The Big Think

Make does a great interview with the dynamic duo.

and just plain insane.

Can’t believe it’s been more than a decade since the ThrustSSC broke the sound barrier on land.

I’ve reached a major milestone on the entertainment center. After 8 hours of doing the final finish on the main cabinet I decided the time had come to move it inside! I spent a lot of time wiring it up and making everything ship shape. I also put the old entertainment center (and I use that term loosely) out to pasture. Or, more precisely, out on the curb with a big old “FREE” sign on it. It was gone within an hour, thank goodness. I do have to say, though, that the $15 I paid for it back in 1997 wasn’t a bad deal at all.

So how does the new one look in the living room? In a word: awesome. I still have to finish the tops and work on the front face frame and all of the doors, but the thing has presence. It looks so much better than the old particleboard and cheap, chipping laminate of the old one. It’s a great color and texture and, since I designed it to fit the whole room by modeling it (and the room) in SketchUp, it fits the space exactly.

Once it was in I sat back an had a sort of existential moment of “holy cow, I made that“. It’s a feeling that all woodworkers (all creative people, really) get when we see the fruits of our labor in the proper setting. I never get tired of it.

I want to post pictures of it, but not until I finish the tops and get the doors attached. Then you’ll get to see it. I think I’m going to submit a picture to some of the woodworking magazines as well and see if I can’t get it published. Home stretch! It’ll probably be done before Thanksgiving.

Total time (I didn’t post a few days in there) is 165 hours.

With much fear and trepidation, I decided to post these thoughts on the current race. I’ve been having a back-channel conversation with a friend who has lost some good friendships over political differences. I’m in no hurry to follow in his footsteps.

This caught me up short. That a brand new freshman senator actually said that he lacked the experience necessary for the office right before being sucked into the machine was pretty revealing about the state of modern politics. The question and answer were crystal clear and I doubt there’s room for any misunderstanding, so this made me start thinking about the reason for Obama’s nomination in the first place. That made me wonder this:

If you keep the person of Obama exactly as he is- same experience, same connections, same upbringing, same political philosophy and voting record, etc- but instead put him in the body of a young, ugly, white guy from the midwest, would he even have a chance of being elected? I don’t think so. Much of his appeal stems from his appearance (young, black, handsome) and demonstrated speaking ability (reportedly leg-tinglingly good), while his voting record and political philosophy have been actively downplayed by the campaign and the media. I’ve no doubt that he’d be a good conversationalist and an interesting person to have a a dinner party, but focusing on his personal attributes and passively hiding his political philosophy tells me that the voters aren’t getting all the information, or at least, they’re having the information about both candidates cherry-picked to make one look smooth as a Camel cigarette and the other rough as skin cancer. To me, that single point illustrates that this election isn’t about voting record or political philosophy. It’s a throwback to our common high school heritage of the best looking, best talking guy getting to be class president.

I’m not saying that the alternative candidate is all Truth and Light, but don’t forget that McCain was lauded as a maverick and renegade by the press. He was called the only Republican that had a chance to bring some moderation and balance to the political landscape. He was praised and honored by the media as a force for change when he stood up to President Bush. He was called all of these things… until he decided to run for President. McCain hasn’t suddenly become Ronald Regan in his consrvatism (if anything, he’s moved slightly to the left since then with his stance on illegal immigration). So why has the press suddenly decided that he’s the embodiment-of-evil-Bush-the-sequel?

I’ve become seriously concerned at the intense double standard that’s playing out in the media. The Republicans have a vice presidential nominee with experience as a governor and mayor (though limited) and she’s being actively decried and ridiculed for her lack of experience and the fact that she’ll only be a “heartbeat away” from the presidency. She’s also become the latest victim of the overused “stupid Republican” trope that’s been foisted on Reagan, Quayle, Bush I, and Bush II (see a tired trend here?) Meanwhile, the other party has nominated- for the high office itself- a person who himself admits to not having the necessary experience to run for the office. A person who scores closer to the extremes of political philosophy than almost every other member of the Senate- certainly more “extreme” than his opponent. However, he’s being lauded with every approbation imaginable. Ask yourself: if the situation were reversed and McCain said that he wasn’t qualified, wouldn’t this self-damning clip be shown every night on every news station?

If the situation were reversed I’d have a hard time explaining or justifying how the Republican candidate was suddenly qualified for a job for which only a short time ago he admitted not having enough experience.

I’m not trying to tick off or alienate my friends who feel differently about politics. I’m just trying to see if there’s something I’ve missed. It disappoints me that our Presidential race may have devolved to the level of a high school popularity contest.

I’m interested in comments, but looking back at my opening paragraph I’m not sure I want to put match to kindling when the tinder is my friends.

An interesting take on Glibness vs. Intelligence. And yes, it’s political. Shame on me.

A great read on stories the media has forgotten to tell. I would really like it if some folks I know who are voting in this election would read this and let me know just why this kind of behavior isn’t a problem. Why is it okay for the media to be acting like this?

It’s been a couple weeks since my last post and much has gone on since then. Erin and I spent ten very long days in Houston seeing to the funeral arrangements for her father, as well as starting the long process of dealing with his estate. As an only child, Erin had the difficult responsibility of making the decisions regarding his burial, memorial service, and disposition of his things, so I think it’s safe to say that those ten days aren’t something we’d like to repeat any time soon.

Thank you to all of our friends (and my mom and dad) who made the long trip to Houston for the short service. We may not have gotten very much time to talk to you each of you, but rest assured that your presence and love were felt and gratefully appreciated. We talked a lot about how supported we felt and how much your presence mattered to us. Really: thank you.

For now, please go to this page to see Harmon’s extended obituary. He lived a long and interesting life and will be missed. We were glad to see so many people learn the details about his life. I’ll be posting pictures there as we get them scanned.

Erin’s father passed away this morning at 1:30am. She’s been in Houston the past few days and got to spend a lot of time with him, but this still comes as a surprise. He had shown improvement over the last few weeks but may have had complications from an infection he contracted. Your thoughts and prayers are appreciated.

Jason: “I can’t believe you’re starting the Harry Potter books again. What is this, the fourth time through the series? I’m going to send you to Harry Potter Anonymous.”

Erin: “I’d go! There’d be lots of good conversations!”

Wherein my good friend Matt posts the first major paper of a series he’s been working on since the dawn of history. That big ‘ol brain just keeps a growin’.

A rather interesting short interview with Neal Stephenson.

I found a site called Suspicious Vans. This one is especially suspicious:

Kam Kuo, extreme pen spinner. Check out the rubber band thing he does at the end. Incredible!

Sorry to be offline for so long. Erin’s dad is doing better and the doctors seem to think that he’s out of the woods. They moved him out of the super-intensive I.C.U. to a less intense ICU (that, apparently, saved on budget by dropping the periods). Then a couple of days ago they upgraded him again to a normal room. His numbers (hemoglobin, etc) are all trending in the proper direction and they’re starting him on physical therapy to regain the balance that he lost from being bedridden for a week.

The doctors are actually talking about him going home in the next week or so. I know it seems sudden if you just read my post below, but we’ve been through a whole week since I wrote that and he’s shown good recovery. For an 83 year old he’s strong (and stubborn) as an ox. Wait.. are ox stubborn?

Anyway, thank you all for your prayers, emails, and phone calls of support. It has meant a lot to us to know that we’ve got a web of friends who have our back when we go through something like this.

As some of you know, it’s been a busy few days for us. On tuesday we received a call that Erin’s dad had called 911 and the paramedics came and took him away. At first, the neighbor told us that it had been food poisoning as a result of eating tuna that had not been refrigerated in the aftermath of hurricane Ike. After making a few calls to the ER, we learned that he had been admitted and they were doing tests. Since we couldn’t do anything until we knew more, we stayed by the phone and waited.

A few hours later the call came from the hospital that he had been admitted to the MICU (medical ICU). The preliminary tests indicated a heart attack. We immediately jumped in the car and drove to Houston. When we got there, we were greeted by a very grave-looking doctor and some pretty bad news.

I won’t go into all the details here, except to say that her dad had indeed had a massive heart attack and they are still assessing the damage. He also had internal bleeding and very low blood volume/pressure. We came very close to losing him the first night and it took almost 48 hours until he was even remotely communicative. Thankfully, he’s been moved out of the super-intensive ICU into a less intensive level (but still ICU). His bleeding has stopped for the time being but the doctors have adopted a wait and see approach instead of the more aggressive go-and-look. This is partially due to his age (83), but also because the internal bleed and the heart attack are running counter to each other. They can’t explore the damage to his heart since he’s got a mystery bleed, and they can’t go looking for the bleed since his heart is so weak.

We’ve been on and off the phone with many people these past few days but couldn’t get ahold of everyone. So if this all comes as a surprise to you, and you’re a close friend, please be assured that you haven’t been demoted to the “we’ll call them when it’s all over” level of friendship. You’re all important to us but Erin and I have been in a very intense little circle of doctors, specialists, and each other for the past few days.

Your prayers are very much coveted and appreciated.

One more thing: if you have children or people you care about that may, in the event of your incapacitation, have to take on the responsibility of some pretty major decisions (Do Not Resuscitate orders, living wills, power of attorney, etc), then please- please- make those decisions now while you are healthy and not lying in a hospital bed. Make sure your loved ones know how you feel or at least know where to go to see your wishes. Fifteen minutes of uncomfortable thinking and ten minutes spent with a notary could potentially relieve your loved ones of some soul-crushing decisions. If you want, don’t even make it legal and official (except for the power of attorney). Just writing down your wishes somewhere known could immeasurably help. Please consider this. It doesn’t matter what you decide, but it does matter that your loved ones know you’ve made a decision and don’t have to make it for you in a time of extreme stress.

Jason

Three hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin was born into a world where electromagnetism, nuclear physics, and even basic germ theory were completely unknown ideas. Anton van Leeuwenhoek had only done his seminal work on germ theory a generation before, and Isaac Newton’s Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was fresh off the presses. All kinds of new discoveries could be made by the layman simply because humanity existed in an intellectual universe where there were undiscovered wonders under every rock and behind every tree.

The period from Gallileo to Einstein was an era of great scientific discovery as humanity first started to make major inroads into the wilderness of knowledge, and while 400 years may seem like a long time, it’s the blink of an eye compared to the tens of thousands of years that homo sapiens sapiens has been roaming the planet.

So along comes the first few generations of people born into a world that has the technology to begin delving into the universe in a truly “scientific” way. Copernicus used simple observations to deduce that the sun was at the center of our local neighborhood. Discovery. Gallileo ground up some lenses and saw the moons of Jupiter. Discovery. Brahe (old metal-nose himself) and his assistant Johannes Kepler built on this work to deduce the laws of motion. Discovery. Newton rolled all of these observations up into some useful mathematical tools that really set things in motion (heh). Just as soon as Newton’s Mechanics and Calculus became widely known, the pace picked up and suddenly all kinds of discoveries were being made: under this stump was uncovered the orbits of the planets, behind this boulder was the first thermodynamics, the principles of pneumatics and hydraulics and then electromagnetism allowed the construction of more useful tools for experimenting. These in turn fed on themselves to create even more methods of discovery. Eventually Einstein wrote down his famous equation and seemed to upset the whole thing. But wait! Einstein was only describing a larger universe that encompassed all of Newton (who had encompassed all of Copernicus before him). Soon Heisenberg and Feynman, et. al. would encompass even Einstein’s landscape in a gigantic theory of tiny things- quantum mechanics.

At every one of these stages it became more and more important to know what had come before. You couldn’t be Gallileo and royally torque off the Church without understanding Copernicus. Brahe built on the work of Gallileo (and Copernicus). Kepler built on Brahe (who built on Gallileo and Copernicus). Today, people like Steven Wolfram build on Hawking, who build on Feynman, who built on Bohrs, who built on Einstein, who built on Newton, and so on down the line to the first guy to bang two shiny rocks together and notice a tiny silver spark. We’ve journeyed a long way, and at each step scientists had to know and understand what came before.

The wonderful result is this: if you pay attention in an average well-taught high school physics class, you can come out knowing more about the world than just about any of the Really Smart People before, say, 1900. You might not be as good with the math or as insightful about the processes involved, but you’ll have a clearer picture of how the universe is put together than the men and women who fought through the initial discoveries. A little more study in college and you, yes, even you, could have an intelligent discussion with Einstein. Study a bit more and you could even impress the old coot. Think about that. The tools to understand creation- tools that were centuries in development and cost generations of intellectual muscle-are handed, sharp, shiny, and clean…. to a sixteen year old. These students then take the intellectual discoveries of Copernicus-Gallileo-Newton-Brahe-Kepler-Einstein-Bohrs-Feynman-Heisenberg-Hawking and use them to create some truly big tools:

That’s ATLAS, the main detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. It’s been called the single most complex object humanity has ever created. This 7000 ton, 80′x130′ monster is about half as big as Notre Dame cathedral. Pause for a moment and consider that.

In fact, the 17 mile diameter instrument is almost as big as Paris itself! (Faint red ring):

In many ways, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and ATLAS represent the capstone of human achievement. You’re looking at the culmination of ten thousand years of technological development, folks, none of which would have been possible without knowing, and understanding, all of the discoveries that were painfully, laboriously unearthed over generations. ATLAS will be used to plumb the very bedrock of matter, and will hopefully give us some answers that are suspected, but not yet proven. Scientists hope the instrument will then open the doors to parts of the map where before there were only the ghostly outlines of dragons.

Four hundred years ago, if you wanted to discover something that had never been seen, the only tools needed were a ramp, a reasonably round object, and an accurate clock. Now, in order to make a new discovery, you need a tool that takes thousands of scientist, millions of man hours, billions of dollars, and the cooperation of dozens of nation-states. We’ve come a long way, baby.

So now what?

Let’s say you’re an aspiring scientist in high school who wants to work on the frontiers of discovery. You want to go where no one has been, dig in a place where the soil is undisturbed, and uncover something new. Write your own Principia Mathematica for the modern age. Here’s a pretty good map to the frontier:

• Spend the first five years of your life learning how to walk, talk, reason, and not soil yourself too often.

• The next twelve years of your life (in the American system of education, at least), are spent learning the basics. Language, arts, literature, and an exposure to introductory physics and math. Hopefully you’ll have some logic courses because they’ll be very useful later.

• Next, do your undergraduate studies. You’ll take some english and literature and maybe even a few courses in the arts, but the vast majority of your next four years will be spent learning to understand the scientific rules that govern how the universe works.

• Now, the work really starts. In grad school you start to focus a lot on the higher reaches of modern science. Advanced physics, higher math, relativity, the quantum universe.

• Your doctoral and post-doc time is spent specializing in one area and getting to know that area as well as humanly possible. Who made the big discoveries? Why are they important? Learn these esoteric theories completely and then incorporate them into your knowledge base. My friend Matt was kind enough to send along the following list of the courses required in order to get a fundamental grounding sufficient to make original contributions in String Theory (just one small subset of physics, though I imagine that there would be a lot of overlap if you saw a list of, say, particle physics or cosmology):

Here is a list of directed (graduate only) courses one needs to do string theory (I’m leaving off several topics that may not be be necessary, though they would be helpful)

PHYSICS
Classical Mechanics
Classical Electromagnetism
Statistical Mechanics
Mathematical Physics
Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics
Relativistic Quantum Mechanics
Special Relativity
General Relativity
Astrophysics
Cosmology
Quantum Field Theory
Gauge Field Theory
Particle Physics
Intro String/M-Theory
Conformal Field Theory
String Cosmology
(each would be 2-3 semesters if you actually took all of these classes… though most of us learn a lot of this by reading)

MATHEMATICS
Complex Analysis
Linear Algebra
Ordinary Differential Equations
Partial Differential Equations
Topology
Abstract Algebra
Algebraic Topology
Differential Topology
Differential Geometry
Algebraic Geometry
Lie Group Theory

At the graduate level, the above mentioned math classes should cover the basic ideas of the following, but you’ll need a fairly advanced knowledge of the following (in no particular order);

Group Theory
Differential Forms
Rational Homotopy Theory
Tensor Theory
Differentiable Manifold (Real and Complex Manifolds)
Riemann Surfaces
Kahler Manifolds
Characteristic Classes
Homology
Cohomology
Fibre Bundle Theory
Noncommutative Geometry
Representation Theory
Calabi-Yau Manifold Theory
Enumerative Geometry
Loop Theory
Knot Theory
Topological Quantum Field Theory
Topological String Theory
Conformal Group Theory
K-Theory
Kac-Moody Theory
Quantum Group Theory
Information Theory

The first third of your life is over and you’re just now ready to begin. Congratulations!

As you advance in school, the amount you learn is utterly dwarfed by the amount that is known. It’s like doing search-and-rescue. You start from a single point of last-known-location and begin to spiral out. Each step from the center of the circle dramatically increases the total area of the circle. To be a modern scientist at the frontier requires that you have a good understanding of as much of the circle as possible, but there are still areas of the landscape that will be forever unknown to you, simply because the circle of knowledge is so big that nobody can know it. Thomas Young is generally regarded as the last man to know everything and while “everything” is a tall order, good old Tom was well-versed in just about every major field of knowledge during his time: 1773-1829. He had a grasp on the overall map of science and made significant contributions all over the place. As a result of his contributions, knowledge soon grew too vast for one person to get the big picture.

Matt, a trained scientist and string theorist, told me that he had been in school for his entire life (minus the first five years). That makes an ongoing twenty year education. He’s just now getting to the point where he knows enough about his chosen field to make a serious contribution. Matt tells me that he didn’t really start to get a picture of how things fit together until he was well into his doctoral studies. Four hundred years ago, you could learn everything there was to know about a subject in a few years, then spend the rest of your life expanding the borders. A hundred years ago it took a bit more time to get to this point, but there was still enough of your lifetime left to make new discoveries (and more important, enough mental agility- most mathematicians, for instance, do their best work before the age of thirty).

When Columbus, Magellan, and Marco Polo set off on their great journeys of exploration, the world was largely unknown. Most people were born, lived, and died within sight of the same church tower, and “far away” meant the neighboring country. A mere one hundred years ago mankind hadn’t yet set foot on the highest place on the map. Or the lowest. Or either pole, for that matter. In the time of my grandparents there remained significant portions of the planet that were unexplored. Today, a simple visit to google earth can reveal any corner of the globe that you want to see, down to an amazing level of detail. Granted, we still don’t have a truly detailed map of the ocean floor, but to any reasonable degree we have “discovered” the surface of our planet. Writer David Brin puts it this way:

“Jungles crash to make way for houses. The world sweats in every pore the breath and touch of humanity. There’s not a single place left where you can go and say to a new part of the universe- “Hello, we’ve never met. Let me introduce myself. I am Man.”
David Brin Earth, p. 272

And yet! Even though each corner of the map has been photographed and measured, cataloged and recorded, there is still an unending amount of work to be done to see how it all fits together. Once the great Age of Exploration of the earth was over, we had really only just begun to see the world. We’re still only just beginning.

However, within a generation or so, the amount of scientific knowledge that will have to be known will be so great, the distance to the edge of the metaphorical map so vast, that the very brightest among us will have to study for literally their entire lives before their education will incorporate what they need to know to be sure they’re not just duplicating past effort. What will science do in this kind of world? Will we constantly be rediscovering the same rock or tree but from different directions? It’s impossible for physicists to keep up with everything that’s going on in biology or math, to say nothing even of their own field, so it’s not uncommon for a scientist in each field to discover the same thing from different angles. Usually they figure things out when somebody points out the similarities, but often these overlaps will go undiscovered for years. In a very real way, we might be approaching the time when new scientific discoveries end, not because there’s nothing new to be discovered (as John Horgan argues in his book, The End of Science), but because, like outer space, the next frontier might simply be too hard to reach. Indeed, particle physicists tell us that we could go on building bigger and bigger ATLAS’s, attached to more titanic Colliders, and still never reach the true foundation of matter, but at some point it becomes impossible to do so (I read somewhere that in order to reach the energy necessary to see the smallest subatomic particle, you’d need to build a particle collider the diameter of the universe. That’s most likely not a bid that would make it past the various budgetary committees.).

Now that we’re facing the possibility that our “local map” might become unmanageably large, how is the scientific community addressing it? How are we making sure that our finite resources are not being focused on overlapping priorities? What should we as a species do to insure that we’re making the most efficient use of the people at the frontiers? I have a few suggestions.

Communicate across disciplines. First, let me suggest that it’s even more important that we get the disparate fields talking to one another. Not only will this keep them from wasting resources by avoiding overlapping discoveries, but combining experts in many different fields can often spur new thinking that leads to new discoveries. The annual TED conference has been doing this sort of thing for over a decade, and has wisely started posting its famous (and famously expensive-to-attend) conferences for free on the internet. Get them direct from the website, or in podcast/vidcast format via iTunes. Some of the talks can be of a more artistic nature, and some are even silly (wonderfully so, sometimes), but there are plenty of examples of experts reporting back from their slice of the frontier.

Open up education. MIT’s Open Courseware project makes it possible to get an advanced education in many different fields. An MIT education, to boot. We need to encourage every university to do this, not only because it’s the right thing to do (and arguments about intellectual property and marketplace competitiveness are unconvincing- it hasn’t hurt MIT at all), but because it seems like a good way to raise the general level of education- the rising tide that floats all boats. Getting the “free” MIT education does come with some drawbacks, namely the inability to interact directly with the professor or students, but come on… it’s a free MIT education!

Leverage the internet: While still in its infancy, the internet is the single greatest tool for improving the human condition since soap. Google, with its amazing search technology and plans to scan every book in the library of congress, Microsoft’s Live Search, the Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg, are all examples of technologies that leverage the capability of the internet to collate, organize, and search-enable knowledge. We need to broaden and deepen this technology to include every word in every language ever written, every picture and movie, every sound recording, and then develop ways to reliably translate between them all so that nothing that is discovered is forgotten and everything ever learned is as accessible as a simple search.

Develop better systems of analyzing what we already know: In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil argues that future artificial intelligence will spend its time collating and analyzing the discoveries that have been made, not making new ones. We need to begin this process by making access to discovery as open, free, and unencumbered as possible. If basic research (sometimes even basic research that has been paid for by public money) is locked up by very expensive subscription services, the pace of discovery and innovation will slow down and only be accessible to those with deep pockets. The technology mentioned above is the basic beginning. Next we need to figure out ways to start comparing what we know so that those of us not on the frontiers (the vast majority), can more effectively analyze what has already been discovered. Just finding a lost tree or valley is great but exploiting this new knowledge is where humanity is benefitted.

Revamp the broken copyright system: Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig have been tireless warriors in the battle against the completely broken copyright mess, but they need help. We need to completely overhaul the system and come up with laws that balance the right of the creators/copyright holders (not always the same entity) with the good of society. There are many creative suggestions that would address this balance, but so far money and political influence have stood in the way of real change. Why is this important? Can you imagine how hard it would have been to make real progress hundreds of years ago if every idea and discovery was locked down to a fare-thee-well with restrictive copyright? True, you can’t copyright a natural fact or discovery, but it only takes one creative lawyer to confuse “natural fact” with “method of doing business”. Once this happens it tends to scare off innovators who maybe don’t have the resources to fight the system. Case in point: your own genome might soon become the property of a drug company. Other companies will then have to pay to use the “natural fact” of a specific sequence of your ATTGATTACA’s in order to develop new medical treatments.

“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.” (From the Budapest Open Access Initiative Web site at http://www.soros.org/openaccess/).

Capitalism is great, and I’m all for it, but I believe there’s a balance between the right of a guy to make a buck and the right of society to build upon past discovery.

Fix the educational system. This is a whole post by itself, and there have been intellectual wars fought over how to do this, but one thing is very clear: our educational system worldwide stinks. In some countries (America among them), you are highly unusual if you possess a high school diploma and college degree. MIT’s idea is a start, but we need to take education more seriously than just the latest demand by the entrenched teacher’s unions or political special interests. I spent five years getting an education degree and what this showed me was that there is a lot of work to be done in improving the system. To that end we need to develop ways to…

Optimize our brains: A recent Wired article interviewed Piotr Wozniak about Supermemo. Supermemo is a computer program that uses the latest cognitive research in learning theory to optimize your memory. Used consistently, Supermemo can help you remember things better. Enter something that you want to remember (Mozart’s dates, the mass of the hydrogen atom, or new vocabulary words), and Supermemo will become your perfect teacher, reminding you of these facts at neurally-optimal intervals. The program is still in its infancy and reportedly very user-unfriendly, but if we can develop ways to optimize how we learn then we can shorten the period of time it takes to get out to the frontier.

The human species is rapidly approaching a point where the quantity of knowledge is so great that we lose our ability to usefully learn anything new. When that happens, humanity may stagnate. It seems clear that we must soon take steps to change our current systems of learning and intellectual exchange so that we can continue to push our frontiers out a little farther.

The single best video I’ve seen describing how the new LHC operates. Awesome!

PHD Comics has a righteous 5 part comic strip (think Scott McCloud-style) that goes behind the scenes at the LHC. According to my super secret physics insiders (hi Matt), a bit of the info isn’t exactly on the money, but the spirit is there. Good stuff!

Wood magazine posts an interview with the Godfather of woodworking, Norm Abrahm.