In which I explain things interesting, remarkable or silly.
One of the cult youtube channels of machinists is the channel of Dan Gelbart. Youtube’s suggestion algorithm found him for me, and it made me nostalgic for all the talented machinists (often with similarly funny accents) I used to run into at Berkeley Labs. I paid more attention after watching one about a home made […]
Imagine you are world hegemon and some shitty little country sidles up to you with an idea of making war on some other country. How can you tell if this is a bad idea? I mean, it’s already a bad idea, how can you assess how bad an idea it might be? Despite all the […]
The statistical picture of quantum mechanics is an idea I had in my mind more or less as the correct picture, while occasionally simultaneously holding the gaseous nonsense that the Schroedinger equation somehow describes things the individual particles are doing. Stated simply, the modulus of the solutions to the Schroedinger equation describe a statistical ensemble […]
I ran across this essay, Freddie deBoer offering a bet to Scott Alexander that the AI singularity isn’t coming in the next 3 years, based on a decent decent set of economic measurements: https://substack.com/home/post/p-187862732 I used to find it somewhat mind-boggling that allegedly intelligent people think we’re on the eve of some giant technological leap […]
Getting the best of it by David Sklansky. This is something that’s been in my list of books to read since I got out of grad school. It’s often recommended for getting a quant finance job for the sort of gambling puzzles it contains. Most of the poker stuff is lost on me, as I’ve […]
I was always a fan of de Broglie and Bohm’s “pilot wave” idea. This is a fully deterministic theory of quantum mechanics which physicists don’t like because “le hidden variables” (also it isn’t yet relativistic I guess). The original pilot wave idea didn’t work out because de Broglie couldn’t calculate scattering cross sections, though Bohm […]
An airplane is a giant tin can. Unlike a beer can, it’s big enough it has to be riveted together. What is a rivet you might ask? It is a permanent fastener with a thicker piece on one end. You drill a hole on the thing to be fastened, stick the rivet in it, then […]
I’ve gone through Khrennikov’s “Beyond Quantum” book and write some notes for the crowd. I’ve also had a look at his book “Contextual Approach to Quantum Formalism,” and at least glanced at his more fruity books. Mostly this is a review of Beyond Quantum, which is a presentation of a group of “sub quantum” ideas. […]
One of the interesting things to contemplate is the scale of the internal combustion engine. It’s a very human scale device; pistons the size of fists, Valves about as wide as knuckles. It’s the kind of thing a man with normal sized machine tools can make. Most internal combustion engines in the world are on […]
There are many amusing stereotypical personalities in Silly Con valley. Steve Sailer coined the phrase “Silicon Valley Adventuress” for the very obvious type of women who try various kinds of shakedowns on tech firms and their executives. There’s the more obvious “Divorce Tick” kind of woman; someone who marries a clueless but rich nerdoid and […]