020071111 - Some Things on My To-Write List

I'll get on to these sometime soon (or never, or in a long time, who can tell - this note is more for my memory than anything else, but if it sparks anything on your part then so much the better).

• Intelligence - There are real physical/biological differences. Some people are more intelligent than others. Primarily though intelligence is “the habit of using a skill”. Put simplistically, what differentiates smart people from stupid people is that when a smart person runs into a new problem they have a bigger and more varied quiver to draw from. Included in this broken metaphor of a quiver are “learning arrows”. Smart people have skills and are in the habit of using them that let them leverage problems and situations so that they learn more from them than they otherwise might. Once you get ahead of the curve it's easier to stay there but in principle (heh) almost anyone can. Relatedly, except in very rare and limited circumstances, nobody is “naturally” good or bad at something. “Natural” ability just reflects the arrows they already have. If you have lots of mathematical arrows you'll find it easier to pick up, aim and hit with other, similar but slightly different mathematical arrows. The same presumably goes for public speaking, flirting, being funny, being a good dancer etc.

• Thoughts from the Paintball Field - How it is similar to other sports. How it is importantly different. Major difference: in a team ball game (football, soccer, doubles tennis etc) everything centres directly or indirectly around the position of the ball. You might move to a particular place because a member of the opposite team moved to a particular place, and they might have moved there because someone on your team moved to a third place, but if you wind back through this chain far enough you'll always find that it's because of the position of the ball. In paintball there is no ball. Or rather, more accurately, every player is a ball. This makes keeping track of what's going on much much harder! Other lessons: importance of communication, how difficult it is to be invisible. The psychological aspects at the individual (fear of getting hit) and team (going on the offense/being on the defense) level.

• Philosophy. The quintessential useless subject, the one that will never get you a job. Is this belief correct?

• How to deal with RSI. Or maybe I'll just put up the relevant spam/epistle in which I wrote about it.

020071108 - Thermodynamics and Armchair Physics

I forget whether I've mentioned this elsewhere on my website, but I don't think I have. It's a question and it's not one I can come up with an answer to, so it nags me. It's also not one that any physicist or philosopher I've asked can answer either. That said, it's very loosely phrased and so I wouldn't put too much by all this, the solution might just fall out of a more rigourous presentation.

Take the universe. It is somewhat ordered and is irrevocably becoming increasingly disordered. That's straight out thermodynamics. But it begs the question: where did all the initial order (energy) come from? Why did the universe begin with order?

In a sense, this isn't a question in physics, although it's very definitely a question about physics. I don't think it's out and out metaphysical either - the answer depends on all the rest of cosmology, but there is a scientific answer to it. And obviously “goddidit” isn't an answer, it just pushes the question around some. Anyway, one physicist I chatted with speculated that the question might be a pseudo-question, by which I think she meant it was a question with no (falsifiable or testable) answer. This could well be right, and the scientific answer might be unknowable, but it's fun to speculate about and it seems to me that any testable answer to this question would strike right at the core of physics.

But that's enough of a ramble from someone who can't even do a good job of pretending to be a physicist! If you have any thoughts on the matter though then please - fire me an email!

020071010 - An Email Configuration

OK, in case anyone's ever interested (or confused, by the appearance of my email) and also in case I ever forget myself, here is the setup of my email.

• All email addresses (comlab, exeter, cgf.listX etc) forward to a single mailbox at syntilect.com. This greylists my email, as of October 2007 that reduces my spam from ~140/day to 3.
• That mailbox redirects to a gmail account, which does spam filtering and web archiving of all of my email.
• The gmail account is configured for pop and smtp.
• I download it to my computer, or read it online. gmail is configured to send from all of my main addresses anyway.

Previously gmail used to redirect the mail back to another syntilect box which I downloaded it from, but I dropped that as there was no need and because it made it easier to use the gmail smtp server as well. There, wasn't that fascinating?