Category Archives: Science
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
This is a post I began quite some time ago thinking it would be a quick and easy one, since it concerns a topic I know very well.
But — perhaps due to my own inability to be brief — it turned out to be more involved than expected. Maybe I just have a hard time leaving out all the details. In any event, I set it aside until I had more time.
Then I had an idea for making this post a bit more fun (at least for me). The problem was: I needed to build a theatre! You see, this post is about color and light.
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10 Comments | tags: blue, cyan, green, light, magenta, primary colors, red, secondary colors, yellow | posted in Basics, Science
The maps you find in some buildings and malls have a little marker flag that says, “You are here!” The marker connects the physical reality of where you are standing at that moment with a specific point on a little flat map.
Your GPS device provides your current location in terms of longitude and latitude. Those numbers link your physical location with a specific point on any globe or map of the Earth.
But to fully represent our location, longitude and latitude are not quite enough. (We might be high overhead in a hot air balloon!) To fully represent our position, we need a little more ‘tude, but in this case that’s altitude, not attitude.
We need three (and only three) coordinates to completely represent our location in space. This post is about why.
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18 Comments | tags: 2D, 3D, 4D, 5D, altitude, Calabi-Yau, Cartesian, coordinates, dimensions, latitude, longitude, polar coordinates, rectangular coordinates | posted in Basics, Math, Physics, Science
This is a post I’ve had sitting on the shelf for when I wanted an easy one. I don’t know about other bloggers, but it takes hours for me to crank out a post. Some can take most of a day. (There are some where I spent days making graphics, and an upcoming one has work that took weeks! (You saw a glimpse in a recent post!))
The situation this concerns is long past. This is no rant, just a piece on a life change that surprised me a little, made me sad a little, and which doubly reflected the end of an era.
I could write this any time, but today I got another plea from Scientific American magazine. Again they beg me to come back. Again I won’t.
This, then, is an open letter to SciAm, a dear old friend with whom I’ve parted ways.
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17 Comments | tags: Carl Sagan, Scientific American, trees | posted in Life, Science
This may be the first actual Brain Bubble I’ve ever posted! The original intent was to provide a mechanism for sudden (short) thoughts I wanted to record or put out there. But the BB posts quickly turned into mini collections of thought bubbles.
But today I started trying to get into Immanuel Kant (again), and that naturally led to a bit of Wiki Walking.
It was when I got to the article about the subject-object problem that a sudden brain bubble burst!
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2 Comments | tags: brain mind problem, David Chalmers, Immanuel Kant, subject-object problem, Theory of Consciousness | posted in Brain Bubble, Philosophy, Science
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