I have been wondering lately... Physicists are very certain that as far as they can see (meaning the observable universe which is estimated to be about 93 billion lightyears across), physics are the same everywhere. This excludes bubble universes (i.e. the multiverse scenario). That means, for as far as we can see, we believe that E = mc² applies on Earth just as it applies to the galaxies in the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, as does Entropy, as does F = G(m₁m₂/r²) and all the other theorems we came up with.

My question is, how can we be sure? Let me give you an analogy I was thinking of yesterday.

Assume we are all small retroviruses living in the ocean. We live in the Pacific Ocean, so our average SG is about 1.025. Since we are about 80nm in length, scaling the sea : microbe ratio, if a microbe was 1.6m tall (like us), then the ocean with a length of approximately 19,800km at the longest end would be 0.05 ly across. That does not seem like much, but think about this - the Voyager 1 which is the furthest man made object from our planet is currently about 0.00207 ly from us. That is 1/10th of the distance the retrovirus is from land in our ocean - universe analogy. So it is safe to say that this retrovirus (located in the middle of the pacific ocean) has not yet had any means to visit the boundaries of the universe to prove the physical properties are the same as in its current location.

The retrovirus performs various physical experiments and measurements. Lets look at specific gravity. He measures that to be 1.025. For him, it seems to be a fundamental constant as everywhere he looks the SG seems to be 1.025. Now he wonders whether this is truly universal. Since he cannot really measure this value at the boundaries of his galaxy (the Pacific Ocean) without making assumptions, he assumes it is constant because of the following reasoning. If the SG would have been significantly different than 1.025, say 1.020, life as he knows it could not readily exist. Osmotic pressure would become troublesome for living organisms (those that have evolved and adapted to SG of 1.025). So he theorises that if SG had not been 1.025 or very close to it, life (as he knows it), would not be possible. Without an example, he cannot fathom how life would look like at a different SG. So SG must be constant.

Seems like my ethernet network is doing just fine... It is 1Gbps so I am extremely close to the theoretical maximum throughput - this between a Mac Pro and a MacBook Air using scp:

Yesterday I attempted to make a simple California Roll. I have eaten sushi many times before but never tried to make a roll myself. It was not hard, and actually surprisingly good - as good as any I've had. It is not expensive to make either and enough to feed 4 people (that is, 4 below average people as they call them over here). Here is the result:

I do not normally do reviews - the internet is full of them. Besides - they are usually pointless as they are usually strongly biased. I have been fortunate (or not, depending on your viewpoint) of having owned an Apple Watch since the start of May 2015. It has been three weeks now and I think I am in a position to offer some comments on the watch's usefulness.

The Ugly

I tried to copy some large files (500MB+) from a remote location... In fact, it is very remote - exactly on the other side of the world. Using standard pppd in Ubuntu, I established a PPTP VPN connection to the server. However every time I tried copying the file it would randomly stall at 2% - 30% and then the PPP connection would drop. Errors such as these showed up:

May 11 15:25:16 waldopcl pptp[2354]: anon log[decaps_gre:pptp_gre.c:414]: buffering packet 1423724 (expecting 1423723, lost or reordered)
May 11 15:25:25 waldopcl pptp[2354]: anon log[decaps_gre:pptp_gre.c:414]: buffering packet 1426544 (expecting 1426543, lost or reordered)
May 11 15:25:31 waldopcl pptp[2354]: anon log[decaps_gre:pptp_gre.c:414]: buffering packet 1428269 (expecting 1428268, lost or reordered)
May 11 15:25:40 waldopcl pptp[2354]: anon log[decaps_gre:pptp_gre.c:414]: buffering packet 1431253 (expecting 1431252, lost or reordered)
...

It is clear to me that the link for some reason did not support the speed at which the sending side thought it could send packets. Somewhere the MTU or window size was incorrectly negotiated. I tried lowering MTU but it made no difference. In the end, what worked for me was to notice the transfer rate it was trying to send packets at, and then forcefully lowering it. It still produced dropped packets, however since the rate of transmission is slower it seems to keep up - I have been copying 2GB of files without a disconnect so far: