Rather, the classical world emerges from the quantum in a comprehensible way: you might say that classical physics is simply what quantum physics looks like at the human scale.
.. Erwin Schrödinger, who invented the quantum wave function, discerned at once that what later became known as nonlocality is the central feature of quantum mechanics, the thing that makes it so different from classical physics.
.. Arguably it’s better to forget this picture of cause-and-effect: you could say that two entangled particles aren’t really two particles at all, but have actually become one single, nonlocalized quantum entity.
.. Given their super-efficiency, PR boxes could do computation even faster than quantum computers. Could they ever exist, though? Sure, the world looks quantum-mechanical, not super-quantum; but it also looked classical for a long time, until we figured out how to spot quantum nonlocality.
.. The question becomes not so much why nature isn’t completely classical, but why it’s not “more” quantum.
.. All this fits with a growing conviction among many physicists that quantum mechanics is at root a theory not of tiny particles, but of information.
Life as a Verb: Applying Buckminster Fuller to the 21st Century
Fuller consciously, even obsessively, documented his own existence, referring to himself as an experiment: “Guinea Pig B,” as he phrased it. The Chronofile, assembled by Fuller and his assistants, is perhaps, Keats says, the most comprehensive record of any individual’s life. Now maintained by Stanford University, it challenges scholars with 1,200 linear feet of boxes containing manuscripts, drawings, and tapes of lectures (as well as overdue library notices and grocery lists). Fuller’s was not a life unrecorded. But it is a life practically un-examinable in any comprehensive way.
.. Yet peeking through that smokescreen of self-mythologizing in fact provides ample evidence that, even when it came to basic moments in Fuller’s life, the visionary designer was anything but a reliable narrator.
.. For instance, central to Bucky Fuller’s story was a winter evening in 1927 when, beset by financial woes and a string of business failures, he resolved to end his life in the icy waters of Lake Michigan. A voice, telling Fuller that he “belonged to the Universe,” convinced him that his life had purpose. Returning home in a trance, he then remained silent for two years (maybe); wrote 5,000 pages of notes (maybe); became a vegetarian (maybe); started to lecture, publish, and craft his own legend (certainly).
.. Readers who possess sufficient fortitude to brave the Chronofile, writes Keats, might be disconcerted at how little of Fuller’s autobiography agrees with facts.
.. Yet for someone whom left-leaning university students embraced as an iconoclastic advocate for international peace and cooperation, his professional life was enormously shaped by the military.
.. Fuller designed and patented his Dymaxion World Map. Eliminating the spatial distortions of traditional Mercator projection, Fuller broke the world into 20 equilateral triangles, projected onto a multi-sided polyhedron, which could then be unfolded and flattened. As Keats describes it — inexplicably, the book does not have illustrations — Fuller’s Dymaxion map was a “remarkably neutral platform.” One could use it to center the world around any one point instead of privileging a particular country or landmass.
.. Fuller’s dome design swiftly became a symbol and instrument of American power.
.. He became an example of what Keats might call a “world-changer”, a person with an expansive view of our planet’s systemic shortcomings and how Big Ideas — specifically, Fuller’s — could fix them. His lecturing stamina became legendary. Picture a sprawling TED talk lasting for hours with dozens of ideas, concepts, and neologisms projected at the audience in a manic torrent of words.
.. they acted not as visionaries but what I have called “visioneers.” The former offer only speculations, informed or not, about what the future, especially the technological future, might hold. The latter work to bring these over-the-horizon conjectures closer to physical reality.
.. For example, Fuller’s car anticipated, according to Keats, today’s use of biomimesis, in which features from nature are incorporated into designs.
Weasels Are Built for the Hunt
“The weasel heart beats at up to 400 pulses per minute,” said Mark Linnell, a faculty research assistant who studies mustelids at Oregon State University. “They’re geared to run at full speed, and they’re always high-strung.”
.. Big cats must eat the equivalent of roughly a third of their weight each week; weasels must eat a third or more of their weight each day.
.. a strategy that allows them to attack prey up to 10 times their size.
.. Weasels are among the few animals that play as adults.
If they’re well fed, Dr. Powell said, “they’ll bounce and ricochet around, pounce, stalk, wiggle and change shape and just about turn themselves inside out. They put kittens to shame.”
.. A good head of human hair has about 350 hairs per square inch. On a mink, the fiber count per square inch is 44,000
Dat: Versioning Data for Science Collaboration on Open Web
Dat is an open source, decentralized data tool for distributing datasets small and large.
.. Dat shares versioned data through a decentralized network, getting faster as more users use it.
.. Dat deduplicates data between versions, reducing bandwidth costs and improving speed.