User:Cherlin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Generalist

Poverty: One Laptop per Child, Sarvodaya, Grameen, Partners in Health,...

Serial non-profit founder: Berkeley Buddhist Priory, Coalition Against UCE (spam), Earth Treasury (piggyback on OLPC to teach children around the world how to go into business together)

Economics: Welfare Economics, General equilibrium, Free Market, Perfect Competition

Human languages and writing systems: Unicode; Hebrew, Latin, French, German, Russian, Swahili, Yiddish, Korean,...

Computer languages: APL! Well, LISP, FORTH, SNOBOL, Smalltalk, Java, Unlambda...

Philosophy and religion: Hume, Nietzsche, Buddhism

Science Fiction: John Brunner, Philip K. Dick, Sheri S. Tepper, Richard Matheson

Music: Yale Concert Band, Slavyanka Russian Chorus, Bluegrass and Old-Time, Klezmer,...

Games and puzzles: Go, Kakuro

Math: John Horton Conway's Surreal numbers and Combinatorial game theory; Combinatory logic; Algebraic topology

Science: When a white dwarf star goes over the Chandrasekhar limit, its electron degeneracy pressure fails. The electrons combine with protons (inverse beta decay) to form neutrons, and the star collapses to form a neutron star. When a neutron star goes over the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, neutron degeneracy pressure fails, and it collapses to form a black hole.

Now the neutrons have to turn into something else on the way down. What? Strange matter? Free quarks? Di-baryons? Something we haven't thought of yet? Nobody knows. But we're working on it, with gamma-ray spectroscopy, LIGO and other gravity wave telescopes, the IceCube neutrino detector at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, and lots of big particle accelerators.