Archive for the ‘Brain Stretch’ Category


Literary Linkage

Mike Lawton on August 2, 2007 in Brain Stretch, Lit No Comments »

I think I’ve posted about this before, but it’s cool enough to get my attention again. I love this idea, and it sounds like a perfect way to chew through some of those classic stories I’ve always meant to read.

I used to always have 2-4 books on the go at any one time; typically one good engrossing fiction to read before bed, one way-over-my-head intellectual/science/philosophy book to read during the day when I needed to stretch my brain, and sometimes a light biography/memoir that was like an easy conversation. Don’t always have time for all that these days, but I’m signing up for one of these books right now (I’ve wanted to read Flatland since I first heard of it as well).

Thanks again for the head’s up Wil!

via WWdN: In Exile by wil@wilwheaton.net (Wil Wheaton) on Aug 02, 2007


I’m having a bad day. There, I said it. Details will not be forthcoming, but if you were wondering why I may seem like Captain Crankypants, now you know why.

However, I still came across something that’s so totally awesome, I thought I’d share with my usual enthusiasm:

DailyLit sends you bite-sized chunks of public domain books (including many classics) daily, on weekdays, or three times a week via email or RSS — for free. Each serving takes less than five minutes to read, and if you want, they’ll send you the next installment right away if you click a link. The whole idea is to read short segments for a few minutes in your spare time.

When you find a book at DailyLit, (via Title, Author, or Category) it tells you how many parts you’ll be subscribing to, so you can get a sense of how long it will take to finish the book, and what kind of commitment you’re making. I’ve subscribed to Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which I’ve meant to read for an embarrassingly long time. It’s 37 parts, and I’ll get it three times a week at noon, just in time for my lunch break.

(Via Cool Tools)

So Much For Next Year’s Vacation Plans

Mike Lawton on June 18, 2007 in Brain Stretch No Comments »

Futility of space exploration

via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on Jun 16, 2007


Cory Doctorow: Badass ninja science fiction writer Charlie Stross has just posted a killer essay on the futility of space exploration. Nutshell: it’s far and hostile, and we can’t even figure out how to live in the Gobi desert or the ocean’s floor, infinitely closer and more hospitable.

Here’s a handy metaphor: let’s approximate one astronomical unit — the distance between the Earth and the sun, roughly 150 million kilometres, or 600 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon — to one centimetre. Got that? 1AU = 1cm. (You may want to get hold of a ruler to follow through with this one.)

The solar system is conveniently small. Neptune, the outermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun at a distance of almost exactly 30AU, or 30 centimetres — one foot (in imperial units). Giant Jupiter is 5.46 AU out from the sun, almost exactly two inches (in old money).

We’ve sent space probes to Jupiter; they take five and a half years to get there if we send them on a straight Hohmann transfer orbit, but we can get there quite a bit faster using some fancy orbital mechanics. Neptune is still a stretch — only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, has made it out there so far. Its journey time was 12 years, and it wasn’t stopping. (It’s now on its way out into interstellar space, having passed the heliopause some years ago.)

The Kuiper belt, domain of icy wandering dwarf planets like Pluto and Eris, extends perhaps another 30AU, before merging into the much more tenuous Hills cloud and Oort cloud, domain of loosely coupled long-period comets.

Now for the first scale shock: using our handy metaphor the Kuiper belt is perhaps a metre in diameter. The Oort cloud, in contrast, is as much as 50,000 AU in radius — its outer edge lies half a kilometre away.

Link

James Miller’s Cryonics Agreement

Mike Lawton on June 14, 2007 in Brain Stretch No Comments »

James Miller’s Cryonics Agreement

via Accelerating Future by Michael Anissimov on Jun 13, 2007


James D. Miller, an Accelerating Future reader and associate professor of economics at Smith College, just came up with a really interesting hypothetical economic agreement about cryonics, reproduced here for your convenience:

“Some people are planning to have their head frozen just after they die. These believers in cryonics think that freezing the head preserves brain patterns. They also believe that there is a reasonably high chance that someday humanity will have the technology to restore life to those who have undergone cryonic head freezing.

If the price of cryonics becomes low enough then a cryonics believer and unbeliever should try to come to the following three part agreement:

(1) The believer will immediately pay the unbeliever some amount of money.

(2) The believer will pay for the unbeliever to undergo cryonic freezing shortly after death.

(3) If the unbeliever is ever brought back to life he will owe a huge debt to the believer. It is hard to know what will be valued in the far future. But if brought back to life the unbeliever promises to try his best to spend at least 50% of his time and resources improving the life of the believer.

This agreement will always make the unbeliever better off, and given his beliefs it may well improve the expected future welfare of the cryonics believer.”

In an unrelated item, I’ve joined the SIAI blog team and made my first post here.