From the Sky Down documents the creation of the U2 album Achtung Baby at Hansa Studios in Berlin.U2: From the Sky Down (part2) by u2opia100@17:22 -- the moment of inspiration for the song One, while working on Mysterious Ways.Achtung Baby is one of my favorite albums. I bought it at Tower Records in Harvard Square, and must have listened to it a million times in my Dunster House apartment overlooking the Charles. Songs from the album bring me back to the cold grey Cambridge and Boston of winter 1991. Nothing like the warm Berkeley sunshine I had...
Saturday, 31 March 2012
Thursday, 29 March 2012
Crossfit competitor Blair Morrison does a brutal but very basic workout. AMRAP = As Many Reps As Possible.Morrison was a wide receiver for Princeton and it's interesting to hear him in other videos talk about mental toughness and overcoming challenges.How good is Morrison? In earlier years he qualified for and placed highly overall in the Crossfit Games, but as the talent pool deepens that's getting much harder. At the end of the open competition (anyone can compete by submitting video of their performance on the 5 workouts), he's ranked 12th in...
Wednesday, 28 March 2012
The journal made me replace my crude but hopefully charming hand drawn figures with computer-generated ones. Which are better? (Paper previously discussed here ; http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.0549.)Unfortunately I have no artistic talent, and even less when using a drawing program. My daughter must have gotten her abilities from mom :-)FIG1: However, if the combined system S' = S + M evolves unitarily (in particular, linearly) as in (1), we obtain a...
Sunday, 25 March 2012
The NY Times has a great profile of Gil Elbaz, founder of the startup which eventually became Google AdSense.Elbaz's early aspirations sound like those of other Caltechers, except perhaps the part about being rich :-)NYTimes: AT 7 years old, Gilad Elbaz wrote, “I want to be a rich mathematician and very smart.” That, he figured, would help him “discover things like time machines, robots and machines that can answer any question.”He is old enough...
Jonathan Haidt argues that self-transcendence is an evolutionary consequence of group selection, and not merely a side-effect of our brain wiring.Podcast interview. Thanks to Arnold Kling for recommending Haidt's book The Righteous Mind.Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife.... intuitions come first, strategic...
Thursday, 22 March 2012
In his PhD dissertation, Charles Misner, following a suggestion from his advisor John Wheeler, formulates quantum gravity in terms of the path integral. This article has a very clear explanation for why the Hamiltonian operator in GR is zero.Rev. Mod. Phys. 29, 497–509 (1957): Feynman Quantization of General RelativityOf course, in this kind of formulation the "wavefunction of the universe" plays a central role, and the universe is necessarily a closed system. There is no appealing to outside "observers" for help!Misner was a contemporary of Everett,...
Monday, 19 March 2012
Albert Einstein:“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”Wigner on Einstein and von Neumann:... But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's...
Saturday, 17 March 2012
A big profile in the NYTimes magazine. Very few things are harder than a career as an auteur in independent film.An earlier post (2009) on this blog, with an interview.Whit Stillman wrote and directed the trilogy Metropolitan, Barcelona and Last Days of Disco, three of my favorite movies. It's been 10 years since his last film and I've often wondered what became of him.This Stillman fan echoes Charles Murray on WASP morality:Whit Stillman primer: ... For the few that might identify with the characters in any of these films, it might be easy to...
Wednesday, 14 March 2012
No. This guy will probably regret writing a bitter resignation op-ed.NYTimes: ... It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products...
Tuesday, 13 March 2012
Luis Alvarez laid it out bluntly: The world of mathematics and theoretical physics is hierarchical. That was my first exposure to it. There's a limit beyond which one cannot progress. The differences between the limiting abilities of those on successively higher steps of the pyramid are enormous.See also Out on the tail. People who work in "soft" fields (even in science) don't seem to understand this stark reality. I believe it is because their fields do not have ready access to right and wrong answers to deep questions. When those are available,...
Sunday, 11 March 2012
I recently came across the audio from a talk I gave at Def Con 9, July 2001 in Las Vegas: itunes; Def Con (couldn't get the video to work). Very interesting to hear myself forecast the future over a decade ago.I wonder how many people have spoken at Def Con and also given technical briefings in the bowels of Langley ;-)When I visited China after starting (and exiting) SafeWeb, I thought I might have an unpleasant surprise waiting for me when entering the country. But luckily this cloak and dagger stuff is overblown.SafeWeb's Triangle Boy: IP spoofing...
Thursday, 8 March 2012
With the exception of George Church, everyone mentioned below has a background in physics (even Larry Smarr). Physicists are not like other types of "experts" !See also Prometheus in the basement.NYTimes: ... Bill Banyai, an optical physicist at Complete Genomics, has helped make that happen. When he began developing a gene sequencing machine, he relied heavily on his background at two computer networking start-up companies. His digital expertise...
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
I managed to track down the Wigner quote I mentioned in an earlier post.... Perhaps the consciousness of animals is more shadowy than ours and perhaps their perceptions are always dreamlike. On the opposite side, whenever I talked with the sharpest intellect I have ever known -- with von Neumann -- I always had the impression that only he was fully awake, that I was halfway in a dream.It can be found on page 46 of Philosophical reflections and syntheses by Wigner et ...
Monday, 5 March 2012
I recently came across this excellent talk (podcast number 84 on the list at the link) by Philip Tetlock about his research on expert prediction.Putting aside the fox vs hedgehog dichotomy, I think the main takeaway is that "expert" predictions are no better than those of well-informed ordinary people, and barely outperform simple algorithms.Longnow.org: ... Tetlock took advantage of getting tenure to start a long-term research project now 18 years old to examine in detail the outcomes of expert political forecasts about international affairs....
Saturday, 3 March 2012
A great quote from this review of George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral. Despite the title, von Neumann is the central character. ... mathematician John von Neumann, ... was incomparably intelligent, so bright that, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner would say, "only he was fully awake."More Wigner quotes:I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend,...
I'm writing a review (for Physics World) of a recent book on the history of options pricing, and I'm collecting a few links here so I don't lose them. Please ignore this post unless you are interested in arcana ... the actual review will appear here eventually.AFAIK, high energy physicist M.F.M Osborne was the first to note log-normal behavior of stock prices. (Bachelier, who amazingly gets so much credit, proposed arithmetic Brownian motion, which neither fits the data nor makes logical sense.) Osborne's book is quite interesting as he explores...
Yale economist William Nordhaus, who has studied cost-benefit aspects of potential policy responses to global warming, responds to this recent editorial.I don't find Nordhaus completely convincing (in fact his discussion of the performance of climate models, point 2, alarmingly misses the point), but the article is worth reading.NYBooks: ... Then, I saw an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal of January 27, 2012, by a group of sixteen scientists, entitled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” This is useful because it contains many of the...
Thursday, 1 March 2012
For related posts, click the "income inequality" label below. Here's one: real wealth.WSJ: ... Schiff says his $350,000 salary just isn’t enough. “I feel stuck,” he told Bloomberg.He says he struggles to pay rent for their duplex in Brooklyn, as well as the summer rental in Connecticut and the $32,000 a year tuition for his daughter’s private school.“I can’t imagine what I’m going to do,” Schiff told Bloomberg. “I’m crammed into 1,200 square feet. I don’t have a dishwasher. We do all our dishes by hand.”He said that it would cost at least $1.5...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
