Recent Posts
2021-08-25 - Hedge your bets
I can be an . . . opinionated person. My wife often likes to remind me that, before we were married, more than one of my family members warned her that I can be overly stubborn when I think I’m right. And who doesn't think they’re right most of the time? I have the luxury of often being able to spend the time to do some basic research to come up with the "best" answer when forming an opinion. (Vim is the best editor. Fight me.) But what if I’m wrong?
2021-08-04 - Play the odds
In statistical mechanics, a foundational concept is that the most likely macrostate is the one with the overwhelming majority of consistent microstates. That is a lot to unpack in one sentence if you haven’t had a stat mech course, but the concept ends up being pretty intuitive (bear with some hand-wavy physics for just a moment). A macrostate can be thought of as a measurable quantity of a system, like the air temperature in a room, while a microstate is a specific configuration of components of a system, like the specific positions and velocities of all the molecules of the air in a room.
2021-08-01 - Who knows?
How much do you know? Consider for a moment the vast amount of information that you've accumulated in your lifetime: the facts and trivia you learned through school and work, your day to day experiences, the memory of your internal thoughts and feelings over the years, what you've read, what you've seen with your own two eyes...
2021-08-01 - Introduction
Reboot. I made this site a few years ago and never ended up writing anything for it past an introductory post. I've decided to start it up again and see if I actually end up posting this time, so here goes...