Category Archives: Science
I woke early to the sound of thunder this morning. It was hot enough earlier in the week to force me back to enclosed air conditioning. Friday, I realized it had cooled off enough to open the windows again. I very much prefer breezes blowing through my place. The weather witches mis-predicted rain Friday and Saturday but got it right Sunday morning.
I lay in bed sleepily thinking how much I enjoy the sound of rain and thunder. That thought was immediately followed by the realization that I needed to wake up and go close some windows! As the rain continued, I began to wonder if the Twins game today would be rained out, but now it’s just partly cloudy, so no problem.
I thundered yesterday, but on Sundays I try to be sunny (or just partly cloudy).
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8 Comments | tags: canine, Canis lupus familiaris, dogs, love, needles, NOVA, phobias, thunder, time, University of Virginia sundial | posted in Life, Science
If you have read this blog much, you know that a topic that interests me greatly is the nature of consciousness. How is it that a three-pound clump of cells, a brain, gives rise to the rich experience of consciousness, our minds? Cognitive scientist David Chalmers termed this “the hard problem” of consciousness, and as it stands we really have no idea what consciousness is (and yet we all experience it all the time).
Back in 1979 cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach, a book that attempts to answer the question. GEB, as it became known, was a large book most took as a random tour of interesting scientific ideas. But GEB did have a theme, so 25 years later Hofstadter wrote another (much shorter) book to re-state his case.
That book is called I Am a Strange Loop, and it has much worth considering!
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46 Comments | tags: brain, David Chalmers, Douglas Hofstadter, experience, GEB, mind, Paris Hilton, Philosophical zombie, Theory of Consciousness | posted in Philosophy, Science
Over the last two days I’ve written about a way of viewing words, sentences, even entire books, as single (very large) numbers. We do that by treating the characters in the string as “digits” in a number system we define. Technically speaking, we interpret the string as a number written in some large radix.
This is actually what we do every time we look at a written number. For example, we interpret the four-character text string “2013” as representing the numeric value two-thousand-and-thirteen. We do this easily, because we’ve grown up with the base 10 number system, decimal. The systems I’ve written about simply extend the concept.
Today, as a Sideband, I thought I’d get into some of the more technical details.
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Leave a comment | tags: ASCII, CP-1252, decimal, hexadecimal, Mayans, number systems, Python, radix, Sumerians, Unicode, UTF-8 | posted in Computers, Math, Sideband
Yesterday I introduced you to the idea of words as numbers. There are many ways to create a map between words and numbers. For example, we could assign them the number that represents their position in the dictionary. That would make words that start with “A” have smaller numbers while words that start with “Z” would have the largest numbers.
There are also ways to treat the words themselves as numbers. We can interpret the letters the same way we do digits. Each letter has an assigned numeric value, and then a string of letters—just like string of digits—forms a number. The scheme I showed you yesterday allows us to treat (only!) single words as numbers.
Now let’s extend this so that entire sentences—or even entire books—become numbers!
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2 Comments | tags: big numbers, number systems, numbers, positional notation, Rudy Rucker, words, zero | posted in Basics, Math
Today I’d like to introduce you to a concept I picked up from mathematician Rudy Rucker in his 1987 book, Mind Tools (The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality). I’ll warn you now that there is some math ahead (but no math homework—unless you want to). It won’t get any more complicated than multiplication and addition, but we will be dealing with some extremely large numbers (so large they are more ideas than numbers).
The end result is that we’re going to tie together the written word with numbers. I’m going to show you how every word, every sentence, every book, magazine and blog article can be reduced to a single (very large) number. That we can do this provides a foundation we can use to discover some amazing things about mathematical reality.
It may sound dry or intimidating but stick with it! You just might find it worthwhile.
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10 Comments | tags: base 10, base 2, binary, decimal, number systems, positional notation, Rudy Rucker | posted in Basics, Math
I misspent my younger days in the warm climes of Southern California. In particular, I went to high school and college there. I moved to the Midwest about seven years after college. For many, college was the end of anything resembling much in the way of time to call their own. I have many fond memories of idle times in perfect weather!
People who know me know I have a pretty intense work ethic. They also know I have a pretty intense party ethic. (Truth is I’m just intense. Period. Work hard; play hard; relax hard.) This past week — my first week into retirement — I’ve been relaxing hard.
And the weather has been just glorious this week. So far, retirement is aces!
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1 Comment | tags: algebra, backgammon, humor, math humor, peach daiquiri, pi, retirement, weather | posted in From My Collection, Life, Math
The other day I was watching a TNT rerun of Castle, a show I recently decided to check out and discovered I liked. I’m actually vaguely embarrassed — not in liking the show, it’s a good show — because I didn’t realize the male lead, Nathan Fillion, is Malcolm from Firefly (and the movie based on it, Serenity).
A while back (probably when they first began airing older episodes), TNT was running a lot of ads for the show, and I kept thinking, “Gee, that guy looks so familiar.” It took another blogger reviewing the show to make the connection. (I’m oddly bad with faces sometimes.)
It’s a good show, but this isn’t about Castle so much as coffins and creepy things.
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18 Comments | tags: Abby Sciuto, bugs, Castle, coffins, Firefly, Nathan Fillion, NCIS, NOVA, snakes, spiders, venom | posted in Brain Bubble, Science
I find myself in an increasing funk the last few weeks. By now I’m feeling maximally funky, but unfortunately not in the good way. Funky often refers to smell, and in this case the increasing stink is mental. I’m just … fed up, halfway between tired and disgusted, many miles south of annoyed.
Work accounts for much of that, perhaps all of it. Yet another week of literally zero progress. In fact there was a setback: vendor work that didn’t, and the vendor is being difficult about dealing with it. I seem to be on the IT project equivalent of the Titanic (and there are a scary number of parallels).
And for a variety of reasons I’m feeling a strong sense of impedance mismatch with the world.
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9 Comments | tags: Bill Gates, buffalo, internet, Joni Mitchell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technology | posted in Computers, Life, Science, The Interweb
“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which the most crucial elements — transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting, profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995
I ran across the above quote on a blog, and it really hit home on a point I’ve been pondering and struggling with recently. It has to do with that line about how “almost no one understands science and technology.” It has to do with how weary I am of living in that world.
But rather than rant about it, here are some other quotes I like from a truly great man and wonderful scientist.
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7 Comments | tags: Carl Sagan, Cosmos, space, space exploration | posted in Quotes, Science
In Monday’s post I started writing about light and color. I described how white light can be created by adding three primary colors (red, green, blue), and how mixing any two result in secondary colors (yellow, cyan, magenta).
I went on to describe how subtracting two of the secondaries gives you the primary color they have in common, and how subtracting all three filters out all color, giving you black. The secondary combinations are the negative of the primary ones (e.g. blue is “anti-yellow”). I also touched on how color is the “pitch” (frequency) of light and that X-rays, radio waves, microwaves and gamma rays are all forms of light.
Today I continue the topic by exploring some details and nuances.
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5 Comments | tags: blue, cyan, green, ink, light, magenta, primary colors, red, secondary colors, yellow | posted in Basics, Science
Logos con carne 