After remembering my dreams in the bath the other morning, I puzzled some more about gravity, wondering “where is the equal and opposite reaction to the force of gravity?” Looking at gravity from Einstein’s point of view, that it is a curving of spacetime, allowed me to wonder if there shouldn’t be a corresponding negative […]

In thinking about the political difficulties which inevitably arise every time we generate a too top-heavy oligarchic system, I started wondering how to frame such a challenge to our best thinkers — how would you change society’s rules to take advantage of the tremendous energy towards the accumulation of wealth and power such that those […]

Our sense of group identity is the fundamental failure of our species, perhaps of all intelligent life. The problem arises when a group starts believing the importance of its agenda supersedes that of its originating group. This happens first in governments, a proxy for the group itself when we were hunter-gatherers.  The necessary belief underpinning […]

A friend mentioned having heard an estimate that anyone living past 65 these days has a pretty good chance of seeing 80.  I’m not sure what the national and worldwide statistics show about this belief, but in my own case, I think there might be something to it.  My mother is approaching 90 and many […]

While reading the Quantum Reality article in last week’s ScienceNews, I was inspired to dig a little deeper and found this review of work by G. Chiribella, G. D’Ariano, and P. Perinotti last year. It points up a fundamental flaw in my previous attempts to understand quantum mechanics — that there are “events” and “observers”. […]

David Letterman plaintively asked Rachel Maddow last night “Why, in 2012, are we still so focused on killing other humans?” during the interview about her book Drift which discusses our increasing disconnect from the process of declaring and making war.  She dodged his question with “That’s above my pay grade” and “Whoever figures that out […]

This is a bit of a ramble, a collection of thoughts, perhaps not in the usual order … Security and Fairness We like to know we’re going to eat and have a place to sleep and have those pretty much in equality with our neighbors. Being Right, Competition, Greed and Secrets But we also need […]

It never ceases to amaze me that people continue to insist their own notion of God is the only valid one, despite the absolute abundance over the millenia of claims of different people having received direct, personal, but very different, dispensations from God.  It would seem that God, at the very least, thinks no one […]

Before the Beginning was the Void.  Then was the Law: something must change.  And the Law was called entropy, aka time.  So, the Void changed into Something.  And at the next execution of the Law (planck time tick), the Something also changed.  And on, and on, ’til nowabouts … Stars following the first generation formed […]

The photon is said to be the massless carrier of the electromagnetic force, having only energy, polarity, and direction. In information terms, it might be described by 1 bit for spin and a direction vector representing the counts of right and left turns at the vertices of equilateral triangles on the surface of the sphere […]