Skeptic

Hmm... so today I received my first ever 'Skeptic' magazine! :) Very interesting, especially the article on 'climate change'. And apparently it is Darwin's 200 year anniversary .... so lots of info on that and 'how to argue with creationists'. Hahaha! I would say that with people who are 'religious' creationists you can't argue faith... hmm... but it's about time religion was gone as a meme... jeez... to paraphrase, or quote, (or something in between) Schaupy - religion is like a glow worm it glows brightest in darkness. We should really move on!

Anyway! Reading Dawkin's 'Blind Watchmaker' again... and I get the feeling my mind was elsewhere the first time I read it, because I don't remember being in so much agreement with him (still too early in the book to get to the sticky points). Hmm...and I know everyone says this and thinks so already, but gosh, the guy can write! Very well thought out, and leaves your mind feeling organized and clean, which is refreshing.

Liars, damned liars and scientists

"Even after half a century of quantum theory and under the present impact of information theory and cybernetics, one often finds the rather outdated opinion that the application of statistical methods to a problem is dictated by our inability to solve it 'exactly'. Yet unless statistics are understood as a mere averaging process, the opposite is in fact true. A random quantity can be considered as found when not only its mean value, but the entire probability distribution about this mean value is known. In certain rare and usually idealized cases, this probability distribution is such that the mean value is, in the limit, the only value the quantity may assume and in this case the quantity is no longer random. In this special case of a single value instead of an entire distribution, we have a (so-called) 'exact' solution; this is of course much easier to find than the statistical solution, which includes the 'exact' solution as a special case. From this point of view the two opposites are not 'statistical' and 'exact solution', but 'general, statistical solution' and 'idealized limiting case'. "

YEAH! :)
Just wanted to write this out, because I think its particularly relevant today to the interfacing problem of science and society, and also because I keep wanting to remember it, and want to stop carrying the book around with me :)
"The Scattering of Electromagnetic Waves from Rough Surfaces" - Petr Beckmann, Andre Spizzichino, page 71.

Nonsinusoidal Signals

Wow :) I am speechless, this is why I am blogging... :) Hahaha, okay, overwhelmed and stunned. I have stumbled upon the works of Henning Harmuth. It's just amazing, so many of my questions already worked out, and so many things which I have read by people already, worked out by him years ago it seems.

Here is just one paper by him, which is freely available: http://www.emph.com.ua/18/harmuth.htm

and hmmm... I hope to I am not yet a complete invalid in mathematics that I can fully understand his work. It's rare when you read something and notice that you are feeling light headed because you have stopped breathing :)