What are the chances
September 3, 2020
that the US election on November 3 happens without serious violence or worse – perhaps much worse? I guess not zero, but not much more than zero.
More from 100 suns
Run from the future
September 2, 2020
One of the great dreams of the internet is that people who do office jobs will be able to, by and large, work from anywhere. I don't think it was clear in March that the infrastructure or the people were ready for this dream. But, wonderfully, it turns out they were: the great dream came true and now many millions of people in the UK will be able to work from anywhere once CV19 is over, and won't need to spend hours a day commuting. Enlightened companies will soon realise that they can provid...
Analytic
September 4, 2020
Analytic functions are both infinitely differentiable and have a Taylor series which converges in some neighbourhood of every point.
I think it's possible to argue that the functions of physics should not only be sufficiently differentiable, but analytic. The reason for thinking this – well, the reason I think it – is that I think these approximation techniques correspond to the measurements we can make: you can measure the position of something, say, and then by measuring the change in positi...