Have you ever heard of John B. Calhoun? He conducted a series of experiments on mice in the 1960s and 70s to examine the effects of a utopian environment. He set up physical conditions which provided unlimited food and water for 4000 mice and eliminated all ordinary dangers and challenges. Starting with a small colony, at first the mice multiplied...
Dan Pace put me onto Sabine Hossenfelder's work, and I had a look at a few of her videos. I was impressed with her approach -- and humor -- and ordered her new book Existential Physics (2022), which arrived a few days ago. I like to have a hard copy that I can mark up with a pencil. I have...
I have been having an interesting exchange on Quora about the Twins Paradox with a questioner who can't understand why simple relativity, understood since Galileo, does not dictate that you can't say that Earth bound twin ends up older than Astronaut twin. Surely, he says, it means that if you look at it one way (A moves away from E...
I finally unearthed the secret to those incredibly long sales videos or "marketing letters" you find on the internet, particularly on the Weather Channel. The astonishing thing about them is that they work. Apparently they are the hottest thing in advertising these days, accounting for millions of dollars in sales daily.
No, I am not going to propose that Humpty Dumpty should have landed on a rubber sheet and he wouldn't have broken, though it isn't a bad idea.
This is being written on Saturday Jan.28 2023, around noon, passing through the Tjeldsundet Strait near Kongsvita Norway. We left Alta yesterday evening and are making our way down Norway's inside passage. Alta is 400 km north of the arctic circle, and we are still about 200km above. The coast of northern Norway has many islands and fiords, so is...
This is another summation of ideas I have been working on. I feel that these ideas are fitting together better and better into a meaningful overview, and I like to attempt an expression of the big picture every once in awhile.
There was a "time" in human history, not so long ago, when it was generally believed that thunder and lightning were due to the actions of gods. It is universally understood now that it is due to the buildup of a positive electrical charge in clouds, and the entire superstructure of a society of gods who make decisions and...
I have discovered another book on time, this one called The Arrow of Time, by Coveney and Highfield, with a foreward by Ilya Prigogine. This book has good credentials, and from the sound of it so far, is right up my alley. I am reading it with my feet up in the Explorer Lounge of the Viking Venus this...
A Swedish mathematician and physicist by the name of Krister Sundelin gave the following answer on Quora to the question: "How do scientists know that the Big Bang is real?" It strikes me as a very good summation and consistent with everything I have read on the subject, so I thought I would pass it along. Sundelin includes pictures of...
