Murray Gell-Mann

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/apr/17-man-who-found-quarks-made-sense-of-universe/

He and Feynman did not get along, unfortunately... I love Feynman, a special talent no doubt. Gell-Mann is something in his own right...

--

Did you find it strange that Feynman became such a celebrity?
Feynman was a peculiar case because he was a very brilliant, terrific, successful scientist, but he was also a clown. He was more of a clown than he was a scientist sometimes.

But you and Feynman could get into really deep conversations about physics. You were well matched, weren’t you?
For some years, and then I got fed up with him. He was just so turned in on himself. Everything was a test of his brilliance. So if in discussing things we came to some interesting conclusion, his interpretation of it was, “Gee, boy, I’m smart.” And it’s just annoying, so after a few years I just wouldn’t work with him.

--

Murray Gell-Mann

...beauty is a very successful criterion for chosing the right theory...




This one is great too.. close to my field-ish. Do all languages have a common ancestor?

Merlin Donald, an absolutely brilliant free-thinker, and my thesis adviser and teacher, thought about this a lot. Such a great topic! Recently visiting Iceland and falling into the Gaelic language, learning that it came from nordic, knowing that the geography prevented Latin influence... sort of a side branch of what we use here, ugh.. just like our genes... split, etc.. pretty good. More if you talk to me about this here... I like this shit. Merlin postulated that language came from gossip (trying to communicate about other events, people), which I adhere to, but it's a bit more complicated then that.. (geographic?) bottlenecks, as addressed below.

iPhone

I picked up an iphone 3gs from a guy I know... ugh... I'm totally convinced. The one thing that was holding me back was the lack of keyboard, but with the learning curve I have no hesitation using the onscreen keyboard.

So many freaking applications. There's one where if you point at the night sky, it will point out stars, constellations, etc in augmented reality. So great. Jailbroken, yes.. but not necessary. (aside: I did manage to brick the phone for a good two hours where I decided that if it stayed bricked I would get a new one... that's how great)

Anyway, I AM T-PAIN app.



AUTOTUNE EVERYTHING YOU SAY.

ugh.. fun stuff... especially after the cottage this weekend, where Jordan played us a bunch of R-Kelly, which I will get to later...

--

oh, and here's the I AM STING app..

http://gizmodo.com/5360947/i-am-sting-app-is-even-whinier-than-i-am-t+pain

Festival weekend

Roncesvalles Polish Festival, Queen West Art Crawl, and Parkdale is throwing it down too.

Evolutionary mutation?

http://io9.com/5359538/evolutionary-throwback-snake-with-foot-discovered

A woman in China discovered a snake clinging to the wall of her bedroom with one clawed foot. It turned out she'd discovered an incredibly rare mutation - it's actually more common for snakes to have two heads than feet.

Nice link Sandra!

LHC creationism

Megastructures beyond the horizon? Nah...

.. it's just multi-dimensionality!


http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327246.000-13-more-things-dark-flow.html

So a recent finding by Sasha Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, does not make sense. His team has found a group of galaxy clusters moving at an extraordinary speed towards a small patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela. Kashlinsky calls it the "dark flow", in tribute to those other cosmic mysteries dark matter and dark energy (New Scientist, 24 January, p 50).

... One of the foundation stones of cosmology is the Copernican principle, which says that there is nothing special about our region of the universe.... There are also suggestions that the pull might be from another universe altogether. That would be good news for proponents of eternal inflation theory, which suggests that the universe should actually be composed of "mini-universes" that have bubbled off from one another.

--

From the series:

13 things that do not make sense
and
13 more things that do not make sense

New Malcolm Gladwell book, sort of.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316075841/



Below; straight from Kottke.org

What the Dog Saw is a collection of his writing from The New Yorker. Here's an annotated table of contents with links to all the articles and the dates on which they originally appeared in the magazine:

The Pitchman - Ron Popeil and the conquest of the American kitchen. (Oct 30, 2000)

The Ketchup Conundrum - Mustard now comes in dozens of different varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same? (Sept 6, 2004)

Blowing Up - How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy. (Apr 22, 2002)

True Colors - Hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America. (Mar 22, 1999)

John Rock's Error - What the inventor of the birth control pill didn't know about women's health. (Mar 13, 2000)

What the Dog Saw - Cesar Millan and the movements of mastery. (May 22, 2006)

Open Secrets - Enron, intelligence and the perils of too much information. (Jan 8, 2007)

Million Dollar Murray - Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage. (Feb 13, 2006)

The Picture Problem - Mammography, air power, and the limits of looking. (Dec 13, 2004)

Something Borrowed - Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life? (Nov 22, 2004)

Connecting the Dots - The paradoxes of intelligence reform. (Mar 10, 2003)

The Art of Failure - Why some people choke and others panic. (August 21, 2000)

Blowup - Who can be blamed for a disaster like the Challenger explosion? No one, and we'd better get used to it. (Jan 22, 1996)

Most Likely to Succeed - How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job. (Dec 15, 2008)

Dangerous Minds - Criminal profiling made easy. (Nov 12, 2007)

The Talent Myth - Are smart people over-rated? (Jul 22, 2002)

Late Bloomers - Why do we equate genius with precocity? (Oct 20, 2008)

The New Boy Network - What do job interviews really tell us? (May 29, 2000)

Troublemakers - What pit bulls can teach us about crime. (Feb 6, 2006)

From Amazon:

"Good writing," Gladwell says in his preface, "does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head."What the Dog Saw is yet another example of the buoyant spirit and unflagging curiosity that have made Malcolm Gladwell our most brilliant investigator of the hidden extraordinary.

Uh, all are pretty much must reads.

ok, one more youtube video...

.. cuz I'm in the mood...

What not to do when a dog starts to hump your leg.

I am packing my bags!

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Hilarious hick kid. This is tv gold.

Anna's 25th birthday!

25th!

We went to La Veranda at Royal York and Bloor; food was ok.. nothing special. Lacked creativity, almost chain-ish... but, fun night (before getting pulled away for a football draft :(.

Dad excitedly tearing open a gift from Africa.


This one's for you Anna, cuz it's your birthday.


No more salt!

Labour Day, classic.

I went down to the Labour Cay Classic with a few great friends; Argos at the Ti-Cats. What a fantastic day, from start to finish.

Setting up the bbq... A few of us arrived a bit late for the start of the tailgating, but it didn't matter one bit.













Above and below; beef tongue. Yeah. Fuck yeah.



Surprisingly sweet!



Master of ceremonies at work.













Look below. Kari, arm in arm with the Pinball. The arm grab; the expression (click to enlarge!).





Happiness ensues.





Later...