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Notes on Resonance
Resonance occurs when two sources of excitation fall completely in sync, and reinforce one another endlessly. In this state, the sources convey an unbounded amount of energy over time.
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Losing the Nobel Prize
There’s a fascinating new book just now appearing in book stores, Losing the Nobel Prize, by astronomer Brian Keating. An excerpt from the book is available at Nautilus, with the title How My…
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Apollo 11 and Other Screw-Ups
(A paper presented to the 27th annual Guidance and Control Conference of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), in Breckenridge, Colorado on February 6, 2004, and designated AAS 04-064. This version includes additional illustrations and comments, and several minor corrections.)
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Jean Bourgain
I have just learned that Jean Bourgain passed away last week in Belgium, aged 64, after a prolonged battle with cancer. He and Eli Stein were the two mathematicians who most influenced my early ca…
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Why Were Early Psychedelicists so Weird?
[Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this a…
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Why are amplitudes complex?
[By prior agreement, this post will be cross-posted on Microsoft’s Q# blog, even though it has nothing to do with the Q# programming language. It does, however, contain many examples th…
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How thick is the atmosphere? A derivation of the Boltzmann distribution
Let’s talk about a small question as a way of introducing a big question. How thick is the atmosphere? How far does Earth’s atmosphere extend into space? In other words, how high can y…
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Supertasks
Background Reading: Earman and Norton, Infinite Pains: The Trouble with Supertasks and Comments on Laraudogoita's Supertask
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The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
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How much is time wrong around the world? (2014)
Why Spaniards have dinner so late? A map of the difference between solar time and clock time around the world.
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Why FTL implies time travel
In science fiction, it is pretty standard fare to introduce some form of faster-than-light communication or travel. After all, space is big, and you can't write your swashbuckling Hornblower-in-space novel if you have to wait for a generation ship to crawl painfully slowly between the nearest stars,
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Embryo Selection For Intelligence
A cost-benefit analysis of the marginal cost of IVF-based embryo selection for intelligence and other traits with 2016–2017 state-of-the-art.