On Friday evening I was in Tesero, where a crowd of 150 interested laypersons attended my talk on particle physics, organized by the very active Gruppo Astrofili Fiemme. There, among other things, I discussed the challenge that is on between the Fermilab experiments in the United States and the CERN experiments in Europe. I will discuss elsewhere the successful evening; here I just want to show the status of data collection by the two challengers.

Should you happen to be in Washington, D.C. in October and at House of Sweden, the Swedish Embassy, you will get a chance to see a fireball red colored car that delighted Europeans who like tiny red cars earlier this year.

It's called the Baldos II and it is a hybrid auto built by engineering students at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden.    So what?

The fuel tests show it can run 152.2 kilometers on a liter of fuel, whatever that means - in Sweden, they use some primitive system invented during the French Revolution to stick it to the English, so I am not certain but that sounds like 357 MPG.   Or approximately 12X my tiny convertible's mileage!

M.A.D. 2.0

The greatest fear of mankind after World War 2 was the real possibility of a World War 3.

It was a rational fear of a very real threat: the global destruction of civilization.

Nations, most especially the USA and the former USSR, found themselves in a mad race to build more bombs, more powerful bombs, megadeath bombs.

The military theory behind this madness was that if a nation had weapons enough to utterly destroy any enemy then it would not be attacked.  But a first strike might reduce the ability to launch a counterstrike powerful enough to utterly destroy the enemy, so it was thought necessary to keep in constant readiness far more than enough weapons to destroy any enemy.

Fear blinds us, immobilizes us, and makes fools of us. Scary stories abound on the internet, through emails, and in conversations, and dangers lurk in the dusty corners waiting to pounce on us and tear our loved ones from our grasps. We know this. We feel it viscerally. And sometimes we shake in our boots. 

We've got enough real dangers, and we do, without adding in made-up ones. We do a terrible job at assessing risk. Don't believe me? Which is safer? Driving or flying? If you said driving, you're so terribly wrong and have let both the illusion of control and the availability heuristic make you run with your gut. 

When I was in my late teens, my father (a chemical engineer) took an interest in quantum mechanics.  Two words from his conversation at that time stuck in my mind, namely Hamiltonian and eigenfunction.  The former was almost certainly due to the Scottish part of my ancestry, but with the latter it was the word itself.

Indeed, it at first sight seems quite an intimidating word, along with its relatives eigenvalues and eigenvector.  Fear not – I will show you that it despite its fearsome bark, it has a very soft bite.

Look at a waterfall for 30 seconds. Now look at something stationary. The stationary object will appear to drift upwards. The same phantom movement is true after stepping off an airport walkway: if you close your eyes and stand still, you should continue to feel yourself moving.

Coincidences in fundamental physics, sometimes in the form of so called “fine tunings”; what are they? Generally speaking, some parameter happens to have a value very close to some other interesting number, and we do not see why. Often, some totally unrelated parameters are equal, at least as far as we can tell given measurement accuracy and finite resolution.

There has been much debate surrounding Ray Kurzweil and his talk at the Singularity Summit on August 14th 2010, where he discussed reverse engineering the brain, among other things. He was criticized quite harshly by science blogger and biologist PZ Myers (of ScienceBlogs), based mainly on a second-hand account of the presentation by a journalist who covered the event. Ray has since responded to these criticisms, and I have collected the links to those arguments/responses here.

I took a moment to look at Ray Kurzweil's response to PZ Myers' second-hand dissection of his talk at the Singularity Summit(1) I attended last weekend (see The Singularity Stole My ATM Card) because Andrea Kuszewki is on the case and trying to keep things on track (like, can we reverse engineer the brain?