Dork Scratchings

When learning Quantum Mechanics the rules can seem very abstract, and also very arbitrary.  The starting point is often taken to be the Schroedinger Equation, a deterministic equation describing the rate of change of an isolated system's state, and the Born Rule, which describes how that state gives rise to probabilities for each outcome when you interact with the system by making a measurement.  These two form the axioms of quantum mechanics from which everything else flows. These axioms seem incredibly arbitrary, which makes accepting them harder.  In this post I will show that you can, in fact, start with much more basic axioms and then derive both the Schroedinger Equation and the Born Rule from them.  What's more, we'll be able to show how collapse of the wavefunction  emerges  from these simpler axioms as a  subjective  phenomenon.  This then deals with the measurement problem, which is that collapse appears  to require us to arbit...

  October 2023, I took an extended break from work to travel around Nepal and India, with my wife Anna.  For me it was a once in a lifetime trip; for her it was a return to the a place she spent a significant part of her childhood - so it was a big thing.  However, having initially suggested the trip I was suddenly hit by a wave of guilt: I'd completely forgotten about my no-flying commitment.  I was in a dilemma - either break with my commitment or pull out of a trip that meant a lot to both of us. I hit upon a solution: Climeworks.  This is a Swiss company selling carbon credits using Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology.  The plants are based in Iceland so they have access to abundant zero-carbon geothermal energy to power the fans which suck in the air, and the process that mineralizes and buries the carbon.  But it was eye-wateringly expensive.  We needed to offset 5 tons of CO2 - the emissions of two passengers travelling from London and back...

Great Larson cartoon But I can't make out the joke Oic 

I was watching Nate Hagens' Wide Boundary News, part of The Great Simplification project, and was struck by a reference to Sunset, a prize winning Holstein cow who produced 51,000 lb of milk in one year. This led me to start wondering exactly what kind of resources need to be fed into the machine that has a cow like that at the top of its pyramid. In the past I might have spent an hour or two making back-of-fag-packet estimates, but AI has made me lazy: now I just ask Claude. This is what he/it came up with:  

Nearly two weeks into the US-Israeli war on Iran many commentators have drawn attention to the climate cost of war.  But whether it's the BBC's Climate Question  on Radio 4, or Covering Climate Now's Press Briefing , they all ignore the elephant in the room: the blockade of the Straits of Hormuz.  So, what is the effect on the climate of this blockade? Saving Lives at Sea I made a meme, plz share... How many lives are saved by stopping a single tanker?  Estimates of the number of climate deaths this century vary enormously, with some sources saying around 10 million and others many billions.  There are plenty of serious climate scientists who believe most lives on Earth are at risk.  But let's follow this study  which says "The number of caused deaths will likely lie between a tenth of a person and 10 people per 1,000 tons." A typical tanker carries 1,000,000 barrels of oil, which when burned will create 430,000 tons CO2.  If we treat all anthropo...

  I've been thinking a lot about the limits to growth recently.  If you look up the non-renewable resources that our economy depends on it quickly becomes apparent that all of them, whether they be fossil fuels or metals like copper , are somewhere between 30% and 70% exhausted.  And the exhausted part is invariably the easiest to get to.  However, it has only recently occurred to me that land is also a non-renewable resource:  they're not making any more of it.... Checking out Our World in Data  one can see that nearly 5 billion hectares are currently in use by humans.  That compares with a total available of 13 billion hectares, if you discount the ice covered land.  So, in fact land falls into the same 30-70% exhausted range as everything else. I downloaded the data and produced a smoothed graph of growth (%) vs year and found something interesting: growth grew more or less exponentially until about 1956 at which point it fell sharply to zero....