Reading Arrival of the Fittest, by Andreas Wagner, today. In the promotional material for the book, Wagner made a tall promise: that he would explain how the chemical constituents needed to “bootstrap” life could have formed on primordial Earth faster than one would expect given nothing but random chaining of amino acids. I haven’t gotten […]
Well, I drifted away for a while; just got busy with work and family. Right now my leisure time’s mostly spent on physics and guitar. I’m particularly enjoying guitar instruction videos by Steve Stine, Jake Lizzio, and “StitchMethod Guitar” (I haven’t picked up that fellow’s name yet). On the physics front I’m particularly excited right […]
One of my biggest peeves in the physics world is the idiocy of the Everettian Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory, characterized by this quote from Sean Carroll: There was nothing stochastic or random about any of this process, the entire evolution was perfectly deterministic. It’s not right to say “Before the measurement, I didn’t […]
Ran across this link via Jason Kottke’s kottke.org site: “Side Hustle” as a Sign of the Apocalypse. This is one of the most cogent, spot-on description of how our world’s evolving that I’ve seen in ages.
I’ve watched something amazing happen over the last couple of weeks. The left-leaning part of our society is suddenly worried. Not just about Donald Trump per se, but about a whole host of things. I wish I still had the link, but about two days after the election I read a post by someone calling […]
For some time now this site has been hosted on a virtual server provided by VPSLink. When I first set that service up, and for quite a while after, I was very impressed with VPSLink’s solid customer support and quick resolution of issues. Friday, however, the server went down, and it took over a day […]
I’ve been surfing a lot of physics forums lately, and I’ve run across several “misguided” interpretations of the law of large numbers. For example: The law of large numbers is rigorously provable from the axioms pf probability. What it says is if a trial (experiment or whatever) is repeated a large number of times, independently […]
Bohmian Mechanics, also referred to as De Broglie-Bohm theory or pilot wave theory is often presented as a completely deterministic theory that matches all of the predictions of quantum theory. Strictly speaking this is true – all of the state variables of a Bohmian model evolve in a precise way specified by equations associated with […]
Bitcoin has been getting a lot of press over the last few years. I love the idea behind bitcoin, and the goals that it tries to achieve. I don’t, however, think that is our “final answer” on the digital currency front. I’ll quickly run through the pros and cons of bitcoin from my perspective. What’s […]
I have some new directions I want to go with the site. These things will show up soon, but in the meantime I chose a new WordPress theme that seemed appropriate, and I re-wrote the “About Kip” page. The theme is just a framework right now, but over the next few days I’ll be putting […]