Author: Jon Jagger

Jon Jagger from less code, more software

Mini-bottles in hotel bathrooms...
Am I the only one who can't read the writing on them?
I mean the font size is tiny. You can't read them.
There's just no way to tell which bottles are which.
Shampoo? Conditioner? Body lotion? Moisturiser? Shower gel?
It's unbelievable how many different bottles there are!
(But no toothpaste).
Even if you have your reading glasses on you still can't read the labels.
Not that you have your reading glasses on when you're about to take a shower!
Not at first anyway.
You get in the bathroom and you see the 18 mini-bottles!
And you think - "figgins - which one is shampoo?"
You pick one hoping the bottles in this hotel will be different.
That you'll be able to read the label.
But no. You can't.
So you walk back into your room to try and find your glasses.
Now you're buck naked, wearing nothing but your glasses, about to take a shower!
You start reading the mini-bottle labels.
The colour is #3422DE and the background colour is #3422DD.
They're so similar you cannot read anything!
It's just not physically possible.
A small defeat in todays modern world!

Jon Jagger from less code, more software

is an excellent book by Carlo Rovelli (isbn 978-0-141-98321-9)
As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages.

It doesn't describe where there is a particle but how the particle shows itself to others.

It isn't things that enter into relations but, rather, relations that ground the notion of 'thing'.

An object is a monotonous process. [Nelson Goodman]

The sun bends space around itself, and the Earth does not circle around it drawn by a mysterious distant force but runs straight in a space that inclines.

What is conserved is the sum of mass and energy, not each separately. Processes must exist that transform energy into mass, or mass into energy.

Take the equations of quantum mechanics that determines the form of the orbitals of an electron. This equation has a certain number of solutions, and these solutions correspond exactly to hydrogen, helium, oxygen ... and the other elements!

On Mars, there are events that in this precise moment have already happened, events that are yet to happen, but also a quarter of an hour during which things occur that are neither in our past nor in our future.

Time is not universal and fixed, it is something which expands and shrinks, according to the vicinity of masses.

Suppose we want to observe a very, very, very small region of space. To do this, we need to place something in this area to mark the point that we wish to consider. Say we place a particle there. Heisenberg had understood that you can't locate a particle at a point in space for long. It soon escapes. The smaller the region in which we try to locate a particle, the greater the velocity at which it escapes. This is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

It isn't true that we 'do not see' Faraday lines. We only see vibrating Faraday lines. "To see" is to perceive light, and light is the movement of Faraday lines.

Jon Jagger from less code, more software

is an excellent book by Jacob Bronowski (isbn 0-7088-2035-2)
As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages.

Evolution is the climbing of a ladder from the simple to the complex by steps, each of which is stable in itself.

The turning point to the spread of agriculture in the Old World was almost certainly the occurrence of two forms of what with a large, full head of seeds. Before 800 BC wheat was not the luxuriant plant it is today. It was merely one of many wild grasses that spread throughout the Middle East. By some genetic accident, the wild wheat crossed with a natural goat grass and formed a fertile hybrid. ... Now we have a beautiful ear of wheat, but one which will never spread in the wind because the ear is too tight to break up.

The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science or outside it, we are not uncertain, our knowledge is merely confined within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance.

When to copper you add an even softer metal, tin, you make an alloy which is harder and more durable than either - bronze. ... Almost any pure material is weak, and many impurities will do to make is stronger.

The making of the sword, like all ancient metallurgy, is surrounded with ritual, and that is for a clear reason. When you have no written language, when you have nothing that can be called a chemical formula, then you must have a precise ceremonial which fixes the sequence of operations so that they are exact and memorable.

To us gold is precious because it is scarce; but to the alchemists, all over the world, gold was precious because it was incorruptible. ... every medicine to fight old age contained gold, metallic gold, as an essential ingredient, and the alchemists urged their patrons to drink from gold cups to prolong life.

We still use for the female the alchemical symbol for copper, that is, what is soft: Venus. And we use for the male the alchemical sign for iron, that is, what is hard: Mars.

When the Bible says three wise men followed a star to Bethlehem, there sounds in the story the echo of an age when wise men were stargazers.

Three thousand years after they were made, the village women of Khuzistan still draw their water ration from the qanats.

The Greeks when they saw the Scythian riders believed the horse and the rider to be one; that is how they invented the legend of the centaur.

Galileo is the creator of the modern scientific method... he really did for the first time what we think of as practical science: build the apparatus, do the experiment, publish the results.

Relativity is the understanding of the world not as events but as relations.

He [Einstein] hated war, and cruelty, and hypocrisy, and above all he hated dogma.

It was because [James] Brindley could not spell the world 'navigator' that workmen who dig trenches or canals are still called 'navvies'.

Always [Leo] Szilard wanted the [atom] bomb to be tested openly before the Japanese and an international audience, so that the Japanese should know its power and should surrender before people died.