(no subject)

I read Ryan's copy of Piled Higher and Deeper. It was agonizing!

p.s. it starts here.

cosmology on a human scale

I came across an amusing observation today. The age of the universe is about 10¹⁸ seconds. That's about 30 billion years. The lifespan of a human on Earth is on average 67 years, and there are about 6.5 billion people now alive. The combined lifespan of everybody now alive well exceeds the current age of the universe. You could line people up, side by side in time, and reach back to the beginning of time. On the other hand (no pun intended), if all of these people held hands, they could form a chain about 12 billion kilometers long. Sure, this could wrap around the earth thousands of times, but it wouldn't even make it one-millionth of the way to Alpha Centauri.

It's often said that there are now more people alive than have ever lived. Or sometimes there's a restriction on this statement, like that there are now more physicists around than the total of all physicists before this generation. But this fact is true for any population which at least doubles from one generation to the next, because of the curious fact that if you add up the first N powers of two, you get one less than the next power of two, a fact known and loved particularly by computer engineers, as it becomes obvious when expressed in binary, eg: 10000 - 1 = 01111, e.g. 2^4 - 1 = 2^3 + 2^2 + 2^1 + 2^0.

turbo visit wknd

Last year the U of R's birthday present to me was admission to its Physics department. This year the university is flying two of my friends across the country for the occassion, Kristen (auressiel) courtesy the Physics department and Eric (shamster) courtesy the chemistry department. With Brandon (_________b) possibly driving up from Pittsburgh— this calls for some festivities!