As time ticks, Information decays to disorder equivalent to Energy decays as space expands

Excerpted from DarkReading ‘Stone’s movie also hit on the biggest legal vulnerability threatening our constitutional rights: secret laws being written that avoid the critical checks and balances of the American system of balance of powers. One key source of these secret threats is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court system, which issues secret rulings […]

The point of literature: a search engine for equity I’ve been conducting a rather intense and thoroughgoing review of the principal themes of literature in the last couple of years, at least as it shows up in television and movies.  It seems to me the point of most of our literature is to explore the […]

My son has been suggesting for some time now that I contact actual scientists about my search for physics which better explain our universe.  Finally I have found one edge of a larger community of such maverick thinkers in the annual contests of Max Tegmark’s Foundational Questions Institute. The first contest essay I read last […]

The recent disclosure by Edward Snowden of some of  the extent of the NSA’s information collection system has drawn unwelcome attention to the scope of governmental disinformation policy. I think a case can be made for the notion that this outrage is an example of society evolving in a healthy direction, away from secrets and […]

As we get closer to creating a true thinking machine, with projects like OpenCog, it seems expedient to re-examine what protections, like Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, we ought to contemplate. What has gone somewhat unnoticed in previous considerations of superintelligences, including gods, is their entirely different motivational context.  Gods were imagined as interbreeding with us, […]

My son mentioned a talk he heard by Marcel Molina about applying Thomas Aquinas’ characterization of beauty (Clarity, Proportion and Integrity) to computer programming. Which got me thinking about code integrity, which according to Geodel’s Incompleteness Theorems, is not possible to prove. But, nature does it anyway, or something close, with DNA. Species too far […]

Could life be described as simply as: structures or patterns capable of diverting energy flows from their normal entropy destinations into replications of their patterns (including copying error mutations)? Under this definition we should expect to see life in many more circumstances than ones whose chemistry resembles our own, maybe even as cloud formations in […]

It seems to me all momentum is angular momentum.  An ice skater pulling in her arms will rotate faster, and conversely, extending her arms will slow her rotation.  If her arms are extended to the radius of the planet, her rate of spin will slow to unnoticeable (to us), seeming instead to go in a […]

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 […]