Faster Than Light Communication?
I haven’t had a chance to fully digest this article yet, but it looks like somebody’s figured out a way to use quantum entanglement to communicate useful information. Seems to me that there’s a fair...
View ArticleMore detailed critique of Quantum Communication Paper
Yesterday I got all excited about a journal article indicating the possibility of faster-than-light communication through quantum entanglement. But I got excited before fully reading the article, and...
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Breaking Bridges
Last night I had a great time at a local O’Reilly event building a bridge out of popsicle sticks with a few good friends. The rules were pretty simple: you get 1,000 popsicle sticks and some hot glue...
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New York bans Trans-fats
I’m a little slow to re-report this, but but I find it fascinating so I want to share it in case you missed it. New York City has banned the use of trans-fats in restaurants. They’ve done this almost...
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100% Chance of Rain in Seattle
I’ve had my own system for interpreting that "chance of rain" numbers that meteorologists use to predict weather. Along the lines of how people say eskimos have 137 different words for snow, here in...
View ArticleFree Will and Turing-completeness of the Brain
In this essay, I’m going to explore the question "If the human brain is Turing complete, what does that imply about the existence of free will?" And moreover, what does that mean about the ability to...
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Naturopathy: the Difficult choice
My girlfriend has an auto-immune skin condition called psoriasis that gives her rashes. For some people the condition gets serious enough that patients and MD’s turn to drugs that suppress T-cells,...
View ArticleWhy does smoked food taste so good? Evolution.
Last night I cooked a chicken the really old-fashioned way: by roasting it over an open wood fire. My buddy Mez and I made many observations about how much of an evolutionary throwback our dinner...
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Do We Live in a Simulation? Implications for Morality and the Beauty of Physics.
There’s been a lot of fuss lately about Nick Bostrom’s ideas that we live in a simulation as a result of an article in the New York Times. Here I’ll provide some analysis of Bostrom’s bold claim,...
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Two Big Questions Physics Isn’t Addressing
One of the reasons I chose not to pursue a career in science was a feeling that all the interesting problems of physics have been solved. In a sense I still believe this — I don’t see the current line...
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LHC blue-screens the world
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for quite a while, and I figured tonight might be my last chance. Plenty of people have been worrying about how the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could...
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The Paradoxes of Color Temperature
Last week I went to the Indoor Sun Shoppe in Fremont and got a couple new CF bulbs for the house. I love their selection — they have everything from tiny 7W candelabra bulbs to these massive 150W...
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Space Weather
Recently some of my friends were discussing solar activity, and I learned that there’s a system for rating geomagnetic storms. This recent one was a G3, which is fairly common and not that serious....
View ArticleHow training in Physics is relevant to work at Google
As promised, I gave a talk at the Pacific Northwest Association of College Physicists conference today. The topic was Physics at Google, or more specifically, “How a background in physics helps to...
View ArticleBrain Simulation Tactics and Complexity Estimates
Ray Kurzweil recently predicted that we’d be able to reverse engineer the human brain by 2020. He makes an argument that a brain simulator would need about a million lines of code: Here’s how that...
View ArticlePaul Dirac’s PhD Thesis
Recently my grandfather’s PhD thesis has found its way onto the Internet. You can view a PDF of it here, courtesy of Florida State University:...
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