Suicide is a disturbing topic that most of us would rather avoid thinking about. Recently I spoke with an old friend of mine. He was shaken up because just the previous day a work colleague and friend, a middle-aged man, had committed suicide. He said he was a cheerful, fun-loving person, hence his death came as a great shock. [Read more…]
The game tic-tac-toe is something only very young children enjoy. Before long one learns that one can always avoid losing and if both players discover this, then you have only drawn games. But via Cory Doctorow I learn of a variation called Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe that is extremely easy to learn but promises a quantum leap in the strategy required as well as in challenge and fun. [Read more…]
As children growing up in Sri Lanka, we were addicted to the game Monopoly. When a bunch of us cousins got together during school vacations, we would play games over and over again late into the night, with a lot of shouting and laughter. [Read more…]
I am definitely not a gourmet when it comes to food and drink. My senses of taste and smell are not highly developed and I do not frequent fancy restaurants. My idea of a good eating experience is to order familiar take out dishes from local Chinese, Thai, Indian, and Mexican restaurants. My reaction to food consists of just three categories: good, okay, or bad. [Read more…]
Thanks to all those who provided excellent comments (and sent private emails) in response to my request for help in understanding the compatibilistic view of free will. I have been reading them carefully and trying to digest them and will be posting a follow-up soon. [Read more…]
Ken Wilson died on June 15. He won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1982 when he was at Cornell University, and then moved to Ohio State University in 1988 which is where I got to know him. [Read more…]
As part of my series on the Higgs boson, I mentioned that it used to be that we thought of objects in the macroscopic (‘classical’) world as consisting of either particles or waves while in the microscopic (‘quantum’) world, we had wave-particle duality, where entities had both properties. Both worlds were governed by different laws. [Read more…]
I am a hardline materialist. I think the material world is all that there is and I have no reason to believe in the existence ofany nonmaterial entities. I did not start out with this view as an a priori philosophical premise. Rather I have arrived at it over time as the only way that I can make sense of the world as I see experience it. [Read more…]
Three companies in the Czech Republic have created a flying bicycle. They have a prototype that is controlled remotely at present, rather than having a human rider.
Pretty cool, I thought.
(Via Machines Like Us.)
For reasons that are obscure to me, Andrew Sullivan and his blog The Dish are highly popular. He is often cited as someone whose opinion is worth considering and is a frequent guest on talk shows. But he has always struck me as someone who has no internal compass to guide him but worships power and those who possess it. The only purpose he serves to me is as a reliable indicator of where the boundaries of conventional wisdom lie, because he cruises close enough to give himself the air of a daring thinker while not threatening the current social order. [Read more…]