User:Cherlin
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[edit] Generalist
Poverty: One Laptop per Child, Sarvodaya, Grameen, Partners in Health,...
Human languages and writing systems: Unicode; Hebrew, Latin, French, German, Russian, Swahili, Yiddish, Korean,...
Computer languages: APL! Well, LISP, FORTH, SNOBOL, Smalltalk, Java, Unlambda...
Philosophy and religion: Hume, Nietzsche, Buddhism
Science Fiction: John Brunner, Philip K. Dick, Sheri S. Tepper, Richard Matheson
Music: Yale Concert Band, Slavyanka Russian Chorus, Bluegrass and Old-Time, Klezmer,...
Math: John Horton Conway's Surreal numbers and Combinatorial game theory; Combinatory logic; Algebraic topology
Science: When a white dwarf star goes over the Chandrasekhar limit, its electron degeneracy pressure fails. The electrons combine with protons (inverse beta decay) to form neutrons, and the star collapses to form a neutron star. When a neutron star goes over the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, neutron degeneracy pressure fails, and it collapses to form a black hole.
Now the neutrons have to turn into something else on the way down. What? Strange matter? Free quarks? Di-baryons? Something we haven't thought of yet? Nobody knows. But we're working on it, with gamma-ray spectroscopy, LIGO and other gravity wave telescopes, the IceCube neutrino detector at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, and lots of big particle accelerators.
