September 2008
4 posts
New Science Museum!
Next weekend, on September 27, the California Academy of Sciences museum opens to the public! This is an exciting time for nerds all over the Bay Area, especially those of us who live close to Golden Gate Park and have been watching the construction site for years. Yesterday the museum held a preview open house for members, and they showed up in droves. Hundreds of people were in line when I got...
Vitamin M
Hearing the word “morals” makes me cringe. It seems to get used when someone is trying to tell you what to think. But this talk given at a recent Ted conference by Jonathan Haidt gets beyond the sermons about right and wrong, and it’s worth watching. Instead of telling you what to think, he talks about how people come up with their ideas about morals, and what is right and wrong...
Infinity in practice
There are approximately 10^80 atoms in the visible universe. That’s the practical equivalent of infinity. There is no way to keep track of individual things above this number. So unless some kind of compression is being used, this is the limit. (source) There are approximately 10^13 bits in a terabyte. A 1TB magnetic hard disk costs about $150. (source) Therefore, the universe can store the...
What's your story?
Have you ever read Homer’s Odyssey? I haven’t, at least not until now (see the new cover image in the sidebar). People say it’s one of the greatest stories ever, an inspiration for so many movies and books that came in the thousands of years since it was first told. That got me thinking about the importance of stories… Stories are entertainment, and when they’re...