Link Check
December 30, 2004 top

I've gone through the entire main site to check for broken links and add updated ones.

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From John Gribbon's Little Book of Science:

If you hang a bucket of water from a long twisted rope, and let it start to spin as the rope untwists, at first the bucket rotates but the water stays still. Gradually, friction makes the water rotate, and as it does so it forms a concave surface, produced by centrifugal force. Now grab the bucket and stop it moving. At first the water keeps moving, and stays concave. How does the water 'know' when it is rotating, and ought to have a concave surface? It certainly doesn't measure its rotation relative to the bucket, because it can be concave when both bucket and water are moving, or when the water's moving and the bucket is not.

This highlights the puzzle of inertia, which the Irish philosophy, mathematician and bishop George Berkeley explained in the early eighteenth century by saying that objects measure their motion (somehow) relative to the most distant objects in the Universe. He referred to the distant stars, but today we would think in terms of distant galaxies.

The idea was developed further by Ernst Mach in the 1860s, and is often known as Mach's principle, but didn't quite succeed. Even so, there seems little doubt that when I try to push a child on a swing, and have to use energy to make it start to move, somehow the influence of all the matter in the Universe, in all the stars and galaxies, resists my efforts and provides the inertia that I have to do work against. The coffee in your cup rises up the side of the cup when you stir it because it knows that the distant galaxies are there.

Just a little reminder that in some way we are connected to all the matter in the universe.

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Okay, I have started updating the site again. The hiatus was due in part to now-resolved hosting problems (no more bandwidth running out!) but mainly because I found other things in life more important and didn't have the time to do it all. Been studying and practicing C++ programming, getting into shape, spending time with people important to me, and other than that just generally trying to keep my sanity in this brilliantly twisted world of ours.

Expect updates to be sporadic as always, but not so far between that neighbors begin to sniff around for scents of the site owner's decaying flesh.

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...everyone thinks they can write. I've updated my haiku page.

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If a highly accurate test says you have cancer, chances are good you do not have cancer. I've added an article to the science section explaining why. Click here to read it.

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"There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life - happiness, freedom, and peace of mind - are always attained by giving them to someone else."
--Peyton Conway March

[courtesy of Whiskey River]

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