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Currently Reading
Oliver Johnson, Christophe Vignat (2006). Some results concerning maximum Renyi entropy distributions.
We consider the Student-t and Student-r distributions, which maximise Renyi entropy under a covariance condition. We show that they have information-theoretic properties which mirror those of the Gaussian distributions, which maximise Shannon entropy under the same condition. We introduce a convolution which preserves the Renyi maximising family, and show that the Renyi maximisers are the case of equality in a version of the Entropy Power Inequality. Further, we show that the Renyi maximisers satisfy a version of the heat equation, motivating the definition of a generalized Fisher information.
Luciano da F. Costa, Francisco A. Rodrigues, Gonzalo Travieso, P. R. Villas Boas (2006). Characterization of complex networks: A survey of measurements.
Continue reading Currently Reading
A Challenge to the Discovery Institute
Scott Hatfield sez, put up or shut up.
Who’s Talking about Judgment Day?
I don’t have a television set — just a projector connected to a computer, which is plenty good for movies but not so great for tapping the airwaves — so my impression of NOVA’s new program, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, has been mostly textual. I say “mostly,” because I did see the trailer:
PBS promises us that the whole thing will be available ontube this Friday.
The National Center for Science Education is pleased with Judgment Day, and that’s a recommendation which carries a lot of weight. Still, they’re an awfully Web 1.0 lot over there, so what do we suave cyber-philosophes have to say?
PZ Myers and the Pharynguloids watched the show last night, live-blagging as they went along. Then, this morning, PZ observed that the Discovery Institute’s response was a regurgitation of old whines which managed to miss the point of the program entirely. (EDIT: Tyler DiPietro has some details.)
Greg Laden, who also live-blagged the broadcast (1, 2, 3, 4) has an overview and a couple complaints — nothing fatal; he enjoyed the show, but in a few respects, the producers could have made a good thing even better.
Meanwhile, Dave Bacon is complaining that the biologists are having all the fun. Where are the epic court battles over quantum physics? Come on, you pansy Vedic Shiva-botherers, bring it on!
Continue reading Who’s Talking about Judgment Day?
Permanent Links on Wikipedia
It’s time to vent a grievance. Hopefully, my gripe is just an artifact of sampling bias: the people who know the truth aren’t saying anything, and the people who are uninformed keep speaking up, leaving me with the impression that nobody knows what’s going on.
Consequently, as a public service, I’m going to demonstrate the permanent link feature of the MediaWiki software, the platform which underlies Wikipedia. Pop open a Wikipedia article, say James Burke (science historian). Unless you’ve modified your skin CSS, you’ll see a sidebar on the left edge, headed by some “navigation” links (“Main page,” “Contents” and so forth). Down below the search box, in the “toolbox” section, is an item labeled “Permanent link.” This is a hyperlink to the current version of the article you are at the moment reading. The URL for this hyperlink gives both the article title and the revision ID, thus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=James_Burke_
%28science_historian%29&oldid=171016319
Upon clicking the link, you’ll be directed to that specific version of the article. Furthermore, this link will remain valid, unless extreme measures are taken, until Wikipedia itself goes foom.
Continue reading Permanent Links on Wikipedia
I Get E-Mail
Below the fold is an e-mail I received this morning from Victor Senchenko, human space navigator, and his “Media Team.” According to his website, Senchenko can explain why homosexual humans exist (OK), why God doesn’t exist (not clear whether this is the Abrahamic tantrum-tosser or something more sophisticated) and why time also does not exist (and right there, we hear the fuses blow).
Greetings Blake,
Considering your involvement with science, the following Press Release may be of interest to you.
As an astute person, you probably would agree that for a long while humans – especially the scientists – had been claiming that they wanted to solve all the mysteries of physical existence. They have also repeatedly indicated that they wanted to understand the causes of human behavior.
I don’t know many scientists who’ve claimed they want to solve all the “mysteries of physical existence.” We’ll settle for solving one mystery big enough to get us tenure; the others are left as an exercise to the interested reader.
Continue reading I Get E-Mail
Spotted on Teh arXivotubes
You know, I’m beginning to like these RSS feeds for the arXiv. Two e-prints just popped up in the “quantitative biology” section which I should look over more carefully:
Continue reading Spotted on Teh arXivotubes
Open Laboratory Needs Poetry!
Coturnix says that the second annual anthology of science blogging needs “more poems and more original cartoons.” Well, sez I, if it’s poetry you want, then you must needs talk to the Cuttlefish!
To wit:
Similarity shows that a common designer
With similar blueprints and parts
Constructed the human and cuttlefish forms—
I swear by all three of your hearts.The God who created the heavens and earth
And killed dinosaurs off in The Flood
Used the same old ideas again and again
You can tell by your copper-green blood.
Read the rest of Cuttlefish in Genesis, and stay for Noah’s Flood.
Continue reading Open Laboratory Needs Poetry!
C. proponentsists Caught on Video
If Carl Zimmer says it, it’s gotta be official: cdesign proponentsists is the new term for “creationists.”
For the background to this discovery, see the National Center for Science Education.
Words You Can’t Say in an Obituary
This is from the Washington Post obit of Norman Mailer:
After the war ended, he served with occupation forces in Japan, then returned to the United States in May 1946. He spent the rest of the year in a bungalow near Provincetown, Mass., transmuting his military experiences into “The Naked and the Dead.”
His publisher, Stanley Rinehart, insisted that he clean up the language in the book. Mailer complied by inventing the word “fug” as a substitute for an expletive that the publisher found offensive.
Now. . . .
Continue reading Words You Can’t Say in an Obituary
Pop Science in Die Zeit and Spike TV
For today, I’m going to let I Postdoc, therefore I am voice my complaints for me:
What bothers me, is that both journalists and the public seem to be so much more interested in, ahem, improbable science than in the usual garden variety.
Via Doug Natelson, who adds,
It is a shame that sometimes the media can’t tell the difference between good science or engineering and crackpottery. On a plane last week I had someone (who realized I was a physicist from my reading material) ask me about the guy who can get hydrogen from seawater by hitting it with microwaves. Kind of cool, yes. Source of energy? Of course not — it takes more microwave power to break the water into hydrogen and oxygen than you can get back by burning the resulting hydrogen. It’s called thermodynamics.
Spoilsport!
There go my plans for funding my all-consuming chocolate habit by selling the secret of seawater power to Big Oil so that the industry could suppress it. . . .
At this point, I should also mention the depressing and macabre quote of the day, which comes from Prof. Clifford Johnson, string theorist at USC. He describes what happened to the guest appearance he made on Spike TV’s show MANswers. While the whole post is quite worth reading, I’ll quote just a tiny bit:
Continue reading Pop Science in Die Zeit and Spike TV
The Prisonbear
I think it says something about a TV show when you can remake it with stuffed animals and not change the essential content. I mean, honestly, would an episode where Number Six woke up as a teddy bear be any more bizarre than the finale which was actually aired?
Come to think of it, haven’t I seen Patrick McGoohan as a small, furry animal before?
Continue reading The Prisonbear
Another D-Word Sighting
This is Mark Lawson interviewing Sir David Attenborough on BBC Four.
Remember, Sir David is the most trusted man in Britain.
LAWSON: Have you at any time had any religious faith?
ATTENBOROUGH: No.
Clearly, he’s not going to be trusted in the United States any longer.
One verbal item caught my attention. Lawson, a journalist of English birth and education, employs the word Darwinist.
LAWSON: Your programs clearly are Darwinist, but it’s not something. . . You never seem to actually take on the creationism. For example —
ATTENBOROUGH [overlapping]: Oh, I certainly do, privately, and, and would be happy to do — it’s not the place to do it in the sort of programs I make.
From this single instance, it’s hard to tell whether Lawson equates “Darwinist” with “atheist,” as our American creationists are wont to do, or if he’s closer to the usage observed among certain academics, roughly equating “Darwinism” with “evolutionary biology.”
Cosmic Tentacular Goodness
With Phil and PZ together in the same place, it’s only fitting that today’s Astronomy Picture has placed cephalopods in the heavens:
A beautiful blue ion tail has become visible in deep telescopic images of Comet Holmes. Pointing generally away from the Sun and also planet Earth, the comet’s ion tail is seriously foreshortened by our extreme viewing angle. Still, enthusiastic comet watchers have remarked that on the whole, the compact but tentacled appearance suggests a jellyfish or even a cosmic calamari.
Go here for pix.
Defence Against the Liberal Arts
Memetic Silliness
OK, it’s Saturday afternoon, I’ve spent most of the day doing a literature hunt (giving myself a crash course on immunology — don’t ask why, just yet) and it’s time for some silliness. Brian Switek informs me that the Internet can tell how smart I am, or at least how smart I look.
Don’t ask how that judgment was made. It’s the Internet. The Internet knows all.
According to the Internet, in fact, John Armstrong is writing for high-school kids. You were in ninth grade when you first developed topology with category theory, weren’t you?