2007 October

Geneticist, Steve Jones interviewed in 1994 during the controversy over the book, The Bell Curve. Something that is very relevant today, given that one of the most famous living scientists claimed that black people were less intelligent. (as an aside – I’ve finally figured out how to embed videos so that they start at a specific timecode point – do a view source on the video linked to here, if you want to now how.) Steve Jones Interview – (in light of the Watson controversy) | smashing telly – the best full length free tv programs on the web, updated every day

Wojciech Zurek is onto something wonderful. My dad is a physicist and runs and Internet startup. Since I am over 40 myself, this is fairly unusual. It also means that when we don’t talk about physics, we talk about computers. For the last couple of years this has amounted to pretty much the same thing, since I have become immersed in the voguish idea that physics and information theory are essentially the same thing. My hobbyist hunch is that information is relative (being measured in bit pairs) and that it doesn’t flow so much as sync. I believe that the interpretation problems we have explaining the experimental results at the extremes of physics magnify the effects of us trying to explain the inevitable information syncing within system that we are part of by looking near the scale of the entire system or its individual bits, where the definition of the…