, grey skies, humor, John Varley, melting snow, Numberphile, Santa Claus, science fiction, science fiction movies, snow, Titan trilogy, USAnian, winter | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday
One of the things I mentioned in my recent Material Disbelief post was that, if you accept everything physics has discovered in the last 100 years or so — and if you believe in philosophical materialism — you are faced with the very strong possibility that all of reality is some sort of simulation or machine process.
Not only does all the evidence, as well as some basic logic, seem to point in that direction, but as a model of reality it provides easy answers to many of the conundrums of modern physics (e.g. Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” and some basic questions regarding the Big Bang).
Today I want to lay out the details of the arguments for this.
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31 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, Bell's Theorem, DisneyQuest, DNA, EPR paper, Leopold Kronecker, materialism, metaphysics, Philosophical materialism, physicalism, reality, simulations, virtual reality, Zeno's paradoxes | posted in Physics
I learned the lesson so long ago that video rental stores were still a thing. Sometimes the most interesting movies are the ones that sit — one lonely copy — forlornly on the rental shelves. They’re almost lost among the popular movies with their dozens of copies. (Let alone the Big Hits taking up entire shelf sections.)
Movies imitate real life in many ways. The content versus popularity equation is no exception. Often, popular means shallow and bland — by definition inoffensive. (Almost always, greater appeal means less flavor or spice. No surprises.)
But that lonely outlier can be an unexpected and delicious meal!
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9 Comments | tags: A Dangerous Method, Carl Jung, David Cronenberg, Helen Hunt, hysteria, Hysterical, iron lung, Keira Knightley, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Fassbender, Samuel Jackson, Sigmund Freud, The Sessions, vibrator, video rental stores, Viggo Mortensen | posted in Movies
Early this year I wrote an article comparing how we store music in digital versus analog form along with a follow-up article exploring the contrast between them. There is another major consideration that predominates when it comes recording information these days. Quite simply: what are we going to record onto?
How many of you remember (or have even seen) eight-inch floppy disks? How about five-and-a-quarter floppies? Show of hands if you’ve ever actually used a three-and-half inch floppy? Some of you might not even know what a “floppy disk” is!
Not very permanent, were they. Now consider the Rosetta Stone.
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35 Comments | tags: analog, analog recording, digital, digital data, digital format, digital recording, floppy disk, John Naisbitt, punch cards, punch paper tape, Rosetta Stone, Zip drive | posted in Computers
It’s bad enough that it’s winter and cold and dark and I’m stuck inside and my back is bugging me and I’ve got a major case of the seasonal blues.
The icing on today’s cake is the email from the ISP that supports my personal webpage. A large professional organization. (In point of fact, I’d give their support a C- rating at best, but the price is hard to argue with, and you get what you pay for.)
Were dommed I tales yu. “Literally” Dommed!
61 Comments | tags: doomed, misspelling, seasonal blues, spelling, you're, your | posted in Rant
What if, suddenly, you found you could not only read minds but change them? What if the eponymous hero of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh was real, was two-thirds god, was immortal, and — from sheer boredom — had divided his powers of mind with you just so he could have a really good war between the eastern and western hemispheres?
What if you and your brother, both young students, went along on a wild drunken graduation party that spanned a dozen galaxies and were left behind on some primitive no-account planet as a joke. What if, as extremely long-lived energy beings, it was millions of years before anyone remembered and came back for you? What if — from sheer boredom — you’d illegally tampered with the minds of the primitive indigenous apes?
This Sci-Fi Saturday: two authors, two tales, two books each.
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21 Comments | tags: Brenda Clough, Doors of Death and Life, Gilgamesh, How Like a God, paperback books, Parke Godwin, Robert Parker, science fiction, SF Books, Spenser, The Snake Oil Wars, thick books, thin books, Waiting for the Galactic Bus | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday
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