Free Thought
thusspakezuska | June 24, 2010Jun. 17, 2010 3:34 AM ET
SB COMMUNITY DEEMS FEMINISTS IRRELEVANT NOBODY MEAN GIRLS, OMNIPOTENT PRIVILEGED HELLIONS
Douchey McDoucherson, ScienceBlogs Writers
ANYWHERE (SB)
Just days after a remarkable dustup in the science blogosphere, ScienceBlogs community members gathered to render judgment on feminist science bloggers.
Noted commenter, blogger, and cress fancier B-DOH! said "PZ and Orac take out the clueless fuckwits of the world with penetrating criticism, incisive wit and clever put downs. Feminists science bloggers, with their aggressive snark, set a tone."
Newly disclosed…
dgmacarthur | June 24, 2010Blogging time has been pretty scarce for me lately, mainly due to the impending submission of the 1000 Genomes Project pilot paper (more on my involvement in that project later). Sadly, personal genomics has not done me the favour of sitting still while I'm busy. Here are some of the more interesting recent bits and pieces from the personal genomosphere:
Speaking of the 1000 Genomes Project, the consortium has formally announced the release of data from its three pilot projects. The pilot data include low-coverage whole-genome sequences from 180 individuals, high-quality whole-genome…
drorzel | June 24, 2010
On Writing and the Internet: Data Is the New Alcohol « Lev Grossman
"A lot of writers have been ruined by addictions in the past. Heroine, alcohol, etc. Me, I don't have big -- big -- problems with drugs and alcohol. (I have in fact, over the past 6 months, moderated my drinking, something I never thought I would do. In case you were, wondering, that's where the shortage of drunk-tweets is coming from.) Data will be the addiction that gets me if anything does."
(tags: writing blogs drugs internet computing culture)
What is quantum co-tunneling and why is it cool? « Physics and cake
A…
pontiff | June 23, 2010Yep, it's that time again. Paper dance time!
arXiv:1006.4388
Making Classical Ground State Spin Computing Fault-Tolerant
Isaac J. Crosson, Dave Bacon, Kenneth R. Brown
We examine a model of classical deterministic computing in which the ground state of the classical system is a spatial history of the computation. This model is relevant to quantum dot cellular automata as well as to recent universal adiabatic quantum computing constructions. In its most primitive form, systems constructed in this model cannot compute in an error free manner when working at non-zero temperature. However, by…
drorzel | June 23, 2010I don't remember who pointed me at this transcript of Deepak Chopra interviewing Michio Kaku, but if I remember who it was, I fully intend to hate them.
DC: Is our conversation affecting something in another galaxy right now?
MK: In principle. What we're talking about right is affecting another galaxy far, far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. Now when the Big Bang took place we think that most of the matter probably was vibrating in unison.
DC: So it was already correlated?
MK: It was already correlated. We call this coherence or correlation. As the universe expanded, we're still correlated, we'…
stoat | June 19, 2010A post about "Engineering the Software for Understanding Climate Change" by Steve M. Easterbrook and Timbo "Not the Dark Lord" Johns (thanks Eli). For the sake of a pic to make things more interesting, here is one:
It is their fig 2, except I've annotated it a bit. Can you tell where? Yes that's right, I added the red bits. I've circled vn4.5, as that was the version I mostly used (a big step up from vn4.0, which was horrible. Anecdote:it was portablised Cray Fortran, which had automatic arrays, but real fortran didn't. So there was an auto-generated C wrapper around each subroutine passed…
stoat | June 18, 2010Via mt I find
too much of our scientific code base lacks solid numerical software engineering foundations. That potential weakness puts the correctness and performance of code at risk when major renovation of the code is required, such as the disruptive effect of multicore nodes, or very large degrees of parallelism on upcoming supercomputers [1]
The only code I knew even vaguely well was HadCM3. It wasn't amateurish, though it was written largely by "software amateurs". In the present state of the world, this is inevitable and bad (I'm sure I've said this before). However, the quote above is…
drorzel | June 18, 2010
www.dumpert.nl - Hoe amerikanen voetbal kijken
A good spoof of American sports television, applied to soccer. the titles are Dutch, but the video is in English.
(tags: soccer sports world television silly)
World Cup 2010: Brick-by-brick fussball - England 1-1 USA | Video | Football | guardian.co.uk
"An animated recreation of England's first match against the USA. "
(tags: soccer video world games toys silly)
Luis von Blog: Outsourcing My Research Group
"A PhD student at Carnegie Mellon costs approximately $80,000 per year. (Research programmers and post-docs cost about the same.) Given…
mikethemadbiologist | June 16, 2010Yes, you read the title correctly--I'll get to that in a bit. Nicholas Wade's article about the Human Genome Project (HGP), "A Decade Later, Genetic Map Yields Few New Cures" has been getting a lot of play. Thankfully, ScienceBlogling Orac summed up perfectly my thoughts about both the science and hype surrounding the HGP, so I don't have to. But this post by Mike Mandel has been getting some play:
My nomination for the most significant economic event of the past decade: The failure of the Human Genome Project to thus far deliver medically significant results.
I dunno: the collapse of…
drorzel | June 16, 2010
The A-Team steers clear of Hill Street and avoids St Elsewhere and Cheers
"The A-Team premiered in 1983, a year after Cheers and St Elsewhere, two years after Hill Street Blues, a year ahead of Miami Vice, the fall after M*A*S*H said goodbye, farewell, and amen.
There had always been well-written, well-directed, and well-acted television shows. What made these shows different was that all at once TV audiences were presented with a group of shows that were more like movies in a particular and significant way.
The characters and their situations changed.
Not just from season to season either…
drorzel | June 15, 2010
In the Hunt for Planets, Who Owns the Data? - NYTimes.com
"Astronomers everywhere, who have been waiting since Kepler's launch in March 2009 to get their hands on this data, will be rushing to telescopes to examine these stars in the hopes of advancing the grand quest of finding Earthlike planets capable of harboring life out there.
But a lot of attention has been paid in astronomical circles over the past few months to what the Kepler team will not be saying. By agreement with NASA, the team is holding back data on its 400 brightest and best planet candidates, which the astronomers intend…
pontiff | June 14, 2010I grew up in the small town of Yreka, CA ("Yreka Bakery" backwards is...) that sits just minutes south of the Oregon-California border on Interstate 5. Yreka, population a little over 7000 brave souls, is the county seat of Siskiyou county. Siskiyou county is "god's country" meaning, yes, (a) it votes strongly Republican :) and (b) its scenery is awesome:
Siskiyou county is, however, not a wealthy part of the United States (yes, if you measure wealth in dollars :)) Unemployment in the county is currently 19 percent (not seasonally adjusted), the median income is $29,530, and about 18…
oracknows | June 14, 2010I've had the immense good fortune to have trained and ultimately become a physician-scientist during a time when the pace of discovery and the paradigm changes in science have occurred just over the course of my career in medicine and science has been staggering. microRNA, the shift from single gene studies to genomics, the development of targeted therapies, the completion of the Human Genome Project, these are but a few examples. Of course, arguably the Human Genome Project is the granddaddy of all of the huge changes and paradigm shifts that has occurred to revolutionize biomedical research…
drorzel | June 12, 2010
slacktivist: Sex & Money, part 3
"My conundrum was not unique -- not to me and not to the question of usury. The same dilemma arises whenever we treat the Bible as a rulebook. That's an approach that guarantees -- that manufactures -- conflicts between text and reason, text and experience, text and reality, text and context.
And such conflicts always produce perverse choices. In my case it was the perverse choice between, on the one hand, the evident goodness of the work being done by South Shore and Grameen and a hundred real-world incarnations of the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan…
goodmath | June 8, 2010 Sorry for the ridiculously slow pace around here lately; I've been
ridiculously busy. I'm changing projects at work; it's the end of the school
year for my kids; and I'm getting close to the end-game for my book. Between
all of those, I just haven't had much time for blogging lately.
Anyway... I came across this lovely gem, and I couldn't
resist commenting on it. (Before I get to it, I have to point out that it's on
"viXra.org". viXra is "ViXra.org is an e-print archive set up as an
alternative to the popular arXiv.org service owned by Cornell University. It
has been founded by scientists…
pontiff | June 7, 2010One result of a workshop held in 2008 that "broad research themes within theoretical computer science...that have potential for a major impact in the future, and distill these research directions into compelling "nuggets" that can quickly convey their importance to a layperson" is this set of nuggets. Among the summary of nuggets we find quantum computing and three questions:
In the wake of Shor's algorithm, one can identify three basic questions:
(1) First, can quantum computers actually be built? Can they cope with realistic rates of decoherence -- that is, unwanted interaction between a…
pontiff | June 7, 2010One interesting thing about quantum computing is that because it is a very new field, a large amount of the research in the field is on the arXiv (interestingly the worst users have historically been computer scientists.) Back in 2006 whenever I would sit around BSing about the arXiv with other quantum computing people, the idea of improvements that would bring the arXiv more up to date would come up. After hearing repeatedly about such ideas, in January 2007, I got fed up of hearing about these ideas and so I sat down and wrote scirate.com, a Digg-like front end for the arXiv. Okay well…
pharyngula | June 7, 2010
Jonathan Sarfati, a particularly silly creationist, is quite thrilled — he's crowing about how he has caught Richard Dawkins in a fundamental error. The eye did not evolve, says Sarfati, because it is perfectly designed for its function, and Dawkins' suggestion that there might be something imperfect about it is wrong, wrong, wrong. He quotes Dawkins on the eye.
But I haven't mentioned the most glaring example of imperfection in the optics. The retina is back to front.
Imagine a latter-day Helmholtz presented by an engineer with a digital camera, with its screen of tiny photocells, set up…
pontiff | June 7, 2010Rob sends me information about an interesting new position at the Perimeter Institute (more info here):
The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) is looking for a Scientific IT specialist -- a creative individual with experience in both scientific research and information technology (IT). This is a new, hybrid, research/IT position within the Institute, dedicated to helping PI's scientific staff make effective use of IT resources. It has two clear missions. First, to directly assist researchers in using known, available IT tools to do their research. Second, to uncover or…
pontiff | June 6, 2010Customer X: Hi, D-wave? So, I hear that you have this computer that can be used to solve computationally hard problems. Oh, yes, sorry, should have said a quantum computer, my bad. Well, you know we've got this hard computational problem, [Editor: problem description deleted to protect identity of involved company.] So what do you think, can you solve this problem for me? Great! Let me put you in contact with my technical guy. Yes, I'll wire the money to your account today.
Months later.
Customer X: Hi D-Wave, thanks for all your help with getting us set up to use your machine to solve…