I wrote this in June 2003, two months before defending my thesis. I was doubtlessly procrastinating writing up my theorems and proofs. It's my notes on some document or web page that explains glucose and fat metabolism, and it's just as true 8 years later. There's more to the story of how to improve your health with diet, of course, but the open ( Read more... )

Hanford was the site of the first large scale nuclear reactors in the world, with the first one, the "B" Reactor, going online ("critical") in September 1944. The purpose of these reactors was not to generate power, but to transmute Uranium into Plutonium for the war, and later the cold war, effort. Heat was a waste product; the maximum rate of ( Read more... )

I have an A/V project from my college days that I'd love to turn into a DVD image so that I can watch it. The audio's in an AIFF file -- not much problem there -- but the video is in the IRIX "makemovie" format with a .mv extension. I know it's NTSC and interlaced because I made it :) but I have no idea how best to play or convert such a file ( Read more... )

General relativity, the theory of gravity, is hard to test, because we don't live near any strong gravitational fields. "Strong" means something like the gravity of a black hole; Earth's gravity is really weak by comparison. Successful tests have taken two different routes: either find a place in the universe where gravity is strong, and infer ( Read more... )

Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance wrote this post three years ago. It is of fundamental importance.

Caroline, after making a good-faith effort to understand the distinction between quarks and leptons, pleasantly but firmly demanded to know “What is the practical use of all this? What can we actually do with it? Why is it worth spending time on it ( Read more... )

AIG failed not because it bought mortgages or mortgage-backed securities, but rather because it wrote policies, called "credit default swaps", to insure others against the risk of default in mortgage-backed securities. Literally, one of these policies says that the insurer would pay an amount (e.g. $1000) to a creditor if a particular counterparty ( Read more... )

This is a perfect example of what happens when math grad students have too much free time on their hands.

Click to view

It's unusual for expert scientists to be called upon to give a full and complete explanation of an entire branch of human knowledge which is understandable by and intended for a non-expert. This is exactly what happened in the Dover intelligent design court case. Plaintiffs' strategy was to invite a series of scientists into the courtroom to ( Read more... )

Perfect for Halloween! Listen here!

Back in 1989, in the summer between my seventh and eighth grade years, I started playing a roguelike game called Moria. It was the first such computer game I had ever discovered, and I loved it. I played for hours on end on the University of Minnesota's 8-processor Encore Multimax mainframe, which I was able to access through an account ( Read more... )