Feynman Lectures for math

I need an equivalent Feynman's Lectures for mathematics.

I've had plenty of math and science courses as an undergraduate and now as a graduate student. I did well in math, but have always felt that this was due to superficial, short-term rule memorization, rather than to a deep and fundamental understanding. Basically, most courses were slow enough for strugglers, and those with an intuitive feel didn't have to work terribly hard. Courses were generally crowded, taught by overworked grad students with poor teaching skills and limited English, with textbooks long on pages and short on clarity. There was little deliberate carryover between courses, and each introduced new jargon, styles, and notation. The result was a handful of memorized facts and rules not forming any cohesive structure, and which slip away with disuse, which is a real shame for such a fascinating subject.

I think it boils down to textbooks being the worst possible way to actually learn something. I've had the opposite experience with science, not because the textbooks are better (they aren't), but because I know which authors to read. I've read much more widely from authors such as Asimov and Sagan who can explain concepts accurately and with clarity. I remember discovering and being blown away by Richard Feynman's lectures on physics. He took a complex subject and presented the breadth of it with perfect clarity; I doubt whether anyone has ever explained the the double-slit experiment more clearly. Conversely, math textbooks, and even sources such as Wikipedia and Mathworld, while presumably perfectly accurate, are shrouded in layers of obfuscation and jargon rendering them impenetrable.

But hopefully someone's done a Feynman-esque job of bringing it all together. Hopefully. Or maybe it's just a pipe dream.

Hank Williams and Rachmaninov

Here's a cool NPR story about a guy who tracked down a set of wax cylinders from the dawn of recorded sound. Mostly Russian, they feature the only known recordings of a number of people, the earliest surviving recordings of a number of others, and just plain interesting recordings of even other cool cats in the ~1890s. For instance, Rachmaninov playing Rachmaninov, Jascha Heifetz on violin at age 11, and voice recordings of Tolstoy.

Apparently, they cylinders were thought destroyed in Germany in WWII, but actually ended up in St. Petersburg. They languished there unnoticed for 60 years until someone stumbled upon them, and now they're available on CD for all of us to enjoy.

Neat.



Reminds me of this story a few months ago about some recently rediscovered Hank Williams recordings of a radio program from 1951. Extra neat.

My Mars

Well, Ray Bradbury's Mars. This forward is from a recent space-related issue of National Geographic.

When I was six years old I moved to Tucson, Arizona, and lived on Lowell Avenue, little realizing I was on an avenue that led to Mars. It was named for the great astronomer Percival Lowell, who took fantastic photographs of the planet that promised a spacefaring future to children like myself.

Along the way to growing up, I read Edgar Rice Burroughs and loved his Martian books, and followed the instructions of his Mars pioneer John Carter, who told me, when I was 12, that it was simple: If I wanted to follow the avenue of Lowell and go to the stars, I needed to go out on the summer night lawn, lift my arms, stare at the planet Mars, and say, "Take me home."

That was the day that Mars took me home—and I never really came back. I began writing on a toy typewriter. I couldn't afford to buy all the Martian books I wanted, so I wrote the sequels myself.

The rest of it is here.

12 billion years in 6 minutes

Here's a really cool video someone made showing the 12-billion-year history of a sunlike star, underlain by some cool trance music (F.C. Kahuna?):


Really awe-inspiring, and much better than, say, a Donnie and Marie Star Wars tribute, starring Red Foxx as a Jedi and Paul Lynd as an Imperial General (to pick a random example):

Echo chamber

So I just found out at least two people actually read this blog. Guess I better a) start proofreading, b) start writing coherently, and c) find a thesaurus so that I stop describing everything as "awesome."

Disappointment

So I was playing around with a version of Conway's Game of Life on my iPhone the other day, and got really excited that I had discovered a stable repeating pattern:

Looked to me like a size 48, 72 generation oscillator. It's made up of two small size 16, 8 generation oscillators and two 4-cell blocks stabilizing a small back-and-forth shuttle. Here's one of the smaller oscillators (the other is top-bottom mirror symmetric):

Of course, millions of people have been playing around with Conway's Game of Life for 40 years, so it might have been found before. But, it's large enough that I thought there was a chance it might be novel. And initial searches seemed to bear out my hopes: There are no described 48-cell, period-72 oscillators.

But, alas, it was not to be: The penultimate state, although much less attractive, has a size of only 47 cells:

And someone had, in fact, already discovered it. However, I discovered it independently, goddamnit, and if Leibniz gets co-credit for calculus, then this will damn well be Bryan's 48-Cell Oscillator. :)

But I guess Stephen Wolfram is still safe as the reigning champion of cellular automata.

For now...

More sky goodness

To continue on my recent post about exciting things in the sky, last night was a very entertaining celestial evening. First of all, for some reason, there was a blimp circling downtown for several hours. And not just any boring old blimp--this blimp was lit up all pretty bright electric blue (if you could ignore the obnoxious DirectTV advertisements). It was circling from about 1-2 miles away, to about 4-5 miles away, almost due east of me. Orion was also rising in the east, and was especially bright, considering the urban location and the blimps and whatnot. The interesting thing is that, while nearby, the blimp would sail majestically in front of Orion, but on the far side of its loop, it actually appeared to be behind Orion. This was presumably because it was so much smaller and fainter, while bright Orion was large and prominent; similar, perhaps, to the moon-on-the-horizon optical illusion. In fact, Orion was so bright, that while running along, it appeared as if it should have passed in front of trees and rooftops, rather than behind them. No, I wasn't drinking--it was my perceptual system insisting that large, bright objects are closer than small, dim objects. In this case, my perception was only off by a factor of approximately a trillion.

Venus was also exceptionally bright in the southwest last night, and again this brightness made it appear very odd. It seemed to be floating significantly closer than the background, and this caused it to appear to undergo a phantom parallax compared to the stars.

Or maybe I'm just not getting enough oxygen while running.

Big skies

An amazing thing happened to me tonight while I was out running.

We have an incredibly boring night sky. Don't get me wrong: It's one of the most breathtakingly beautiful things we have to look at. But there are only two objects in the entire sky larger than point sources.

But there are places that have vertiginous views of the heavens. From the Moon, the Earth is a good-sized coin in the sky; the Sun viewed from Mercury is about the same size. And Jupiter's moon Metis is at a third of the distance that our Moon is, while Jupiter is 11 times larger than Earth. That means that if you were a miner in the far distant future walking around on the surface of Metis with your pickaxe and your spacesuit, Jupiter would appear 132 times larger than the Moon; it would take up 66 degrees of the sky, or a third of the distance from horizon to horizon. Can you imagine the vertigo induced by having something that large career overhead?!

(Asimov does a great job of articulating these kinds of celestial details in some of his earlier works--perhaps the Lucky Starr series?)

Back to running tonight. As I rounded a corner, there was one of those rare confluences of coincidence. There was a roughly-circular cloud formation which was being shaped into a series of approximately a dozen parallel bands by the wind. They were whispy cirri that were not immediately obvious in the dark. As I rounded the corner, the pattern-recogniztion subroutines of my brain were triggered by my peripheral vision and identified what they thought was a huge sphere floating in the sky. It literally made me jump as a Jupiter-type body appeared to be filling 20% of the sky. Even when I looked directly at it, the illusion persisted; it was perfect cloud paraeidolia. It was also a truly remarkable vision of what living in a system blessed with such scenery would be like--the standard sci-fi huge-planet-in-the-sky doesn't really compare to actually seeing what appears to be an indescribably massive object seemingly suspended in the real-world sky.

This brings up a related point: This is probably the third or fourth such occasion where I've seen a celestial event that could have been confused with a UFO by a less scientifically-minded individual. All of those "It was just Venus" explanations offered by scientists always sound pretty lame as explanations of UFO phenomena--until it actually happens to you. Last night I literally saw a cloud out of the corner of my eye that made me jump. And I remember another occasion driving due east to work at dawn. In that case it really was Venus in the sky that freaked out my peripheral vision due to miss-applied motion. Its extreme brightness (and the solidity of buildings) fooled my sensors into thinking it was moving and the buildings were standing still rather than that it was stationary and the buildings were gliding past.

Irresistible Stupidity

The Immovable Object of the First Amendment meets the Irresistible Force of Human Stupidity.

What a piece of garbage

The phrase "worst piece of shit ever made" is bandied about all too often these days, but the TV show Star Wars: The Clone Wars is beyond the pale. I finally got around to getting it off my DVR tonight, and it's just awful. It's cliche to criticize George Lucas' godawful abortions these days, but this is horrible even for him. This is sort of like the George W. Bush presidency: Every single decision made in the production of this is about 180° wrong from what I would have made; so many that I can't even begin to address them all. I know the show is aimed more towards children, but it must've been profoundly stupid children in this case.

The technology is stupid--why would you send robot astronauts to cut open escape pods manually, one at a time, when you've just shown you can blow up entire ships with your new superweapon? The tactics are even more retarded--why do they send in inept, unshielded, cannon-fodder droids and hold squads of shielded, advanced rollers in reserve? Fuck, they've even got ninja droids that show up a few episodes in. And General Grievous is supposed to be the most bad-ass general in the galaxy--but this dimbulb is incompetent in every conceivable way. The animation would have looked cheesy on Saturday-morning cartoons ten years ago. The physics are arbitrary-- The writing is insultingly vapid--the comic-relief droid dialog is cringe-inducing. They appear to be following the Jar-Jar-Binks-just-stepped-in-poop-oh-look-that-animal-just-farted school of comedy. Holy shit: I just wrote that, and literally five minutes later there was an actual fart joke. High brow.

Droid one: "I've never seen such bad aim!"

Droid two: "Sorry . . . It's my programing!"

Wah wah. Jesus.

It also faces the same problem that Star Trek has had for years--in Star Trek it manifests in its serial nature, where no technological advances carry from episode to episode. There are literally dozens of episodes where medical or transporter advances, or alien encounters, introduce knowledge or abilities that should effectively create human immortality thenceforth. Yet, those technologies or abilities are never referenced in the future when they could come in handy. Similarly, the god-like Jedi powers in Star Wars only seem to show up in dire straights, and are just strong enough to accomplish whatever is necessary. If you can flick your hand and send dozens or hundreds of droids flying at a moments notice, where's the dramatic tension when facing four? And why do you have to carefully meditate this time? It leads to a kind of arms race of ever-increasing dramatic requirements. You can sustain that for a couple of movies, but after 30 years it wears kind of thing--why does no one ever remember that they've got superpowers and JUST FUCKING USE THEM?! This is the kind of thing that you usually suspend your disbelief for, but if the writing sucks, and the animation sucks, and the characters suck, and the science sucks, and the entire thing is a generally insulting travesty, just what would one be suspending it for?

Finally, 30 years later, Lucas-co is still trying to win the "we meant to use parsecs!" battle. There are multiple very wooden, transparently deliberate uses of "parsec" dropped into conversation

Also, they have once again taken an incredibly cool character and made it thoroughly mediocre. First they gave Darth Maul, the most intreguing character to date, only three lines in Episode I before killing him off. Now they've taken the creepy, silent female Sith from the original Clone Wars shorts and made her some kind of whining, incompetent boob.

Garbage, garbage, garbage.

The one good point that the series has is that it fleshes out Anakin's character a bit. It's not much, but the whole sense of potential, rise, fall, and betrayal of Anakin in the new trilogy is largely self-imposed interpolation, benefit of the doubt, and wishful thinking. The actual offering is about 20 minutes in the second movie where he's heroic, I guess, and 20 more in the finale, where he falls. But most of the actual character development has happened off screen. Here we at least see him acting like a human being, showing compassion, etc., which at least makes us care a little that he falls in a few years. Also, characters like Grievous and Dukoo that were shoehorned into the movies with no development are more fully fleshed out here; of course, if any of it was any good, it should have been included in the movies.

The end of science

I've been pondering several things along these lines lately...

I saw this piece today about the end of the age of the individual scientist. We're probably not going to see another Einstein or Newton--the shoulder of the giants have reached such a height that it takes 30 years of learning to climb that far. And the problems have grown so large and complex that it takes teams rather than individuals to tackle them. Nature has also recently had a number of stories about the end of the age of the single-author paper. No more brilliant, reclusive geniuses striding through academe; the new colossi are and will be geniuses at managing, at marketing, at networking. The age of Fermi, Feynman, Wheeler, and Einstein is ending, making way for the age of CERN and ESO and Merck.

The upside of this is that, while single great intellects will no longer be able to be famous down the ages for solving timeless and profound questions, it is an age of fabulous opportunity for everyone. Despite the fact that billions choose to grossly ignorant, anyone who desires to can easily know more than Newton or Einstein or Feynman. We have instant access to all of their writings, thoughts, and lectures. I no longer need to take physics from tired, struggling grad student who doesn't speak English; I'll just take the definitive, greatest physics course ever given and listen/read/watch the Feynman lectures. It took all of the computing power in the world and dozens of the greatest minds ever developed to simulate nuclear reactions during the Manhattan Project. Now, if I want, I can solve the equations, create the simulations, all of it, in just a few afternoons. The commodity at the moment is time to cogitate on the vast information that we have, and the filters to sort through it.

An indication of this information overload is that it shouldn't actually take 30 years to climb to the top of the shoulders of giants--we just haven't yet created the filters and the access to the right information to allow education to be as quick and easy as it could be. Most subjects aren't difficult, if you find the person who understands it the best and can explain it the most clearly. Physics isn't confusing or counterintuitive when coming from Feynman. Asimov's books on neutrinos or chemistry are such brilliant little jewels of clarity that they should be in every classroom. I spent eight years in high school and college learning not very much--most of it was an exercise in frustration being taught poorly by people who didn't really understand what they were talking about; I could have saved years of effort just by reading Dawkins and Gould and Hitchens and watching and listening to every lecture they ever gave. The fact that I was a science major at a large midwestern university, and I don't think I had ever even heard of Richard Feynman until after college when I stumbled across an audio file of his on Napster sums up the lack of filters currently available in education.

A recent Astronomycast was discussing how the age of the astronomer spending long, cold nights in mountain observatories is likewise ending--today's researchers get the data remotely, and more and more from huge datasets already there to be analyzed. A couple of quick calculations show that we aren't too many years from just recording the entire sky and archiving it. Assuming a resolution of 0.001", a 2D 360° sky, and equations for circumference and surface area of a sphere, the sky can be considered a digital canvas of 50 billion pixels. With 24 bit color, and one scan per second, the entire sky produces about 10 petabytes a day in the visible, or about 4 exobytes a year. Sure, that's a hell of a lot of data, but Moore's Law says I'll be able to store one day's worth in 20 years, and a year's worth in 30ish. Humans do so poorly at intuiting exponential growth; Phil Plait mentioned something similar on The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe this week: Recently some researchers suggested looking along the ecliptic for SETI-transmitting civilizations, reasoning that, since we can detect transiting planets, aliens that might similarly be able to detect us via transect may decide to transmit towards us. Dr. Plait's point was that, there is such a short technological window in which this is relevant, that there's not much chance that it would make a difference.

Finally, the worry about about human environmental destruction and climate change causing the extinction of thousands of species is not such a great worry, if humanity shows enough foresight to take a few precautions. If we can go just a few more years without managing to destroy all global biodiversity, the "extinction is forever" argument will no longer be valid: Genetic archives of all life--again a huge dataset, but one becoming managable--will allow the recreation of what we have lost, once we get control of our destructive practices. (Hopefully someone's got a preserved tissue sample from a baiji--a particularly poignant recent loss.) And it doesn't need to be physical archives of frozen cells such as the seed vault in Norway--all that is needed is the data. Venter-type metagenomics projects dedicated to cataloging biodiversity will allow recreation of desired species, de novo. Sure, it'll be complex, but it's an engineering problem, not a fundamental one.

Black holes suck

Researchers recently released results from 16 years of observations of stars at the very center of the Milky Way some 27,000 light-years away. They mapped the orbits of about 30 stars in a 3 light-year region (for scale, there are no stars within 3 light-years of the sun--the nearest is about 4 light-years away). The orbits and Kepler's Third Law allowed them to precisely measure the mass of the black hole--4 million times the mass of the sun, which, if my Schwarzchild math is right, gives it a diameter some 20 times bigger than the sun. Meaning that, if this black hole were the distance of the sun from us, it would be about as big as your fist held at arms length. If you could see it, which you couldn't. And we would not be happy.

Anyway, here's a cool video not showing the black hole at the center of the galaxy:

http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2008/video/vid-46e-08_P_QTP.mov

Inheritance of the cool

So I just found out that the lead singer of the Eels, an incredibly cool band, is the son of Hugh Everett III, creator of the incredibly cool Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics*. The other night I saw the NOVA episode on the father and son, "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives," and it was very well done. Mark Everett is an odd duck, but enjoyable, and his music features heavily throughout. Fascinating location shots in Princeton dorms, classrooms, and archives, and archival footage and audio recordings from key physics players in the 50s, made me very jealous of what it must have been like to be a physicist at that time.

I also managed to download Hugh Everett's dissertation, the resulting paper, and his advisor John Wheeler's accompanying paper. Hopefully I'll have a chance to read them soon!

*Also, his cousin was a flight attendant on the 9/11 plane that hit the Pentagon, another weird link in this guy's family. It's strange how certain people seem to have a disproportionate number of links to significant people and events--although I may just be acutely cognizant of it at the moment, as I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's excellent books, which thoroughly describe the links permeating society.

Paid by the word

And, it looks like 2009 will be...

<drumroll>
The year of Dickens!
</drumroll>

Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee, Charles Dickens, and Ian McEwan all have 10 or 11 entries in the index of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (Jane Austen has a respectable six, as do the combined Brontës). However, not all index entries are actual must-read selections--some are merely other works mentioned in the book's text. Beckett and McEwan "only" have eight actual must-reads; Dickens and Coetzee have ten. Considering I've never heard of Coetzee or any of his books (what'd he do, pull a Blagojevich with the book's editors?), so I'm declaring 2009 The Year of Dickens! Woo-hoo!!

So that'll be some dozen and a half novels, dozens of short stories, and a smattering of plays, essays, and longer non-fiction works--should be a busy year! I'll be getting an early start with A Christmas Carol, as read by Patrick Stewart.*

*Next year will conveniently be the sesquicentennial of A Tale of Two Cities, if I need a justifying excuse for all of this.

Author of the Year

My reading habits are pretty OCD--I generally can't read just one book by an author, but usually must read everything they've written. Consequently, my literateness is deep, but not broad.

Two factors conspire to put certain authors perpetually at the bottom of my to-read list: First, new must-read books are constantly getting bumped to the head of the line--I just finished Michael Pollan's three books, and am now reading Malcolm Gladwell's three. Second, prolific authors get pushed aside so that I can knock out big names with only a few titles under their belts: Homer? Dante? Machiavelli? Cervantes? Check, check, check, check. Tolstoy? Hemmingway? Dickens? Yeah, I'll get around to them sooner or later...

Thus is born my new project: The Author of the Year. I figure, if I pick just one author, I can probably work through all of their material in one year, and still have time for all of the interesting flotsam that comes out in the interim. Now I just have to pick an author. A logical starting place would be a nice conversational book I have lying around, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die; I think I'll select the author who has the most entries in that book. It could be Jane Austen, or it could be Dickens. Or Hemmingway. Or someone else entirely.

But I think I'll declare 2009 "The Year of ________"

Evolution in silico

An evolution-y day yesterday. One person programed a car to evolve in Flash:

Someone else programed Mona Lisa to evolve out of polygons:

Sharks...

...in Venice!

Time to make room on the DVR, because on Sunday the Sci-Fi Channel is playing what promises to be the greatest movie they've ever shown. It's Sharks in Venice! I was waffling on its awesomeness, considering the complete apparent lack of Samuel L. Jackson, but then I saw that it has the next best thing: a Lesser Baldwin!

I'm thankful I don't have to live with these people

Well, this is just awesomeness incarnate. Go 1950s!



"You'd never credit her with thinking beyond her dolls." Ha! This keeps getting better and better!

Two further thoughts:

Is it just me, or is the eagle's eye a Communist sickle?

Also, it appears to have been produced in Lawrence, KS. The Lawrence, KS where I went to college. Where I got my degree in evolution. From Kansas.

I like legs...

...I use them all the time.

This lecture is all about legs--Neil Shubin discusses his recent discovery of missing-link Tiktaalik fossils in the Arctic. If nothing else, it's cool to hear words "Tiktaalik," "Nunavut," and "Devonian" used a bunch--make a drinking game out of it!

Dawkins being Dawkins

Here's another awesome video of Richard Dawkins being Richard Dawkins: Kicking ass, taking names, and discussing The God Delusion. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be embedable, and the video on the site is pretty small. Fortunately, iTunes has the video freely available in a larger format (just search for "Richard Dawkins"). Unfortunately, both versions annoyingly neglect to include shots of the slide presentation going on over his head, so one gets to play "guess what is pictured that the audience thinks is so funny." Fortunately, it comes with a free frogurt! Unfortunately, the frogurt is also cursed.

Reef protection

This clever lady is a former student of my advisor:

Thirsty in the fourth dimension

Well, this guy is a whole new kind of crazy. But in a good way.



I've seen his Klein bottles around for years--xmas is coming; who knows, maybe someone'll get me one!

Mmm...sea biscuits

Some pr0n for the evo-devo crowd. Here's a really cool video of the development of a young echinoderm. (Warning: Copious amounts of invertebrate sperm present.)

A Sea Biscuit's Life from Bruno Vellutini on Vimeo.

Complicated life

I suppose that the complexity of intracellular mechanics should be apparent from the fact that it took three billion years for life to evolve multicellularity, but only half a billion years to get from the simplest animals to humans (and its arguable that animals haven't gotten significantly more complicated in 100 million years, or more). Still, images like this very simplified cell map never fail to impress me:


Of course, this image knocks that into a cocked hat:


There's a lot of shit going on inside cells! Genome Projector is a cool program that, among many other things, allows one to explore these pathways.

I always liked archery...

...but I'm pretty sure this is impossible.

Cantor, Boltzmann, Gödel, and Turing

Oh my.

A BBC documentary on four of the greatest mathematicians of the last 150 years (well, three mathematicians and a physicist--Boltzmann seems kinda strangely shoehorned into this group; his work doesn't seem particularly attached to the others). It's actually a little light on content--it doesn't describe the Continuum Hypothesis, entropy, or the halting problem other than superficially. And it seems to fall prey to the common fallacious canard that entropy suggests that "all things must pass away," "all life must end," blah blah yada yada. Still, typically impressive BBC production: Interesting content, nice locations, good interviews. It's no Cosmos, but it's pretty good.



Also, we've got asylum, suicide, starvation, and suicide. Plus a jailing, chemical castration, and I lost count of how many breakdowns--apparently, being a great mathematician turns one into a raving nutter and/or leads to a life of suffering.

Yet another snarky anti-religion video

Yet another one, but it is pretty funny. I posted it because the Flying Spaghetti Monster makes an appearance towards the end, and I happen to recognize the photo as having been taken in the Atlanta Hyatt lobby during Dragon*Con, probably this last Labor Day. Go FSM! Go D*Con!

Infinite books

If only I had all the time in the world to read, this is the bookcase I would want:

Stellar software

Just downloaded Stellarium to my Mac (on the recommendation of Astronomycast). So far, it looks amazing! The interface is a little buggy, but not in any way that hampers use. The implementation, however, is smooth and beautiful.

Happy brithday, Carl

Carl Sagan would have been 74 yesterday. Happy birthday, Carl; we need more like you.



Carl Sagan's life and legacy.

Now this is important

OK, now we're getting to some important science: To hell with cancer research, artificial hearts, and the Large Hadron Collider, someone has scientifically determined the maximum amount of alcohol one can put into a Jell-O shot. The result? A standard 3oz sugar-free Jell-O packet can hold 24oz of vodka before falling apart (regular Jell-O can only hold 19oz of vodka, for some reason).


In other cool home science news, measuring the speed of light using chocolate chips and a microwave.

My god, it's full of stars

The European Southern Observatory just released a remarkable image: a deep field view of a speck of the sky (one half-millionth of the total sky).

So count every spot of light in the image, multiply by 500,000 for an approximation of the total number of galaxies in the observable universe, and multiply for another 100,000,000,000 for the total number of stars.

As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

And, as Douglas Adams said, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

The original photo is huge--some 79MB and 27 million pixels--but there smaller versions available. Phil Plait's take on it is excellent, as always.

Summing up

Well, this about sums it all up: The complete history of the Universe in one image.

Purple's majesty

I've seen purple-shaded maps of the recent election, where areas are shaded according to percentage Rep/Dem, rather than strictly red/blue--specifically here, and PZ Myers discussion of them.

But I haven't seen one colored by state, which, granted, isn't as neatly nuanced as the one colored by county, or as impressive of the population-scaled version, but I figured it would be easy enough to calculate RGB values and do 50 fill areas in Photoshop, so here's my version:


The maximum difference between candidates was in Hawaii, so that's set to pure blue, and the rest are scaled accordingly. (DC was overwhelmingly for Obama, to the tune of 93%, so I ignored it so as not to squash the scale.)

Also, just because I keep crying every time I hear it, here's will.i.am et al.'s video "Yes We Can,"



which is also the new background music for palinaspresident.us, which movingly has the Oval Office restored to its former dignity. And now I'm crying again; this is ridiculous.

Make your voice heard during the transition; contact change.gov.

Well polled

fivethirtyeight.com has done an excellent job over the last several months of election season. Basically, they've been accumulating every poll that's conducted and aggregating them into one poll of polls.

How accurate were they? Well the last map they generated before the election was only wrong on Indiana (which had the third-smallest margin after MO and NC), with Missouri and North Carolina still too close to call at this point, but leaning the way predicted. They predicted the national popular vote to go Obama by 6.1%. Actual result (thusfar)? 63,244,187 Obama, 55,896,601 John McCain. Margin: 6.167%.

Good job, guys!

Steel and hot dogs

I don't know which is more awesome: using the sun to melt steel, or catching a hot dog on fire.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOT!!!!!!!!

Presumably I am not the only one breaking into tears at my desk every few minutes today. Our long national nightmare is (almost) over.

Illustrated Stories from the Bible

(That They Won't Tell You in Sunday School)


Everything from Elisha and the bears, to the rape of David's daughter by David's son.

Plantbot

Plants not getting enough sun? Try one of these:


Now, if I can get it to wander to the faucet every few days....

Beautiful galaxies

Today's APOD is particularly beautiful:

Now that's a megastick!

I've been sleeping too well at night. Fortunately, now I've got this to contemplate: They just discovered a half-meter long insect in Borneo--Chan's megastick (Phobaeticus chani).


I'm not sure which is coming true, Cloverfield or Starship Troopers; but whichever it is, it should keep me up at night.

Music Blooms

There's a pretty cool iPhone/iPod Touch application from Brian Eno that came out recently: Bloom. It lets you create your own ambient music, works pretty well, and is a hell of a lot of fun for $4.



Thanks to Bob Boilen.

Pot, meet kettle

Cool factoid: Next time you need to pot-and-kettle someone, quote Miguel de Cervantes

"[S]aid the frying-pan to the kettle, get away, blackbreech"

(Don Quixote, chapter LXVII)

Sounds much classier, don't it?

Carl Sagan's Cosmos

Well, this is pretty cool: Someone has gone and put the entire 13-part Cosmos series online for free (who knows how long it will be available, though.



Still an amazing series. The effects are, of course, a little cheesy and dated; but it is still as profound, touching, and moving as ever. Hopefully another billion people will watch it.

Go football!

*Sigh*



Looking forward to a long and lucrative career.

The Things He Carried

Jeffrey Goldberg's article from the November Atlantic titled "The Things He Carried" provides a frightening look behind the scenes at the supposedly-comforting-though-more-often-arbitrary-and-inconvenient sham that is airport security.

On another occasion, at LaGuardia, in New York, the transportation-security officer in charge of my secondary screening emptied my carry-on bag of nearly everything it contained, including a yellow, three-foot-by-four-foot Hezbollah flag, purchased at a Hezbollah gift shop in south Lebanon. The flag features, as its charming main image, an upraised fist clutching an AK-47 automatic rifle. Atop the rifle is a line of Arabic writing that reads THEN SURELY THE PARTY OF GOD ARE THEY WHO WILL BE TRIUMPHANT. The officer took the flag and spread it out on the inspection table. She finished her inspection, gave me back my flag, and told me I could go. I said, “That’s a Hezbollah flag.” She said, “Uh-huh.” Not “Uh-huh, I’ve been trained to recognize the symbols of anti-American terror groups, but after careful inspection of your physical person, your behavior, and your last name, I’ve come to the conclusion that you are not a Bekaa Valley–trained threat to the United States commercial aviation system,” but “Uh-huh, I’m going on break, why are you talking to me?”

Tim Minchin

What would you get if you put Ben Folds, Victor Borge, Randy Newman, and George Hrab in a blender? Probably a mess. But that mess might be something like this guy:



There are approximately 7 billion awesome Tim Minchin videos on YouTube; particularly enjoyable are "Inflatable You", "If You Really Loved Me", "If I Didn't Have You", "If You Open Your Mind Too Much", "Not Perfect", "Some People Have It Worse Than Me", and "Peace Anthem for Palestine".

Science in the goo

This was pretty cool: Science is reporting that vials have been found from Stanley Miller's original 1953 experiment, and have been chemically re-analyzed. Where Miller originally found five amino acids, the reanalysis found 22!

PZ Myers covers it over on Pharyngula. It was also on the Science Magazine Podcast, and Miller's 1953 Science paper is available here.

Feynman's last message

From Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death in 1988:

Seth Shostak, "E.T., where are you?"

Here's an excellent lecture Princeton's Seth Shostak delivered at ASU last year discussing, among other things, how long we'll have to wait until E.T. comes calling. Specifically, he mentions Carl Sagan's, Isaac Asimov's, and Frank Drake's estimates of the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, 1,000,000, 670,000, and 10,000, respectively. Applying Moore's Law to SETI's listening capabilities and these estimates, we could expect to detect the first extraterrestrial civilization by 2015, 2022, or 2027, respectively. He doesn't mention this, but even pessimistically assuming that N=100 civilizations, the date of first detection would only be pushed to 2039. And if we are the only one, we should know by 2051. So within my lifetime, it is almost certain that there will be a definitive answer to this question.

Weird coincidence: I blogged about watching David Bowie's The Man who Fell to Earth just a few days ago. About nine minutes into this lecture, Dr. Shostak mentions this movie, and that Bowie made a big mistake coming to earth for water, when there are in the same solar system moons with 60-mile-deep oceans and several trillion comets. This points out one of the central flaws of many fears people have about aliens: That extraterrestrials would show up to enslave us, to eat us, or to steal some essential resources (all of our water, our atmosphere, etc.). These are all very unlikely to occur; the galaxy is filled with all of these resources in much higher abundances, more easily obtainable, in shallower gravity wells, and without several billion sentient beings protesting. And as far as enslaving or eating, we can barely hurl a few tons out of low earth orbit, and we're already on the verge of artificial meat, so it's very unlikely they'd come all this way to eat us when, if they have a taste for humans, they could easily grow their own tasty human flesh (that's the first time that phrase has appeared in this blog). And the technology to bring them all the way here would be easily able to do anything human slave labor might accomplish.

Other interesting factoids he points out: We (well, not me) are currently trying to spectroscopically detect methane in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. Methane cannot exist for long periods in a warm oxygen atmosphere; it relatively quickly breaks down into CO2 and water. Distant civilizations should be able to detect us (well, the presence of life) by the above-equilibrium level of methane in our atmosphere. A large amount of this methane comes from the . . . posterior eructations of livestock. Thus, if we detect methane in a distant atmosphere, we may very well have discovered pigs in space.

Final interesting fact: The human brain runs on about 25 watts. That's just amazing--the most complicated structure in the known universe uses the same power as a lightbulb.

Darmok and Jalad

Darmok and Jalad at . . . ow, my face!

Turing Test

The Turing Test remains safe . . . at least for now. Of course, the machines are still scheduled to rise up and kill us all just three years from now. . . .



Dr. Steven Novella on An Upcoming Turing Test and Artificial Consciousness.

Full text of Turing's 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," and the original article from Mind (1950) 59(236):433-460, if your institution can access it.

Cartoon-Off

The Great 2008 New Yorker/XKCD Cartoon-Off!

Who is Barack Obama?

Who is he really?

FACT! Barack Obama spent twenty years in the same church as radically black pastor Jeremiah Wright, who has been known to make such incendiary claims as "white people enslaved black people" and "white people killed Native Americans." Is Barack Obama part of the international black conspiracy to trick white people into thinking about racism? Answer: maybe.

FACT! Barack Obama has been friends with Rashid Khalidi, an openly Arab Arab who is so Arab he writes about other Arabs. Is Barack Obama part of the international Arab conspiracy to trick white people into thinking about Arabs? Answer: also maybe.

Facts don't lie, people. (Neither do FACTS.)

Sad customer service

It's sad when you know more than customer service. I've got a fancy Nike watch-heartrate-pedometer combo that's supposed to download from the watch through a USB receiver. Unfortunately, the software hasn't recognized the connection since I got a new computer. So I called Nike. After three holds and transfers:

Me: "Yeah, my Triax Elite isn't being recognized by the computer."

Nike: "What software are you using?"

Me: "...the Triax Elite software?"

Nike: "No, what software are you using?"

Me: "You mean operating system? It's OS X 10.5."

Nike: "I don't know why a new computer would make it stop working..."

Me: "Apple changed its processors; it's a new chipset."

Nike: "Oh. Let me check. [Five minutes later] We don't have any software for new Macs."

Me: "Nevermind. That's OK, I'll just go buy a new $300 watch."

Well, at least all three people I talked to were very friendly about it. It's too bad--the Nike Triax Elite HRM/SDM has been a very good system for me for two or three years now. The only major problems are that the watch bands don't appear to be sweat-proof (two of them have corroded completely through), and that the battery hatch on the foot pod is accessed through a screw-off cap made entirely of plastic. The slot to twist it strips very easily, and it is now jammed in there unmovably. Fortunately the compartment can be accessed by removing four tiny screws and taking the thing apart--kinda a pain in the ass, but at least it works.

The major thing that the Triax had going for it was that it was compatible with a Mac (and the software isn't too bad). I don't think the Garmin, the Suunto, the Polar, or the Timex are. :P

Chemistry is hot

I don't know what it is . . . there's just something about {trans-1,4-Bis[(4-pyridyl)ethenyl]benzene}(2,2'-bipyridine)ruthenium(II) that gets me all . . . excited.



On second thought, it must be the β-cyclodextrin. Yeah, that's the ticket--look at the acetal linkages on that babe!

Religulous

Saw Religulous tonight. It was an excellent movie, if that's the right adjective; others appropriate might be hilarious and terrifying. It was certainly full of laughs, and very enjoyable.

It was filled with remarkable examples of (often) seemingly intelligent people tripping over themselves making ridiculous arguments in support of things they are determined to believe at all costs. And Maher is sharp, quick, and dead-on in pointing out logical implications, ridiculous assertions, and hypocrisies.

With the exception of one instance where Jesus left him speechless.

Lighthouses are more useful than churches.
-Ben Franklin

Hayden Panettiere PSA

Hot enough to keep your attention for 30 seconds.

See more Hayden Panettiere videos at Funny or Die

John McCain: Everyone gets fucked.

I Drew This

Well, no, I didn't. But the blog I Drew This consistently has excellent commentary on political happenings. And the most recent post is even more excellent than the usual excellent excellence*.

You see a lot of false equivalencies in the media. It's sort of their creed: if you report that Republicans have done something that makes them look bad, you must immediately find a way to say that Democrats do it also. That is how you seem "fair." If the Republicans are, for instance, lying through their teeth, and the Democrats aren't, you're obligated to say something like "Republicans are claiming that Ted Kennedy is a serial killer, but Democrats today used a very generous interpretation of their tax plan, so both sides lie."

She then goes on to use Paul Krugman as an example the day before he won the Nobel; pretty good timing!

*Note to self: Buy thesaurus.

Worst . . . movies . . . ever

Tonight I watched both The Man Who Fell to Earth and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, which I think is the most surrealistically crappy combination of movies possible.

And I made my SO watch them, so I guess I'll be sleeping on the couch.

(Breakin' 2 actually has a surprisingly good scene where a character dances up the walls and across the ceiling, accomplished by rotating the room--they pulled it off pretty well. The rest was crap, though.)

Christopher Hitchens, Ira Glass, and the melting economy

I love Christopher Hitchens--I'd read a Hitchens commentary on the phone book. He just did a piece for Vanity Fair titled "America the Banana Republic", in which he skewers the powers that got us into this mess. Best line:

Remember the scene at the end of Peter Pan, where the children are told that, if they don’t shout out aloud that they all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s gonna fucking die? That’s what the fall of 2008 was like, and quite a fall it was, at that.

Also, back in May, This American Life did a very popular episode explaining the then-breaking mortgage crisis in layman's terms for those generally unfamiliar with financial doublespeak. This week they did part two of the series, covering the global financial meltdown--pretty good, if terrifying.

Bette Davis is missing something...

Roger Ebert blogged yesterday on the new Bette Davis stamp, which is sans her ubiquitous cigarette (although her fingers remain extended around the missing cylinder). And, as Ebert points out, stamp collecting is clearly a gateway to hard-core smoking for the impressionable youth.

Now my paternal grandmother died all to young from lung cancer--ten years on my three other grandparents are all healthy octogenarians--so I'm no fan of smoking. If all cigarettes disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't mind in the slightest. (Although the occasional cigar is fun in an oooh-I'm-a-50s-sophisticate kind of way.)

But give me a break: Screwing with the historic record so as not to offend modern sensibilities is ridiculous. My mother owns a children's book store, and many (probably most or all) classic books which featured authors smoking in their jacket photos have been cropped, switched, or digitally edited to have the smoking removed. Goodnight Moon's Clemont Hurd has been digitally de-smoked. Shel Silverstein not only smoked, he was pot-smoking hippie Playboy cartoonist--it'd probably be safest to ban him altogether. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Mark Twain smoked, as did most heroic baseballers from the golden age; characters (titular or secondary) smoke in Curious George, Babar, Tintin, and many, many others.

Finally, Santa Clause smokes, according to Clement Moore. Plus, he's unhealthily overweight. Guess we'd better change

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laugh'd, like a bowl full of jelly:
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laugh'd when I saw him in spite of myself;

to

The stump of a candy cane he held tight in his teeth,
And the scent of it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face, and some tight little abs
That stayed firmly in place when he laugh'd, like an iron-hard slab:
He was fit and trim, a right jolly old elf,
And I laugh'd when I saw him in spite of myself;

Honeybees can count to four

Honeybees (Apis mellifera) can count up to four — giving them another string to their navigational bow. Working at the Australian National University in Canberra, Marie Dacke and Mandyam Srinivasan trained the insects to fly down a tunnel in search of food placed beside one of five identical landmarks positioned at intervals.

When trained bees flew into a tunnel that had no food, they searched most at the previously rewarding landmark — unless it was number five.

Moving the landmarks nearer to or farther away from each other did not fool the bees, showing that they were not relying on distance, but were counting the number of landmarks before the food. Changing landmarks from stripes to spots had no effect either, suggesting that bees can use numbers in an abstract way.

Summary from Nature (25 Sep. 2008) 455(7212):435; original work from Animal Cognition (2008) 11:683-689.

Interestingly, this is the same Nature issue that featured this unfortunately coincidental front and back cover:


(The closing sci-fi story is worth a look, too.)

Meteoroid impact

There's been some recent buzz about a meteoroid that hit us last Tuesday. Basically, for the first time, an object this small (2m) was detected significantly in advance of its hitting the atmosphere, allowing prediction of the time and point of impact. Unfortunately, it hit over the middle of nowhere northern Sudan at 5:30 in the morning, and apparently no one on the gound has reported sighting it (a shame, since it should have been amazing).

But apparently the one-kiloton flash was captured by at least one weather satellite.


Some cool videos, simulations, and more info can be found on these sites:
http://www.eumetsat.int/Home/Main/Media/Features/707785?l=en
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/home/30686199.html
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news159.html

Three reasons to move to Canada

The news (especially on BoingBoing) is full of crazy today.

120-page EULA for children to watch Disney BluRay.

According to The USA Today, teenage girls gaining weight makes them "fat".

The McCain-Palin base is 1) the rich and 2) the ignorant.



That is all.

World Exclusive!

MOST SIGNIFICANT and UNDENIABLE UFO VIDEOS OF ALL TIME THAT ALSO COVER ALIENS IN THEM WERE CAUGHT ON TAPE in ISTANBUL! . . . WITH MOST AMAZING FOOTAGES OF ALL TIME!!

With hyperbole and grammar like that, this can't be anything other than legit.


İstanbul / Kumburgaz UFO's and ALIENS ARE BACK in 2008! from fox mulder on Vimeo.

Holy crap--that video is totally unfakable! (It's an amazing coincidence how the quality of UFO videos is so much better in these days of ubiquitous video editing software. I wonder why videos today look so much more . . . professional, while those from 20 years ago look much more like hubcaps on fishing line. It's almost like there's some sort of conspiracy...)

So . . . much . . . want

Holy crap! This guy is a serious bibliophile and general collector of nerdabilia. He's got an original Sputnik, an original Robert Hooke's Micrographia, an Enigma machine, a Kelmscott Chaucer, books bound in rubies, a napkin on which FDR outlined his plan to win WWII, and about a billion other things, all collected in the coolest wood-paneled multi-level Escheresque library I've ever seen.

I don't think I've ever been so jealous; I need to invent a Priceline.com and become an Internet millionaire.

Hal Bidlack

Skepticality this week interviewed Hamiltonian scholar and retired Air Force lieutenant colonel Hal Bidlack, who is now running for Congress. We need more politicians like this guy.

(I obviously don't agree with all of his positions; for instance he implies that universal health care might not be a top priority, and that NASA might not need quite so much money. But he's clearly a guy with intelligence, integrity, and compassion--why is it strange to find those qualities in politicians?)

Fireside comfort

Sarah Vowell was on The Daily Show the other night and gave an excellent interview:



She mentions that she has recently started listening to FDR's fireside chats for comfort and reassurance in a time of national economic crisis that she's not otherwise receiving. I got curious and went poking around; you can find the fireside chats (and many other cool presidential speeches) here, and here is the first fireside chat from March 12, 1933.

I also found the earliest extant recorded voice of an American president (there was reportedly an older recording of Rutherford B. Hayes, which is now lost). It's Benjamin Harrison's inaugural address from 44 years earlier; March 4, 1889: