A Most Astounding Fact About the Universe

A lovely video made of Neil deGrasse Tyson's response to what he thinks is the most interesting fact about the universe.

Less Wrong

Hi, I'm James, and I'm also a contributor to this blog.  I don't know how often I'll post anything, though - and no one has posted anything in a while.

Today I'd like to mention my favorite website - another blog - Less Wrong.  On its About Page, Less Wrong describes itself as a "large, active website for people who try to think rationally".  In my opinion, they've discussed almost every interesting thing you can think of there.

My favorite reading on Less Wrong was a "sequence" of posts called "How to Actually Change Your Mind".  This series of blog posts discusses ways that people (including you (and me)) can be biased when evaluating different truth claims, and ways that we can avoid such bias and be in the best possible psychological state to change our minds about something, if that is what the evidence truly dictates we should do.

A quote I recently read there that I found insightful was taken from the post "My Childhood Death Spiral" (discussing the author's reaction to his parents' reaction when he questioned the religion he was brought up in, Judaism):

For a long time, I thought that the moral of this story was that experience was no match for sheer raw native intelligence.  It wasn't until a lot later, in my twenties, that I looked back and realized that I couldn't possibly have been more intelligent than my parents before puberty, with my brain not even fully developed.  At age eleven, when I was already nearly a full-blown atheist, I could not have defeated my parents in any fair contest of mind.  My SAT scores were high for an 11-year-old, but they wouldn't have beaten my parents' SAT scores in full adulthood.  In a fair fight, my parents' intelligence and experience could have stomped any prepubescent child flat.  It was dysrationalia that did them in; they used their intelligence only to defeat itself.

Another one of my favorite Less Wrong posts is "Truly Part of You".

I'm sorry that this blog post wasn't well-written.  I preferred to write a somewhat disjointed blog post over nothing at all.  Less Wrong is such a large site that I didn't really know how to compress it into a single blog post.  If you want to learn more about it, Less Wrong also has a FAQ.

And one more addendum: The primary author of Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, wrote a Harry Potter fanfiction (which actually gets good reviews) called "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality".  You might want to take a look at that here, if you are both a fan of Harry Potter and rational thought.

The Sagan Series

     Carl Sagan was a scientific genius. He was a pioneer in space exploration. He was also incredibly articulate (breaking the stereotype that scientists are cold and lack human compassion). He hosted a television program "Cosmos" and wrote an amazing book The Pale Blue Dot.
     His words are beautiful and poetic. There is no way that I can describe what Dr. Sagan's words are really like, so instead I will have you listen to them.
     Reid Gower has compiled quotes from Sagan's audio-book, and placed them along side music and significant pictures. The effect is amazing.

     The video is short, so I think it's is more than reasonable to ask for you to sit and listen intently for the three and a half minutes. If you can, just listen and consider what Dr. Sagan says. If you do this I promise you won't regret it.

     If you enjoy this, there are 8 more videos like it. Also Cosmos is available on Netflix, and The Pale Blue Dot is available pretty much all over the place.

What Slinkys can show us that Newton's laws can't

     What happens when you hold up a solid object and let it go? ...well it falls of coarse. How soon does it start falling? As soon as you release it... sort of. Radiolab and a few YouTube videos can explain and demonstrate what I'm hinting at a lot better than I can.

     See, when you dangle the Slinky you make it so that the only way information can travel from top to bottom is through the coil. Because the path is so long you can see this delay of "knowledge" between what the top of the Slinky "knows" and what the bottom of the Slinky "knows". 

     This is a simple example of how matter can act as a wave. The Slinky is literally falling molecule by molecule. The molecules have small spaces between them, so it takes a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second for the first molecule to effect the next one. If you add up these each individually invisible delays you end up with one visible one.

     Its the same sort of effect as shown by a whip or a pole vault. It occurs in all matter, not only flexible matter. So this means EVERYTHING occurs on some amount of delay. The longer the path the longer the delay, but even short delays can have a large effect.

F=ma

     This might be taken to mean that any two items made of the same material, traveling at the same speed, hitting the same surface will have the same effect. This isn't the case. A ball bearing of mass m will not hit as hard as a metal rod of mass m that strikes on its end. Pretty cool.