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voice transition
Over the past month, I've gotten kind of obsessed with watching different Youtube tutorials on how to change your voice from male to female. I've probably watched at least 20 of them so far, which amounts to several hours of information. (Some of those I've ended up going back and watching a second or third time if I found them good.) Interspersed ( Read more... ) -
Out of the closet
I recently came out as trans to all 528 Facebook friends of mine. Not trans as in "woman trapped in a man's body" but as in non-binary/genderqueer (don't identify with the male gender I was assigned at birth)... which I only recently realized was a type of trans. (I included some photos of myself which I would normally not have put on Facebook ( Read more... ) -
made it back to the promised land
It took many months of planning, and a very intense amount of unrelenting physical work through just about all of June, but as of approximately yesterday I've accomplished a major goal for 2016: moving back to California. I say approximately yesterday because the move in process has required a lot of work and there's always "1 more thing" we need ( Read more... ) -
new blog!
Exciting news. I've started a new blog about physics on Medium. It's called Physics as a Foreign Language ( Read more... ) -
a coin operated quantum suicide booth
So here we come finally to the quantum suicide booth. I'm getting rid of the "instrumentalism vs realism" title now because I think we've strayed far enough from the original topic that this is pretty tangential. Truth be told, that whole series ended up being a lot of tangential stuff and not a whole lot directly related to the debate between ( Read more... ) -
instrumentalism vs realism, part 6: the relationship between quantum and stat mech
I realized after writing part 5 that by continuing on to the anthropic principle and observer selection effects, I've skipped over a different issue I planned to write more about, which was how statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics are actually the same thing. I think I actually covered most of what I'd wanted to cover in part 4, but then ( Read more... ) -
instrumentalism vs realism, part 5: the anthropic principle and observer selection effects
I've continued to think about a lot of interconnected topics in physics this past month. Lots of explaining/debating on a mailing list I joined recently that's filled mostly with biologists and systems theorists (with one astrophysicist and one philosopher of science who each became pretty central to the discussion) how quantum mechanics works and ( Read more... ) -
instrumentalism vs realism, part 4: KvN
As I mentioned in part 3, I had never heard of the Koopman-von Neumann formulation of classical mechanics until reading Tom Banks' 2011 post about probability in quantum mechanics on cosmic variance ( Read more... ) -
instrumentalism vs realism: part 3
I wrote two posts in January of this year ("instrumentalism vs realism" and "instrumentalism vs realism part 2") and wrote "to be continued..." at the end of part 2. The main point of both of them was really to voice my thoughts on the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, to see if I could make any sense of it, and to compare it to the ( Read more... ) -
instrumentalism vs realism, part 2
Now on to the part of the instrumentalism vs realism debate which I know the most about: how should we interpret quantum mechanics ( Read more... )