Gregg R Thomas

Have a great week everyone!

I got called into work last weekend to solve an emergency in a hospital IT system. Luckily it was a holiday weekend so I managed to get systems up and running again, 2 hours before the first scheduled operation.

I asked Perplexity for some modern entries to the Devil’s Dictionary’…

God — n. A hypothesis invented to explain the unknown, then promoted to a tenant who refuses to pay rent or leave.

Faith — n. The art of holding a belief so tightly that facts bruise their knuckles trying to get in.

Prayer — n. A one-way telephone call to an invis…[Read more]

But surely the point is, even if we don’t move in space, we still move past the time coordinates (at the speed of light).  What makes this happen?

I followed your lead PopeBeanie and tried Perplexity for the first. FYI, I signed up to ChatGPT within 3 hours of it initial release!

Here is my question….

Hello, this is my first question here. Can you explain why the human concept of “time flow” is just an evolved survival trait as time is “only” a spacetime coordinate. Everything is…[Read more]

Thanks, Reg 🙂

Have a great week! Too sunny to be be indoors today so the post is a bit shorter that normal.

A person has dignity, legal protection, bodily safety, freedom of conscience, and freedom of expression. A belief has no skin to bruise, no liberty to imprison, no mouth to silence, and no claim to immunity from scrutiny.

You have rights; your beliefs do not.

Jake, I don’t think it’s particularly scary.

We have been becoming more and more visible via electronic mechanisms over the years, and eventually we will have to learn to live with this. Tin foil hats probably won’t help. So it’s futile to knee jerk against this kind of usage of WiFi, because it’s coming. Writing laws prohibiting things don’t act…[Read more]

The war with Iran is the next stage of Israel’s post–October 7 strategy. They have dealt with the immediate perpetrators and neighboring proxy fronts . But chopping off their head is not enough. Now they are dealing the Iranian state infrastructure that supports, arms, funds and coordinates much of the wider terror network. ‘Netty’ said that Ham…[Read more]

One has to have a plan in order to know when the objectives are reached.

Make me an omelette of those, Reg and I’ll come visit you!

I think “mushrooms…and…blue cheese vodka”…have much to answer for 🙂

Yes Simon but I would treat “fundamental” and “thorough” differently. A model can be thorough by including many relevant factors, but that doesn’t make all those factors fundamental.

What I’m pushing back on is the physics habit of treating “fundamental” as meaning “smallest,” “indivisible,” or “basic ingredient.” I agree that something can…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
What physics gets wrong about the idea of “fundamental”.

Yes, I think a model should be “thorough” as well as “fundamental”.  Some fundamental elements are not just individisible particles – they’re also structural factors, for example, that form the fabric of reality.  So, the fundamental constants of the unive…[Read more]

Thank you Reg!

Have a great week!!

I generally try to leave personal commentary out of the main page and just publish the linked headlines. But I am in no mood for any religious bigots or theist bullshit this week. 🙂