Daily Archives: 28/12/2013

My brother likes to be useful to the world by participating in BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) projects, in which the computing power of the broad masses is used for processor-heavy tasks like screening data from the SETI program (a hiding to nothing) or testing climate change models (potentially immensely valuable). When I was visiting him recently, I displaced the BOINC screen-saver in order to check the news, and found an item purporting to have mathematical evidence that the universe is a hologram. The idea of the cosmos as an illusion (of what, for whom?) is a common conceit, usually in the form of its being a computer … Continue reading →