Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Build / Engineering

  • Micro Quorums

    Listening to the Radiolab Bit Flip episode. If you haven’t listened, then you really should first.

  • The Great Filter Rorschach 

    Fermi wondered why we have not met aliens. He recreates an equation which we are still just figuring out some of the constants. Part of it wonders how many civilizations wipe out themselves. This Great Filter makes people concerned any time life on our planet is threatened. During the Cold War, the concern was a…

  • Should we rebuild after hurricanes?

    Over the years, I have thought about owning a house a Mexico Beach, FL. However, I knew that hurricanes are inevitable. So, there is no way I would own one on the beach because it would likely get destroyed by a hurricane. However, I felt better about a house well back from the beach, like…

  • A Rant on Complexity and Stock Markets

    Zoran Perkov is one of the heroes portrayed in Flash Boys. Someone liked my review of the book, which made me re-read the review and setup a Google alert on him. This video was one of the first hits on a search for him. His thing is: Failure is feature of complex systems. Basically when you…

  • TED Talk: The magic of Fibonacci numbers

    I first encountered the Fibonacci number series around 10 or 11 taking a class at the university offered to kids to make them excited about learning. In addition to math, I took rocket building, speed reading, and others. About this time I hated school, but I really enjoyed these because those teaching it always approached the…

  • TED Talk: Jennings v Watson

    Deep Blue versus Kasparov was an pivotal moment for me. At the time I was playing lots of chess on the computer. (And usually losing.) So the prospect the best player in the world cannot beat a computer was a depressing prospect.  Maybe it is a sign of how much I had matured (or immatured)…

  • Dodos, Maltese Falcons, and the Art of Obsession

    Kudos to Lindsey for recommending this. I had watched it before he said something, but I was surprised that I had not posted it on this blog because… I. LOVE. THIS. TALK. I’m not this obsessive when I get interested in something. Like Adam though, I never feel I know have or done enough. MythBusters…

  • 50 Years of Americans in Orbit

    Fifty years ago today, John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth. For some reason, Alan Shepard, Jr. being the first American in space did not impress me as a kid. Going up and coming back down did not count. Achieving orbit was realer space. Glenn was the American response to Yuri Gagarin being the first human…

  • Cyborg Stephen Hawking

    Stephen Hawking missed his 70th birthday party this past weekend. He was not feeling well. There has been quite a bit floating around the Internet about how he as survived decades after getting an estimated months to live. Even Intel talked up how they are working on a way to help him speak faster. Speaking…