2011 in blogging

According to the dataviz folks at Wordpress, the concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. My blog was viewed about 9,800 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it. Go here http://cosmicrays.wordpress.com/2011/annual-report/ to see the complete report. Thanks everyone for stopping by and hoping to blog even more in 2012! Happy New Year! Read More …

TEDxZurich 2011: Ideas worth spreading from Zurich

I am proud to have been on the organizing team of TEDxZurich 2011. With the help of great sponsors, including the Swiss National Television Network, at which the event was held, amazing speakers and performers, and a full house of 450 attendees, we celebrated and shared “ideas worth spreading”. I was on the speakers committee, moonlighted with a bit of tech help, and the day of was rushing around making sure all the speakers were happy and prepared for their big moment on stage. Here are the videos; it’s extremely hard to pick a favorite, but the speaker I am most proud of and moved by is Dr. Eleanor Dobson who gives us a peek into the belly of CERN and how modern big science is done. Dr. Dobson’s talk was one of the talks I helped curate, in conjunction with the TEDxZurich team, and came about after I heard her passion on the subject and suggested she speak. Don’t stop there though, there are 20 videos from the day and hundreds of ideas ready to run loose. Read More …

Kliq movie is live

I’m amazingly lucky to have only hobbies, even though I work constantly. The Kliq movie is live! I am extremely proud of the work myself, and my cofounder Michael Craig have done thus far and where we are taking it next, making it easier than ever to interact with people, friends, acquaintances, and potential new best friends, business partners, etc. at events you are already RSVPing to. Read More …

Fault tolerant computing

As a first step to writing my own simulation code while attempting to do something useful, a few days ago I started writing a code to explore failure and recovery from failure in a distributed computation. By failure in this case, I mean when one of the computation units goes down. My test system is N harmonic oscillators on N nodes (or processes on a shared memory machine). Read More …

The Intersection of Productivity and Joy (over the past months)

Since last we spoke a couple of months ago, I had a hell of a time personally: I moved house, went from one location to another too often, had a major and very stressful financial crisis and had some rough times with friends which rocked the emotional boat. Although there are many things which didn’t Read More …

Quantum Field Theory (QFT), General Relativity (GR), and Other Exciting Diversions (OED)

QFT I’m lucky to have a job in which I can take two weeks of mornings of work to study a nominally tangential subject in greater depth. These past two weeks I attended a series of  lectures at the ETH on physics beyond the standard model, the first week was very technical but exciting to Read More …