Global Spin

This may seem like an odd diversion, but John asked about it just this morning so I thought I’d share with the rest of the class. Electrons, in their secret life as wibbly-wobbly quantum particle-wavey things, have a property called spin. To quote a handy article I just ran across: One of the things that [...]

Posted by Chris in Science on December 28th, 2010 | Comments Off

I had to post this in response to the flurry of rumors around NASA’s announcement that this Thursday they will “discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” The rule is simple: When you tell a child anything, they will ignore most of it and leave only the words [...]

Posted by Chris in Family, Space on November 30th, 2010 | Comments Off

Yesterday I did something dumb, and I only realized it today because I don’t trust an easy success. Let’s see if you can spot the flaw in my reasoning: Background: A process (X) is run on a series of items in a queue. Items are added to the queue continuously, about 500 per hour. A [...]

Posted by Chris in Technology on September 16th, 2010 | Comments Off

You may have noticed how quiet Global Spin has become, yet again. With the rise of Twitter and Reader and Tumblr and other such thing-share-ers, our little community no longer has much reason to post their thoughts to a group blog. In response, I’m quitting! … checks notes Oh wait, that’s not it… shuffles papers [...]

Posted by Chris in Animals, Technology, Web 2.0 on April 30th, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Lee shared a thoughtful and entertaining Cracked article* by David Wong about the Monkeysphere. In short, the idea is that we can maintain less than 150 relationships (our monkeys**), so there’s no way for us to care about everyone. Lee also shared a Derek Sivers article that hits right in the gut. As Lee pointed [...]

Posted by Chris in Culture, Philosophy on April 2nd, 2010 | 1 Comment »