Locklin on science (@scottlocklin.wordpress.com.web.brid.gy) — Bluesky Profile | bskyView

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1 month ago

Conditional probability: an educational defect in Physics didactics Conditional probability is something physicists have a hard time with. There are a number of reasons I know this is true. Primarily I know it is true from my own experience: I had a high-middling to excellent didactics experience in physics, and was basically never exposed to the idea. When I got out into the […]

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2 months ago

Optimizing for old battles About 3/4 of our management expertocracy is optimizing for old battles. It’s a pattern which is pervasive in Western Civilization, which is one of the reasons everything is so weird right now. Gather together a group of bureaucrats to solve a real problem, it’s still there 50 years later doing …. things. Things which are […]

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2 months ago

Winter Q4 2025 books The Kaufmann Protocol Sandra Kaufmann. I saw this lady on youtube somewhere, and she seemed half nuts, so I bought her book. Mostly it’s a rough explanation of some of the human biological system and a list of supplements that good for stuff that breaks down as you get older. It listed some things I […]

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2 months ago

Don’t go to physics grad school and other cautionary tales Contra Professor Katz, I have known more people ruined by drugs. Mostly because I didn’t spend my life as a physics professor as he did. But I can see why he said it, because you’d see a lot of ruined lives in gradual school. It is an essay that should occur to people in […]

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3 months ago

The first AI bubble The first investment bubble in “AI” happened in the 1980s. As I mentioned before, one of the things which kicked it off was Japanese investment in the fifth generation computing project. Go look at Blade Runner for an idea of how people thought of Japan back then: everyone figured they were the country of the […]

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3 months ago

Wacky fun physics ideas My reading lately has ventured into weird physics papers. Mainstream physics (unlike machine learning and classical statistics where real progress has been made) is booooring these days. There’s no point in reading another “shittonium on silicon 111” papers, nor am I interested in stupid big budget projects where people always get the expected answer, nor […]

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4 months ago

Things that should be considered essential vitamins but aren’t If you look at the history of vitamins, they were all discovered between 1910 and 1948. Casimir Funk invented the idea and called them “vital amines.” The thing is they ain’t all amines: Vitamin C isn’t, nor is B5 or B7 (I think they’re amides; I never took organic chemistry, sorry not sorry). We’ll stick […]

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4 months ago

Stochastic computing I’ve wanted to write about this topic since I started this blerg, but various things have kept me from it. Stochastic computing is a subject I’ve been somewhat aware of since I went through the “Advances in Computers” series in the LBNL library while procrastinating over finishing my PhD thesis. It’s an old idea, and […]

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5 months ago

Pre-Dreadnaughts: an aesthetic appreciation Continuing my fascination with transitional designs, I’ve been looking at Pre-Dreadnought battleships. Battleships are ridiculous, but also awesome. The things that came before the classical battleship were even more ridiculous. The Dreadnought, what we think of as a battleship, was the culmination of years of design thought on the topic of sticking a metal boat […]

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5 months ago

Further examples of group madness in technology First set of examples here: Examples of group madness in technology Many of these taken from the comments on the last one; thanks bros. Again, one of the worst arguments I hear is that “thing X is inevitable because the smart people are doing it.” There are tons of examples of smart people doing and working […]

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5 months ago

Best quantum computing paper of 2025 Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog by Peter Gutmann and Stephan Neuhaus Click to access 1237.pdf Supposedly AI investors are poised to fuel this horse shit with your retirement money, now that the air is going out of that bubble. This paper comes in the nick […]

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6 months ago

Summer Q3 2025 books The Urban Astronomer’s Guide: A Walking Tour of the Cosmos for City Sky Watchers by Rod Mollise. Uncle Rod gives a seasonal guide to Urban sky watching. I’ll eventually find the time to buy a dark skies country house, but clouds and having a social life keeps me in the back yard in an Urban […]

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7 months ago

A-5 Vigilante The North American Aviation company was pretty much wiped out by the Apollo-1 accident; a political sacrifice, as the all-oxygen atmosphere which caused the disaster was called out by …. North American Aviation. The company made some amazing planes before it bit the dust and got bought out by the Rockwell conglomerate. For WW-2 planes, […]

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