No, this is not a Dr. Who fanfiction, but I couldn’t resist the allure of what I like to think passes for a clever title for a post about a new change to international standard timekeeping. That’s right: instead of worrying about minor controversies over things like religion, politics, or the Great Pumpkin, what should really be getting your blood pressure up is the CGPM’s vote to abolish the leap second.
Zeno’s Zeros
While Zeno’s Paradoxes appear ridiculous, even silly, on the surface, considering them with greater seriousness reveals that they begin to plumb concepts of physics and mathematics that remain unresolved today.
Keeping Track of Terms
Every now and then, I come across something that already seems so effective that I have no need to alter it to fit my own way of doing things. The most recent example of this is a post from Marie Brennan (author of The Memoirs of Lady Trent, among others) discussing, of all things, ways to prepare your manuscript for the copyeditor.
Artificial Miracles
What really is the difference between something that is natural and something that is artificial?
Autocomplete Your Story
Now, tools that leverage artificial intelligence can predict entire paragraphs of writing, rewrite your paper for you, and may one day do the first draft, too.
Communicating Clearly
Compare these two sentences: 1) LyttIeton hypothesized long ago that Triton and Pluto originated as adjacent prograde satellites of Neptune, and 2) A physical unclonable function (PUF) is a hardware security primitive that exploits the inherent randomness of its manufacturing process to enable attestation of the entity wherein it is embodied.
Energy Storage
If I wanted to make this post extremely short, I could probably leave it at this: we humans are absolutely terrible at energy storage.
On the Origin of Triton and Pluto
The paper proposed a radically new hypothesis for the origin story of Pluto and Triton, and in the process laid the groundwork for a whole new understanding of the structure and formation of the entire solar system.
Magic is Science is Science is Magic
Long before Arthur C Clarke coined the phrase “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” before Howard Taylor riffed on that claim to assert that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun,” and probably even before Mark Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, people, and especially writers, have been fascinated by this idea of an equivalency between science and magic.
Thoughts on John Milton’s Areopagitica
It was in this pursuit that I came across John Milton's Areopagitica, which is considered by many amongst the first, cogent defenses of the right to freedom of speech.
IGC Publishing 