Space is Negative Energy

The great mystery at the heart of the Big Bang is to explain how an entire, fantastically enormous universe of space and energy can materiahse out of nothing. The secret lies in one of the strangest facts about our cosmos. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called "negative energy." To help you get your head around this weird'd but crucial concept, let me draw on a simple analogy Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the univ...

 Competitive and Addictive Gaming VS Gaming for Play

The compulsive games-player, of course, is another universal phenomenon, particularly where gambling is a part of the game. The compulsive gambler is not made in a day: he descends an increasingly slippery path, eventually falling into a psychological trap from which escape is rare. The Chinese god of gambhng, Tu Chieng Kui, represents a man who spent his hfe gambling until he died, deeply in debt. Traditionally, statuettes made of him - known as 'a devil gambhng for cash' - show a figure in ...

 Shannon and Thorp Hack the Roulette Wheel

It was in this tinkerer’s laboratory that they set out to understand how roulette could be gamed, ordering “a regulation roulette wheel from Reno for $1,500,” a strobe light, and a clock whose hand revolved once per second. Thorp was given inside access to Shannon in all his tinkering glory: Gadgets . . . were everywhere. He had a mechanical coin tosser which could be set to flip the coin through a set number of revolutions, producing a head or tail according to the setting. As a joke...

 Emulate Water

虛實: 夫兵形象水，水之形，避高而趨下：兵之形，避實而擊虛；水因地而制流，兵因敵而制勝。故兵無常勢，水無常形；能因敵變化而取勝，謂之神。故五行無常勝，四時無常位，日有短長，月有死生。 Weak Points and Strong:...: Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards. So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak. W...

 The Big Gods Hypothesis

...without supernatural enforcement of cooperative, “moral” behavior, ancient Egypt—as well as nearly every other large-scale society in history—wouldn't have been able to get off the ground. All-knowing big gods are “crazily effective” at enforcing social norms, says Norenzayan's collaborator Edward Slingerland, a historian at UBC Vancouver. “Not only can they see you everywhere you are, but they can actually look inside your mind.” And once big gods and big societies existed...

 Flatland Science: Dimensions

What and where is Flatland? A Square gives us several interesting answers, many of th contradictory. We know that it’s flat, big (but how big?), and very thin, the most important question of all is “how thin?” A lot depends on the answer… A Square himself eliminates the version that’s easiest for three-dimensional readers to understand; a world that’s thin – maybe only a few atoms thick - but nevertheless has some physical height. It would have some sort of solid or semi-solid ...

 Everything is for You

Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky an...

 The Nominal Fallacy

The nominal fallacy is the error of believing that the label carries explanatory information. An instance of the nominal fallacy is most easily seen when the meaning or importance of a term or concept shrinks with knowledge. One example of this would be the word “instinct.” “Instinct” refers to a set of behaviors whose actual cause we don’t know, or simply don’t understand or have access to, and therefore we call them instinctual, inborn, innate. Often this is the end of the expl...

 An Elegant Complex Description of Fire

The atoms like each other to different degrees. Oxygen, for instance in the air, would like to be next to carbon, and if they get near to each other, they snap together. If they’re not too close though, they repel and they go apart, so they don’t know that they could snap together. It’s just as if you had a ball, it was trying to climb a hill and there was a hole it could go into, like a volcano hole, a deep one. It’s rolling along, it doesn’t go down in the deep hole, because if it...

 A Watch Implies a Watchmaker Argument

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to shew the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be enquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watc...