James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

The universe is kind of an impossible object. It has an inside but no outside; it’s a one-sided coin. This Möbius architecture presents a unique challenge for cosmologists, who find themselves in the awkward position of being stuck inside the very system they’re trying to comprehend.

It’s a situation that Lee Smolin has been thinking about for most of his career. A physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, Smolin works at the knotty intersection of quantum mechanics, relativity, and cosmology. Don’t let his soft voice and quiet demeanor fool you — he’s known as a rebellious thinker and has always followed his own path. In the 1960s Smolin dropped out of high school, played in a rock band called Ideoplastos, and published an underground newspaper. Wanting to build geodesic domes like R. Buckminster Fuller, Smolin taught himself advanced mathematics — the same kind of math, it turned out, that you need to play with Einstein’s equations of general relativity. The moment he realized this was the moment he became a physicist. He studied at Harvard University and took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, eventually becoming a founding faculty member at the Perimeter Institute.

“Perimeter,” in fact, is the perfect word to describe Smolin’s place near the boundary of mainstream physics. When most physicists dived headfirst into string theory, Smolin played a key role in working out the competing theory of loop quantum gravity. When most physicists said that the laws of physics are immutable, he said they evolve according to a kind of cosmic Darwinism. When most physicists said that time is an illusion, Smolin insisted that it’s real.

Smolin often finds himself inspired by conversations with biologists, economists, sculptors, playwrights, musicians, and political theorists. But he finds his biggest inspiration, perhaps, in philosophy — particularly in the work of the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, active in the 17th and 18th centuries, who along with Isaac Newton invented calculus. Leibniz argued (against Newton) that there’s no fixed backdrop to the universe, no “stuff” of space; space is just a handy way of describing relationships. This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did Leibniz’s enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world’s fundamental ingredient is the “monad,” a kind of atom of reality, with each monad representing a unique view of the whole universe. It’s a concept that informs Smolin’s latest work as he attempts to build reality out of viewpoints, each one a partial perspective on a dynamically evolving universe. A universe as seen from the inside.

.

Lee Smolin at his home in downtown Toronto. All photos by Philip Cheung for Quanta Magazine.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

1. Speak softly and carry your trash

.

D3sign | Moment | Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

If you stop to think about it, society is pretty fragile. A lot of it’s just agreements between total strangers to do certain things in certain ways all the way down, and if enough people stopped honoring those agreements, everything would collapse pretty fast. Most of those agreements are unwritten and unspoken—like not playing the bongos at 3 a.m. while your neighbors are sleeping—but many are enshrined in a written contract. And we should all be using contracts more in our lives, because they remove uncertainty.

A contract is just a legally binding agreement between two or more parties that sets out the terms of an agreement. You don’t need to be a lawyer (or hire a lawyer) to write one, and they can protect you and the other party in a variety of ways. Any time you enter into an agreement that involves money or property, you should have at least a simple contract in place to make sure things go smoothly—because if they don’t and you need to take someone to court (even small claims court), having a contract will significantly strengthen your position and improve the odds of things going your way.

Contract basics

First, you have to know a few basic things about writing a contract. You don’t need fancy language, formatting, or specific legal terms in there, but the contract does have to include a few basics to be considered legally enforceable:

• Consideration. There has to be an exchange of value, like when you pay someone to perform a service for you.
• Clear acceptance. What’s being offered (e.g., a fee and a service) has to be very clear, as does the other party’s acceptance of the terms.
• Legality. A contract that has illegal terms can’t be enforced, so forget about legally binding someone to commit crimes for your benefit.
• Capability. Both parties in the contract have to be competent, of legal adult age, and capable of understanding what they’re agreeing to.
• Mutuality. Everyone has to agree that they are, in fact, entering into a contract and agree to be bound by its provisions. In other words, you can’t trick someone into signing a contract.

Contracts don’t have to be lengthy, but they do have to be clear—any confusing wording or imprecise terminology may come back to haunt you. There are a lot of free downloadable contract templates out there, however, which you can either use as-is or alter to your needs. And if you have any doubts about your ability to craft a contract, you can always pay a lawyer to either write one for you or review one you’ve created yourself.

.

Credit: Gutesa/Shutterstock

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The German historian Oswald Spengler considered our age the age of abstraction. Nowhere is this more apparent than in programming, where abstraction isn’t just a conceptual convenience but an absolute necessity. Programmers like to talk about their tools (rather abstractly) as a “stack.” At the top of the stack—the surface most of us encounter first—are simple markup languages, HTML being the best known. At the bottom are the “bare metal” languages of the machine. Thus, there is a hierarchy, and the further down in the stack you go, the less abstract—and, in a way, more difficult—programming gets.

It’s not really metal down there, of course. It’s sand—impossibly thin layers of silicon dioxide that conduct electrical impulses in ordered patterns we experience as a screen showing us a rectangle with text on it, flickering images, and so on. Still, you can see how Spengler, though he died before the era of digital computing, was on to something. None of us are keeping 1s and 0s etched in sand in our head, and yet we all manipulate them every day using friendly, high-level abstractions.

The danger of living in this Spenglerian moment is that it’s easy to mistake such abstractions for the world as it really is. This, I think, is why programmers often dive deeper into the stack as they progress through their careers. We think that maybe when we reach bare metal, our world will finally be real.

I started, like most, at the top of the stack. HTML. 1995. Geocities. Angelfire. Blink tags. Marquee. I’ll admit it: I loved me some marquee tag, which scrolled text across the screen. I loved marquee so much, I ran straight out of HTML and into the welcoming arms of Flash. Blame the Matrix website. Coolest animation ever.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

On the next U.S. census and future federal government forms, the list of checkboxes for a person’s race and ethnicity is officially getting longer.

The Biden administration has approved proposals for a new response option for “Middle Eastern or North African” and a “Hispanic or Latino” box that appears under a reformatted question that asks: “What is your race and/or ethnicity?”

Going forward, participants in federal surveys will be presented with at least seven “race and/or ethnicity” categories, along with instructions that say: “Select all that apply.”

After years of research and discussion by federal officials for a complicated review process that goes back to 2014, the decision was announced Thursday in a Federal Register notice, which was made available for public inspection before its official publication.

Officials at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget revived these Obama-era proposals after they were shelved by the Trump administration. Supporters of these changes say they could help the racial and ethnic data used to redraw maps of voting districts, enforce civil rights protections, and guide policymaking and research better reflect people’s identities today.

“These revisions will enhance our ability to compare information and data across federal agencies, and also to understand how well federal programs serve a diverse America,” Karin Orvis, U.S. chief statistician within OMB, said in a blog post.

Most people living in the U.S. are not expected to see the changes on the census until forms for the next once-a-decade head count of the country’s residents are distributed in 2030. But a sea change is coming as federal agencies — plus many state and local governments and private institutions participating in federal programs — figure out how to update their forms and databases in order to meet the U.S. government’s new statistical standards.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Hmmmm…

.

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

In 1957, Nashville’s all-white Hattie Cotton Elementary School was destroyed by dynamite blast when black kids integrated the school.

—On September 9, 1957, as 19 Black six-year-olds integrated all-white elementary schools in Nashville, Tennessee, white church members—including one local minister—organized a persistent and violent campaign to oppose the integration of Nashville public schools. Outside Fehr Elementary School, one person held a sign that read “God is the author of segregation” and pursued two Black children walking to the school. Outside three different elementary schools that same morning, Fred Stroud, a white minister, sought to dissuade white parents from allowing their children to be educated alongside Black children by preaching damnation for those who did not uphold segregation.

The next day, 100 sticks of dynamite were thrown into Hattie Cotton Elementary School and exploded. Patricia Watson, the one Black elementary student who had been in class the previous morning, did not return. No Black children returned to Hattie Cotton Elementary School the following year, and no one faced criminal charges for the bombing.

Though Brown v. Board of Education determined in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional, for three years white residents in Nashville relied on intimidation and organized political resistance to maintain segregation in the public schools. In 1957, Nashville finally developed a “stair step program” which permitted a few Black elementary school students to enroll in eight elementary schools in their zones.

Throughout the summer of 1957, white segregationists in Nashville held intimidation rallies to terrorize Black families. In the days leading up to the first day of school, as Black parents pre-registered their children for school, mobs of white church members gathered outside buildings with signs calling segregation the “will of God.” One leader declared that “integration can be reversed” and that “blood will run the streets” before Nashville’s schools were integrated. tangie

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

https://twitter.com

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Watch live with us as a total solar eclipse moves across Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Weather permitting, people throughout most of North and Central America, including all of the contiguous United States, will be able to view at least a partial solar eclipse. See views of the eclipse from sites along its path.

.

NASA Eclipse 2024

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

https://plus.nasa.gov

.

__________________________________________