Fardels Borne

Dawkins eats pieces of shit like this for breakfast

2009-08-07T18:38:00.000-04:00

What a fruit loop.

Francis Collins

2009-08-07T12:07:00.003-04:00

God I love Sam Harris. This meticulous blasting of Francis Collins is about the best thing I've ever read. Collins' The Language of God is an indescribably awful book (well, maybe not indescribable--Harris does a pretty good job of describing how bad it is, actually), and his appointment to head the NIH is terrifying.

Holy shit; I just reread Harris's essay, and I can't believe how thoroughly he blows Collins out of the water! How delightful. :)

Feynman videos

2009-07-20T00:43:00.002-04:00

There's been a lot of buzz about Bill Gates' purchasing some of Richard Feynman's videos and making them available online for free (well, "free"--if you install Silverlight). Anyway, it had me jonesing for some hot Feynman action, so here is a series of 13 excellent "Fun to Imagine" videos:

And here are his excellent Messenger Lectures from 1964.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson "rebukes" Richard Dawkins

2009-07-08T09:23:00.003-04:00

Neil DeGrasse Tyson here gently points out that Dawkins' acerbic style may be somewhat antithetical to his position as Professor for Public Understanding of Science. Dawkins' response is good-humoured and classic.

Sixty Symbols

2009-07-08T01:35:00.005-04:00

This cool set of short videos from the University of Nottingham provides descriptions of 60 symbols used in physics and astronomy. (Well, almost 60 symbols--they apparently had to stretch a bit, as they included things like Schrödinger's Cat and the human brain.) My favorite constants? Probably the fine-structure constant and the Schwarzchild radius. Feigenbaum's constant is pretty cool, too.

This same group (mostly) also did a cool set of videos on the each of the elements in the periodic table.

Blue birds ain't blue (but they ARE dinosaurs)

2009-07-07T01:19:00.005-04:00

Cool: This guy (Richard Prum) taught my evolution course at the University of Kansas. In this week's episode of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast, he discusses the evolutionary relationship between birds and dinosaurs. Interestingly, he digresses briefly into speculations on dinosaur feather coloration. I remember several invited lectures he gave on coloration in bird feathers; specifically (if I remember correctly) there was something about there being no such thing as actual (i.e., pigmented) blue feathers. Rather, blue coloration is due to the diffraction of the light through clear feathers--pretty neat.

Anyway, here's the episode.

PS--That reminds me: I recently saw an article of his in Science on parental behavior in dinosaurs.

Parrots, the Universe, and Everything

2009-07-06T00:20:00.004-04:00

Here's a talk Douglas Adams gave at UC Santa Barbara in 2001--he's hilarious as always. It focuses mostly on his excellent environmentalist book, Last Chance to See. (The Geeks questioning him at the end are nearly unbearable, though--they're almost charicatures out of an SNL skit.)

Wish I could trade a few dozen Jenny McCarthies and Ben Steins to have Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, and Douglas Adams still alive today.

Jared Diamond on the origin of religion

2009-04-13T09:55:00.004-04:00

Here's an excellent lecture by the always fascinating Jared Diamond, where he discusses the evolutionary factors that probably lead to the establishment of religions in human societies:

Christopher Hitchens beating the intellectual shit out of lots of blithering idiots

2009-04-13T09:44:00.004-04:00

Christopher Hitchens: Man I love that guy. CH: knows history. Vs. other guy: makes up words about history he wishes were true.

Next, same deal, but five times worse. It's amazing that there are no arguments that are less than 300 years old, which have all been thoroughly refuted. My favorite is the gentleman who actually says science is good for intelligent people, but what about unintelligent people?

For his next trick, CH'll beat up a pack of kindergartners. (Don't these people read even one book before trying to debate this guy?

Bonus: Here he is shredding some nimrod on the radio.

Philosophiæ Doctor

2009-04-13T09:30:00.001-04:00

I'm back, baby! And it's Doctor FardelsBorne now!

That was a miserable couple of months, but I turned in a 443 page dissertation to the University last week, jumped through all the hoops, paid obeisance to the bureaucracy, appeased the witch-doctors, achieved escape velocity, and I'm out!

Attenborough

2009-01-31T17:42:00.002-05:00

Sir. David Attenborough is teh awesome.

Feynman Lectures for math

2008-12-30T14:30:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-29T19:23:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-29T19:15:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-29T11:44:00.004-05:00

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

2008-12-23T00:15:00.001-05:00

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

2008-12-21T18:15:00.006-05:00

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

2008-12-21T16:56:00.004-05:00

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

2008-12-17T01:41:00.005-05:00

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

2008-12-17T00:35:00.001-05:00

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

What a piece of garbage

2008-12-16T00:35:00.006-05:00

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

2008-12-14T21:12:00.008-05:00

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

2008-12-14T17:38:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-14T16:27:00.006-05:00

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

2008-12-12T15:46:00.006-05:00

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

2008-12-11T14:45:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-10T16:38:00.003-05:00

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...

2008-12-09T22:19:00.003-05:00

...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

2008-11-26T19:04:00.002-05:00

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...

2008-11-25T23:06:00.002-05:00

...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

2008-11-19T19:06:00.003-05:00

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

2008-11-19T18:47:00.001-05:00

This clever lady is a former student of my advisor:

Thirsty in the fourth dimension

2008-11-19T18:29:00.004-05:00

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

2008-11-19T18:21:00.002-05:00

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

2008-11-19T18:07:00.005-05:00

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...

2008-11-19T17:57:00.001-05:00

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

Cantor, Boltzmann, Gödel, and Turing

2008-11-19T16:32:00.005-05:00

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

2008-11-17T10:34:00.003-05:00

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

2008-11-16T12:14:00.003-05:00

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

Stellar software

2008-11-11T09:50:00.002-05:00

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

2008-11-10T10:28:00.002-05:00

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

2008-11-09T12:39:00.004-05:00

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

2008-11-09T11:49:00.003-05:00

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

2008-11-09T11:45:00.004-05:00

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

Purple's majesty

2008-11-06T11:23:00.001-05:00

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

2008-11-05T13:11:00.002-05:00

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

2008-11-05T11:50:00.001-05:00

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

WOOOOOOOOOOOOT!!!!!!!!

2008-11-05T08:47:00.000-05:00

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

2008-10-27T17:18:00.007-04:00

(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

2008-10-24T00:15:00.002-04:00

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

2008-10-22T19:52:00.002-04:00

Today's APOD is particularly beautiful:

Now that's a megastick!

2008-10-22T17:38:00.004-04:00

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

2008-10-22T16:49:00.002-04:00

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

2008-10-22T16:37:00.005-04:00

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

2008-10-22T16:31:00.004-04:00

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!

2008-10-21T10:32:00.004-04:00

*Sigh*

Looking forward to a long and lucrative career.

The Things He Carried

2008-10-19T17:24:00.002-04:00

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

2008-10-19T15:52:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-17T17:28:00.004-04:00

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

2008-10-17T17:02:00.002-04:00

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

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

2008-10-17T10:52:00.007-04:00

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

2008-10-16T18:37:00.004-04:00

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

Turing Test

2008-10-16T12:46:00.004-04:00

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

2008-10-16T12:38:00.002-04:00

The Great 2008 New Yorker/XKCD Cartoon-Off!

Who is Barack Obama?

2008-10-16T11:51:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-16T11:36:00.002-04:00

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

2008-10-16T00:16:00.006-04:00

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

2008-10-15T23:59:00.008-04:00

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

2008-10-15T01:36:00.002-04:00

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

2008-10-15T01:24:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-15T01:17:00.004-04:00

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

2008-10-12T15:05:00.004-04:00

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...

2008-10-12T13:30:00.009-04:00

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;

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

2008-10-11T14:18:00.005-04:00

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

2008-10-11T13:08:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-11T12:38:00.004-04:00

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!

2008-10-11T12:29:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-09T11:38:00.004-04:00

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

2008-10-09T11:33:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-09T11:05:00.004-04:00

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:

Amen

2008-10-09T10:31:00.003-04:00

I wouldn't include my dad in this category, but definitely other family members and a father-in-law.

A Ha!

2008-10-08T15:35:00.001-04:00

"Take on Me," the literal version. Now I finally know what this song is about!

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Wil Wheaton

2008-10-07T22:18:00.003-04:00

Have I mentioned yet in this blog that Wil Wheaton is awesome?

Make-Believe Maverick

2008-10-07T20:42:00.002-04:00

From a Rolling Stone article titled "Make-Believe Maverick" by Tim Dickinson:

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

Ouch.

What are you doing here?

2008-10-07T20:33:00.002-04:00

Just saw the last episode of Doctor Who (a little late in catching up). The new series have been unquestionably awesome, and the last season even more so. A whole slew of excellent episodes: "The Unicorn and the Wasp," "Silence in the Library," "Turn Left," the finale...all excellent.

You know the best thing about Doctor Who? The writing.

Dawkins and Krauss

2008-10-06T11:28:00.005-04:00

Here's an excellent discussion between Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss at Stanford University titled "Against Ignorance". It's available in various formats at richarddawkins.net, as well as free on iTunes.

Among the things the biologist and physicist discuss is whether Darwin or Einstein was able to make the more fundamental intuitive leap in human understanding. Interestingly, the biologist expresses admiration for the achievements of Einstein, and the physicist for Darwin, both stating how difficult their respective intellectual leaps were; perhaps reflecting that through years of experience their own disciplines seem overly simple, or through unfamiliarity the other discipline seems overly difficult.

Dawkins very enjoyably ponders why it took so long for science to get its Darwin; the fact of evolution should have been evident as far back as Aristotle, or even for as long as humanity has been breeding plants and animals. Again, someone open-minded enough to violate the fundamental assumptions needed to make that simple leap took thousands of years to come along--much longer than the 30 years needed for an Einstein--indicating, perhaps, that the assumptions in question were that much more deeply ingrained, and perhaps explaining why the simple and easily-observable theory is still so gut-level controversial today.

It will be interesting to see, if a Unified Field Theory ever comes along, what basic assumptive stumbling blocks might have been in place that prevented its development for so long.

Einstein's smart

2008-10-06T11:12:00.000-04:00

I just read the original Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, source of their eponymous paradox. (Check it out--it's only four pages, and probably nearly two of them are mostly skipable math.) It's a really interesting read. It is absolutely precisely reasoned (obviously--it's Einstein), and the conclusions are inescapable. What's remarkable is that they choose exactly the wrong conclusion.

It's interesting to note that Special Relativity was lying around waiting to be discovered for about 30 years before Einstein noticed it. It was (in retrospect) completely obvious from Maxwell's equations and the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and several people, such as Lorentz and Poincaire, were within a gasp of discovering it. But no one did discover it. Because what the equations implied was the contradiction of an assumption so basic that no one could conceive of discarding it; no one even realized it was an assumption. It was apparent from theory and from observation that light moved at the same speed for all observers. And it's plainly obvious that v=d/t. But no one came out and said that if velocity remains constant, distance and time must be changing. I mean, that's third-grader math. Sure, the details are more complicated than that, but if all observers measure the same speed for light, their perception of time must be different. But it took an Einstein to say it, because adjusting that postulate seems ridiculous.

And 30 years later, he* makes the exact same mistake in the first line of the EPR paper--hell, you can't even call it a mistake; he goes through inescapable steps of logic and comes to an unavoidable conclusion. He admits that it's absolutely clear from theory and experiment what the implications of Quantum Mechanics are. And he realizes that either QM is mistaken, or our basic concept of what "reality" is is wrong. And he concludes reducto ad absurdum that it must be QM that is wrong, because the assumption that reality is "wrong" was beyond his comprehension; it's ridiculous. For SR it was the absolute nature of space and time; for QM, it's the concreteness (or the "singleness") of reality. However, it is now absolutely clear from theory and experiment that our intuition about reality is wrong: there are no hidden variables; the located particle has every momentum; the electron travels through both slits.

This is not a criticism of Einstein, of course (I mean, who looks at a result and says, "That's right, and existence is wrong"? Even now, I think pretty much no one has a fundamental grasp of what's really going on, and just what the theory implies; hell, I probably made half a dozen fundamental errors in the last paragraph). This is just an observation about humanity: I notice a similar thing whenever I'm debating a Creationist, or a conservative, or pretty much having any argument. Most people are not deluded, irrational, or dishonest; they are more or less capable of forming logical constructions from a set of assumptions. Arguments usually (or at least often) seem to arise from constructions built out of different sets of postulates. Is freedom of each individual or protection of every individual the most important right? I think that one axiomatic difference explains about 90% of the differences between liberals and conservatives. If your postulates include the inerrancy of the Bible or that 2+2=4 or that Muhammad spoke to Gabriel in a cave, then trying to talk you out of them would be like convincing Euclid that triangles have more than 180º; postulates are by definition basic assumptions which can't be proved, and their definition is what keeps philosophers employed. And some of these postulates are so fundamental to our nature and our worldview that it's very difficult to break them; it sometimes takes an Einstein or a Darwin to do so. (I'll post about Darwin's postulate-breaking breakthrough next.)

Thanks to Eliezer Yudkowski's post on this topic, which was much more clear and eloquent than I've been able to achieve.

*I actually have no idea who did most of the work on the paper. But Einstein's going to get most of the credit because he's, well, Einstein.

Bill Maher on The Daily Show

2008-10-06T01:14:00.004-04:00

(I meant to post this last week, but forgot:)

Bill Maher was a guest on The Daily Show last week. I know he's not had an impeccable record of judgement over the years (no, I'm not talking about Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death), but this interview was pretty funny, and the movie looks pretty good, as well.

Piggies

2008-10-06T01:05:00.003-04:00

Ever wonder what to call the nameless toes on your feet? The ones between the big toe and the pinky toe? Well, thanks to a 1991 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, all five toes now have proper Latin anatomical names! Ready? They are, from biggest to smallest:

Porcellus fori
Porcellus domi
Porcellus carnivorus
Porcellus non voratus
Porcellus plorans domum

Translation is left as an exercise for the reader.

(Thanks to A Way with Words.)

Which Shakespeare?

2008-10-05T17:58:00.008-04:00

I think I might need a new edition of the complete works of Shakespeare. The edition I have (the Pelican edition) is just fine, but who can be satisfied with a Pelican when there's an Oxford edition available (which contains Edward III & Sir Thomas More)? Normally, if there's an Oxford, I'd call that definitive and be done with it. But my very clever friend, who instigated this introspection, has the Yale edition, which appears to be pretty up-to-date, but for some reason doesn't seem to be very available (I wonder if Yale University Press doesn't sell through Amazon?). There's also an interesting-looking Norton edition based on the Oxford, but which is almost three times as long; a handsome Modern Library edition; a Bevington edition; and a Riverside edition, all of which got 4.5 or 5 stars, compared, strangely, to the 3-star Oxford (though it's the Oxford that's the source most found on Wikipedia).

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any consensus as to which is the best or "definitive" edition. Guess I'll probably just wind up getting the Oxford...

Materialistic intelligence

2008-10-05T15:26:00.004-04:00

On this week's The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, a listener wrote in saying that her debate opponents, essentially, argue for the irreducible complexity of human-level intelligence--that some miraculous force is required to explain human intelligence; i.e., the old materialism/dualism debate. The Skeptics did a great job in pointing out the logical errors in the arguments the questioner was encountering. However, it got me thinking about what arguments she can use for her position--i.e., that there can be a scientific basis for intelligence materialistically arising simply from the interaction of our neurons, that we are "more than the sum of our parts". She might find some discussion of the phenomenon of emergent behavior helpful. This concept results from the observation that many systems exist where the high-level behavior is not immediately apparent from the properties of the low-level components. That is, it is not inherently apparent from the properties of quarks or electrons that the aerodynamics of a plane's wing or the display of high-level information on my computer screen should be implicit, yet these emergent properties are the sum of trillions of base-level interactions.

The predominant example is probably the social insects: No study of the abilities of individual termites would ever suggest the complex collective accomplishments they are capable of when taken by the thousands or millions. No individual possesses significant intelligence; there are no orders from the queen; there is no psychic hive mind that makes decisions. But when each termite makes individual decisions based on inherent genetic instructions and environmental perceptions including chemical signals, complex behaviors emerge, such as the optimization of path-length to food resources or orientation of mounds relative to sun and airflow. Interestingly, in analogy to the apparent "obvious" gap between humans and animals, there is an "obvious" gap between collective insects such as termites and individual insects with no socialization--there don't seem to be a lot of semi-social insects. Again analogous to human/animal cognition, I suspect this gap is in a large sense perceived or imaginary, caused by factors such as: 1) The enormous evolutionary success of the two endpoints, with the semi-social middle not being terribly advantageous. 2) My own, and, I suspect, the general public's, ignorance of these middle groups. There are probably fossilized pre-social insects, insects that only form loose colonies, insects such as locusts with intermittent emergent behavior that might not strictly be called "socialization." But I'm much more familiar with social or asocial types, which are understandably more often covered by science media. This somewhat overlaps with: 3) Our human nature of categorizing things distinctly, leaving little room for grey-area exceptions (and, in the case of intelligence, our hubris).

It doesn't seem to be at all implausible that the firing of 100 billion neurons with an average of 7000 interconnections each would result in emergent properties not dissimilar in some respects to a learning or chess-playing computer--especially since this seems to be what is observationally suggested. There is still plenty of room for speculation about the rules of how this behavior emerges, what the specific properties and processes are, and the philosophical implications thereof, hell, it's possible some mechanism other than emergent properties may ultimately be determined to be responsible for human cognition. But regardless, there are certainly plausible scientific explanations which are the basis of current research, no metaphysics required, which shoot down suggestions of miraculous requirements as well as the evolution of eyes or flagellum shoot down irreducible complexity.

Some resources that discuss emergent behavior, some directly, some tangentially:

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach
Much of Richard Dawkins, especially perhaps The Selfish Gene
I believe E. O. Wilson covers some of this, perhaps in The Insect Societies
Richard Feynman played around with ants and discusses, among other things, their path optimization in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(And here's PZ Myers discussing ant trails that stumped Feynman, and the Nature paper solving the mystery.)

Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses emergence in posts such as "Reductionism" in his excellent blog series on taking the mysterious out of quantum mechanics, which is very enjoyable for many other reasons, as well.

Finally, I enjoyed Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence, which attempts to materialistically describe the emergence of intelligence from the brain. I'm not a neuroscientist (neither is the author), but, while his specific models and mechanisms may be wrong, his gestalt concepts of emergent mechanistic intelligence struck me as pretty plausible (rather than, say, Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind, which implies that quantum effects are necessary to explain intelligence, which seems unlikely).

Hope you haven't just eaten...

2008-10-05T15:04:00.003-04:00

Sir David Attenborough discussing some truly humongous Australian earthworms. Two-meter long earthworms. Yeah, that could only come from Australia.

James Randi on homeopathy

2008-10-04T13:07:00.001-04:00

Title pretty much sums it up, I think.

I'm Obsessive

2008-10-02T01:38:00.008-04:00

I have a confession to make: I've never read The God Delusion. Or On the Origin of Species. I know: I'm a fraud. Worst . . . atheist evolutionary biologist . . . ever.

The problem is that I'm obsessive: I find an author that I simply love, and then I read them and read them and read them until I've read everything they've ever written. I mean, when you read a novel like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you want the entire world to be filled up with Douglas Adams' books. You'll read their proverbial laundry list. Or the posthumous leavings on their computer.

Some authors over whom I've obsessed: Douglas Adams, Stephen King, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, F. Scott Fitzgerald*, George Orwell, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Simon Winchester. I started Isaac Asimov a few years ago. How's it going? Ask me in 400 books. It's so bad, I actually resent prolific writers. Part of me despairs that there will never be a new Stephen Jay Gould book to read, but part of me is glad that I might now actually catch up.

You'll notice Dawkins was on that list. Unfortunately, it's been about seven years since I finished all of his books, which means I'm now two or three books behind. And all of his were such Douglas-Adamsy profoundly good classics that I really ought to read them again.

One of the reasons I love Homer, Dante, and Cervantes? They had the common decency to save up their life's work into a reasonable number of magnum opi. Similarly Sam Harris and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Socrates? Genius. Aristotle? Fuck you. Goddamn geniuses like Martin Gardner, E. O. Wilson, and Mark Twain are going to kill me.

I'm similarly obsessive about music. Those bands who's songs make you feel like they were written for you, and you don't want to risk the chance that there's something out there just as good that you're missing out on. Artists I've obsessioned: The Beatles, Ani DiFranco, Cake, Ben Folds, Barenaked Ladies, Grateful Dead**, Nick Drake

Somebody help me.

*I don't even like Fitzgerald. This brings up a second category of author: Those who are interesting and/or culturally or historically relevant. The likelihood that they'll get read varies inversely to the size of their canon. Fitzgerald fortunately only had a few novels and some short stories.

**OK, I'm obviously a liar about having everything the Grateful Dead have ever done--that'd be like collecting all of the water in the ocean. But I have at least reached the point where even Dick Dick's Picks would concede I'm at saturation. I mean, how many concert versions of "Sugar Magnolia" can you discriminate?

Bathtime in Clerkenwell

2008-09-28T16:33:00.002-04:00

Just because I'm feeling mellow, here's a cool video for a cool song, "Bathtime in Clerkenwell" by The Real Tuesday Weld.

Piano tuners

2008-09-27T15:49:00.007-04:00

So how many piano tuners are there in Chicago?

I approached the problem this way: I know the city of Chicago has more than 1 million people, and I think it has less than 10 million. I was going to say that I think it has closer to 10 million--something like 6 or 8--but I decided to go with the rule of thumb and use the geometric mean, or 3.15 million (I'm glad I did--we'll see why in a minute). I figure that the proportion of piano tuners is somewhere less than 1 in a 1,000 people--I've only ever met one, and that was when I was a kid and we had our piano tuned--but that they're probably more frequent than 1 in 100,000 people. The geometric mean would then be that 1 in 10,000 people are piano tuners (come to think of it, my home town had about 10,000, and he might have been the only piano tuner in town--pretty good estimate). OK, so 1 in 10,000 people out of 3.15 million Chicagoans is 315 piano tuners, Q.E.D. Time to hit Google...

So, it turns out the population of Chicago is 3 million--thank you geometric mean! And estimates of tuners? Here's one example:

From the almanac, we know that Chicago has a population of about 3 million people.
Now, assume that an average family contains four members so that the number of families in Chicago must be about 750,000.
If one in five families owns a piano, there will be 150,000 pianos in Chicago.
If the average piano tuner
serviced four pianos every day of the week for five days
rested on weekends, and
had a two week vacation during the summer,
then in one year (52 weeks) he would service 1,000 pianos. 150,000/(4 x 5 x 50) = 150, so that there must be about 150 piano tuners in Chicago.

An interesting solution (Wikipedia gives essentially the same)--I would never have tried to estimate the time it takes to tune a piano, about which I know nothing (although in hindsight I suppose I know that it doesn't take more than a day--it certainly didn't for that guy when I was a kid--and it probably takes more than an hour, so the geometric mean of 1 and 8 hours is about 2-3 hours!). Still, I like my solution better--I made fewer estimates. ;)

Interestingly, I didn't find anywhere how many piano tuners there actually are in Chicago.

Coincidences

2008-09-27T15:20:00.007-04:00

So, in one of those weird life coincidences, I was catching up on my Science reading at Starbucks this morning, and came across this review by Stephan Mertens of the book Guesstimation. The review (and the book) is about how physicist Enrico Fermi cultivated the skill of back of the envelope calculations--being able to roughly approximate results from limited data and general knowledge. For instance, the number of cells in a human being is deducible from an estimation of the smallest object the eye can see, the power of early very poor microscopes, the density of water, the mass of the average human, and the fact that we float. Interestingly, the result of this calculation is exactly the number you always see bandied about--100 trillion. They picked a pretty good example!

Other suggested problems in estimation are: How long a hot dog can be made from a typical cow? How many people are airborne over the US at any given moment? What is the photon flux at the eye from a faint visible star? How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?

One of the suggested rules of thumb when making wild approximations is to use the geometric mean rather than arithmetic mean. The geometric mean is the square root of the product of the bounds of the estimate, where the regular mean is the sum of the bounds divided by two. Thus, if your best estimate of the number of people who could fit in a VW bug was that it is more than one and less than 100 (a pretty poor estimate), the average is 50, but the geometric mean is 10, which is a pretty good guess. The geometric mean keeps the large value from dominating the result.

Anyway, I realized that geometric mean is precisely what I was using in the denominator of the CCV metric I've been speculating about. I should have realized that earlier, but I wasn't paying attention. A friend had suggested that a problem with using the CCV might be that it would be biased towards larger values, but I think that this means that that wouldn't be the case. Curiouser and curiouser...

Statistical queries

2008-09-27T13:20:00.005-04:00

A statistical problem I've been pondering:

The normalization of the variance (well, standard deviation) can be accomplished by dividing by the mean to produce the coefficient of variation. However, the normalization of the covariance is accomplished by dividing by the standard deviations. Why can't the covariance be normalized by dividing by the means, producing a coefficient of covariation (CCV)?

If I take, say, N=10 one-acre samples from a forest, each sample may contain a certain number of two species of trees, A and B. You'll get an average number of each species per acre, X_A and X_B. Each will also have a standard deviation (SD), s_A and s_B. You can calculate a coefficient of variation (CV) of each species as X/s, and make meaningful comparisons of their dispersion, irrespective (largely) of the magnitude of their relative means--i.e., the dispersion measures have been normalized. I just generated some fake data, and species A has a mean of 14.4 and a SD of 4.2 individuals/acre, while species B has a mean of 7.9 and a SD of 3.2 individuals/acre. The CVs of the species, however, are 0.3 and 0.4, respectively, showing that B has a higher dispersion than A, even though its SD is lower.

You can find the covariance between A and B as sum((X_i-X_A)(X_j-X_B))/N, where X_i is the number of species A in the ith acre, and j for species B. (I realize the denominator may or may not need to be N-1 for arcane reasons, but let's not complicate this any more than it already is.) So far it still seems to be a measure of dispersion (or squared dispersion), although it's getting harder to say dispersion of what. This covariance reduces to the variance if one species is being compared against itself (sum(X_i-X_A)^2/N). For this made-up data, the covariance is -11.46 individuals^2/acre^2, which indicates that they strongly negatively covary: When the population of A is high, B tends to be low (which I know because I set the data up that way). But exactly how strong? Is it significant? The respective variances are 17.8 and 10.0 (obviously: the squares of the SDs), so that at least gives us some sense of the magnitude of the covariation, but nothing very precise. If there was a third species, C, with a covariance to A of -12, it wouldn't really be clear if it was more or less covariant to A than B is, or by how much.

I know that the standard practice to normalize the covariance is to divide by the product of the SDs (s_As_B) and generate a correlation coefficient (r=s_AB/s_As_B=-0.8 in this case--pretty strongly negatively correlated). I also understand the nice property of the correlation coefficient that it's capped at -1 and 1 (the normalization of the variance by itself; r=s_AA/s_As_A), which allows you to say if something is absolutely correlated, inversely correlated, uncorrelated, or somewhere in between. But the CV has a nice intuitive feel to it, because you're normalizing the SD by something easily understandable: the mean. Removing the central tendency component from a dispersion measure, leaving just the dispersion, and utilizing both parameters of the Normal distribution. Conversely, while the correlation coefficient itself is fairly intuitive, the method of generating it doesn't seem as concrete: You divide something that looks like a dispersion squared by two dispersions and get...well, something pretty darn useful, but it doesn't seem like what one would try a priori. To answer the a priori question "How do I normalize these covariances" (not necessarily the question "How do I generate a metric of correlation"), it seems like one would try the same trick that worked before--dividing something dispersion-y by something central tendency-y. Interestingly, the result of doing so is not very intuitive.

To put it another way, if you can normalize the variance/SD in two ways (by dividing by the SD, or by the mean, generating the correlation coefficient and coefficient of variation, respectively), why can you only normalize the covariance/co-SD one way (by dividing by the SDs)? Where's the fourth entry in this table--the memristor, if you will? The covariance (sum((X_i-X_A)(X_j-X_B))/N) reduces to the variance (sum(X_i-X_A)^2/N) as a special case; the correlation coefficient (s_AB/s_As_B) reduces to unity (s_AA/s_As_A); it seems that some coefficient of covariance (sign(s_AB)(s_AB/X_AB)^0.5) should exist where the CV (sign(s_AA)(s_AA/X_AA)^0.5=s_A/X_A) is the special case reduction. (The CCV for this made-up data was -0.32.)

I'm not trying to use the CCV for anything in particular; r works perfectly well. I'm just wondering what the heck (if anything) this CCV thing is or would be, what its properties are, if it's been tried before, if it's called something else, if it's discussed anywhere, if anyone's heard of it, thought of it, tried it out, played with it, etc. None of my statistics books seem to mention it or anything like it, and Web of Science returned zero results. The one paper I found through Google, from a South African scientist published in the Pakistan Journal of Applied Sciences, is incomplete in the available online PDF (missing two middle of the five total pages, where presumably some important math occurs), is unavailable from my interlibrary loan office from any source, and the author hasn't replied to my emails yet. But I can't see why it's not more mentioned, since a priori it so seems like the way to approach things? It was certainly the first thing that popped into my head when I was sitting there tiredly looking at a few covariances I happened upon and wondering how to legitimately compare them. Normally, if I was trying to correlate something I would have gone straight to, duh, the correlation coefficient, without ever explicitly thinking about the covariances. But when unexpectedly confronted with covariances, I thought to myself, "Self, I need to normalize these. How? Well, covariances are, as far as I can tell, mathematical generalizations of variances. You normalize variances with the mean; I should be able to normalize these against an appropriately 'combined' mean--something like the square root of the product of the means." Google "coefficient of covariation" and, sure enough, the predominant hit is an (incomplete) paper containing precisely this equation. Spend 20 minutes calculating these CCVs before doing a face-palm and realizing you're computing an obscure or non-existent metric for something that would've been perfectly obvious if you'd had more caffeine. Redo calculations, and spend the next week wondering what the heck you were calculating, and how two such seemingly similar objects can be normalized in such strangely different fashions. Spend too much time on Wikipedia getting your brain warped by excessive Greek notation.

Surely, if there's such a commonly utilized non-normalized matrix (which seems pretty useless otherwise), and there's a common normalization that applies to the diagonal of that matrix, somebody would have tried the mathematically simple analogization of that normalization, and it'd be mentioned pretty early in the literature. And if that obvious attempt is a mathematical or interpretational disaster, you'd think textbooks would give a warning as to why it isn't useful to do, or someone would have published on why exactly it doesn't work; how it violates some assumption of normality, or is a biased estimator of thus-and-such, or some other statistic-ish problem. But so far I haven't seen anything...

Sarah Silverman is teh Win!

2008-09-26T10:26:00.000-04:00

See more Sarah Silverman videos at Funny or Die

Pursuing Randomness

2008-09-25T23:25:00.013-04:00

Ruminating some more on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan . . .

Say the income of Americans approximates a normal distribution (i.e., is Gaussian), as Taleb suggests most people, including economists and Wall Street, tend to assume, if only for simplification. Say the average American income is $50,000, and that the standard deviation in income is $10,000. Then about 16% of the population should be making more than $60,000 (and 16% less than $40,000). 2.3% of Americans should be making more than $70,000, and 0.2% more than $80,000. Only 0.003% of Americans should be making more than $90,000 a year (or less than $10,000). But it's a big country--0.003% of 300,000,000 is still 10,000 people! But for $100,000 or more, only 86 Americans should be found in the income bracket, and I think we can safely say there are more than that in this country. And for $110,000, the chances would only be one in three that any American would achieve that level of wealth.

Ok, but let's say that I grossly underestimated both the average American wealth (which I didn't), and the standard deviation thereof (which I to some extent just pulled out of my ass). Let's say instead that the average American makes $500,000, with a standard deviation of $250,000. In that case, the odds of any one person having an income of $2,000,000 are one in a billion--so we'd have about a one-in-three chance of seeing a twice millionaire in the US--again, I think we can safely say that we've got more than that.

In fact, if the least-earning American made $20,000,000 a year, and if the standard deviation in incomes was $20,000,000, the odds of seeing even one Bill Gates in the entire country would be one in 220,000,000,000,000.

As Taleb points out, book, music, and movie sales; incomes; fame; internet success; financial booms and busts; deaths in war; all these types of phenomena are non-Gaussian: The chances of the next one being unimaginably orders of magnitude larger than the last are far (far, far, far, far) greater than could be justified in the tail of a Gaussian curve.

I'm going to go stuff my money in my mattress (half of it--the other half I'm investing as venture capital in my future blogging empire). Thanks a lot, Taleb!