I've a print copy of this, the content is quite good but rather marred by the annoying typsetting everything is all jammed in right up to the marigns (something which is sadly true across this whole series of great books).
The problems however are absolutely fantastic, a great mix of computational and theoretical which go from half an hours fun to really unanswered problems. Fun fun fun! I highly recommend trying them and referring to the text as needed.
Dirac said, “follow mathematical idea wherever it leads”. When I first opened ths book years ago, unpublished draft then, I just skimmed the ToC, checked a few problems and then to my horror encountered that interesting approach to restricted three–body problem (nicely wrapped as the “Jupiter” problem in the book). I was horrified because I had a lead on that too… and there – it's all in textbooks. That situation allowed no relaxed wackiness in my thinking about it anymore, I had to formulate my thoughts. ‘I need more math’, I thought. When I finally digged out of that rabbit hole I found myself learned in dynamical systems, ergodic theory, harmonic analysis, spectral theory, operator algebras, homology, algebraic topology, and constructive renormalization, and in numerical methods, symbolic dynamics, symbolic algebra, Grobner bases and group cohomology and applied algebraic geometry, and then Hopf algebra of Connes–Kreimer computable renormalization and, uh, followed Connes the way up to motivic integration… (ok. ok. I'm done enumerating now) at which point I lost all interest in physics and turned mathematician.
All that not to mention intersection of algebra and topology of statistical mechanics with coding theory and infromation theory which led me to machine learning (which is just statistics btw).
I'm unsure what the moral is. That was not healthy. (OTOH, mathematicians have high life expectancy, routinely living up to 90, gauging from AMS Notices obituareis).
When thinking about nukes, remember that the whole point is to not fire them - their value lies in deterrence, and in everyone knowing the horrible things that would happen if they were fired (this is less the case with tactical nuclear weapons, but Iran doesn't have those). So if you're using them for deterrence - especially in the case when you're up against a much stronger enemy - you target them (and announce this) in such a way as to cause the greatest damage for the greatest number of parties.
Let's say Iran had a nuke, and was feeling so threatened that it had to launch its nuke. If it takes out Jerusalem, it destroys a significant pilgrimage location for Islam, as well as the capital of the (local) great enemy. The US then comes and levels most of the country, and the Israelis likely drop a nuke on Tehran. There's also the pretty good possibility that the Israelis would be successful in shooting down the missile, but would still launch an overwhelming military response. Israel is now in bad shape, Iran is gone, and the rest of the local Arab countries are pretty unhappy, but still alive and kicking.
If they launch on Mecca, there's a much greater change of the thing detonating where it's supposed to. They also destroy a very significant Islamic pilgrimage site. The rest of the Arab world then converges on attacking Iran (with American blessing), as well as Israel (the Sunni states would use the logic that those evil Shiites must have conspired with the Israelis to do this). This results in the US now getting involved militarily to protect Israel, and now you've got a pretty serious war going on in the Middle East, disturbingly close to both India and Russia.
Of those two, the second causes much more hell - which is what they're going for. The second also has the benefit of making the Islamic states much more interested in dealing with their threats, and possibly getting the US to (covertly) be more accommodating.
I'm all for the good things in modern life, dentists, technology &c &c and I don't believe that the author is explicitly against this either.
Rather his main point was that we-the-people have been manipulated into thinking that the onus of environmental destruction is squarely upon our shoulders, as opposed to the meta-shoulders of "industry".
The whole back-to-the-land ideal is flawed and short-sighted, as he suggests making changes at the personal level is pointless if mandates at the government/global level end up being the cause of all the damage. Sweeping change is needed but of course this doens't mean stand at the barricades waving gaia flags revolution. It's just that revolution in a che-guavera/1917 fashion is far more romantic than revolution in the form of sensible change brought about by public opinion & lobbying and all that.
"the nervous system is essentially an electrical aparatus using very low powerlevels"
Signal propagation in neurons is not by electrical conduction, in the wire sense, i believe that this would actually be incredibly slow for the conductivities / currents involved. Rather signals are transmitted by an active chemical process where potassium ions are pulled into and out of the axon in serquence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential.
I'm not sure that this has a direct implication for any kind of interference effect, but just wanted to point out that nerves don't really work like metal wires so how external fields effect the internal currents is not trivial. Also skin-depth/screening is going to play a big role in stopping most of the external radiation.
Good resource, i had to start using R recently and most of the examples and books i found were of the "stats with R" variety which all emphasise how to just roll along with the library functions. The general advice i got from some statisticians was to find someone else's code that kind of works and copy|paste. Blurg
> also the headline seems a bit over-dramatic it's not running out it's slowing down.
Good point. Time is only relative. I'm not sure if there would be any nasty (human) consequences to time going infinitely slow. It's still going at the same pace for the observer.
I wonder how we would even know if time was running backwards. Supposing it is even possible, couldn't time be running backwards right now and we don't know it?
I'm with you on the headline. Article doesn't explain anything about time actually stopping.
Time slowing seems like it'd be asymptotic. You should be able to have an arbitrarily large time t, where time is flowing at rate r > 0. According to my calculations, anyway. (Along the lines of: "shit, I really don't want time to stop.")
Now that their party is out of office, they're going back to the woods as some sort of populist/anarchist pro-militia media outlet. Maybe they can grab a few of the mainstream anti-authoritarians in the process.
A little off topic but i can't get over that damn name, i read it as "cul" which is, by my shoddy translation, french for ass-hole. "Va mis en cul!" And from its performance that's actually pretty sound advice.
