Entropy in our Everyday Lives: Active Stability

Because things naturally move to disorder over time, we can position ourselves to create stability. There are two types of stability: active and passive. Consider a ship, which, if designed well, should be able to sail through a storm without intervention. This is passive stability. A fighter jet, in contrast, requires active stability. The plane can’t fly for more than a few seconds without having to adjust its wings. This adjustment happens so fast that it’s controlled by software. Ther...

 Understanding the Education Customer

VCs and entrepreneurs tend to be well educated. Well educated people think about education as an investment. You put as many of your resources in to an investment as you can. It may take 20 years to pay off, but if the return-on-investment is high (which it is for education) then you invest. This group of people — if you’re reading this, you fall into this group — generally understand that education is an investment, and as a result are price insensitive and will optimize for quality ...

 The Market Forces Driving AI

Pretty soon, it will be possible to buy artificially brained robots that perform useful tasks around the house. If the price of such robots can be made affordable, then the demand for them will be huge. I believe in time that the world economy will be based upon brain-based computers. Such devices will be so useful and so popular that everyone on the planet will want to own them. As the technologies and the economics improve, the global market for such devices will only increase to the point ...

 Imperialism and Feudalism are Mountains Weighing Down the...

There is an ancient Chinese fable called "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains". It tells of an old man who lived in northern China long, long ago and was known as the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain. His house faced south and beyond his doorway stood the two great peaks, Taihang and Wangwu, obstructing the way. With great determination, he led his sons in digging up these mountains hoe in hand. Another greybeard, known as the Wise Old Man, saw them and said derisively, "How silly ...

 The Printing Press is the Messiah

The printing press has come like a true Messiah to emancipate the great family of mankind from this double yoke. This Messiah is immortal, and its saving powers must be universal and perpetual. By this, and by no other Messiah, can man be saved from ignorance and misery; the only hell that he has to fear. It will prove the true Messiah of the Jew, of the Christian, of the Mahometan, and of the Pagan. It is a Messiah for all, and it will go on to unite under the name and title of Man and Citiz...

 The Experiment that Disproved Astrology

A story told by this friend, Firminus, shook the young Augustine from his pagan faith. Firminus’ father, an earnest experimenter in astrology, always noted the positions of the stars and even “took care with the most exact diligence to know the birth of his very puppies.” Firminus’ father learned that one of his women-servants was to be delivered of a child at about the same time that Firminus’ mother was expecting. “Both were delivered at the same instant; so that both were const...

 Humanity is Like an Infant

Taking a very gloomy view of the future of the human race, let us suppose that it can only expect to survive for two thousand millions years longer, a period about equal to the past age of the earth. Then, regarded as a being destined to live for three-score years and ten, humanity although it has been born in a house seventy years old, is itself only three days old. But only in the last few minutes has it become conscious that the whole world does not centre round its cradle and its trapping...

 Disproving Santa Claus with a Back of the Napkin Calculation

There is another approach to the extraterrestrial hypothesis of UFO origins. This assessment depends on a large number of factors about which we know little, and a few about which we know literally nothing. I want to make some crude numerical estimate of the probability that we are frequently visited by extraterrestrial beings. Now, there is a range of hypotheses that can be examined in such a way. Let me give a simple example: Consider the Santa Claus hypothesis, which maintains that, in a ...

 What Do We Plant When We Plant the Tree?

What do we plant when we plant the tree? We plant the ship, which will cross the sea. We plant the mast to carry the sails; We plant the planks to withstand the gales— The keel, the keelson, and beam and knee; We plant the ship when we plant the tree. What do we plant when we plant the tree? We plant the houses for you and me. We plant the rafters, the shingles, the floors, We plant the studding, the lath, the doors, The beams and siding, all parts that be; We plant the house when we plant...

 Burning Coals Warms Us With the Warmth of the Sun

From the cold garden, you run into the house, and find the fire laid indeed in the grate, but the wood dead and the coals black, waiting to be lighted. You strike a match, and soon there is a blazing fire. Where does the heat come from? Why do the coals burn and give out a glowing light? Have you not read of gnomes buried down deep in the earth, in mines, and held fast there till some fairy wand has released them, and allowed them to come to earth again? Well, thousands and millions of years ...