Quiddities and quandries from my quintessential quest

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Creating a Creative Style

I think any creative activity is in fact a learning process. Musical performance is included in this, by the way, because you have to create your particular style of playing. You’re always trying to develop and move forwards… Creative cycles – By Tim J I agree so much with what Tim says in this blog [...]

Relativity and Time Dilation

The fact that time isn’t consistent for everyone is a very troubling idea, and even physicists have a hard time learning about it initially. Imagine how difficult it was for Einstein to convince his peers about it originally! He didn’t even have the benefit of science fiction to lean upon for sparking the imagination! In [...]

I Like Xmas

I want to be very clear about the fact that I mean no disrespect by my use of the word Xmas.  I am just tired of the awkwardness of trying to balance my love of Christmas with my non-Christian spiritual beliefs.  I was delighted to discover recently that Xmas is not “taking the Christ out [...]

A Church of Realists

This church is all about where we are going[,] and [of] taking control of our own evolution. We believe in taking responsibility for our future by being realists and using reality to guide us in making important choices so that we can ensure that we grow the Tree of Knowledge and that tomorrow is better [...]

Non-Prophet Religious Organization

The Church of Reality is a non-prophet organization. I recently discovered the Church of Reality, and I am totally amazed. What a great collection of musings on what a modern, thoughtful religious notion could entail! I’m not done reading yet, but so far I haven’t found anything that didn’t send a shiver down my spine [...]

Heating and Cooling Degree Days

To analyze your building’s thermal efficiency, it is useful to review historical temperature data, particularly the heating and cooling degree days.  To that end, I just found an incredible website: DegreeDays.net, where I found a table showing my local daily heating degree days, with various baseline temperatures, so I can analyze my heating costs and determine [...]

Green Party FTW!

Let me start by saying that I’ve never been interested in politics. Apathetic would be more like it, until I started paying attention and getting disgusted, which then made me want to revert to apathy again. Unfortunately, there is no going back: once you know something, you can’t un-know it. All that was left for [...]

Electron Spin Visualization

Air on the Dirac Strings, by EVL: Electronic Visualization Laboratory, and posted by evltube on YouTube. Electron spin is definitely a weird property, especially because of the fact that it requires two full rotations to return to its original orientation, instead of just one. This video has some excellent visualizations to help wrap your head [...]

Playful Cleverness, Applied

While the word ‘hacker’ to refer to someone who enjoys playful cleverness is most often applied to computer programmers, it is sometimes used for people who apply the same attitude to other fields. Hacker (free and open source software) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia OMG, this and a few of the other Wikipedia articles have [...]

Relativistic World Line Animation

I’m totally in awe of this image every time I come back to the Wikipedia article on Special Relativity. This animation shows how events in spacetime (the background dots) at various distances (horizontal axis) appear at various times (vertical axis, ticking by at a constant rate) to the observer (whose trajectory in spacetime is passing [...]