Reflections and Speculations

Ebolavirus and evidence-based speculations.

Speculations on Story Puns

There is a class of joke which consists of an anecdote , which is sometimes quite long and often has no inherently humorous content, followed by a punchline which is a distorted form of some well-known phrase, proverb or quotation. Usually the punchline purports to summarise or draw a moral from the preceding story. This genre has some unusual aspects, from the viewpoint of conventional claims ...

Speculations on Hodge theory

Recall that a Mumford–Tate domain DM is an open set in its compact dual ĎM — the latter is a rational homogeneous variety defined over Q (think of the upper half plane H ⊂ P1). Thus a polarized Hodge structure (PHS) φ has an “upstairs” field of definition k(φ). If H•,• ⊂ T •,• is a subalgebra then the Noether-Lefschetz locus NLH = {φ : Hg•,• φ ⊇ H} is defined over Q. Its components are defined ...

Speculations on Ate

When I was asked to speak here today on what the future holds for general purpose ATE designed to test complex systems on a chip (SoCs).....I immediately thought of this guy. Does anyone recognize him? This is Isaac Newton who when asked why gravity worked the way it did. .....said, “Hypotheses non fingo” Can anybody here translate this Latin phrase?............... I guess there are no lawyers,...

Speculations on Biology, Information and Complexity

It would be nice to have a mathematical understanding of basic biological concepts and to be able to prove that life must evolve in very general circumstances. At present we are far from being able to do this. But I’ll discuss some partial steps in this direction plus what I regard as a possible future line of attack. Can Darwinian evolution be made into a mathematical theory? Is there a fundam...