Java Zen:Thinking Out Loud Saturday, 2025.05.17 
"We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make
observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby
become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative
form of science-- analogous to the South Sea island airfields, radio towers,
etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They
even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in foreigners'
airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The
results of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of
you are. You teachers who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap
can maybe doubt the experts once in a while. Learn from science that you must
doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way:
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

		Richard Feynman, The Physics Teacher, 7 September, 1969, 313-320

2001.07.20

From The Objects-Are-Closer-Than-They-Appear Department

You might be aware that our Sun will be a red giant in about 15 billion years, and its size will increase dramatically beyond the Mercury orbit and we will enter the “crispy critters” phase of our evolution. But do you know that the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with our Milky Way in about 3 billion years? Then another time after 1 billion years to merge themselves. What a mess! I thought there would be some laws against this happening or at the lease some sort of EPA ruling but no such luck. There are some pretty nice simulations in MPEG, and a lot of pictures with some explanation on the web sites listed below.

So the message for today: Party like it’s 2,999,999,999! WooHoo!

https://www.npaci.edu/online/v4.9/galaxies2.html
https://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~dubinski/tflops/

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