Category Archives: skepticality

11 March 2019
english, resources, skepticality

How I unlocked my Verizon Moto G6 and ditched my iPhone 6 because it was too slow

Recently, I bought a phone for my family visiting, because roaming costs are so incredibly high for no good reason, and because it becomes hard to navigate the world without the internet (booking, GPS, etc.) I bought at $99, and paid a $50 data plan from Verizon (good deal given that the phone the MSRP is $249, that it’s a very decent phone, and that you can use it anywhere with any carrier — it has GSM, CDMA and everything you need.)

On the back of the box, it was mentioned that the phone could be unlocked after $50 had been made. I had just bought $50 of credit for 1 month of 4G with Verizon.

When my parents left, I tried to unlock it. It was a bit confusing, but it did work!

You can find solace in successfully going through automated customer service

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7 January 2019
français, skepticality

Paul Valéry sur le mensonge

Bonne année 2019!

Ces deux dernières années aux Etats-Unis m’ont beaucoup fait reflechir, sur le plan personnel et politique, à la notion de verité, de transparence et d’honnêté, qui plus que jamais est nécessaire au discours civil.

Au centre de cette réflexion, ces quelques lignes de Paul Valéry, toujours juste.

Mensonge

Ce qui nous force à mentir, est fréquemment le sentiment que nous avons de l’impossibilité chez les autres qu’ils comprennent entièrement notre action. Ils n’arriveront jamais à en concevoir la nécessité (qui à nous-même s’impose sans s’éclaircir).

– Je te dirais ce que tu peux comprendre. Tu ne peux comprendre le vrai. Je ne puis même essayer de te l’expliquer. Je te dirais donc le faux.

– C’est là le mensonge de celui qui désespère de l’esprit d’autrui, et qui lui ment, parce que le faux est plus simple que le vrai. Même le mensonge le plus compliqué est plus simple que le Vrai. La parole ne peut prétendre à développer tout le complexe de l’individu.

– Paul Valéry, Tel Quel

6 January 2019
english, epistemology, skepticality

On truth and its perils

What is true, what is false, what is wrong?

With the rise of large scale misinformation, this question has become more and more important, as it seems political parties around the world have reached the escape velocity of facts.

polarization in US politics really goes only one way…

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10 December 2018
english, epistemology, resources, science, skepticality

Hyperloonies

Mr Musk is having a hard time, and even though I have great appreciation for his making engineering look cool again, but I won’t relent as I believe his efforts are misguided.

Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own. – Sidney J. Harris

Today, I’ll talk about Hyperloop.

edit 12/18/2018: Hyperloop startup Arrivo is shutting down -The Verge — lol

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14 February 2018
art & science, english, mood, projects, resources, skepticality

Self-reference

Self-reference is cornerstone in Hofstadter’s Godel-Escher-Bach, a must read book for anyone interested in logic (and we shall rely logic in these days to stay sane.)

Here’s a bunch of examples of self-reference that I found interesting, curated just for you!

Barber’s paradox:

The barber is the “one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves.” The question is, does the barber shave himself?

Self-referential figure (via xkcd):

Tupper’s formula that prints itself on a screen (via Brett Richardson) Continue reading →

3 February 2018
english, science, science life, skepticality

Moore’s wall

A single chip such has Intel Xeon Phi has a computational power in excess of 1TFLOPS and features more than a hundred billion transistors. Few people  outside the world of semi-conductor engineering appreciate this, but that is a fantastical number: 100,000,000,000. If every transistor was a pixel, you would need a wall 0f 100 x 100 4K TV screen to display them all!

Over the past fifty years, the semiconductor industry has achieved incredible things, in part thanks to planar technology, which allowed to exponentially scale the manufacturing process, following Moore’s law. But it seems that we’re about to hit a wall soon.

faith_no_moore

Let’s give an overview of where we stand, and where do we go from here!

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31 January 2018
english, epistemology, mood, resources, science, skepticality

Quick’n’dirty

Over the years I’ve collected quotes from people who are.

I always like quotes, because they are atoms of knowledge, quick and dirty ways to understand the world we only have one life to explore. To some extent, they axioms of life in that they are true and never require an explanation (otherwise they wouldn’t be quotations.)

Here’s a bunch of quotes that I found particularly interesting, starting with my absolute favorite quote comes from the great Paul Valery:

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. – Paul Valery

On research — trial and error

Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target.
-Homer Burton Adkins

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
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1 July 2017
english, mood, science, skepticality

Energy Dominance

To say the least, the mood is not at its peak at the lab…

We have a new Secretary of Energy – Rick Perry (R), former governor of Texas –  who doesn’t seem to care much about science (e.g. he believe it’s fine to question climate change; at least there’s someone to tell him no, it’s not) and who is now on a crusade to ensure #energydominance, a concept that I try to comprehend, but really can’t.

Now see his incredible op-ed in Washington Times (the black mirror of the New York Post, I guess:), Paving the path to U.S. energy dominance:

Mr. Trump wants America to utilize our abundant domestic energy resources and technological innovations for good, both at home and abroad. […] An energy-dominant America will export to markets around the world, increasing our global leadership and influence. Becoming energy dominant means that we are getting government out of the way so that we can share our energy wealth with developing nations. For years, Washington stood in the way of our energy dominance. That changes now.

Holy cow! That is a genius strategy!
Oh wait… what strategy? Selling coal and gas that will be worthless in three years?

Here’s what previous Secretary Moniz has to say:

Moniz: […] With some colleagues, we’re starting up a small non-profit in the energy space and this was also a question that we intended to look at.

However, a review of this type also needs to look at the emerging technologies. For example, the utility in Tucson recently announced a long-term, a 20-year purchase-power agreement for solar energy plus storage at a pretty attractive—stunning, actually in my view—price. They quoted less than 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, including the storage.

Madrigal: Wow. [In Arizona, the average cost of electricity in March 2017 was 9.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. Electricity prices vary around the nation, but the U.S. average was 10.3 cents per kilowatt-hour in March 2017.]

Meanwhile, the office of science at the White House is now empty. zero. nicht. kaput.

It is quite incredible to hear that, while a mere six most ago it was populated by the finest people I know, like my (extended) friend Maya Shankar…

imfine

Oh boy, the second half of the year starts even better than the first half.

6 February 2017
english, mood, skepticality

I’ve got millenial problems but you ain’t one

“Millenials”…

 “We’re the future. And you don’t belong in it. Because we’re beyond you, and naturally, that makes you feel kind of bad. You have this deep-down feeling that you don’t matter anymore. You should be glad, though…  Do you want your kids’ world to be a step above yours? Isn’t that what we’re all doing? So, doesn’t it follow that if you’re a good parent, and your kids evolve, and are smarter than you, they’re gonna make you feel kind of dumb? So if you feel stupid around young people, things are going good.”


(Louie CK, video via Vulture (broken) – view on facebook)

against “old guard”:

There needs to be a ‘maximum wage’ vs minimum wage ; instead of paying young kids with no family obligations $200,000.00 + a year to sit at Philz Coffee all day and play the latest Candy Crush’ mind chewing gum  game with their Lucy Liu wanna be’s, at beck’n call . (SFWeekly, comments added to print)

puzzled by generational drives:

I dropped out of college when I was 18. To move to Los Angeles. To become a rock star. It’s true. […] And lo, it was glorious.

Why share all this silliness? Because there appears to be a strange parallel afoot. Because I recently found myself entranced by Nellie Bowles’ terrific profile over in California Sunday magazine, a tale of the new hordes of “lost boys” of San Francisco, all these naïve, clean-cut, mostly white teenaged computer whizzes from affluent families who are dropping out of college (and, increasingly, high school) to move to San Francisco.

They’re here to code, of course. To found companies. To singe their brains with a million lame logos. Which is to say, not for the fame, or the girls, or the fun drugs, or the free love (different era, but still).

They’re here for the money.
Attention teen dropouts racing to SF: The tech bubble is lying to you
– Mark Morford

or working for funny companies :

The Greylock partners hear a lot of pitches from companies with cute one-word names and bright logos (Meerkat, Sprig, Nextdoor, Vessel, Operator) that aim at “disrupting” some existing set of economic arrangements. At least in conversation, nobody is safe: education, health-care delivery, media, national currencies. – The Network Man (The New Yorker)

8 October 2016
english, epistemology, mood, science life, skepticality

Ubris

Living in the Bay Area has a lots of perks, notably the climate and the people who live here– some are driven, and some maybe too much.

The Silicon Valley became fertile and successful when entrepreneurs started bringing hardcore scientific advances to the masses, with companies such as Fairchild Semiconductors, or innovative technologies, with companies such as Xerox and its Palo Alto Research Center.

Nowadays, the silicon in the valley is mostly gone (I often joke that among my friends living in the Silicon Valley, I am the only one actually working on silicon… yet I don’t live in the valley:), and tech companies that have nothing to do with actual τέχνη. Yet the dreams of technology to save us all are still pretty alive. But it seems that it all has to do with hubris, or PR at best, and it is hurting actual science and those who make it.

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