Monday, July 31, 2017

Here's how it all started

If anybody is reading this decades after I post it, indeed if even the capability is still available to access an internet, then this, in a nut shell, is how it all started.


AS OF TODAY
The United States of America is a failed experiment.
We went out in the way a bad joke would have predicted. We lost against our own racism and sexism, our endemic illnesses whose symptoms were intensified by corrupt law enforcement and institutionally rotten mass media. Undone at the final hour by a bizarre codicil in a slaveowners’ constitution. Undone, pushed over the edge—but the edge was too close all along. When it really mattered, we proved ourselves incompetent: not able to handle our civil responsibilities, indeed, in a sense, not ready for adulthood. In the name of national glory, we have voted ourselves a government of the worst. And now a generation will grow up ignorant, poor and sick, if they get the chance to grow up at all. Many of the things we will lose will be things we can never regain, from international respect to endangered species to the lives of our loved ones.
Many good people will keep up the good fight and stir up, as John Lewis says, the good trouble.
The abyss has opened before us.

Whether the future we make for ourselves will have anything to commend it now depends upon our ability to stare into that abyss and make it blink.

Reference link

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Friday, April 7, 2017

In the Beginning...

What was going on at the beginning of time? The beginning of the universe? Can we even know what  that situation might have been? As physics finds reductionist answers to the questions of how the universe works, this is the last great unanswered question.

Sean Carroll has a presentation addressing this issue.

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Friday, January 13, 2017

Mathematica and automobile reliability

I'm an unabashed enthusiast of Mathematica. And here's an example of a down-to-earth use.

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