Off The Deep End

Part three in my continuing pedantic slow-as-molasses walk through Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. List of posts here: introduction, ch 1, ch 2. SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can't talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don't want the book's main ideas to be spoiled, don't continue reading. IDIOT ALERT: I'm in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I'm an idiot, please tell me why! Having, in the past chapter (hopefully) convinced us that…
Scienceblogs is upgrading. This site won't allow comments from 10pm Pacific Standard Time on Friday, January 9 until...well until the upgrade is complete (possibly Saturday sometime.) So instead of being frustrated at not being able to comment why don't you instead go waste your time by: By reading some provocative statements about teaching over at the information processors blog. If you need to procrastinate about preparing a referee report, you might check out Michael Nielsen's Three myths of scientific peer review The Statistical Mechanic is back, and discussing thermodynamics,…
Moving on to Chapter 1 in my ongoing pedantic plodding through Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. See here for what this is all about. Note that I really am doing this as I read the book (I'm reading it really really slowly), so what I say here may be outdated by the time I get further into the book. List of posts here: introduction, ch 1. SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can't talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don't want the book's main ideas to be spoiled, don't continue reading. IDIOT ALERT: I'm in no way qualified in most of the fields…
So I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's newest book Outliers: The Story of Success the other day, as I'm sure many of you will be doing on your next trip to the airport (where stands of Gladwell's hardcover book, marked down thirty percent, block your every exit through the already cramped airport bookstores.) Gladwell's books are fun, but I find myself often disagreeing with his analysis, so I thought it would be entertaining to take my time reading his latest and jot down my thoughts as I progress. Well "entertaining" in that "holy shit dude you are pedantic" sort of way. Note that I really do…
Today is the 149th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. I'm probably just suffering from a bout of dewy eyed pastoralism, but when was the last time a book which was readable by the general public was also a major work of science? (Not Here That's For Sure) And you will say "but science it is so complicated nowadays!" and "but science is so big these days!" And you will say "only smart people can understand string theory!" and "there is so very much that one must learn in order to even understand today's science!" So then you will go back to your…
I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia...eh. For some reason they have a parade at night in November with floats containing Santa and reindeer (obligatory crappy cell phone picture to follow): Yeah, what the hell? Interesting conference, I'm attending. I haven't been at a conference in ages where disagreed with so many of the talks! For example, I learned that many many people have got it all wrong and quantum error isn't possible because we haven't thought about the role of phase errors properly (sadly I didn't get to hear about the twin paradox.) I also learned form an older, well established…
John Baez (via Zoran Škoda) points to the case of M.S. El Naschie. El Naschie is apparently the answer to the question "how do you publish over three hundred papers of craziness in an Elsevier journal?" Simple: just become the editor and chief of the journal! Tell me again the argument about scientific publishers rendering a valuable service with their stellar editing?
The universe doesn't always operate the way we want it to. No, I'm not talking about the stock market (unless you've been short lately), I'm talking about the role of error in logical deterministic systems! When you zoom down far enough into any computing device you'll see that its constituent components don't behave in a completely digital manner and all sorts of crazy random crap (technical term) is going on. Yet, on a larger scale, digital logical can and does emerge. Today heading to work in the early dawn I was pondering what all of this meant for our notion of reality. Some of the…
I'm not the man they think I am at home Oh no no no I'm a rocket man
"Dreams of poverty excited universal enjoyment in Berkeley, coupled with the hope that the political and economic situation would worsen, throwing the country into ruin: this was the theory of the activists. Misfortune so vast it would wreck everyone, responsible and not responsible sinking into defeat..." - from The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick
You may have noticed an ad running on scienceblogs which says "Has the LHC destoyed the Earth?" If you click on it you find a webpage that says in big letters simply "NO". What's up with that? Check out the webpage source for the page (http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/). Update 9/12/08: Check out the comments for more fun and also read the cat projectile analyzers take on how you can click to save the world. br /> "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth yet? NO href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008…
The London Eye is a gigantic tourist trap rotating wheel, which you can ride to get a great view of London. The trip takes about 30 minutes. While riding it the other day, I noticed an odd illusion. The London Eye is made up of pods which are attached to the wheel in such a way that each pod is always horizontal. What I noticed was that if you were going up on Eye and looked up and toward the top of the Eye, it felt as if the entire contraption was falling over (i.e. the top of the wheel seemed as if it was falling over.) Anyone have any idea what causes this disorienting effect? (I…
Last night we went to see the new Batman movie. After attempting to see it at Paul Allen's Cinerama (it was sold out), we headed down to the standard mall theater in downtown Seattle to view said film. Verdit for me: meh. But what I found interesting was thinking about the reason for why I didn't much like the movie. This is obviously because I am not a bat nor a superhero nor a heroine nor do I live in Gotham. Plus the portrayal of Two Face just hit to close to home. See how easy it is, kids, to analyze movie reviews when you just take reviewers biases into account! Monday's are…
From Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston, we find a gem of quantum computer's capabilities in an interview with Max Levchin, cofounder of Paypal:...Its one of those things where, in the end, fraud is so nondeterministic that you need a human or a quantum computer to look at it and sort of make a final decision... Fight determinism with determinism, but fight nondeterminism with nondeterminism! I like it! But can you fight determinism with nondeterminism? Why am I now singing "I shot the nondeterminism, and the nondeterminism won?" (I'm pretty sure Max is…
Standing in lines is the bane of my existence. Okay, well maybe not, but spending time around universities certainly increases the percentage of time I spend pressing the queue. The good thing about lines in university towns is that they often move fairly fast. The bad thing is that, well, you're standing in line. And, with a nice British last name like "Bacon," you can bet that I'm a stickler for proper line standing. Proper? Oh yeah. Here are the offenders. Which are you? The Gapper: This denizen of the line is apparently extremely afraid of the person in front of them, for a vast…
The Scienceborg is all abuzz about some Sizzle movie, with all sorts of good and bad reviews, and gnashing of the teeth about whether the movie stunk or whether it was the best thing since the invention of sliced ham (few know that this event was much more important than the invention of sliced bread, which is vastly overhyped.) A good way to waste your time, I suppose, but I thought I wasn't going to get much out of it, you known, in terms of actually getting any good insight or educational crap like that. But then I discovered Chris C. Mooney's post on the whole thing. (Chris is lucky,…
There are many paths to take if you are interested in doing fundamental physics research in hopes of discovering the secrets of the universe (awkward phrasing there: this makes the universe is like the Bush administration, I guess?) Here are my three favorite ways to do fundamental theoretical physics. Do it yourself. This is the traditional method. Of course you have to be more than a bit delusional to think you might actually be able to contribute some positive net effect, but such long odds don't seem to influence many people's choice of this method. Build a computer to do it for you. If…
I'll admit it: I like reading George Soros' books. I mean, here's a guy whose made a godzillion dollars in the financial markets, has been behind political destabilizations/stabilizations worldwide, taken on a U.S. president (can you guess which one?), and yet, in spite of this, can write a book in which he talks his own brand of....philosophy and how it relates to life, the universe, and the current financial crisis. Whah? As you might have guessed I just finished reading one such book: the rushed to market The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means…
Crackpot animation of the day: