Penrose, Cardeal on flickr, Marburg, helmets, Chinatown, Kojo,cheater eggs

Wet Easter, head stuffy, settled in to Roger Penrose "Road to Reality"
I have long held that physics like Tensors, fields, calculus are too complicated.
Something about the notation & nomenclature. The notation seems stuck in a printing technology of fonts & italics & Greek letters from 150 ybp.
Subscripts, superscripts and more. Its all to dusty.
Penrose seems to agree. For 50 years (!) he has been using diagrams for tensors & such,
lots of them in this book. I still dont get it but at least he admits a problem.

I also reckon that advanced maths can be discussed. RP does this rather well, mentioning reasons and difficulties. not simply ranks of equations with terse comments.

I have this fantasy that in some far-away place in (time or space) everybody just understands quantum gravity as a matter of course.
RP uses the word 'intuitively' quite a few times, usually when about to introduce something complex and non-intuitive.

Fibre bundles were a new shock to me, that as far into the book that I've got.
RP is very big on spinors & twistors. His head is very spacy, literally, he appears to have a tremendous grasp of space. He famously invented the pentagonal tiling, then sued a manufacturer who used his tiles as toilet-paper patterns.

RP is also famous for his wacky theories that gravity acts inside the head, in microtubules. This is supposed to produce a head-sized quantum state, which collapses into an "ah ha!" moment which no computer will ever attain.
- seems very dodgy to me.
Schrödinger, sensibly avoiding the war in Dublin in 1943, wrote his famous "what is life" which suggested genetic information was proteins on a string like charms on a bracelet. No concept of semantics. However it excited a lot of physics types to get into biochem. Hence the double helix.
RP's ideas on the brain seem unlikely to generate any such movements.
I am happy that someone has at last produced a discursive book on physics with the maths talked about. Someone should do some animations of RP's illustrations.
Its said that you can only grasp 4dimensions by actively moving sliders/joysticks in a graphics program. One day this will be done for gravity and quantum electro-dynamics.
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Lots of neat photos on flickr:
Two from Brazil"

Tatiana Cardeal
Tatiana Cardeal2
Tatiana Cardeal3
Tatiana Cardeal4
Tatiana Cardeal5
Tatiana Cardeal6

carf(Gregory Smith)



mantis
venice
nachosan's wife
nachosan's wife
Yabusame #3 by tokyo knock
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An illness that has killed nearly 100 people in northern Angola was identified on Tue 22 Mar 2005 as the rare Marburg virus, which is from the same family [the family _Filoviridae_] as Ebola virus, state and UN officials said. Des
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USA imported more food than it exported (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
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helmets kill
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Would you let Enron own your water?
& water?
"forget it Jake, its Chinatown"
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24 March 2005..The International Energy Agency is to propose drastic cutbacks in car use..
"Saving Oil in a Hurry: Measures for Rapid Demand Restraint in Transport"
..more radically..cutting public-transport costs by 100%..
..drastic speed restrictions and compulsory driving bans
"the Agreement on an International Energy Programme (IEP)..countries who signed .... US, Japan, Germany, UK and France - would all have to institute cuts.
"In the event of an activation of IEP emergency response measures, each IEA Member country will be expected to immediately implement demand restraint measures ..
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29/03/2005 11:28AM
Paul Volcker's foodforOilScandalcomittee, has criticized Kofi Annan. Apparently Kofi's son Kojo got $45,000 for 8 years.
On the moral calculus, with no-bid KellogBrownRoot and their famous %50 million bridges, this is a bizarre attack. At the USA resiles form more conventions, USA citizens will look more and more ridiculous presiding over calls for law and morality.
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Colony Crime
Offered one of the cheater eggs laid by workers, the nursemaid ants hesitated. It's hard not to anthropomorphize the scene she describes as consultation: "They have it in their mandibles, and they pass it to each other. In the end, usually one will take it and crush it." In these cases, the workers killed up to 90 percent of worker-laid eggs.