(Note: I am using some Greek letters and math symbols in this post and HTML can be dicey in how they appear. They look ok to me using the Safari browser on my Mac but if it looks weird to you, let me know in the comments and I will try and tweak the HTML to make it look better.)

In our lives we need to have some system of units for quantities like mass (M), length (L), and time (T). The most common system, used almost everywhere in the world with the US being a notable exception, is the metric system where length is in meters, time is in seconds, and mass is in kilograms. But any such system of units is purely conventional and if we were to make contact with any extra-terrestrials, it is almost certain that they would have a different set of units. But could there be units that are universal?
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To no one’s surprise, this year’s Nobel prize in physics has been awarded for the detection of gravity waves in September 2015. This was a huge project involving large numbers of experimentalists and theorists because the waves have such a weak signal. It is not unlike the earlier discovery of the Higgs boson in that the final detection was received with relief rather than surprise because both were firmly believed to exist. In the case of the Higgs, the prediction had been made fifty years earlier and with the gravitational waves, it had been made 100 years earlier, as a consequence of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The challenge in both cases was to overcome the immense technical hurdles involved in detecting them.
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A short while ago, residents of Arlington, VA were startled to see a driverless car passing through its streets. At one point a reporter on foot approached the car and looked in and saw that the car did have a driver but that he was disguised as a car seat that he could see through and was controlling the car with his hands held low.
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The new iPhone announced yesterday apparently uses some aspects of facial recognition technology, and Edward Snowden says that it is almost certainly going to be abused. China is forging ahead with facial recognition with estimates of up to a billion people’s faces being entered into databases that enable them to be instantly recognized. The applications made possible by this are vast but the privacy implications are also disturbing.
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The TV images we saw of the Apollo astronauts on the moon had a ghostly, grainy look. That poor quality lent support to the beliefs of some people that the moon landings were faked though the reasoning escapes me. If the video was filmed on a secret Hollywood soundstage by Stanley Kubrick, as some allege, then surely NASA could have shelled out a few extra bucks to make a better quality product? (I never quite understood why people would believe something so bizarre. Why would NASA and the top people in the US government cook up such a story?)
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I recently had two separate interesting discussions with some other expatriate Sri Lankan friends who did not know each other. Each independently recounted their experiences with what is called a ‘light reader’ in Sri Lanka or a psychic or a medium in the US. They both talked about the same person named Hendo Hamy who lived in a village. People would go to him with various problems and he would be able to deduce why they had come to see him, what the problem was, and the resolution of the problem. Both were highly impressed by his abilities.
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