science (17)

Like many people, I am obsessed with prime numbers. To understand more about them, I plotted a 2D diagram of the natural numbers, showing for each the prime factors and where they occur. I was astonished to find obvious regularities that, in hindsight, make sense, but that I had never encountered before.

Here's the diagram, made manually on a spreadsheet. I'd love to hear your observations.

Here are mine:

I was fortunate to attend a fascinating public lecture by physicist-turned-biologist Albert Libchaber at the UBC Pacific Institute of Theoretical Physics.

The main thesis of the talk was to suggest that temperature differences can account for a diverse range of important physical and biological phenomena.

Today, March 14th, is Pi day - can you guess why that particular day? We all know Pi = 3.1415..., but what does this quantity represent, ontologically?

I spent a few minutes figuring it out and then I checked Wikipedia which gave me a very good visualization of the meaning of that number:

What that means is that Pi is actually a distance, namely the circumference of a circle whose diameter is one.

One of the great blinders of science stems from the burden of provability: if something is not scientifically provable, then it does not have objective existence, and it's labelled as "superstition".

I am lucky to find "Genesis", a French documentary about the natural history of the Earth, on TPS Star tonight. Google takes me instantly to the schedule page of the TPS Star channel, informing me: Genesis Film documentaire de Claude Nuridsany et Marie Pérennou. 2004. Thanks globalization for the poor.

The Earth starts with molten lava.

As the fire burns out, steam comes out.

The steam is redistributed on the lava as rain, covering the earth and cooling it.

As the volume of steam gets redistributed as oceans, seas, rivers and lakes, the weather cycle is initiated.

The title gives it away really. It is the paradigm of dialectics (of which I have only a faint idea) to the study and theory of systems (of which I am trying to learn the rudiments).

Randomness is a measure of our ignorance.

Time has been often compared to a river, because it flows. But in which direction? Consider this: things that were once in the future will soon be past. So from our reference point, time flows in the reverse direction! And that makes us creatures that swim upstream :-)

Or, as U2 puts it in Zoo Station (from Achtung Baby):

Time is a train
Makes the future the past
Leaves you standing in the station
Your face pressed up against the glass

Antoine de Saint Exupéry:

La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à enlever. Perfection is achieved not when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing left to remove.

Found in the very good programming book, Programming Pearls, by Jon Bentley.