Miffled: it’s a perfectly cromulent word.
Gynoid 0.1
Screw the “uncanny valley,” this is just creepy:
Thanks, Melusine.
Is it just me, or does she roll her eyes when the guy mentions the singularity?
Power-law Distributions in Empirical Data
Throughout many fields of science, one finds quantities which behave (or are claimed to behave) according to a power-law distribution. That is, one quantity of interest, y, scales as another number x raised to some exponent:
[tex] y \propto x^{-\alpha}.[/tex]
Power-law distributions made it big in complex systems when it was discovered (or rather re-discovered) that a simple procedure for growing a network, called “preferential attachment,” yields networks in which the probability of finding a node with exactly k other nodes connected to it falls off as k to some exponent:
[tex]p(k) \propto k^{-\gamma}.[/tex]
The constant γ is typically found to be between 2 and 3. Now, from my parenthetical remarks, the Gentle Reader may have gathered that the story is not quite a simple one. There are, indeed, many complications and subtleties, one of which is an issue which might sound straightforward: how do we know a power-law distribution when we see one? Can we just plot our data on a log-log graph and see if it falls on a straight line? Well, as Eric and I are fond of saying, “You can hide a multitude of sins on a log-log graph.”
Via Dave Bacon comes word of a review article on this very subject. Clauset, Shalizi and Newman offer us “Power-law distributions in empirical data” (7 June 2007), whose abstract reads as follows:
Continue reading Power-law Distributions in Empirical Data
Ranking the News Agencies
Those of us who have cause to dislike Time Magazine now also have cause to snicker. The University of Maryland’s International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (that’s a mouthful) has just released a study of how “global media outlets” fare when rated on transparency. As their introduction puts it,
The Libby, Enron and Arthur Andersen cases have all put the issue of “transparency†in the forefront of the news. But how transparent are the media themselves? How candid are they about how they cover the news? How willing are the media to make their reporting and editing standards public?
The answer, it appears, is “not very.” Out of twenty-five major websites, fewer than half published public corrections to mistaken stories, and only seven made more than a token effort to state their policies on journalistic ethics. Each of the twenty-five news outlets was scored in five categories, between “excellent” and “not acceptable,” to compute an overall numerical score between 0 and 4. The Guardian led the pack with 3.8, followed closely by the New York Times at 3.4. Sky News is the worst, summarized verbally as flat-out “not acceptable” with a numeric ranking of 0.4.
And guess what publication Sky News just barely edged out?
Continue reading Ranking the News Agencies
Bug Girl on DDT-Resistant Mosquitoes
If the idea of vampire bugs wasn’t frightening enough, how about vampire bugs which are immune to fire, silver and garlic?
That’s the story Bug Girl tells in her latest installment, “DDT, Junk Science, Malaria, and insecticide resistance.” It’s a clear display of Darwin at work, which anybody who has experienced a midsummer night in Alabama can appreciate.
This installment follows last week’s piece, which debunked the recent attacks on Rachel Carson.
Oh No, Not Again
Dammit, Warren, we don’t need you spreading pseudoscience along with everybody else. The Heim theory “spacedrive” is a total crock. Remember, this is the nonsense which John Baez called “a run-of-the-mill crackpot theory” and of which Sean Carroll said,
Just so nobody gets too excited — this paper is complete nonsense, not worth spending a minute’s time on. If I find the energy I might post on it, but this is no better than the other hundred crackpot preprints I get in the mail every year.
For details, you can start here and here. It looks like I might have to dig that post out of my “drafts” pile after all. . . .
New Scientist has a lot to answer for.
Farewell, Mr. Wizard
Don Herbert, better known to my generation as Mr. Wizard, has died. He was 89.
Everyone needs to go, now, and build a baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano in his honor. With enough of them, we can move the world.
More on Behe’s The Edge of Evolution
The list of reviews and follow-ups to reviews continues to grow. The reality-based community has not been kind to Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution, and they’re expressing their reasons why with wit and verve.
The latest addition to the list comes from Jerry Coyne, professor at the University of Chicago. Entitled “The Great Mutator,” a free copy can be found here. I quote the final three paragraphs below the fold, with some added links for the folks who like extra reading.
Continue reading More on Behe’s The Edge of Evolution
Software Agonies: SciPy
In connection with some super-top-secret project — as in, it’s so classified I could figure out what I’m doing, but then I’d have to kill myself — I’ve been coding some programs with SciPy, a bundle of open-source science, math and engineering tools for Python. The thing I need the most is a platform-independent way to plot graphs, and for the most part, SciPy has worked pretty well. I’ve only had one truly infuriating problem so far. That problem, to which I devoted more of my life than I’d like to think about right now, stemmed from the following bug.
SciPy uses Matplotlib to make its visual output, and as the name suggests, Matplotlib was designed with MATLAB syntax in mind. Those of you who have done subplots in MATLAB — multiple graphs tiled onto the same figure — may recall that the subplot command has two valid syntax forms: subplot(211) and subplot(2,1,1), the first being the older form. According to the Matplotlib documentation, both forms work.
Continue reading Software Agonies: SciPy
Quick Post: Voices on the Net
Whoo! The Powers That Be keep inventing deadlines for me, so I will feed the blagobeast with a quick, quote-heavy post. Mark Chu-Carroll’s review of Behe’s The Edge of Evolution has attracted the attention of some creationist trolls, and some of the responses have been both memorable and pithy.
A mysterious being known only as Xanthir, FCD said the following:
As Mark implied, the distinction between micro- and macro-evolution is artificial and false. It amounts to drawing a line in the sand and saying, “Evolution can change things this much, but no further.” It says this without any reason why evolution wouldn’t be able to go past that point, and what’s more flies directly in the face of reams of actual data. It’s basically akin to splitting math into micro- and macro-arithmetic, and saying that numbers greater than a billion are part of macro-arithmetic and don’t occur through natural counting processes, and thus things that involve numbers past that line must have been created whole rather than building up from smaller quantities. The problem with that, of course, is that you can always add 1. Same thing here — you can always add one more mutation.
If you prefer the point made by early-1990s music video, see my earlier post, “Square One on Infinity” (and don’t say I didn’t warn you).
For the standard TalkOrigins critiques of the creationist micro/macro ploy, see here and here.
1 / 3 = 30%
OK, there’s so much to pick on in the Creation “Museum” that it constitutes a classic “target-rich environment,” but one of Media Czech’s photos is just too good to pass up:
First, I think rounding off to one significant figure represents a great advance for creationist mathematics. Dividing 1 by 3 to get 30% is a big improvement over their other, ahem, arithmetic issues (insisting on 6,000 when the actual figure is 13.7 billion, for example). Second. . . .
Continue reading 1 / 3 = 30%
Ludicrously Uneducated Anti-Environmentalists
Angela Logomasini works for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has written articles appearing in major newspapers and is a go-to quotable source for people who want to demonize Rachel Carson.
She also thinks malaria is caused by a virus.
Continue reading Ludicrously Uneducated Anti-Environmentalists
Positive Thoughts
I just discovered that someone found my site by searching the Network for the phrase “positive thoughts more powerful than negative.”
Nope.
Sorry, they aren’t.
But I do have a blueberry bread recipe.
Continue reading Positive Thoughts
Quick Calculation: Trig Identities
In my next quantum mechanics post, I’ll be talking about rotation matrices. My derivation of these mathematical objects will use some equations from trigonometry, the addition and subtraction formulas for sines and cosines. These are the sort of things one finds on the inside front cover of a trigonometry textbook, so if you’re not curious where anything comes from, that would satisfy you; however, if that’s what you find satisfactory, there’s precious little point waking up in the morning, so I’d like to give a little back story.
The addition and subtraction formulas give you the sine and cosine of the sum (or difference) of two angles, provided you know the sines and cosines of the angles themselves. Geometry tells us the sine and cosine of 45 degrees, by looking at an equilateral right triangle (whose internal angles are 45, 45 and 90 degrees). By looking at a 30-60-90 triangle, we can get the sines and cosines of 30 and 60 degrees. With all this information in hand, we’d like to get the sine and cosine of, say, 60 – 45 = 15 degrees, or 60 + 15 = 75 degrees.
One can extract these formulas out of a geometric argument, in the fashion of Euclid, but geometric arguments (while they lend themselves to spiffy pictures) tend to involve a certain amount of chicanery. One must find the proper “construction lines,” inscribe and circumscribe the correct circles and so forth. If one sees a geometric proof and, six months later, wishes to recover the result, remembering the necessary diagrams and manipulations can be quite the challenge.
I say “one must find” and “if one sees,” but really, this is me we’re talking about: I can see the proof, and I’ll remember that the final answer involves sine of this and cosine of that, but I’ve learned better than to trust my memory at getting all the plus and minus signs in the right places. (Talking to other people with college degrees in physics and math makes me suspect I’m not alone.) So, to contribute to the general welfare of the world, I’m going to go through the process I run through every time I need to use the addition and subtraction formulas. I’ve got it down to about fifteen seconds of pencil work, which I can do in the margin of my notebook, and I get all the damn minus signs in the right place.
Continue reading Quick Calculation: Trig Identities
Quantum Mechanics Homework #1
Well, in the past two days I’ve linked to an Internet quiz and some anime videos, so in order to retain my street cred in the Faculty Lounge, it’s time to post a homework assignment. Don’t worry: if you haven’t met me in person, there’s no way I can grade you on it (unless our quantum states are somehow entangled). This problem set covers everything in our first two seminar sessions on QM, except for the kaon physics which we did as a lead-up to our next topic, Bell’s Inequality. I’ve chosen six problems, arranged in roughly increasing order of difficulty. The first two are on commutator relations, the third involves position- and momentum-space wavefunctions, the fourth brings on the harmonic oscillator (with some statistical mechanics), the fifth tests your knowledge about the Heisenberg picture, and the sixth gets into the time evolution of two-state systems.
Without extra ado, then, I give you Quantum Mechanics Homework #1.
Continue reading Quantum Mechanics Homework #1
Smear Attacks on Rachel Carson
Here’s one for the books. The SkepChick who goes by “Bug Girl” in her superhero form has summarized and debunked the smear attacks lately directed at Rachel Carson:
- Bug Girl, “DDT, Junk Science, Malaria, and the attack on Rachel Carson” (7 June 2007)
If that’s not enough for you, see Tim Lambert’s whole category of DDT-related posts.