A holograph of itself All [physical properties of matter] derive from the different patterns of the interaction of electrons and photons within the fields of the positively charged atomic nuclei, stabilized in a particular morphology by the interaction of the levels themselves. Matter is a holograph of itself in its own internal radiation. Matter versus Materials: A Historical View physics
Reality just seems to go on crunching I once met a fellow who thought that if you used General Relativity to compute a low-velocity problem, like an artillery shell, General Relativity would give you the wrong answer—not just a slow answer, but an experimentally wrong answer—because at low velocities, artillery shells are governed by Newtonian mechanics, not General Relativity. This is exactly how physics does not work. Reality just seems to go on crunching through General Relativity, even when it only makes a difference at the fourteenth decimal place, which a human would regard as a huge waste of computing power. Physics does it with brute force. No one has ever caught physics simplifying its calculations—or if someone did catch it, the Matrix Lords erased the memory afterward. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies physics
Corpuscles of nothing and atoms of something The structure of matter devolved ultimately into the intimate coexistence of something like corpuscles of nothing and atoms of something, segregating through the accidents of history to yield regions differing in density intimately interwoven on different scales. The experience of the world as well as human perception and analysis of any part of it is a matter of the angular scale of resolution and of the time necessary for making comparison between the different parts. Without such variations and without time to compare remembrances of them, nothing can be experiences. Cyril Stanley Smith, The Tiling Patterns of Sebastien Truchet and the Topology of Structural Hierarchy physicsperception
I know all about entropy Adell: I know as much as you do. Lupov: Then you know everything's got to run down someday. Isaac Asimov, The Last Question timedeathphysics
The Iridium System Several Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) networks were proposed, but only one got off the ground: the Iridium system. The original Iridium proposal called for a "constellation" of 77 satellites, which gave the plan its name: the element iridium has atomic number 77, meaning that an iridium atom has 77 orbiting electrons. Before the satellites were launched, the constellation was scaled back to 66 active satellites, but no one wanted to change the name to Dysprosium. Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape physicscommunicationaerospacecosmos
Fermi Estimates and Dyson Designs An Article by Venkatesh Rao www.ribbonfarm.com A Fermi estimate is a quick-and-dirty solution to an arbitrary scientific or engineering analysis problem. Fermi estimation uses widely known numbers, readily observable phenomenology, basic physics equations, and a bunch of approximation techniques to arrive at rough answers that tend to be correct within an order of magnitude or so. The term is named for Enrico Fermi, who was famously good at this sort of thing. …It struck me that there is counterpart to this kind of thinking on the synthesis side, where you use similar techniques to arrive at a very rough design for a complex engineered artifact. I call such a design approach Dyson design, after the physicist Freeman Dyson, who was one of the best practitioners of it (not to be confused with inventor James Dyson, whose designs, ironically, are not Dyson designs). designphysics
The State of Agile Software in 2018 A Talk by Martin Fowler martinfowler.com On the surface, the world of agile software development is bright, since it is now mainstream. But the reality is troubling, because much of what is done is faux-agile, disregarding agile's values and principles. The three main challenges we should focus on are: fighting the Agile Industrial Complex and its habit of imposing process upon teams, raising the importance of technical excellence, and organizing our teams around products (rather than projects). How we can do betterTaylorism in software A late change in requirements is a competitive advantageMake the change easy agilesoftware
How we can do better It actually doesn't matter whether you actually have a formal retrospective. It doesn't matter whether you have four or five labels of things on your retro board, or exactly how you do the retro. What does matter is the notion of thinking about what we're doing and how we can do better, and it is the team that's doing the work that does this, that is the central thing. agileprocess
Taylorism in software Interestingly, just as software people were talking about how we need to kind of follow this very Taylorist notion as the future of software development, the manufacturing world was moving away from it. The whole notion of what was going on in a lot in manufacturing places was the people doing the work need to have much more of a say in this because they actually see what's happening. craftwork