Just for fun, here are a bunch of meme images I’ve made recently. Most of them were for the Notes section of Substack (its version of tweets). They’re all just my version of interesting memes I’ve seen or good lines that I thought deserved a nice image. Enjoy…
Tag Archives: Albert Einstein
Pi Day Friday
Happy Pi Day! Also, happy 146th birthday to Albert Einstein. (I love that his birthday is Pi Day. Seems appropriate and makes it so easy to remember.) Over the years, I’ve written quite a bit here about the weirdly omnipresent transcendental number we call pi (p) — 3.14159 (roughly speaking).
As such, I won’t go into it again here today. (Though I do plan something for my Substack blog — where there is a fresh audience for old posts.)
This is actually a Friday Notes post, although — change for the new year— I’m dropping the standardized title format I’d started using for day-based category posts.
Thoughts About Prayer
One of the more interesting sermons I heard during my last bout of churchgoing involved the notion that prayer wasn’t necessary because God knows what’s really in our hearts. Per the dogma of Christianity, that’s actually a true point. (Albeit perhaps a surprising one for a pastor to preach.)
It points out a key distinction between theism and deism. In the former, most religions, God is personally involved with us and hears our prayers (God’s responses have always been a different matter.) In the latter, God is not personally involved and doesn’t.
On the other hand, some see prayer as merely a form of meditation.
BB #92: Actually Using Trig
Today (3/14) is Pi Day. People everywhere (or at least math geeks everywhere) are baking decorated pies (or cakes or cookies) to celebrate. And while this is yet another math-y post, it’s not about pi. I’m more of a tau guy, anyway, so I celebrate Tau Day (6/28), because I get twice the (pizza) pie.
Today is also Albert Einstein’s birthday, which I’ve always thought was a cool coincidence. He’s 145 now (and still being widely misquoted).
But this post isn’t about him either.
BB #80: Gravity Waves
Being retired, along with doing all my TV watching via streaming services, has the consequence of almost completely disconnecting me from the weekly rhythm. Weekends mean nothing when every day is Saturday. To create some structure, I follow a simple schedule. For instance, Mondays I do laundry and Thursdays I buy groceries.
More to the point here, Monday (and sometimes Tuesday) evenings are for YouTube videos, many of which are science related. Last night I watched Jim Baggott give two talks at the Royal Institution, one about mass, the other about loop quantum gravity (LQG).
In the latter, Baggott mentioned gravity waves and that generated a Brain Bubble.
World of Lies
I’ve been thinking about an aspect of modern life that bothers me at least as much — if not more — than the anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-thought, bias of our culture.
It’s bad when emotions are elevated above rational thinking, that what matters most is how one feels. It undermines our future when that is not guided by understanding and thoughtfulness. And all too often those feelings don’t involve compassion and acceptance, but fear, hate, and rage.
What’s worse, what makes we wonder if we’ll ever find a decent path again, is that we’ve become a culture of lies.
Our Own Words
In Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty famously declares that words mean what he wants them to mean. I’ve known people to declare the same thing — that, for whatever reason, they can use their own meanings for words. (To be clear, Lewis Carroll was mocking the idea.)
While ideas matter more than the words used to express them, it’s a lot more challenging to communicate and discuss those ideas without a shared vocabulary. A common language that is rich and detailed makes the expression of ideas all the more precise and accurate.
This is why con artists prefer convoluted language: it’s a mask.
Old School Viral
Remember when “going viral” didn’t mean hospitalization and possible death? (Obviously if we go back even further to the original meaning, it did.) I had an old post go briefly and mildly viral last week. Big traffic spike with a very rapid tail-off. Most bemusing.
I’ll tell you about that, and about a spike on another post, this one weirdly seasonal — huge spike ever September for three years now. I have no idea what’s going on there. Most puzzling.
There is also a book about the friendship and conflict between Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger that I thoroughly enjoyed despite it not being my typical sort of reading (I’ve never gone in much for either history or biography).
SR #X5: Still No FTL Radio?
Back in 2015, to celebrate Albert Einstein’s birthday, I wrote a month-long series of posts about Special Relativity. I still regard it as one of my better efforts here. The series oriented on explaining to novices why faster-than-light travel (FTL) is not possible (short answer: it breaks reality).
So, no warp drive. No wormholes or ansibles, either, because any FTL communication opens a path to the past. When I wrote the series, I speculated an ansible might work within an inertial frame. A smarter person set me straight; nope, it breaks reality. (See: Sorry, No FTL Radio)
Then Dr Sabine Hossenfelder seemed to suggest it was possible.
The Hexagon
I hadn’t really planned to, but it’s both Pi Day and the birthday of Albert Einstein. As a fan of both the number and the man, it seems I should post something.
But I’ve written a lot about pi and Einstein, so — especially not having planned anything — I don’t have anything to say about either right now. In any event, I’m more inclined to celebrate Tau Day when we have double the pi(e). I do have something that’s maybe kind of vaguely of pi-ish. It’s something I was going to mention when I wrote about Well World.
It’s a little thing about hexagons.
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