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Alwin:
Just finished reading the the book 4% universe by Richard Panek, and would recommend to anyone interested in a casual history about Dark Matter.
To anyone who is knowledgable the reasoning, behind why dark matter is not just (matter between the seat cushions ie. dust and gas between stars etc), would love to hear more about this.
Personal thoughts on possible causes:
posted this question on Quora:
Hello Astrophysicists, a very specific question for you.
It seems that the Reimannian ‘rubber sheet’ model of spacetime is useful in describing phenomena that we observe. Some examples below.
My question is, what other exotic geometries may arise and are allowed by the fabric.
For eg. I can see a ‘polyp’ or scrunched ball geometry similar to a sock wrapped in a bedsheet during the wash, that would be inaccesible by most other points on the sheet, but still made from the same ‘sheet’.
This would be essentially a untouchable region made from the same fabric of space time.
Is this possible and has this been theorized? Curious to hear more.
Thank you
Queen Elizabeth sends email to US Secretary of defense in 1976 to open the connnection between England and the US for the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE)
I think of myself as long lived. Growing up in a computer store, seeing many twists and turns within the technology space – I often bounce around as a tech veteran – then you see this, the Queen of England trying email for the first time in 1976 and realize that those among us are much longer lived.. having seen more.
Her email address was hme2 (no hostname to my knowledge). The system was made redundant for military reasons (assured retaliation in case of attack) and its design is ingenious in serving that task. Something I’d like to write about one day.
Enjoy the pic
Just a brainstorm. If the power is provided from above the center of gravity, then it will be easier to land. Sent to @ElonMusk through twitter. : )
Alwin’s design proposal for a smoother vertical rocket landing.
It was my first time at CES this year (2017) and was thrilled to see so many products and innovative ideas under one roof. I guess under any other year, things may be highly seasonal like fashion, but because we are changing as a society so quickly technologically, it really was a display of the next generation ahead to some extents, not just cyclical.
I have been reading the press – which just covered things according to flash/cool factor – but stepping back one, there seemed to be some inarguable themes as competition between two standards eventually leans a certain way. I’ll focus on VR because it is so much of a personal interest area.
This is forward-looking and may not play out in one-year but believe the long term advantages prove that one way of doing things is much better than the others.
Also cool but unrelated to VR was that so many smart objects were on view. Smart hairbrush, smart toothbrush, smart suitcase etc. It likely will be an option for those who can afford it. The predictions people made years ago will likely J-curve change into tangible change for the societies who are exposed to these new products.
The watchmaker analogy as it is known, made by William Paley states that a complex design, such as an eye, implies a designer….
For whatever reason, this thought popped into my head one day while in the shower*.
The role of ‘feature level’ in discussing how a machine is naturally selected and evolves is critical. The order of ‘features’ can be inferred by deduction and something which I didn’t really get until well.. today.
The Gist:
Eyes, or other specialized organs must of developed very very early on in the morph-history of species with eyes. The proto-species where eyes developed must of used ‘eyes’ in a more general purpose. Think protists, sun-sensitive algae etc, maybe even slugs.. I’m not sure of the biological details, but they are irrelevant to the argument. That these innovations come from something less specialized, something more crude and general in application on early prototypes. You can even take something fully specialized and re-appropriate it, say a dishwasher as a propeller for a motorboat, but the initial will be less specialized than later iterations. The novel part (to me) is that you can deduce the order of innovations.
Certain features cannot exist without the supporting base functionality.
The analogy and explanation is easier to see when looking at a car made with rain tread tires on it. We might look at the wheels of a car and see the treads perfectly made, designed to pump water away from the wheels and infer that this complexity can only arrive by a designer, but it doesn’t really belie the history of the tire (made pneumatic by michelin), the tires and bending wood technology before that, spokes before that, discs and ball and round logs before that. The idea which must of come for all bikes, cars or trains is the wheel which evolved very early on in the ‘protospecies’ / a more primitive preceding model.
The feature ‘richness’ of certain abilities allows us to infer which modification came first and set an order, by logic. That is very cool.
*Footnote: Showers are prodigious places for random ideas. Most people would agree with that. My theory about this is that no other place is as isolating or makes you stand stationary with little else to do for 10-15 minutes a day.
Larry Page was on Charlie Rose this week.
He comments on a bunch of current initiatives.
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12366
We are just entering a time period, whereby people’s lives, songs, videos photos, documents (classified or declassified) are entering into the public record. History is much more real, when you can see and hear in film what things were like.
Recently I’ve been immersed daily in both reading and watching of early 20th century american history. Notably 1920’s-1950’s.
WWII:
Watching a 12 part series on WWII (in Color), amazing how ‘day-to-day/homevideo/newsreel’ the footage looks when it is colorized. Among other things: women stepping up into jobs traditionally thought were only done by men. The Spanish Civil War. Malthusian scenarios of debt/Havenstein’s hyperinflation. The genuine debate whether democracy or fascism was the best course for societies. German engineering, American Industry, British perseverance. Postwar companies and industries which developed. In a lot of the footage, people were still using horses for military operations! Amazing to think how much technical innovation came out of that period. In that time, Europe was a garble of turbulent states, very similar it can be said to present day dynamics in the middle east. By the end of the war there was:
Technologies from WWII
-Computers (Independently invented by Attansoff, Turing/Bletchley Park team, Konrad Zuse)
-Radar
-Subs
-Jet Propulsion
-Rockets (eg. v1/v2 Werner Von Braun)
-Nuclear Power
-Planned Stealth Bomber (see the Horten Ho 229).
War brought out some of the best (and obviously the worst) traits of human character. Ingenuity, Achievement & Sacrifice, Barbarism, Genocide. Seeing several documentaries now on the war (from different perspectives), technological, political etc. It is unreal that the world got into such a place.
Bell Labs:
Reading a history of Bell Labs. “Idea Factory: The Great Age of American Innovation, Jon Gertner”.
Bell Lab’s inventions can be summed up by one larger invention: the modern day communications satellite (conceived by John Pierce).
Almost all (if not all) the inventions needed to get a communications satellite working were invented at Bell Labs:
-Solidstate Transistors
-Unix
-Solar Panels (an offshoot of semi-conductor research
-Digital Communication Theory and Protocols (Claude Shannon)
-Various Antennae (Horn and Standing Wave)
-Lasers/Fiber-Optics/Optical Communication
-Modems/Modulator-Demodulators
-Mobile Networks
-Aeronautics Apparatus (through Sandia a branch of Bell)
-Digital Photography (CCD Sensors)
-Polaroids
and a whole lot more..
Some notable names mentioned in the book were Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, Claude Shannon, William Shockley and my favorite John Pierce. Pierce was an ‘idea man’ and provides a model/path to the application of my own temperament (IMO). He was all over the place, a bit of a romantic, musical, focused on pragmatics, a writer and altruistic. He was a conceiver and connector, considered valuable in this role, who initiated and collaborated with others to get things done. He gave the name ‘transistor’ to the new invention and wrote a treatise on music and glider building among other things.
As an UX/IA specialist – essentially an ‘idea person’ – it provides a model for how one like this can contribute to a larger organization.
*It’s also interesting to see how so many of the great inventors and engineers at Bell Labs came from small towns. Both Edison and Bell himself were other examples.
Big Bands – Artie Shaw, Helen Forrest
The Jewish heartbeat of Jazz. Jewish musicians played great. Their lives were as crazy, restless as the rest of the people in this era it seems. There was a lot of anti-antisemitism during that time. It probably made them stronger. Artie Shaw had Billie Holiday as his first singer, which was truly notable (a color-blind meritocracy) ahead of his time. Helen Forrest, born Fogel had a great voice… The whole thing is a jumble and connects with all the other parts of the technology/u.s. life/society during the war that i’ve been reading about. Fascinating.