Life in the multiverse

In the October 7, 2010 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers), one can read a short book review touching on "cosmic inflation," as described by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.

Cosmic inflation is the process by which a small part of the very young universe blows up into a vast geometrically flat and almost-smooth patch large enough to encompass all we can see and more, thereby accounting for the universe around us today. [It] makes a number of predictions that have been verified. Yet because of quantum mechanics, inflation is not a one-time event but occurs continuously. Enormous bubbles of space-time are constantly being spawned, each one causally disconnected from the others and harboring its own laws of physics.

Fascinating, indeed, but is it science? Author of the book review, Michael Turner, writes that "cosmic inflation" gives him a headache. "It is science if we cannot test it? The different patches are incommunicado, so we will never be able to observe them." Turner expresses hope that we will someday understand whether we are part of a multiverse. Then again, he worries that we might be "becoming the philosophers that Feynman warned about [in his 1964 messenger lectures]." When has inquiry ceased being science and started becoming philosophy?

[Richard Feynman] warned that we should achieve the Ionian goal of finding all the laws, then"the philosophers who are always on the outside making stupid remarks will be able to close in," trying to explain why those laws hold; and we won't be able to"push them away" by asking for testable predictions of those ideas.

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New batch of quotes

Every so often, I dig into my collection of quotes. I pick them up in a wide variety of places. I hope that some of these are new for you: It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. —Harry Truman A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking. —Martin H. Fischer Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else. - James M. Barrie (1860 - 1937) “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” - Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) Adventure is just bad planning. - Roald Amundsen (1872 - 1928) Efficiency is intelligent laziness. ~David Dunham "You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train." - Howard Zinn Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein Procrastination isn't the problem, it's the solution. So procrastinate now, don't put it off. - Ellen DeGeneres The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse. - Jules Renard (1864 - 1910) [More . . . ]

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Cool new way to write blog posts

For years, I’m been a big fan of WordPress.  How could you not be? WordPress is amazing versatile open source software; 25 million people rely on it to publish their blogs.   If there is one thing that could be a bit easier, though, it is the WordPress post editor.   It works well enough, but it’s a bit clunky and the window can be confining.  wordpress editor

Rather than composing on the WordPress editor, then, I often write my posts on MSWord, or I dictate them in Dragon, then paste them into the WordPress post editor.  One needs to be careful, though, to first strip out all of the word processing formatting tags.  If you don’t, those tags can wreak havoc with the site design—they crawl outside of the post and change the formatting of other posts too, and they can even modify the homepage design.   To strip out those formatting tags, I copy the finished text from my original workspace and paste it into Notepad (on Windows) and immediately copy it out and paste it into the WordPress post editor.   But that requires two extras steps.  And then I find myself tweaking the post once it has gone live.

windows live writer imageWhere, then, can one get the best of both worlds:  A) a spacious writing area with WYSIWYG and B) no worries about formatting tags?   This post is my first attempt to use Windows Live Writer, a free utility from Microsoft.  I learned about it from the company that provided my magazine theme, Solostream.  The screen looks very much like a well-equipped word processor.  When you are finished with your post, you choose your blog (you can set up many blogs at once) from a pick list, and you are finished.  You can easily format photos and videos too.  

It all seems quite painless.  This is an excellent product by Microsoft, which allows me to appreciate WordPress all the more.   Now I’m going to hit “publish” and we’ll see how it looks. 

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Post cards from Mars

At Huffpo, Jim Bell, a professor of astronomy at Cornell, has offered a collection of Martian landscapes. Consider this amazing fact: "NASA's amazing Spirit and Opportunity rovers have survived (and generally thrived) on Mars for more than 25 times their expected lifetimes."

Postcards from Mars is a partly scientific, partly artistic, partly abstract, partly realistic photographic story about what has been a very human exploration adventure on another world-just experienced remotely through robotic eyes.
I have two poster-sized photos of Mars, similar to several of these photos, hanging in my law office. I often admire the technology that enabled humans to land robots on Mars and to take such beautiful photos. Had I been living 100 years ago, these photos would have been inconceivable and priceless. That's pretty much has I still think of them, even though they are now easily available on the Internet.

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Bill Maher: Obama wilted

Comedian Bill Maher puts the turning point exactly where I do: Barack Obama would rather have had some plan he could call a "health care plan" than to actually fight for the public option. Why? Beats me. But that sent a strong signal that this president wasn't going to fight for something on which he ran his campaign. Since then, he's wilted on Wall Street and net neutrality. In the face of Republican obstructionism, you won't win by compromising, yet that is the strategy Obama has repeatedly chosen:

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