Free Thought
drorzel | December 7, 2006One of my former professors is collecting some awards:
Professor William Wootters is to be honored for his outstanding achievements in physics, not once, but twice in the academic year, by The American Physical Society and by the International Organization for Quantum Communication, Measurement and Computing.
In recognition of his pioneering work in quantum theory, the International Organization for Quantum Communication, Measurement and Computing in collaboration with Tamagawa University, bestowed its 2006 International Quantum Communications Award on Wootters at a ceremony in Tsukuba,…
goodmath | December 6, 2006One thing I've been hearing a lot lately is discussions about Ethanol, and it's been
really pissing me off. Can ethanol be a serious replacement for oil as a source of energy? I don't know. Because *both* sides are using really bad math to make their arguments.
There are two fundamental questions about ethanol as fuel where the bad math comes in:
1. How much energy does it cost to *produce* ethanol compared to the amount of
energy released by *consuming* ethanol?
2. How much pollution is generated by the process of producing ethanol?
There are numerous reports or studies from both sides of…
nisbetmc | December 3, 2006
Over at the "ideas site" World Changing, David Zaks offers up an interview with the NY Times' Andrew Revkin. As I've written on this blog before, Revkin is one of the top science writers in the business, and the country's leading journalist covering climate change. For ScienceBlogs readers, the interview along with the World Changing site are definitely worth checking out. Here's how World Changing describes its mission and content:
WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are…
goodmath | November 28, 2006I wasn't really sure of quite how to start this off. I finally decided to just dive right in with a simple function definition, and then give you a bit of a tour of how Haskell works by showing the different ways of implementing it.
So let's dive right in a take a look at a very simple Haskell definition of the factorial function:
fact n = if n == 0
then 1
else n * fact (n - 1)
This is the classic implementation of the factorial. Some things to notice:
1. In Haskell, a function definition uses no keywords. Just "`name params = impl`".
2. Function…
evolgen | November 23, 2006There's an old paradigm in human population genetics that we each differ from each other by less than one percent at the DNA sequence level. While that may be true for our DNA sequences, recent work indicates that there's also quite a bit of variation amongst individuals in the actual content of their genomes. Such variation is known as copy number variation (CNV) or copy number polymorphism (CNP). What it means is that some people may have one copy of a genomic region, other may have two, and even others may have none.
Nature thinks this research on CNV is quite important, as there are five…
goodmath | November 15, 2006While I was researching yesterdays post on Archimedes integration, one of the things I read reminded me of one of the stranger things about Greek and earlier math. They had a notion that the only valid fractions were *unit* fractions; that is, fractions whose numerator is 1. A fraction that was written with a numerator larger than one was considered *wrong*. Even today, if you look in a lot of math books, they use the term "vulgar fraction" for non-unit fractions.
Obviously, there *are* fractions other that *1/n*. The way that they represented them is now known as *Egyptian fractions*. An…
evolgen | November 15, 2006Dan Hartl just finished a two day whirlwind speaking tour at my university (three talks in under 24 hours). He discussed detecting weak selection in protein coding sequences, identifying the underlying genetic causes of phenotypic variation in yeast, and the genetics of malaria parasites. I won't get into the details of these talks, but I will point out one thing Hartl brought up in his first talk that goes well with our recent discussion of computational and wet lab biologists.
The topic is revolutionary developments, the field is population genetics, and the time frame is the past twenty…
goodmath | November 14, 2006A lot of people have asked me to write something about "Archimedes Integration", and I'm finally getting around to fulfilling that request.
As most of you already know, Archimedes was a philosopher in ancient Greece who, among other things, studied mathematics. He invented a technique for computing areas that's the closest thing to calculus before Newton and Leibniz. Modern mathematicians call Archimedes technique "the method of exhaustion".
The basic idea of the method of exhaustion is to take the figure whose area you want to compute, and to divide it into pieces whose area you already know…
clock | November 12, 2006Here are some blogs with titles that start with the letter C. Am I missing a good one? Yours? Let me know in the comments.
Also check (now updated) blogs that start with:Number/SymbolAB
CalamusCanadian CynicThe Cape Fear MercuryCaptivated by MandieCarbon-based CuriositiesCaridina japonica - breeding Vol.1Carolina Blog ConsultantsCarnivalesqueCarnival of Bad HistoryCarnival of the BalkansCarnival Of EducationCarnival Of The GodlessCarnival of the GreenCarnival of the LiberalsCarotidsThe Carpetbagger ReportCarrboro CommonsCat Daddy and Dr. SqueekyCaterina.netCaveat LectorCentauri…
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2006
Adapted sort of with permission from The Crackpot Index by John Baez, with contributions from the talk.origins howlers.
A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to biology.
1. A -5 point starting credit.
2. 1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
3. 2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.
4. 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
5. 5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.
6. 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts…
j7uy5 | November 5, 2006Finally, a product to bring much-deserved recognition to an
out-of-the-way place: Intel has announced their "enthusiast"
motherboard for high-performance computing: the
href="http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/d975xbx/index.htm">D975XBX,
nicknamed the
"Bad Axe."
Just get a load a'the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_sink">heat
sinks on that baby! Granted, it's not the
most pragmatic piece of hardware on the planet, but it'll make your
lan-party buddies green with envy.
The product's namesake is a little town in Michigan's thumb.
Hardly anybodies been there, but…
chaoticutopia | November 3, 2006The other day, I jokingly suggested that a surplus of red tape might lead to human extinction. Leave it to a brewery to take such a threat seriously. Apparently, beer can generate large amounts of red tape, especially when shipped overseas. (One bottle of Heineken, for instance, requires at least 30 documents to enter the US.) In an effort to reduce the amount of paperwork involved with international shipping, Heineken has begun tracking its beer by satellite:
The Beer Living Lab pilot, designed by IBM and the University of Amsterdam, will see 20 beer containers shipped to Heineken's UK…
catdynamics | November 2, 2006Nice article by MarkCC on why C sucksis not efficient for numerically intensive applications - looks like that's an even better way to get comments and readers than the old "dis String Theory" trick.
Chad has a pointer to a beautiful entry by Aaronson on nifty theoretical things in computer science
So, like, read 'em.
If he writes a book - pop-sci or for "peeple hoo no calculus reel good" I'll read it.
Hell, I'll review it! (Hint)
goodmath | November 2, 2006I came across an article yesterday about programming languages, which hit on one
of my major peeves, so I can't resist responding. The article is at greythumb.org,
and it's called [Programmer's rant: what should and should not be added to C/C++](http://www.greythumb.org/blog/index.php?/archives/152-Programmers-rant-…).
It's a variation on the extremely common belief that C and C++ are the best languages to use when you need code to run fast. They're not. They're good at things that need to get very close to the hardware - not
in the efficiency sense, but in the sense of needing to be able…
thusspakezuska | October 31, 2006So I'm at a conference where the majority of attendees are white males. Well, after all, it is an engineering conference. Anyway, given the demographics, do you expect to walk into any particular parallel session and find that there are only two, three, maybe five white males, and the remaining 25 to 30 session attendees are comprised of ten or 12 white females and the rest minority women and men?
Where have all the white men gone? Long time passing.
The easiest way to clean all the white males out of your parallel session is to title it "Diversity" and to schedule talks on:
The…
drorzel | October 31, 2006The Times this morning has an article on the future of computer science:
Computer science is not only a comparatively young field, but also one that has had to prove it is really science. Skeptics in academia would often say that after Alan Turing described the concept of the "universal machine" in the late 1930's -- the idea that a computer in theory could be made to do the work of any kind of calculating machine, including the human brain -- all that remained to be done was mere engineering.
The more generous perspective today is that decades of stunningly rapid advances in processing speed…
cevans | October 19, 2006
A few months ago, in homage to the last puffs of summertime breeze to caress the Pacific Northwest, I visited the largest computer in the world. Not exactly beach blanket bingo, and I probably could have found a more youthful way to celebrate the dog days of summer, but this monument to computational power, too, is unorthodox. Built on a 30-acre plot of land bordering the Columbia River gorge -- a place, up until now, known solely for its excellent windsurfing -- it kicks back 10 million watts of power yearly and hooks into the largest direct DC current in the world, a backbone of fiber…
stcynic | October 12, 2006So here's what I've been through for the last few days. Two trips to Lansing (an hour away), one in a driving rainstorm and the second in a driving snowstorm. Yes, it's Michigan and we're getting snow in October. On the first trip, I bought a brand new case, motherboard and processor. I brought it home, built it, and the dang thing was dead as a doornail, would not power up. I change out three different power supplies, one of which came out of a working computer, so I know it's not that. So today, I took the whole thing back, the tech plays around with it for a bit and announces what I…
tfk | October 12, 2006The Lancet has published a study of mortality in Iraq, a followup to a similar study from a year ago. In this study, they estimated that over 650,000 more people died in Iraq during the US occupation than would have died otherwise.
The Questionable Authority has some objections. I'll start off by pointing out that he isn't disputing the basic conclusion. Mike writes:
even if I am correct, and all of these errors result in overestimates of the total number of deaths, the number is still going to be much higher than the "official" totals. The population of Iraq is being harmed by this war,…
drorzel | October 6, 2006Third and final post in a series about "teleportation" from July 2002. This one is mostly dedicated to voicing the same complaints I have about the more recent stories that kicked this whole repost business off.
The more things change, the more I keep repeating myself.
So, having discussed how to do "quantum teleportation," how does this get us to "Beam me up, Scotty?" Well, that's the thing. It doesn't, not in any meaningful sense. What gets "teleported" is just the state of the initial quantum particle, not the particle itself. There's no reason why you couldn't do "teleportation" with…