CapitalistImperialistPig

I seem to recall that once upon a time, Nobel Prizewinner Albert von Szent-Györgyi said something like(I can't find the quote): Good theories and bad can be distinguished by the biblical prescription. By their fruits you shall know them. Good theories lead to discoveries. Bad theories just lead to more theories designed to save the old bad theories.

Peter Woit listens to Nima Arkani-Hamed. [Changed from "String Theory" on Peter's advice. New title is more accurate, since Nima actually talked mainly about super symmetry - and funnier.]

Proteins are immensely complicated molecules that somehow manage to fold themselves up quite intricately in surprisingly short times. How do they do it? It seems to be a sort of quantum computing. It seems that rather than explore alternative pathways one by one, the way a classical system would, they explore them all at once in a kind of quantum superposition.

How do we tell if we are dreaming or not? The problem is that in dreams our critical faculties are more than a little attenuated. In a dream it may seem plausible that one has suddenly become wildly attractive to hot nineteen year-old coeds, or (as in my case) that my lifelong dream of flying under mental power has finally been achieved. So there I was, sitting on the edge of a roof to which I believed I had just flown. Dare I launch into space to fly down? In the movie Inception the protagonist carries a little top to test dream vs. reality - if it doesn't stop, it's supposed to be dreamland. Well, I didn't have a top, and it wouldn't have stayed on the slanted roof anyway, but I did recall another idea: supposedly counting your fingers is a good test of dream vs. reality. I looked at my hand. At a glance, it certainly seemed to have the right number of fingers. I began to count: one, two, three...but then the last two - or was it three - seemed to kind of blur ...

The most shocking thing about the New Zealand quake is the large number of casualties from what seemed like a relatively small quake. The total energy in the NZ quake was about 6000 times smaller than the big 2010 quake in Chile, yet the causualty figures are comparable, and this despite the fact that New Zealand is a first world country with very tough building codes. Location seems to be a critical factor. The NZ quake was both near and shallow, both aggravating circumstances, but I expect that they will be taking a closer look at those building standards for the future. Big government, by the way, seems to be an essential feature in coping with natural disasters. Building codes play a critical role in surviving floods, quakes, and related calamities. We saw Bush's small government philosophy in full swing in the Katrina disaster, where thousands of Americans died mostly due to governmental incompetence. The very same year, miserably poor and grossly misruled Cuba survived e...

Mathematicians have been known to note a certain type of relationship, their Erdös numbers and for movie stars there are degrees of Kevin Bacon. We may define a similar number for chess players – the number of steps we need to go through to find a player who played us who played somebody (or chain of somebodies) who played the target. My Bobby Fisher number is two, as is my Alexander Alekhine number, since I have played chess players who played each of them. Via Fisher and Alekhine and a few others, I have second or third degree connections with most of the other twentieth century World Chess Champions. This, of course, doesn’t make me any less of a fish = weakie chess player. While playing in some kind of (bridge?) tournament when I was in the Army, I met another soldier who played chess, and we decided to form a chess team. He turned out to be a very strong player (a former national junior champion), and was acquainted with our mutual contemporary, Fisher. I think that they h...

Obviously, these are lowlights only. This war will pay for itself. Tax cuts will pay for themselves. Markets are efficient. Fanny and Freddie caused the Financial Panic of 2008 A deregulated financial market will take care of itself. Government isn't the solution. Government is the problem. Obama is a Socialist