Posts
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.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Monday, December 29, 2008
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.
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.
The rest of it is here.
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):
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):
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
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."
Sunday, December 21, 2008
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...
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
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 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.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
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.
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
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.
Friday, December 12, 2008
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.
<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.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
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 ________"
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 ________"
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
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:
Someone else programed Mona Lisa to evolve out of polygons:
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
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!
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!
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