UNFORTUNATE COINCIDENCE
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying,
Lady, make a note of this —
One of you is lying.
— Dorothy Parker
Chuck and Bill on Darwin Day
In the morning, I found that a horribly complicated equation which mixed combinatorics, network theory and generalizations of Shannon entropy reduced to zero in a circumstance where I had guessed that might happen, which gave me the exciting feeling that I might actually be doing science.
In the evening, I went to meet Joshua, Expatria, Rebecca and Evelyn at the Redline bar for drinks and carousing. I misremembered the time of the meet-up, so I thought I had a while to kill, and consequently I idled down the street to the Harvard Coop bookstore — not with an intent to buy anything, just to browse. I found myself standing in front of their Shakespeare shelves, listening to the Baroque music being piped in by the bucketful, and I thought, “Holy Jebus, this is the very essence of highbrow and effete — and, damn it all, I love it.”
I picked up a book by Edwin Abbott Abbott, he of Flatland fame, on Shakespearean grammar, and I read its introductory sections until I figured it was time to head for the Redline. Stepping out of the bookstore, leaving behind all the testimonials on how the Network is changing everything, I saw a woman, homeless and shapeless under a once-pink blanket, sleeping or trying to sleep while the snow was beginning to fall. Take that as your allegory for Harvard Square, urban life, the twenty-first century or anything else which is too big for a single person to fix.
Continue reading Chuck and Bill on Darwin Day
Nutating on National TV
I know a guy who knows Conan O’Brien. I mean, this is pretty freaky: how often is a piece of lab equipment in the place where you did your undergrad thesis mentioned on TV?
Here is Conan, setting up the problem:
Simonyi on Popularizing Science
A while back, we merry wanderers of the Net got into a discussion about who would be the best Presidential Science Adviser. While a candidate for that job must meet many qualifications, many people focused on the ability to be the “go-to guy” for science, the voice and face which can be trusted to represent an issue or a discovery accurately, fairly and concisely, as appropriate to the audience. Now, those names will be brought out and debated again, although I expect we’ll see less concern for their ability to work inside the Beltway. The occasion is that, after more than a decade in the position, Richard Dawkins is retiring from the Charles Simonyi Chair at Oxford, a professorship endowed in 1995 to support the “public understanding of science.” Having reached the chair’s mandatory retirement age, Dawkins is moving on, in his words,
to be even more strident, shrill etc etc etc. I expect to be busier than ever, with two Foundations to run (the British and American branches of RDFRS), books to write (I have already started the next one) and who knows what else?
Oxford has put the application requirements online, for those who wish to fill Dawkins’ shoes. Americans are eligible, too, and the professor himself has sent the advertisement to Carolyn Porco, Lawrence Krauss and PZ Myers, among others. Not being qualified for the job myself, I would like to draw attention to a point Charles Simonyi made when he endowed the chair, all those many years ago:
Continue reading Simonyi on Popularizing Science
Status Update
You’re listening to Radio Sunclipse, first on your RSS dial! It’s currently oh-jesus degrees in the Greater MIT Metropolitan Area, with a wind-chill factor of “Why is the nitrogen freezing?” And I managed to lose my gloves on the subway.
So, the endodontist tells me that my decrepitude is in an intermediate state, on the borderline between merely needing elaborate work and requiring the complete excavation and subsequent cyberization of my aching tooth. Man, when the technology arrives to upload ourselves into pure AI form — I figure it’ll be about when Ubuntu reaches the “zesty zebra” release — I’ll be the first in line. apt-get install blake, all the way.
Won’t those be wonderful times? Geek culture will coincide with athletics, because your performance will depend on how much you can overclock yourself, and it’ll all be about leveling-up as quickly as possible. Hipster sophisticates will be angling for the android bodies Designed In California; meanwhile, Cosmo Girl will be touting the new iHuman Air. It won’t have an optical drive or an Ethernet port, but as long as the damsels still have a place for a USB plug, their boyfriends will be happy. Your mind will be able to spawn any sort of sub-process you want, from a simple arithmetic program to a full-fledged molecular dynamics simulation, so math teachers won’t have to worry about calculators eroding manual mathematics skills anymore, and the computerized proof of the four-color mapping theorem will be fully intuitive! Best of all, because they use so few mental faculties, professional creationists will be kept as the new virtual pets.
Anyway, thanks to my tooth problem and the small matter of having to do some science-type research this week, it’s time for playing some “golden oldies.” I’ll be converting a pedagogical paper I wrote a few years ago into blag form, which should yield two or possibly three posts on pushing the supersymmetric quantum mechanics I’ve described recently into the relativistic regime.
Welcome to the Party, Ben!
My friend Ben Allen, a mathematician (he is what I play on TV), has started his own blag, Plektix. This is his way of spelling plectics, Murray Gell-Mann’s suggestion for what to call the study of complexity and simplicity. OK, as far as neologisms go, it’s not quite as shiny as Buckminster Fuller’s replacement for the word sunset, but it’s not bad. Let’s give Ben a warm welcome to the fractious, contentious, infuriating and sometimes enlightening pursuit that is online science writing!
I hope he doesn’t mind if I add that everybody says he looks uncannily like John Cusack.
This sounds like a good time, or as good a time as any other, to mention a few suggestions for anybody who wants to get into the blagging hobby and attract a bit of a reading audience. None of these remarks are particularly original with me, and I won’t pretend that I’m the most successful at implementing them or attracting an audience at all, but what the heck:
Continue reading Welcome to the Party, Ben!
Square Roots by Hand
A little while back, several of my fellow math-and-science bloggers and I got into a discussion of a particularly hare-brained way to reform math education, and I mentioned that nobody in my generation seems to have learned how to take square roots by hand, or at least, not within any formal school curriculum. The comments I received suggest that cheap calculators made this phase out of the grade-school math classes by the early 1980s, or thereabouts. Today, I found that 360 has written a nice post explaining a geometrical interpretation of an algorithm for doing so.
Of course, there’s no way such a lesson would be allowed anywhere near an elementary school, because it emphasizes understanding why a method works.
Additional Weekend Fluff: Sauron
I dropped by a friend’s place while he, his girlfriend and a couple others were watching the last Lord of the Rings movie, which I’d never seen before, and somebody pointed out that many shots would be perfect for commercials. We spent the next ~40 minutes giving the movie an ad-themed MST3k treatment. It didn’t exactly inspire me to see the rest of the series.
However, there was one advertisement in particular which I really wanted to see implemented. And what with current happenings in science-blogging territory, one element of the parody was uppermost in my mind.
Curse you, Internet, for retroactively stealing my joke before I could tell it! Curse you, I say!
Weekend Fluff: Luke As A Girl
I’ve been reading through Podblack Blog ever since the Podblack Cat hosted the Skeptic’s Circle (and kindly included an entry of mine). This is how I discovered that the Internets have a Carnival of Feminist SF, dedicated to feminist perspectives on science fiction. This is undeniably a good thing to have, although stumbling across it like this gives me an eerie feeling: for a kid who spent most of his teenage years reading SF, watching SF on the Tube or trying to write it himself, I know astonishingly little about SFnal happenings on the Internets. I fail at fandom.
(Or is that, in more modern parlance, “FANDOM: UR DOIN IT RONG”?)
Anyway, one of the entries in the carnival is Lisa Paitz Spindler‘s note on a new series of Star Wars merchandise based on Ralph McQuarrie’s early concept art. In one revision of the story which eventually became the first Star Wars movie, Luke Skywalker was a girl named Luka Starkiller. First, I should note, “Starkiller” is an impossibly corny name, even for a movie about samurai in space. Second, Spindler asks,
how might it have influenced Hollywood if the most popular sci-fi adventure flick ever had starred a kick-arse female protagonist?
I can’t give an optimistic response. The portrayal of women in the Star Wars saga is perpetually dismal, varied only by slight interruptions which make the missed opportunities in the rest all the more unbearable. Speculating about how the series would have turned out if, say, the sexes of Luke and Leia had been swapped is rather beside the point: why not ask how the movies would have developed if an entirely different creator had been the driving force?
Continue reading Weekend Fluff: Luke As A Girl
The Judgment of Parris
File this under “he could never get elected in the United States”: Matthew Parris, a former Conservative MP and supposedly the “73rd most influential gay man in the United Kingdom,” has published his critique of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent suggestion that the United Kingdom give legal recognition to Sharia law. Quoth Parris:
Continue reading The Judgment of Parris
Shorter Uncommon Descent
Tyler DiPietro finds a fresh example of steaming creationist nonsense at the weblog of Dembski and sycophants, Uncommon Descent. I summarize for the busy reader:
Because running an image of a face through a software filter makes it look less like a face, Darwin was a fuddy-duddy and materialism is on its last leg.
The cream on the cocoa is, however, this bit, from a commenter:
I’m not sure about the CSI [complex specified information] decreasing, however. Anyone able to get values of the CSI for each picture?
Gee, given that “complex specified information” has never been consistently defined, I wonder how one could compute it.
SUSY QM 5: The Hydrogen Atom
Last time, we found that the problem of the hydrogen atom could be split into a radial part and an angular part. Thanks to spherical symmetry, the angular part could be studied using angular momentum operators and spherical harmonics. We found that the 3D behavior of the electron could be reinterpreted as a 1D wavefunction of a particle in an effective potential which was the two-body interaction potential plus a “barrier” term which depended upon the angular momentum quantum number. Today, we’re going to solve the radial part of the problem and thereby find the eigenstates and eigenenergies of the hydrogen atom.
The technique we’ll employ has a certain charm, because we solved the first part, the angular dependence, using commutator relations, while as we shall see, the radial dependence can be solved with anticommutator relations.
Continue reading SUSY QM 5: The Hydrogen Atom
You Bet Jurassic’s A Pun
A couple weekends ago, some friends and I watched Jurassic Park (1993) for the first time in mumble-mumble years, and the experience brought a few things to mind.
First of all, I remembered reading Michael Crichton’s novel, and while the helicopter was flying to the island, I pondered how the movie took us back to a more innocent age, when the world and we were young, while in retrospect the book seems to look forward to Crichton the global-warming denier, Crichton the anti-scientist, Crichton the general jerk. (Yes, looking forward in retrospect is an odd feeling.) What do I mean by “innocent age”? Well, consider: back then, dinosaurs were just cool because they were dinosaurs, but if Jurassic Park came out today, in Year Two After Dover, the Young-Earth Creationists would bitch and moan on national TV that the movie accepts a 65-million-year gap between dinosaurs and people, and of course, the national media would give them equal time with the real scientists. Meanwhile, over at the Discoverup Institute, we’d have Dembski, Egnor and Behe saying, “Cloning dinosaurs from DNA is really Intelligent Design,” to which O’Leary and Cordova would add, “Yes, and Charles Darwin was a flatulent puppy-killer who didn’t know algebra and who was directly responsible for the Holocaust. Uh-huh. Jesus came to me and said that if I said potty-mouth things about Darwin, I’d get a pony in Heaven.”
Continue reading You Bet Jurassic’s A Pun
Hillary, Kepler and Tycho
Mrs. Bad Astronomer has a guest post on her husband’s weblog, pondering why the press typically refers to Hillary Clinton by her first name. This called to my mind a related question in astronomy, appropriately enough, which I’d like to toss out as thought-food:
Two of the greatest figures in the Scientific Revolution are Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe. The former was among the greatest mathematicians of his day, and the latter had comparable prowess with astronomical observations. And, for some reason, everybody calls the first one “Kepler,” while the second is known as “Tycho.” Look on a map of the moon: there’s a crater called Tycho, where a monolith was found nine years ago, and one called Kepler (the names for these and other craters were doled out by an Italian astronomer, Giambattista Riccioli, in 1651, who was a big fan of Tycho and attached his name to the most prominent crater). Both men invented models for how the solar system worked; nowadays, historians of science speak of the “Tychonic universe,” which had the Sun going round the Earth but other stuff going around the Sun, and everybody still talks about Kepler’s Three Laws.
Is it just that “Johannes” is too generic, while “Brahe” sits roughly on the tongue?
Given their tempestuous working relationship — Kepler and Tycho were not the sort of personalities which could get along — I’m sure the celebrity magazines of their day would have blessed them with a joined name, something like “Jo-cho” (sounds like Yoko), if those magazines had only existed.
An Item of Prime Importance
I was busy with something or other, so I didn’t get to see the event Dennis Overbye describes in the New York Times, where the director and the star of the new film Jumper chatted with MIT professors Ed Farhi and Max Tegmark before a live audience in lecture hall 26-100. Not having been there, I don’t have very much to say, but I do feel the need to quote one paragraph of Overbye’s article and add just a tiny bit of emphasis:
The real lure, [Farhi] said, is not transportation, but secure communication. If anybody eavesdrops on the teleportation signal, the whole thing doesn’t work, Dr. Farhi said. Another use is in quantum computing, which would exploit the ability of quantum bits of information to have different values, both one and zero, at the same time to perform certain calculations, like factoring large prime numbers, much faster than ordinary computers.
Ahem.
In any other circumstance, I’d probably pontificate on how exponential parallelism is not the source of quantum computing’s calculation-fu, but I think we have a few other points to address first. . . .
Attentive readers will recall that Dr. Farhi was the guy who signed my paperwork when I was an undergraduate. For an amusing story from those days, see my post of last November, “Pay No Attention to the Man.”
(Tip o’ the fedora to Dave Bacon.)
SUSY QM 4: Separation of Variables
Today, on a very special episode of Science After Sunclipse, Mary Sue discovers that for a quantum-mechanical system with a central potential, the eigenfunctions of the Hamiltonian can be separated into radial and angular factors, and the angular dependence can be understood using angular momentum operators.
Continue reading SUSY QM 4: Separation of Variables