July 27, 2010 at 4:19pm
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As one of the few astrophysical events that most people are familiar with, the Big Bang has a special place in our culture. And while there is scientific consensus that it is the best explanation for the origin of the Universe, the debate is far from closed. However, it’s hard to find alternative models of the Universe without a beginning that are genuinely compelling.
That could change now with the fascinating work of Wun-Yi Shu at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Shu has developed an innovative new description of the Universe in which the roles of time space and mass are related in new kind of relativity.
Shu’s idea is that time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other. In his formulation of the geometry of spacetime, the speed of light is simply the conversion factor between the two. Similarly, mass and length are interchangeable in a relationship in which the conversion factor depends on both the gravitational constant G and the speed of light, neither of which need be constant.
So as the Universe expands, mass and time are converted to length and space and vice versa as it contracts.
This universe has no beginning or end, just alternating periods of expansion and contraction. In fact, Shu shows that singularities cannot exist in this cosmos.
I was thinking about Robert Anton Wilson earlier, and one thing led to another…
My war story on a compounded service failure.
Data Driven Startups
Originally found here.
Aha, I thought. A system that required little to no profundity! Sign me up.
— Doree Shafrir in a New York Observer story on Tumblr and David Karp.
Note to self: you will not punish your kids like this. Probably.
We have a vague idea in our head of the “price” of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong.
Accomplishing worthwhile things isn’t just a little harder than people think; it’s 10 or 20 times harder. Like losing weight. You make yourself miserable for six months and find yourself down a whopping four pounds. Let yourself go at a single all-you-can-eat buffet and you’ve gained it all back.
— How ‘The Karate Kid’ Ruined The Modern World | Cracked.com
Health Month is a new game (launching soon) designed to help you find that ever-elusive motivation that you need to improve your health. Here’s how you play. It takes place every month. Before the month starts, you choose your own rules that you’d like to follow. These rules are flexible. You can decide to give up drinking altogether, or you can decide to limit yourself to only 30 drinks a week. Everybody’s different, and everybody has a different health riddle that they’re trying to solve for themselves. I think it’s best to just let you do it how you want to do it, and build tools to learn, build momentum, and keep going.
Finally Figured it Out
For years I’ve been trying to be a one blog guy. I like to write about technical topics, but I also just like to post off-topic and personal posts as well. The mixture has never left me happy, which resulted in all sorts of stupid internal conflict / site renames / blog service changes. Jeez. It’s just a blog, man. Right?
Tech posts now go here. Personal posts stay here on Tumblr.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Toadies - “Waterfall”
And then, at some point, you realize you’re spending your best energy on optimization, not on creation.
— Seth Godin
June 29, 2010 at 10:10am
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It’s good to be king, if just for a while…
I am now 30 years old. I have spent the past week on the road, travelling from town to town and showing my kids off to family. Today I will finally make it to Oklahoma City so that they can spend some time with their grandparents and meet their aunt and uncle for the first time.
And I will drink beer with my friends.
Uploading Files to Amazon S3 via C#
I’m working on a small project to help us extract analytics data from a web server that isn’t directly on our trusted network. After a little thought and mumbling about Microsoft’s lack of a simple file transport mechanism, I decided that I could just as easily push the files that I need to analyze out to Amazon S3 and then have the destination box retrieve them.
Fortunately for me, Amazon has provided everyone with a fantastic SDK for .NET, which makes this task extremely simple. After spending a few minutes, I wrote up the following example app to upload any given file to the bucket of my choice. I thought I’d share in case anyone had any anxiety or questions as to how this is possible.
[since I can’t get decent looking sample code to appear with this theme, click here to see the gist]
Very simple, right? Congrats to the AWS guys for making our lives easier.
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