A thought I've been tossing around lately is whether religion is one of those things that's an integral part of human nature ( Read more... )

This is aimed at a couple of fellow math-geeks I have in mind.  But if anyone else is interested, feel free to tune-in as well (and if you're not interested, feel free to tune-out).

So, I've been trying to teach myself the calculus of variations lately, but I feel like I'm in a bit over my head.  I get the feeling I need a better grounding than I ( Read more... )

My gmail account got hacked today. So I'm not really trying to sell you cheap pills, in case you got a weird email from me. And I thought I had a fairly strong password too. I guess I just got complacent, and should have changed it more often.  I got lucky too, because Google does a good job at blocking most outbound spam as well, and locked my ( Read more... )

I'm currently in the middle of reading Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, and Connections, by James Burke ( Read more... )

Well, the title is just meant to grab your attention, and be gratuitously inflamatory. I hope it worked ( Read more... )

So lately, the more I learn about the history of science, the more I'm coming around to thinking of humanity as the embodiment of some massively distributed computational process.  Individuals often solve a certain problem at approximately the same time in history.  And this happens a lot.  It's almost as though those discoveries "needed" to happen ( Read more... )

 I don't believe in "short" text-messages.  Use all 160 characters at your disposal - don't abbreviate a thing!  The phone company is bilking you, so bilk them right back (do the math: compare price-per-byte of a text-message vs. price-per-byte of a data plan or a voice plan).  After all, you're not paying by the keystroke, you're paying per text-

 Another one to add to the list:

• "Heart of Darkness", by Joseph Conrad

This was mostly review of lots of concepts I learned as an undergrad in electrical engineering, but it was really nice to have a refresher, and also nice to know I haven't completely forgotten all of it. In a way, the book is one big reminder of how beautiful a concept the Fourier transform is. Now I really want to go and play with circuits again ( Read more... )

I've been meaning to do book reviews here, but haven't found the time.  And now that months have passed, I don't know how fresh my memories will be.  So these will probably be short blurbs (or will start-out that way at-least).  Here's the "to do" list, of stuff I've read and intend to write reviews on:

• "The Science of Radio" by Paul Nahin
• "The Blank ( Read more... )