It’s Monday. . . and is it ever a Monday.
Instead of a real post, here is another installment of “found poetry” — the search queries by which people have found their way to Science After Sunclipse:
Continue reading Found Poetry: Search Queries 3
Undead String Theorists
Q. What do undead string theorists absolutely crave?
A. ….
Q. No, I’m serious!
A. ….
This may be an indication of how far string theory has seeped out into the general meme pool. I mean, I don’t think a webcomic — even one of general geek interest — has made a joke about gerbes lost forever like tears in rain.
Kindness from the 17th Dimension
The Honorable Frank Easterbrook, presiding over the judgment of the Q-Ray Ionized Bracelet (billed as a cure-all to end all cure-alls) had this to say in his ruling.
Defendants might as well have said: “Beneficent creatures from the 17th Dimension use this bracelet as a beacon to locate people who need pain relief, and whisk them off to their homeworld every night to provide help in ways unknown to our science.”
Sweet, sweet truth. Clearly, the aliens arrive in flying saucers, or better yet, flying Russell’s Teapots.
Judge Easterbrook also remarked thusly about “testimonials” which the Q-Ray people threw about to make their bracelet sound effective:
A person who experiences a reduction in pain after donning the bracelet may have enjoyed the same reduction without it. That’s why the “testimonial†of someone who keeps elephants off the streets of a large city by snapping his fingers is the basis of a joke rather than proof of cause and effect.
Tip o’ the fedora to Rebecca.
Perceptions of Negative Evaluators
All the way back in 1981, Teresa M. Amabile of Brandeis published a paper on the “perceptions of negative evaluators,” examining whether you sound smarter by saying cruel things or kind things.
Using edited excerpts from actual negative and positive book reviews, this research examined the hypothesis that negative evaluators of intellectual products will be perceived as more intelligent than positive evaluators. The results strongly supported the hypothesis. Negative reviewers were perceived as more intelligent, competent, and expert than positive reviewers, even when the content of the positive review was independently judged as being of higher quality and greater forcefulness. At the same time, in accord with previous research, negative reviewers were perceived as significantly less likable than positive reviewers. The results on intelligence ratings are seen as bolstering the self-presentational explanation of the tendency shown by intellectually insecure individuals to be negatively critical. The present methodology is contrasted to that of previous research which obtained apparently contradictory results.
Or, in pithier terms, “Only pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial.”
Continue reading Perceptions of Negative Evaluators
Science Divisor
So anyways, I was reading Chris Mooney’s essay “The Science Adviser,” about the poor luck Jack Marburger has had so far (getting appointed after the President had already made a host of bad decisions, having to defend said bad decisions, etc.) and what the next Presidential Science Adviser will have to do. One item from the second page warrants a discussion of its own:
Or consider another idea for elevating the science adviser position—and making it relevant to the modern media age: why not name a true science celebrity—a Steven Pinker, say, or an E.O. Wilson?
Are we worried that Pinker might sabotage the President’s information on math education for little girls? And OH NOES! What if the Science Adviser converts the President to TEH GROUP SELECSHUN?
. . . Sorry.
Continuing onward, then:
Continue reading Science Divisor
Factorials
Isabel finds a curmudgeonly 1842 quotation from Augustus de Morgan, about the way we write factorials:
Among the worst of barabarisms is that of introducing symbols which are quite new in mathematical, but perfectly understood in common, language. Writers have borrowed from the Germans the abbreviation n! to signify 1.2.3.(n – 1).n, which gives their pages the appearance of expressing surprise and admiration that 2, 3, 4, &c. should be found in mathematical results.
You know, I’d always thought the formula for “n choose k” was a little, well, enthusiastic:
[tex]\left(\begin{array}{c} n \\ k \end{array}\right) = \frac{n!}{k!(n-k)!}.[/tex]
“n! k! n minus k!! You gotta believe me, guys!”
Still, though, if I saw de Morgan’s way of writing the factorial of n, I’d read it as
[tex]1 \cdot 2 \cdot 3 \cdot (n-1) \cdot n,[/tex]
which is only the factorial of n when n is 5. I guess there’s little point in pleasing the dead. . . .
Skeptic’s Circle the Seventy-Seventh
PalMD has the seventy-seventh Skeptic’s Circle up at WhiteCoat Underground. Lots of the up-and-coming critical thinkers are represented.
SUSY QM 2: Shape Invariance
After a while, you just get tired. An honest science blogger can only handle so much science jargon thrown around without meaning, only a limited amount of Choprawoo and quantum flapdoodle. How long can anyone with integrity, curiosity and a dose of genuine knowledge endure the trumpeting that, say, the brain’s limited ability to recover after injury is evidence for some quantum spirit? The brain is living flesh, made of living cells: by the same so-called logic, the scabbed knees of childhood are all evidence of quantum skin.
After a while, a deep reserve of psyche cries out, “Enough! If my freedom means aught, I must stop responding to these charlatans and move beyond. I must send a message of my own, a message which is not a reaction but an expression unto itself. I must sing the quantum genuine!”
In my case, this means another post on supersymmetric quantum mechanics.
RECAP
Last time, we deduced some interesting properties of Hamiltonians which can be factored into operators and adjoints:
[tex]H_1 = A^\dag A,\ H_2 = AA^\dag.[/tex]
We observed that [tex]H_1[/tex] and [tex]H_2[/tex] are isospectral. That is, while the forms of their eigenfunctions may be different, the eigenvalues associated with those functions are the same; or, in physical terms, the wavefunctions have different shapes, but the energies match. The only exception is the ground state: if [tex]H_1[/tex] has a zero-energy ground state, then [tex]H_2[/tex] will not. Furthermore, the operator [tex]A[/tex] maps eigenstates of [tex]H_1[/tex] into those of [tex]H_2[/tex], and the operator [tex]A^\dag[/tex] maps eigenstates in the reverse direction:
Blagging Behind: Software Issues
First, earlier this afternoon, I tried upgrading to WordPress 2.3.2, being that it’s an “urgent security release” and all that. In the process, it incinerated my categories, and nothing I could do would convince it to create new ones. I had to pull out the MySQL backup I’d made before the upgrade attempt and downgrade to the 2.2 branch again.
Second, Technorati seems to have dropped forty-odd days’ worth of blog reaction data. I think that’s a glitch on their end — hooray for any mistake it’s not my responsibility to fix!
Shorter Sal Cordova
Sal Cordova, famous for calling Charles Darwin a puppy-killer, has attempted to reply to Tyler DiPietro’s demonstration that he, Cordova, is blitheringly ignorant of quantum physics. (Such ignorance would not be a crime, of course, except that Cordova is hell-bent on using quantum physics to prop up his “Advanced Creation Science.” See here, here, here, here and here if you’re morbidly curious.) Cordova’s latest reply compresses down rather nicely; once you do him the favor of cutting out the prevarications and the contradictions, the result resembles the following.
Stringing words I don’t understand together in a row is just as good as a logical argument, thank you very much, and if the laws of physics impose any limits on the “Ultimate Observerâ€, well then Jesus will come down and make everything better.
Click away if you want the gory details. . . .
“Three! Two! Ten! Seventeen!”
One step away from me, in the world where you know me, Russell Blackford has been suffering through the heat — “around the century mark on the old scale” — to see the fireworks. Here in Boston, we have to brave the cold to see the colorful explosions. It’s a funny round world we live on, isn’t it?
Last night, we confirmed a discovery first made many a year ago: you can’t put any number of MIT and/or ex-MIT people together and give them any sort of numerical task, like paying a restaurant bill or counting down to a zero point, without something going terribly awry. In this particular case, a dozen or so of us were standing atop a building, passing around a champagne bottle and looking off to the east, where the harbor and the explosions were supposed to be. “Ten, nine, eight, seven,” somebody called out, at a random time a few minutes before the New Year. This countdown sputtered into giggles, but then another broke out: “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six —” And a medley of other voices joined in: “Seven! Eight! Twelve! Twenty-two! Seventeen! Sixty-nine! π!”
Finally, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and flipped it open.
“Hey, it’s midnight by my cell phone!”
Others soon agreed: “It’s midnight by my phone too! Happy New Year!”
And then the harbor fireworks started, but they were too far away, and with too much of Boston in between us and them, to get a very good view, or to feel the visceral impact of the detonations.
Random Thought #4,376,987,…,002
Doesn’t “The Halting Oracle” sound like a great title for a fantasy novel by somebody like Pullman or Pratchett?
The Unbinding Problem
We human folk are pretty good at taking information from different sensory channels and combining it into unified impressions. When I watch a video recording of Richard Feynman, for example, my optic nerves carry a flood of data pulses, signals which somehow arrive in my brain and sync up with the voice which sounds like a Brooklyn gangster (but which actually came from Far Rockaway, of course). A unified whole then emerges, without my conscious effort.
Like they’ve done with all the other odd aspects of brain function, people have invoked quantum mechanics to “explain” this: the mind is mysterious, quantum physics is mysterious, and so the two must be related. Only your blind devotion to linear, Western, patriarchal science prevents you from seeing the Truth! (Oddly enough, the Oprah–Chopra-woo crowd never seem to remark on how the original developers of quantum physics were, almost all of them, White Males who are now Dead.) The “binding problem” is no exception.
However, as both Max Tegmark and Ray F. Streater have pointed out, the proponents of what we might call “quantum binding” — Henry Stapp in particular — fail to consider that correlations are perfectly possible in classical physics. The invocation of quantum physics is only a maladroit solution to a non-problem. In Tegmark’s words,
For instance, oscillations in a guitar string are local in Fourier space, not in real space, so in this case the “binding problem†can be solved by a simple change of variables. As Eddington remarked [77], when observing the ocean we perceive the moving waves as objects in their own right because they display a certain permanence, even though the water itself is only bobbing up and down. Similarly, thoughts are presumably highly non-local excitation patterns in the neural network of our brain, except of a non-linear and much more complex nature.
Now, a patient has turned up in whose brain binding does not occur. G. Lee and H. B. Coslett write of the patient “K.E.,”
He was unable to report more than one attribute of a single object. For example, he was unable to name the color of the ink in which words were written despite naming the word correctly. Several experiments demonstrated, however, that perceptual attributes that he was unable to report influenced his performance.
K.E. had suffered stroke damage to his parietal lobes on both sides of his brain, or in technical terms, “bilateral posterior parietal infarcts.” In addition to his binding difficulties, he experienced simultanagnosia, an inability to see more than one object out of several presented to his view at once.
It may be a “dog bites man” report by now, but I think it’s worth noting that finding patients with neural dysfunctions is still a more productive way of gaining new neuroscientific knowledge than woolly-headed speculation about quantum mechanics, speculation which incidentally ignores big facts about physics.
(Tip o’ the fedora to Mind Hacks, and to Warren Ellis, whose “4am” provides my current background score.)
What I Value Most in Life
I was just about to settle in with a slice of chocolate cake, fresh from the oven, and a DVD of Laura (1944), when I noticed that a new Carnival of the Godless had come online. While skimming the essays therein collected, I left a comment at John Wilson’s place, on a subject I’d like to explore more fully sometime soon, and then I found that Mike Haubrich had discovered a book called (it really satirizes itself) The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible (2007). Its author, Robert J. Hutchinson, should certainly be proud of the reviews:
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible by Robert Hutchinson fires back at this icy trend with history, statistics, logic, humor and even a few rabbit punches. If counter-terrorist Jack Bauer were to take up Christian apologetics, he might have penned something like this.
Well, Dan Dennett might get his fingernails torn off, but I’m not sure that style of apologetics really constitutes a worthwhile intellectual argument.
“For secular fundamentalists, religion in general, and the Bible in particular, are not just wrongheaded but actually dangerous,†Hutchinson writes. “That’s because religion and the Bible stand in the way of everything they value most in life—primarily unlimited sex, of course, but also the power to reshape society into a kind of secular utopia free from traditional ethical restraint.â€
That these words were put in this order the way they were just fills me with admiration for the sheer variety of wirings which can exist between human ears. It also pumps up my urge for the cheap shot: don’t ya know that the “traditional ethical restraint” against, oh, say, rape was only fifty shekels and an arranged marriage? You can’t get much more traditional than Deuteronomy 22:28–9.
Continue reading What I Value Most in Life
X is the Y of Z
Today, we observe that Monty Cantsin is the Nicolas Bourbaki of pop rock:
Continue reading X is the Y of Z
Perspective
According to Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), the United States is spending $15 billion a month on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This is almost three times the National Science Foundation’s annual budget, spent every month.
The original cost estimate for Mars Direct, a manned mission to Mars relying on present-day propulsion technology, was only $55 billion, which would be spent over a decade.
You know, whenever grant-writing time rolls around, everybody jokes about working in “fight the war on terror” applications for their research (in carbon nanotubes, or category theory, or whatever). I don’t think it’s working.
(Tip o’ the accountant’s visor to Phil Plait.)