Free Thought
drorzel | August 3, 2006The Dave Bacon post linked earlier today is actually the beginning of a plug for Doug Natelson's list of hot topics and controversies in condensed matter and nanoscale science.
As was suggested in a recent comment, now that a nonzero number of condensed matter and nano people are (apparently) reading this blog (at least occasionally), this could be a fun opportunity to have a series of discussions about the hot topics and controversies out there in the world of condensed matter and nanoscale science. The idea would be to take maybe one topic a week, give a relatively gentle introduction to…
loom | July 24, 2006The Washington Post has an article today called And the Evolutionary Beat Goes On . . .. It is based on some interviews with scientists who are documenting evidence of natural selection in humans. I won't be surprised if it gets emailed hither and yon, but not for the text, which is based on stuff that's been out for some months now. No, it's got a slick animation with the following caption: "A morphing demonstration of human evolution shows the transformation from a small lemur, up the evolutionary ladder into a human: seen here as legendary evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould."
The…
bcohen | July 18, 2006The book Rebuilt, by Michae Chorost, and the documentary Sound and Fury, by Josh Aronson, here re-considered. (This is a Bookshelf #1 revisitation and expansion.) ((No reason for mentioning Jerry Falwell, by the way. That was a typo.))
I finished Rebuilt, about cochlear implants and technology-society relationships and deaf culture and the Bionic Man and cyborg philosophy. Here are some tidbits.
Rebuilt is about cochlear implants. They put a thing in your head, behind your ear. You can then hear. Or have sounds transmitted to your brain, through the device. "You can then hear." Some…
goodmath | July 14, 2006Via [Migrations][migrations], I've found out about a really beautiful computational biology paper that very elegantly demonstrates how, contrary to the [assertions of bozos like Dembski][dembski-nfl], an evolutionary process can adapt to a fitness landscape. The paper was published in the PLOS journal "Computational Biology", and it titled ["Evolutionary Potential of a Duplicated Repressor-Operator Pair: Simulating Pathways Using Mutation Data"][plos].
Here's their synopsis of the paper:
>The evolution of a new trait critically depends on the existence of a path of
>viable intermediates…
oracknows | July 11, 2006Sitting in a corner office, Adolph Mongo perused daily reports. It was early evening and nearly everyone in the office had gone home, leaving only a few die-hards left to finish up. A crack political operative who runs a political and media consulting firm active in Michigan and Detroit politics, Mongo never hesitated to play the race card when he thought it might help his client.
He heard a crash outside his door.
"Jonella?" he said. "Is that you?"
No answer.
Mongo went back to his reading, but he was tired. That's enough attacking Governor Grahnolm and defending Detroit Mayor Kwame…
catdynamics | July 5, 2006It was NASA proposal season last month, meant to comment on it, but was so exhausted and pissed off about the whole thing that I needed some space.
A typical proposals is 15 pages of main text; including biblio, bios, associated documents and blurbs the final (electronic) package is typically 40-55 pages.
NASA's budget is a funny thing.
It has the Space Operations Directorate which is basically keeping the shuttle and space station and associated armies of contractors at JSC and KSC in business. $6 billion in round numbers.
Then is has Science, Aeronautics (well, not so much anymore) and…
goodmath | July 4, 2006As several [other][panda] [folks][pz] have mentioned, George Gilder has written a [new anti-evolution article][gilder-article] which was published in the National Review.
[panda]: http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/07/the_technogeek.html
[pz]: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/07/if_it_werent_for_those_femin…
[gilder-article]: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=3631
There's a lot to hate in this article. It's a poorly written screed, which manages to mix together all of Gilder's bogeymen: feminists, liberals, anti-supply-siders, peer reviewers,…
cevans | July 3, 2006
The history of information -- which is to say, the history of everything -- is littered with codes. Some are cryptic, designed to be understood by only a few, while others are made to be cracked. Numbers, for example, are symbols which translate the abstraction of mathematical information into a code we can understand. Language, too, is such an idea code. The Dewey Decimal System was a code for organizing all knowledge into ten distinct classes. Morse code broke meaning into short pulses of sound. HTML and other computer programming languages are codes which make the arrangement of graphics…
drorzel | July 2, 2006I'm going to be away from the computer for the long weekend, but I don't want to have the site go completely dark, even over a weekend, so I'm going to schedule a few posts from the archives to show up while I'm away. Everyone else seems to be doing it (and pushing my posts off the front page, the bastards), so I might as well.
This goes back to the early days of the blog, back in July of 2002. This is the second part of the explanation started in the previous post.
So, at the end of yesterday's post, I had talked about how to use light to exert forces on atoms, and change their velocity.…
mixingmemory | July 1, 2006The literature on robot navigation is huge, and summarizing it would be difficult, if not impossible, but I thought I'd provide a few examples of papers you can read on robots that utilize ant-like navigational mechanisms.
Franz, M.O., Schölkof, B., Mallot, H.A., & Bülthoff, H.H. (1998). Learning view graphs for robot navigation. Autonomous Robots, 5, 111-125.
Abstract: We present a purely vision-based scheme for learning a topological representation of an open environment. The system represents selected places by local views of the surrounding scene, and finds traversable paths between…
drorzel | June 29, 2006Matt Leifer, whose blog I hadn't previously encountered, has a long and fascinating post on evaluation criteria for quantum interpretations. "Interpretation" here means the stuff of countless "Isn't Quantum Mechanics weird?" books-- Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Bohmian hidden variable theories, all that stuff. These are the "meta-theories" that are used to explain how you get from all that weird and messy wavefunction stuff up to the reality that we see and observe in our experiments.
The list is explicitly modeled after the well-known DiVincenzo Criteria for quantum computing (see also Quantum…
goodmath | June 27, 2006Before I dive into the depths of todays post, I want to clarify something. Last time, I defined categorical products. Alas, I neglected to mention one important point, which led to a bit of confusion in the comments, so I'll restate the important omission here.
The definition of categorical product defines what the product looks like *if it's in the category*. There is no requirement that a category include the products for all, or indeed for any, of its members. Categories are *not closed* with respect to categorical product.
That point leads up to the main topic of this post. There's a…
loom | June 26, 2006Last night I took the ferry across Long Island Sound to spend the day in Stony Brook at Evolution 2006, the joint annual meeting of American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the Society of Systematic Biologists. About 1500 scientists were there, and there were enough talks going on--often simultaneously--to keep me in constant motion from eight in the morning till eleven at night.
The presentations were all over the map. In one study, scientists were pinpointing the molecular changes that Southwestern Indians have acquired to their cells as they adapted to…
goodmath | June 24, 2006Back when I first started this blog on blogspot, one of the first things I did was write an introduction to information theory. It's not super deep, but it was a decent overview - enough, I thought, to give people a good idea of what it's about, and to help understand why the common citations of it are almost always misusing its terms to create bizzare conclusions, like some ["law of conservation of information",][conservation]
[conservation]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_conservation_of_information "wikipedia on Dembski's law of CoI"
This is a slight revision of that introduction. For…
goodmath | June 22, 2006Off topic, but can't resist commenting, for reasons that will become clear.
Over at Sadly No, Brad discusses a review of Glenn Reynold's latest book, which includes some babble about "Transhumanism".
The very first comment?
I was watching a show on the History Channel on Star Trek's influence on scientific research- there's a guy in Britain, as I recall, who is trying to connect everyone to the Internet, and engage in cyborging, etc.
This is, actually, rather more widespread an ideal than one would think, particularly among both neo-libs and communistic types; theoretically, a non-intrusive…
jrosenhouse | June 20, 2006There's an interesting blog discussion going on about the age-old question of whether .99999..., where the nines go on forever, is actually equal to one. The answer is: Yes, it does, and if you think it does not then you are mistaken. Polymathematics got the ball rolling with several arguments establishing the equality of the infinite decimal on the one hand and the number one on the other. Mark Chu-Carroll offered some follow-up thoughts here.
One way to prove that .9999... repeating equals one is to realize that the notation “.9999...” is really just a short-hand way of writing the…
goodmath | June 16, 2006I was recently sent a link to yet another of Dembski's wretched writings about specified complexity, titled Specification: The Pattern The Signifies Intelligence.
While reading this, I came across a statement that actually changes my opinion of Dembski. Before reading this, I thought that Dembski was just a liar. I thought that he was a reasonably competent mathematician who was willing to misuse his knowledge in order to prop up his religious beliefs with pseudo-intellectual rigor. I no longer think that. I've now become convinced that he's just an idiot who's able to throw around…
mixingmemory | June 16, 2006A few weeks ago, I wrote a post that was pretty critical of the current state of Experimental Philosophy. In the post, I focused on the work of Joshua Knobe, not because his work is the worst Experimental Philosophy has to offer, but because it is, in my mind, the best by far. Yesterday on the Experimental Philosophy blog, David Pizarro linked to a manuscript he's writing with Knobe and Paul Bloom that demonstrates quite well why I think this, and furthermore provides a very good example of what Experimental Philosophy can be when it closely aligns itself with scientific psychology.
The…
drorzel | June 16, 2006Rob Knop has another post to which I can only say "Amen!", this time on the relatioship between simulation and experiment (in response to this BoingBoing post about a Sandia press release):
Can simulations show us things that experiments cannot? Absolutely! In fact, if they didn't, we wouldn't bother doing simulations. This has been true for a long time. With experiments, we are limited to the resolution and capabilities of our detectors. In astronomy, for example, we don't have the hundreds of millions of years necessary to watch the collision of a pair of galaxies unfold. All we can look at…
goodmath | June 13, 2006 As I mentioned yesterday, I'm going to repost a few of my critiques of the bad math of the IDists, so that they'll be here at ScienceBlogs. Here's the first: Behe and irreducibly complexity. This isn't quite the original blogger post; I've made a few clarifications and formatting fixes; but the content remains essentially the same. You can find the original post in my blogger information theory index. The original publication date was March 13, 2006.
Today, I thought I'd take on another of the intelligent design sacred cows: irreducible complexity. This is the cornerstone of some of the…