A recent lecture and a series of interviews has been posted online where cosmologist George F.R. Ellis discusses the issue of fine-tuning in biology at considerable length and in considerable detail. Of course, the larger theme here is that to discuss and understand things like Darwinian evolution properly, one needs to have an understanding of […]
Category: Mathematics
A big part of my research involves dynamical systems theory. A lot of people don’t know what this is, at least, they don’t have a very good idea. It has not helped that the vast majority of Canadian university physics programs have deemphasized classical mechanics and differential equations, but that is an another story! Anyways, […]
Since I expect the concept of gravitational waves to once become very popular in the next few days, I wrote some quick notes on them, I.e., where they come from. They are handwritten, as I didn’t have time to LaTeX them, but, hopefully, they’ll be useful to interested readers! Also note that, gravitational waves are […]
One of my earliest works was deriving equations which themselves were forms of Einstein’s field equations that described the state of the early universe, which may have had dominant viscous effects. I was delighted to learn that these equations were published in Springer’s Handbook of Spacetime Cosmology textbook. Here is a snapshot of the textbook […]
Our new paper was accepted for publication in Physical Review D. The goal of the paper was to calculate the probability that a multiverse could emerge from a more general background spacetime, in this case, Bianchi Type I coupled to a chaotic inflaton potential. Basically, we found that a multiverse being generated from such a […]
I’ve been interested for some time on figuring out an analytical way to determine what characterizes an NBA team as a playoff team. Looking at the previous six seasons, I pulled together almost 65 different statistics that characterize how a team plays, and then performed a classification tree analysis. I found the following result: […]
The vast majority of NBA analysts claim today that the NBA has changed. It has become more fast-paced, and there is a significantly greater emphasis on teams attempting more three point shots. The evidence for this is the repeated recital of the fact that over the last number of years, the average three-point attempt rate […]
The first thing to note is that just by looking at Basketball-Reference.com there are 62 factors that uniquely classify a team: MP FG FGA FG% 3P 3PA 3P% 2P 2PA 2P% FT FTA FT% ORB DRB TRB AST STL BLK TOV PF PTS OMP OFG OFGA OFG% O3P O3PA O3P% O2P O2PA O2P% OFT OFTA […]
The 2015-2016 NBA season is dawning upon us, and as usual, ESPN has been doing their usual #NBArank, where they are ranking players based on the following non-rigorous methodology: We asked, “Which player will be better in 2015-16?” To decide, voters had to consider both the quality and quantity of each player’s contributions to his […]
Tomorrow is the date of the Canadian Federal Elections. Here are my predictions for the outcome: That is, I predict the Liberals will win, with the NDP trailing very far behind either party.
Relativity Digest 