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A couple weeks after the 2020 US presidential election was held, Nate Silver tweeted several times about the irrationality of betting markets (for example PredictIt), since they still had a 10% chance of Trump wining various states.
Bit of a meta post here - how I use LaTex formatting for math / equations in blogger. Starting with this Stack Exchange TEX question/answer, I copied the provided code to load the MathJax library and then followed these blogger/google instructions in the section "change your blog with HTML or css", in the html section - edited the blog template, added the code copied from above into the <head> section. Seems to be working now:
$$a^2 + b^2 = c^2$$
$$y(x) = sin(\omega x)$$
$$c^2 = a^2 + b^2 - 2ab \cos(c)$$
I've been struggling to understand General Relativity - the theory that describes gravity - for a long time now. One thing I realized might help is a very simple example - solving a very simple, recognizable problem using general relativity. In an analogy with software engineering, I'm looking for how write "hello world" in new programming language.
For the equivalent of programming's "hello world" in physics, I'm going to choose the problem of tossing a ball up into the air. I'm going to solve this problem using 4 different types of physics: classical/Newtonian, quantum mechanics, general relativity, and quantum electrodynamics. I hope this will give me (and you perhaps) a better understanding of the differences and similarities between these theories, and some practical understanding of how one uses / applies them.
I captured some lightning strikes on video, it was neat to look at the individual frames and observe the qualitative standard progression of how they work.
I recently watched GLOW - the Netflix TV series about the 1980's female wrestling show of the same name (Gorgeous Ladies Of Wresting) and was extremely surprised that seeing the styles of the 80's and hearing the music had a deep / profound impact on me. It hit me. It connected. I was 9-10 years old at the that time, but hated it! It's not that I decried the music publicly but secretly loved - I have no memory of ever enjoying it. I wrote this blog post to explore why I deeply enjoyed it now, and have loved watching GLOW.
Some stones had fallen off some stone walls in our backyard, and I decided to repair them - basically cleaning up the area where the stones should go, mortaring them back in place. Note these are nominally retaining walls but the work I did was not structural - there is not a bulge or tilt to these walls, the stones for the most part were on the top or edge of the wall.
