Dork Scratchings

Imagine you were a hamster in a hamster ball living on a hilly surface.  Base camp is surrounded on all sides by high summits, but you have a powerful catapult there that can fire you to the top of any of them.  Once fired you can influence your trajectory, but it's hard work and you don't have much energy in your little legs.  Suppose you know where you want to end up beyond the hills.  What's the best strategy for getting there?

ESA/Rosetta/NavCam – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0 In November 2014 the Philae lander touched down on 67P.  As I tried to imagine what was happening there now, I realized that "there now" doesn't really have much meaning when "there" is 30 light minutes away.  And maybe "what's happening" doesn't have much meaning either, given that the region of spacetime outside of one's light cone provides the sort of causal isolation quantum computing engineers would kill for. In a lapse of character brought on by mental fug I penned a poem On Everett's Peak  Rosetta, Philae, half an hour away if you're travelling light Packed with meters, big and small And a single transistor failure could ruin it all Cosmic ray, beta decay, a single gamma misplaced State changed, plan deranged, non-redundant memory defaced It hasn't happened yet, at mission control, as far as it is known At mission control, it hasn't happened yet, anyti...

The following equation can be viewed in a couple of ways $$ action =  \int_{\Omega} \mathcal{L} (\phi_a, \partial_{\mu}{\phi_a}) d^4x $$ 1. Classically Every physical law can be written in terms of an Action Principle .  An action principle states that measurable values $\phi_a(\mathbb{x},t)$ over a region of spacetime $\Omega$ will be such that the action is stationary.  Or to put it another way, if you infinitesimally deform the $\phi_a$ then either  however you do it the action will increase, or  however you do it the action will decrease. There is an important caveat though: the action is stationary because we only consider deformations of the $\phi_a$ that preserve its values on the boundary $\partial \Omega$. This is an alternative to the differential way of describing the universe, in which only a single point of spacetime is considered.  In the differential formulation, instead of being told the values of $\phi_a$ on a boundary of a r...

I would be glad to know your Lordship's opinion whether when my brain has lost its original structure, and when some hundred years after the same materials are fabricated so curiously as to become an intelligent being, whether, I say that being will be me; or, if, two or three such beings should be formed out of my brain; whether they will all be me, and consequently one and the same intelligent being. —  Thomas Reid letter to Lord Kames , 1775 If only nature could provide some way to distinguish between identical and the same  then one could answer Thomas Reid's question.  If a reconstructed Thomas Reid were the same being then that being would be him; if it were an identical being then it would merely be a person with the same memories, but without any continuity of experience linking it to the original Thomas Reid.  Incredibly, it turns out that nature does provide a way! A well known feature of modern physics is that if you perform the same experi...

COBE CMB fluctuations. Original Source: NASA All tortoiseshell cats are female.  Males can be black, or ginger, but never tortoiseshell.  The reason for this is that the mechanism by which tortoiseshell cats get the patterns on their coats depends on having two X chromosomes.  This is all described beautifully in Chapter 7 of "Junk DNA", by Nessa Carey . Females have twice as many X chromosomes as males, which on the face of it should result in 100% more expression for the genes on that chromosome.  This should lead to much greater differences between males and females than we actually see.  To put this in perspective, Down's syndrome is caused by individuals having 3 copies of chromosome 21 instead of 2.  But this is a far smaller chromosome than X and the difference is only 50%, rather than 100%.  (The fact that chromosome 21 is so small is the reason Down's syndrome is more common than syndromes in which there are too many copies of more impo...

How much can you make the top Jenga brick overhang the base by stacking them together? Surprisingly, you can go as far as you want. Suppose your bricks are length $l$ and you have one brick (not including the base).  Obviously you can overhang by $\frac{l}{2}$ without the centre of mass being unsupported.  What if you have two?  Now you have two conditions The centre of mass of the top brick is supported The centre of mass of the top 2 bricks are supported A quick calculation gives us that if the top brick is displaced (relative to the one below) by $\frac{l}{2}$ then the one below could be displaced by at most $\frac{l}{4}$ (relative to the one below it). Now suppose you have $n$ bricks (not including the base), then  you have $n$ conditions.  Let's guess the answer based on the result for $n=2$ and let's set $d_k = \frac{l}{2}\frac{1}{k}$ where $d_k$ is the displacement relative to the brick below and $k$ is the brick number starting at the top....