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Edit, 8 17 23: A condensed restatement of my speculation on dark energy as a natural prediction of treating gravity as a nonlocal gauge theory: A long time ago (2008) I got really curious about dark energy. A common intuition pump is to treat matter’s gravitational effect on […]
Lawrence Lessig has been getting some trolls over at his blog and asked his readers for advice on a comment policy (basically, what the threshold should be for deleting inappropriate comments). Here's what I took to be the most insightful suggestion: Anon: You should delete all […]
John A. Wheeler, the great physicist who coined the term 'black hole,' a primary architect of modern physics, and the scientist for whom the fictional "Wheeler Laboratory" is named in 'A Beautiful Mind', died last week. Many are calling this an end of an era; as Max Tegmark of […]
I like America a lot. But lately I've been wondering, "what's going on here?" The latest poll numbers are in, and I'm clearly not alone. The AP is now reporting that 81% of Americans think we're on the wrong track. One need not look far for proximate reasons: a strange and […]
The New York Times recently published a set of speculations on what the lives of New Yorkers will be like in the year 2108. Among those asked were professors and Nobel Laureates, and discussion topics ranged from biotechnology to global warming. All very interesting, but here's […]
Part 1: The Transhumanism Movement. Part 2: Society is more delicate than transhumanists think. This short essay doesn't delve into my personal ethics as applied to enhancement which, I must admit, I don't have figured out yet. And I'm assuming, for the sake of this essay, that […]
Lawrence Lessig has announced an extraordinarily important and what I hope will be an extraordinarily effective movement to reform Congress. If you listen to one speech on politics this year, make it this one.
Wikipedia's immune system is impressive, but I think it scales more poorly and devolves more easily than outsiders realize. Really, most of Wikipedia's current ills can be explained as a moderate form of autoimmune disease, caused by chronic inflammation of the community by […]
Transhumanism: an odd name for an interesting movement. There’s a growing number of people who believe technology is going to make things Really Different around here. And while they’re still essentially a loose knit, fragmented movement, they’ve made significant inroads among […]
As part of my infatuation with scientific mysteries, I really dug this Nature News piece about how the number 10^122 keeps popping up in many seemingly unrelated places in physics. Scott Funkhouser (what a name) from The Citadel identifies five of them I'm sure this […]
