An interesting discovery announcement came across the wire on Friday. In an article to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, Steven Prado and Stuart Shaklan of JPL write up their detection of a ~6 Jupiter mass companion orbiting the nearby … Continue reading
In 1972, at the Tricastin uranium enrichment facility in Pierrelatte, France, a routine check on UF6 extracted from the two billion year-old ore of the Oklo uranium mine in Gabon unveiled a highly irregular anomaly: a deficit in U-235. The … Continue reading
Bitcoin, through proof of work, combined with Landauer’s relation for the minimum energy required to flip a bit, reinforces the idea that energy and computation and money are all equivalent. At any given moment, they are fungible The Planck temperature … Continue reading
Music from your formative years stays with you — generally in latent form, but at other times echoing resurgently through the amorphous cycles of nostalgia that stretch out into decades. For me, it was the era of The Sisters of … Continue reading
Time has a way of sliding by. More than five years ago, I wrote a blog post with a suggestion for a new cgs unit, the oklo, which describes the rate per unit mass of computation done by a given … Continue reading