Rotwang

Back from holiday with my family in Corfu. It will be nice to eat a meal without having to constantly shoo wasps away from my food.

Greater Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaahndaaaaaahn

Thanks.

AFAICR I only know his tracks off Blueprints. They're awesome though.

If melody and harmony are the only elements of music you're able to recognise then yes, you would think that. But obviously the people who enjoy the kind of music you write about enjoy it for reasons other than its non-existent melodies.

Thunks.

That's Metropolis. Someone else have my go if I'm right, I don't have time right now.

Pretty cool.

How so? By "popular science" I mean books like A Brief History of Time and The Elegant Universe and so on. Huh. I never thought of that.

From reading the crackpot theories that insane laypeople come up with (sort of a hobby of mine), my impression is that making "dummies feel smart" is not a good thing. Understanding university-level physics, or whatever, is something that takes time and effort; if you could learn General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory by reading A Brief History of Time then physics degrees wouldn't need to take four years. There's nothing wrong with not understanding e.g. GR (nobody has time to understand everything), but the problem is that popular science books give people the impression that they understand something when they don't. That's why there are so many cranks who think they've come up with the Theory of Everything; because they have no idea how current theory makes predictions, what those predictions are and how many of those predictions have been tested and found to agree with experiment, they think that any idea that pops into their heads is just as good. The various physics and mathematical cranks that litter the internet are an amusing diversion rather than a social problem, but cranks in some other areas (e.g. the anti-evolution and anti-climate change people) have a lot more power than they ought to.

Sadly not. I am working on some ideas about the foundations of quantum mechanics, but it remains to be seen whether they pan out or not (obviously the odds are overwhelmingly against).

Nice, thanks.

Not really, I'm afraid; I'm not a fan of popular science generally. I will say that Wikipedia's technical articles are pretty reliable in my experience, so they're as good a place as any to start.

Pretty good stuff IMO - nothing groundbreaking but well made and enjoyable.

I've not been following the news too closely, but I think the gist is that someone got shot by the police, and a load of scrotes decided that this was the perfect excuse to get some free shit. Arab Spring it ain't.

This assumes that there was an equal quantity of matter and antimatter in the early universe. We don't know whether that was the case or not. Of course, we can tell that the universe doesn't have exact rotational symmetry by simply looking at it. No, in the absence of a Killing vector generating rotations there is no such law. The problem is that angular momentum isn't even defined globally.

This is a good example to illustrate my point: in GR, unless your spacetime has an exact rotational symmetry (more precisely, a Killing vector) you simply don't have any law of global conservation of angular momentum.

While it's not generally reliable to try applying ordinary intuition about mechanics to situations where GR rules, I believe it's true that things rotate faster as they collapse. But I don't see anything in the article contradicts that; presumably the small effect they observed in the present day would have been much more noticeable when the universe was smaller.

Oh, nice. I was wondering why the saikosounds cover image looked so different from the goastore one.

+1 It's obvious they still have the capacity to make great music, I just don't like their current direction.

Yes.

Nobody? Here are a few more:

+1 -2