One of my professors, Arjendu Pattanayak, used to defer hairy questions in class with “That’s a beer question—meaning, buy me a beer at the pub, and we’ll talk about it.”
In that spirit, I will buy anyone who can explain this as many beers as it takes:
In general relativity, spacetime curvature is proportional to the stress-energy tensor T. T’s components are basically four-momentum density and flux, which are characterized as “momentum” and “energy”. Photons count. So do other particles with with four-momentum. Does anything else contribute? Electrostatics? The vector potential? The strong nuclear force? What is it that makes something contribute to T?
I’ve read a few critiques of consequentialism recently, and am starting to get pissed off. Not because I harbor an affinity for any particular brand of consequential morality, but because I believe we don’t have any other options.
What are morals, anyway?
As far as I can ascertain, morality is a construct of sentience. No morality detector exists. The universe just doesn’t care. Every single moral statement I have ever encountered has arisen from the mind of a human being. Moreover, the fact that it is possible to find two people who disagree on the morality of almost any action strongly suggests that if there is some moral code outside our own heads, we’re remarkably bad at listening to it.
Seriously, North Carolina? Shooting a man in the head in front of his three year old child is felony assault? Only four months in prison? This can’t be right–the article implies that military service and friendly colleagues is grounds for vastly shorter sentencing. I’d love to read the transcripts from those proceedings.
Contextual advertising just gets better and better. During the scene where the T-2000 is frozen by liquid nitrogen, breaks into pieces, and then melts back together under blast furnace heat, up pops this gem.
I just built a Chrome extension for Vodpod.com. It builds off of the high-performance API I wrote last year, and offers some pretty sweet unread-message synchronization. You’ll get desktop notifications when someone you know collects a video, in addition to a miniature version of your feed.
As it turns out, Chrome is really great to develop for. Everything just works, and it works pretty much like the standard says it should. Local storage, JSON, inter-view communication, notifications… all dead simple. Props to the Chrome/Chromium teams!
Going off on a purely hypothetical and somewhat morbid tangent…
Some people protest the behavior of public entities by protesting: for example, picketing and handing out flyers on the sidewalk in front of Urban Outfitters. Sometimes, though, I wonder about more subtle ways to damage an organization. Most people don’t realize it, but scents are extremely powerful. I’m not just talking about putrescine: Butyl isocyanide, for example, is a shockingly effective deterrent at low concentrations, and defies all attempts at containment:
Butyl isocyanide proved to be so disagreeable to manipulate that none of its physical constants except boiling point were determined. Even when a hood with an extra forced draft was used, the odor pervaded the laboratory and adjoining rooms, deadening the sense of smell and producing in the operator, and in others, severe headaches and nausea which usually persisted for several days.
My bike has been parked next to this 750cc black Ninja for a few weeks now. I think they’re moto friends.
Man, his Triple looks like an absolute blast. Maybe someday I’ll get one of those.
So Justin took my bike out for a spin with some friends from out of town—and while locked up out in the Marina, it was stolen!
I’m sad to see you go, little grey hybrid.
I bought that bike seven years ago with my first paycheck from Kryptiq. Saved up $400 cash and bought myself a brand new Trek 7200 FX. We rode through thick and thin, all over the city. It got me to school, to work on Fridays, to friends’ houses and through the rain to Aikido out in east Portland. It braved flooding, 80 MPH winds, power outages, nails through the tires, and kept on going. We ran Zoobomb, trails through the west hills, construction sites, and freeways. Mostly, though, it got me places without a car.
Hi Mom! I know you want to know what I’m up to down here in CA. This basically sums it up!