Aug
6th
Fri
6th
2010
Aug
5th
Thu
5th
2010
Eccentricity has always abounded where and when strength of character has abounded: and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
— John Stuart Mill
It now takes two days for humankind to record as much data as they did during all years before 2003 combined.
— Eric Schmidt at Techonomy
Jul
26th
Mon
26th
2010
A line showing the speed of light on a scale model of Earth and the Moon, about 1 1/3 seconds.
The Taxonomy of Things
“A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word – ‘Everything’ – and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this is merely to say that there is what there is. There remains room for disagreement over cases; and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries.”
— Willard Van Orman Quine: ‘On What There Is’
Jul
9th
Fri
9th
2010
Jul
6th
Tue
6th
2010
Comparison of a Lévy flight with a Brownian random walk. Lévy flights are a theoretical construct that has attracted wide interdisciplinary interest. Empirical evidence shows that the principle applies to the foraging of marine predators. nature
Developing pig eye, light micrograph. From right the structures seen are: the cornea (purple), the lens (yellow green), the retina (dark green), the choroid (dark purple line) and the sclera (white of the eye, purple). The optic nerve is at centre left.
Paul Klee - Highway
I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, “Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass” “Why?” “Because, they are all the same electron!” And, then he explained on the telephone, “suppose that the world lines which we were ordinarily considering before in time and space - instead of only going up in time were a tremendous knot, and then, when we cut through the knot, by the plane corresponding to a fixed time, we would see many, many world lines and that would represent many electrons, except for one thing. If in one section this is an ordinary electron world line, in the section in which it reversed itself and is coming back from the future we have the wrong sign to the proper time - to the proper four velocities - and that’s equivalent to changing the sign of the charge, and, therefore, that part of a path would act like a positron.” “But, Professor”, I said, “there aren’t as many positrons as electrons.” “Well, maybe they are hidden in the protons or something”, he said. I did not take the idea that all the electrons were the same one from him as seriously as I took the observation that positrons could simply be represented as electrons going from the future to the past in a back section of their world lines. That, I stole!
