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…]
When I came across this story about a person getting killed in an attempt to retrieve a cellphone that had fallen on rail tracks, I was saddened but not surprised. Some people are really attached to their phones, seeing them as almost their lifeline to the rest of the world and feel lost and isolated if separated from it. [Read more…]
In this article, Jason Marlin describes what it felt like to be hit by a direct lightning strike. [Read more…]
All of us know the rule of thumb that says that one calendar year for a dog corresponds to seven years for a human, though the origins of the formula are unknown. But this is a very rough approximation because small dogs age more quickly early on (for the first two years it is 12.5 years per human year for small dogs, 10.5 for medium-sized dogs, and 9 for large dogs) and then age more slowly later. In other words, smaller dogs have a truncated childhood and extended adulthood when compared with bigger dogs. There is a calculator that enables you to calculate more accurately the equivalent age of your dog for a certain number of breeds.
There are two things about dogs that immediately strike an observer and those are the huge diversities in size and lifetimes within this single species. Dogs range from the tiny Chihuahua (2-6 lbs) to the massive Spanish Mastiff (121-154 lbs). Such diversity gives us a unique window to study how size affects aging. [Read more…]
The actor seems to be deeply interested in science.
(This clip aired on May 30, 2013. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)