While working on an entirely different topic (rhymes with ‘fissile’), I got to wondering — how does the Earth’s gravity vary with depth? Let’s start by examining what causes gravity. We have Newton’s law for gravitation: We can use this to calculate the acceleration towards the center of the Earth…

This question became of acute importance to me a few weeks ago, after some bicycle-related lithobraking. The answer turns out to be fascinating. Water is quite an odd substance. In terms of phases, we have three phases we’re familiar with: gas, liquid and solid. …

With the current cold weather, I got curious — how should you stay warm while cycling? Clearly, cycling faster requires more energy, heating you up. On the other hand, it also increases heat losses: the air flows around you faster, cooling you down. How does this scale? …

David Hume was a 18th century empiricist Scottish philosopher. One of his early works was A Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739. This was not received well by critics. In his memoirs, My own life, published in 1776, just a few months before his death, he mentions: Never literary…

A while back, I was reading a poem called Counter-Attack, by Siegfried Sassoon — a First World War poet. The poems from that period tend to be gruesome, unpleasant, evoking the mud, stench and death of trench warfare. An excellent example of such poems is Dulce et Decorum Est, by…

I have been working on neutron Monte Carlo simulations for quite some time, in order to simulate various aspects of nuclear systems. Recently, I realized I can use the exact same approach to model radiative transfer of heat as well. The overall approach should be surprisingly simple! We will start…

This is an excerpt of a larger set of comments on determinism and compatibilism, and serves as a short introduction to the concepts. Determinism is a philosophical concept stating that, given full information about a paste state, the future is fully determined. That would appear to imply a lack of…