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No, the mysteries that "are deep, hard to understand, and not worth the effort" are why Scientific American is publishing this junk article. My lay theory is that SA hasn't been worth reading in decades and basically nobody can write well about quantum mechanics for a casual audience..

Rather the opposite - us-west-2 is big but not the biggest region, or the smallest, or the oldest or newest, it's not partitioned off like the China or GovCloud regions. Because us-west-2 is fairly typical it tends to be one of the last regions to get software updates, after they've been tested in prod elsewhere

People here know offhand what they weigh in pounds, and the packaging on food lists macronutrient content in grams. The article could've listed g/kg as well, but for a US audience g/lb isn't particularly wacky.

The current theory is that particles are waves, or rather localized excitations ('bumps') in a field. One of the surprising things from quantum theory is that these bumps have a finite minimum size, and they can only increase in multiples of that size; this unit is what we call 'a particle'.

This model seems to work (makes accurate numerical predictions, etc.) for all the known fields other than gravity, so physicists think there should be a 'graviton', ie quantum of the gravitational field. But they haven't been detected directly and we don't have a good mathematical theory of them (for a bunch of reasons I don't understand, but I think "gravity is really weak" and "gravity is nonlinear" are a good start)

I had a bramble of related ideas in mind, and instead of putting in effort to untangle them I lazily let them came out as a pithy aphorism. But:

- Even if all of Musk's enterprises were aimed at colonizing Mars (like gp suggested), they can be quite useful here.

- Turning Mars into a self-sufficient habitat is both an absurdly long-term (and laudable) goal and no guarantee of survival. We have to worry about the problems of surviving on Earth today and, in the very long run, how to live in many other places.

(upvoted your comment, because I agree with it)

Manhandled 10 years ago

There's a lot to be said about the vagaries of workplace romance - but don't just fucking grope your coworkers!

I'm also taking the view that raising the prosperity for the lowest individuals will in turn increase the prosperity for everyone else.

This is an aside, and I don't particularly want to evaluate it as good or bad, but this statement is striking compared to the neoliberal idea of 'a rising tide lifts all boats' - i.e. increasing general prosperty raises prosperity for the lowest individuals.

Category Theory 12 years ago

Eilenberg & Mac Lane needed a word like 'set', 'group', 'class', etc, except of course those were all taken. They claim to have gotten the word 'category' from Kant, although they didn't intend an actual semantic relation.

At least within mathematics and physics, 'the properties of one defines the properties of the other' is a pretty good explanation of what's meant by 'duality'. Looking at that wiki list it explains all of the dualities I'm familiar with except (maybe?) the wave-particle duality.