Free Thought
catdynamics | March 11, 2007Bee asks: "when you write: but we missed on the deep guiding principle which tells us how to select the true theory (such as it is) and where the exact theory came from and leads to. Do you have anything specific in mind? "
Uh, yeah, sure...
er, well, I did, but the boxes of this 'ere blog were too narrow to fit it...
(I should note that one of Backreaction's recent blog entries is on an apparently non-existent topic
Bother that.
I don't know, honestly, obviously I have some ideas, but if they were even half-baked I'd write them up for GRF or something. So, here is the half-assed bloggy…
jlynch | March 9, 2007March 9th
1564 - Birth of David Fabricius, German astronomer
1758 - Birth of Franz Joseph Gall, German neuroscientist
1851 - Death of Hans Christian Ørsted, Danish physicist
1900 - Birth of Howard Aiken, American computing pioneer
1923 - Birth of Walter Kohn, Austrian-born physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
1934 - Birth of Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut
1954 - Death of Eva Ahnert-Rohlfs, German astronomer
1974 - Death of Earl Wilbur Sutherland Jr., American physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate
1983 - Death of Ulf von Euler, Swedish physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate
2006…
drorzel | March 6, 2007Arcane Gazebo provides a picture of a giant blue bear, a few notes on talks about quantum computing, and thoughts on the Kook Session.(*)
Cocktail Party Physics offers thoughts on Irish giants and large-scale pattern formation in geological systems.
Physics World offers three posts: on carbon-trapping windmills, the physics of icicles, and the 20th anniversary of Woodstock.
Know of any other reports from the meeting? Leave a link in the comments.
(* - Background for non-APS types: The American Physical Society meetings accept essentially all contributed abstracts, even the ones from crazy…
evolvingthoughts | March 6, 2007Janet started a meme, which started the whole world meming...
Ten weird things about me? Hell everything about me is weird.
1. My first full novel read was Brave New World. I was eight.
2. As a kid I wrote to all the Soviet as well as the American space centres looking for information. I'm sure there's an intelligence file on me aged 12 somewhere. I kept a card index of all cosmonauts and astronauts. I probably knew more than the FBI.
3. My first introduction to philosophy was Søren Kierkegaard. I read nearly all his works. I regained sanity about my mid-20s.
4. That was while I was doing a…
drorzel | March 1, 2007This is probably too arcane to be an official Dorky Poll, but I thought of it yesterday, and sort of like the idea. In pop-culture circles, it's very common to find people making list of "Desert Island Books" or CD's or DVD's, or whatever. The idea being to list those pop culture items that are of sufficient quality that they would be sufficient entertainment if you were stranded for years on a desert island.with nothing else to read/ listen to/ watch.
So here's an extremely nerdy variant of the "Desert Island" idea: imagine that you're being exiled to a remote island or a a space colony or…
retrospectacle | February 27, 2007A "study" conducted for computing firm Hewlett Packard warned of a rise in "infomania", with people becoming addicted to email and text messages and this impacting (what else?) their IQ. This came in 2006, but I just stumbled upon it today and became predicably irate at yet another example of terrible science reporting.
The study, carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry, found excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence.
Those distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ - more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking…
drorzel | February 23, 2007It's a good day for people posting about science I don't understand...
Peter Woit points to the Non-Commutative Geometry blog, at which Alain Connes, the godfather of non-commutative geometry, is posting. It's not the most polished blog, but if you can understand what they're talking about, it's probably interesting.
Scott Aaronson is excited about new results in quantum computing, where somebody has "announced a quantum algorithm for evaluating NAND trees in O(âN) time." I'm not quite sure what he's talking about either, but it has something to do with ants, sugar cubes, and teaching…
goodmath | February 23, 2007 What we have here is a truly warped language.
Back in the very early days of what eventually became computer science, many of the people working in the field invented all sorts of automatons/computing formalisms. The one that I've always found the most confounding is the Tag machine invented by Emil Post.
The tag machine is simple to the point of triviality. The machine is a queue of characters (with one character designated as "Halt"), and a set of rules. Each rule has a different character that selects the rule, and a string of characters. Each step, the machine looks at the first…
catdynamics | February 22, 2007in which I triangulate on string theory and quantum gravity and ponder the "Trouble with Physics"...
which is that physicists are hired the same way we pick apples at the supermarket.
Look! Shiny! Big! Red!
Finally, I finished Smolin's "Trouble with Physics". Hopefully in time for the paperback coming out...
It is very good, in parts. Well worth reading, and will amuse some, interest others and infuriate the occasional technician.
Fortunately I am not the first to review the book and I will lay no claim to being comprehensive nor unbiased.
I had a brief and early fling with string theory…
revere | February 21, 2007Good idea, but is it new? When I read (hat tip easyhiker) that computer scientists at the University of Maryland were suggesting logging onto a social networking site as a useful adjunct to official information in the event of a pandemic, I thought this was not a new idea. The grandaddy/mama of sites like this, The Flu Wiki, has been up since June of 2005. It regularly logs thousands of daily visitors sharing information and tips on pandemic prepping. Other sites, in bulletin board format, have also been up for a long time. Flublogia is already well-populated.
But an examination of their…
goodmath | February 20, 2007 So, after our last installment, describing the theory of monads, and the previous posts, which focused on representing things like state and I/O, I thought it was worth taking a moment to look at a different kind of thing that can be done with monads. We so often think of them as being state wrappers; and yet, that's only really a part of what we can get from them. Monads are ways of tying together almost anything that involves sequences.
In previous parts of this tutorial, we've seen the Maybe type. It's a useful type for all sorts of things where there might be a value. For example, a…
goodmath | February 17, 2007 Yet another term that we frequently hear, but which is often not properly understood, is the concept of optimization. What is optimization? And how does it work?
The idea of optimization is quite simple. You have some complex situation, where
some variable of interest (called the target) is based on a complex
relationship with some other variables. Optimization is the process of trying to find
an assignment of values to the other variables (called parameters) that produces a maximum or minimum value of the target variable, called
the optimum or optimal value
The practice of optimization…
goodmath | February 16, 2007Frameshift, "Walking through Genetic Space": a track from an album inspired by the writings of Steven Jay Gould about genetics and evolution. The leader of the project is the lead singer of Dream Theater; the end result has a very DT like feeling to it. The album overall is quite good; bit this track is a slow ballad, and a ballad about genetics just doesn't really work.
Robert Fripp and David Sylvian, "Jean the Birdman": Fun, interesting piece of work, from a project that David Sylvian and Robert Fripp did a few years back. Sylvian's usual crooning voice, over his and Fripp's guitar work.…
cortex | February 12, 2007What biological organ does this machine resemble?
In leaping beyond the two- and four-core microprocessors that are being manufactured by Intel and its chief PC industry competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, Intel is following a design trend that is sweeping the computing world.
Already, computer networking companies and the makers of PC graphics cards are moving to processor designs that have hundreds of computing engines, but only for special applications.
For example, Cisco Systems now uses a chip called Metro with 192 cores in its high-end network routers. Last November Nvidia introduced…
chaoticutopia | February 8, 2007
Here is another philosophy paper of mine, which I find to be increasingly relevant, all the time. It describes how a computer might soon have a consciousness equivalent or surpassing the human consciousness: philosophy with a bit of AI theory mingled with a touch of neuroscience.
When I got the paper back from my philosophy instructor, it had a perfect score and hardly any marks. I balked. (I'm one of those self-critical perfectionist types--it couldn't have been 100% without an editor!) When I approached him about it, he told me it was one of the best arguments he had heard on the subject,…
goodmath | February 6, 2007 Many people would probably say that things like computability and the halting
program aren't basics. But I disagree: many of our basic intuitions about numbers and
the things that we can do with them are actually deeply connected with the limits of
computation. This connection of intuition with computation is an extremely important
one, and so I think people should have at least a passing familiarity with it.
In addition to that, one of the recent trends in crappy arguments from creationists is to try to invoke ideas about computation in misleading ways - but if you're familiar with what…
goodmath | February 5, 2007 I haven't taken a look at Uncommon Descent in a while; seeing the same nonsense
get endlessly rehashed, seeing anyone who dares to express disagreement with the
moderators get banned, well, it gets old. But then... Last week, DaveScott (which is, incidentally, a psueudonym!) decided to retaliate against my friend and fellow ScienceBlogger Orac, by "outing" him, and publishing his real name and employer.
Why? Because Orac had dared to criticize the way that a potential, untested
cancer treatment has been hyped recently in numerous locations on the web, including UD.
While reading the message…
mixingmemory | February 5, 2007There's been a ton of research over the last decade or two on what is often called folk psychology or theory of mind (the latter is a bit theoretically loaded). That research concerns who has the ability to reason about other minds -- do young children? autistic children? chimpanzees? dolphins? elephants? -- and what that ability looks like. In most research on the subject, what people consider minds to be, and who they consider to have minds, has largely been taken for granted. While that doesn't mean we haven't learned anything about theory of mind, it does mean we may have missed some…
goodmath | February 3, 2007 As long as I'm doing all of these basics posts, I thought it would be worth
explaining just what a Turing machine is. I frequently talk about things
being Turing equivalent, and about effective computing systems, and similar things, which all assume you have some clue of what a Turing machine is. And as a bonus, I'm also going to give you a nifty little piece of Haskell source code that's a very basic Turing machine interpreter. (It's for a future entry in the Haskell posts, and it's not entirely finished, but it does work!)
The Turing machine is a very simple kind of theoretical computing…
drorzel | January 31, 2007Gordon Watts has deja vu:
[Leaving a colloquium], I got stopped by another member of our department, who is a good friend of particle physics, and she said basically the same thing: all particle physics talks look the same. Some of the comments: Two slides on the detector. Some pictures of quarks, and then some hard-to-understand plots. Where is the story? I only know how hard it is to do this sort of thing because I know you guys: I'd never guess how hard it is from your talks. It is the same plots over and over!
To a certain extent, he's being too hard on himself-- after a while, all sorts…