One of those commercials that was a favorite from my youth: Got my waltzing on today for real for the first time. Been reflecting on it ever since: waltzing is like the dharma. Duty, law, the way things go. It’s a set form that basically unarguable. Such and such is a waltz. Such and such isn&...

 http://wtcdemolition.blogspot.com/ In attempting to ascertain what caused the destruction of the WTC on 9/11/01, and the great heat and molten metal observed for up to six months afterward, one must account for ALL the phenomena involved in WTC destruction, and the aftermath-- and not just one...

At the end of a recent discussion (in the comments to this post), Allen and I started to discuss whether quantum computing theory had something to say about the potential for simulating the human mind on a computer. I then read a couple of review articles on quantum computing he referenced. Before g...

Figure 1. Dr. Manhattan working to isolate a "gluino." “…and he’s American” (IV.13).  His backstory comes straight out of a Marvel comic, a company famous for its heroes who are made so by exposure to some form of atomic energy.  He begins life as Jon Osterman, a ...

TNP Part IV Previous Post V. Distributed Representation A. A First Glance at Distributed Representation Above, when discussing the "Jets and Sharks" example, I mentioned that the hidden units represent individual people. This representation occurs not in virtue of any property or characteristic of t...

“QED” by Peter Parnell March 13-15 and 20-22 Starring Brian Matuszak and Cheryl Skafte Directed by Minden Anderson Physics can be fun! At least when taught by Richard Feynman, the real-life Nobel Prize winning physicist who also frequented topless bars, played bongos, and appeared in col...

1497 Nicolaus Copernicus first begins to record his astronomical observations. 1611 Dutch astronomer Johannes Fabricius becomes the first person to observe sunspots as he observes the rising sun through his telescope. Observing the Sun becomes painful, so Fabricius and his father will soon switch to...

An article from Time magazine in 1951 about the then-younger generation - by their math, young adults born 1923 - 1933. Monday, Nov. 05, 1951THE YOUNGER GENERATION IS it possible to paint a portrait of an entire generation? Each generation has a million faces and a million voices. What the voices sa...

Editor’s note: Below is a guest post from Nova Spivack , CEO of Radar Networks, about a new computational knowledge engine called Wolfram Alpha being developed by computer scientist Stephen Wolfram. Spivack originally published it on Twine, and it is republished here with his permission. Some ...

With nerd tastes, you just can't win—I could write a book about it. In one chapter: you're annoyed that the thing you love doesn't seem to get any love from anybody else, and you need that validation to feel important, to feel as though you exist. That's the big one, it seems to me, the oil that l...