This morning we are starting with a pop quiz: suppose that we have a petri dish with some bacteria. The amount of bacteria doubles every minute. After exactly one hour, the petri dish is full of bacteria. When was the petri dish half full?

This teaser appears in a very interesting article at Tech Central Station that discusses the impact of nonlinearity on forecasting trends. Its central thesis is that nonlinear trends require nonlinear modes of thought, and that if you are not used to doing that, you can find yourself dramatically off base. And even if you can think correctly about nonlinear trends, they can have surprising results:

However, the odd thing about nonlinear forecasts is that they can be wildly wrong in the quantity dimension without being far off in the time dimension.

The author is essentially saying that when a trend is growing exponentially, errors in the x-axis (usually time) do not have to be that great to produce wild swings in the trend so that, if you are predicting when a trend will reach a certain value and you are wrong, you won't have to wait long for the trend to catch up. Here is a computing-related example:

In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil focused on the implications of Moore's Law. One way to think about his thesis is to imagine that we add up the total intelligence on earth by summing up the amount provided by human beings and the amount provided by computers. Today, the proportion supplied by computers might be much less than 1 percent. Yet Kurzweil would be confident that the proportion supplied by computers will be 99 percent by the end of the century. That is because the capability of a typical computer is doubling about every two years, while the capability of the typical human grows more slowly.

Kurzweil might project that a computer will have the same mental capacity as a human in the year 2030. If the computer only has 1/8 the capacity of a human at that date, you might think that he is spectacularly wrong. However, if computer intelligence doubles every two years, then the computer will catch up six years later -- and once it catches up, it will zoom past.

There is also a fascinating discussion of nonlinearity and the extension of human lifespans, and what it would take to become immortal. Cool read!

On Quark Soup there is a short commentary on an article appearing on The New Republic that is continues on the "physicists are whacked" theme I commented on last week.

It is a bit of a shame that modern physics presents such a tempting target for ridicule. It is also a shame that the people doing the ridiculing don't realize that, without people willing to ask, and work on, the hard questions, we would still be living in a never-ending Medieval Barber sketch, writing on parchment by candlelight while the sun did its daily dance around the earth.

This most recent article takes the discussion to the spiritual level, and complains that a spiritual dimension is laughable, while a multiplicity of "physical" dimensions is not:

To modern thought, one extra spiritual dimension is a preposterous idea, while the notion that there are incredible numbers of extra physical dimensions gives no pause. Yet which idea sounds more implausible--one unseen dimension or billions of them?

Ummm, both of them? Yet until there is better proof for either, which is more likely: one derived from well-understood physics and mathematics and driven by a method designed to find the answer, however unlikely, or one derived from faith?

There are lots of other people out there thinking that Easterbrook is an ass. Here is one particularly biting piece. And for those readers that don't know, Easterbrook was recently fired from ESPN for writing this review of Kill Bill. No, he wasn't fired for not liking the movie, but the out-of-place analysis in the concluding paragraph was not received well. I guess he has an agenda.

This week's installment can be found on Blogger Rabbit. Enjoy.

I came across two artcles that, I think, are worth reading if you are either a Microsoft lover or Microsoft hater. If you are the former, you might become the latter. If you are the latter, you can gloat and feel even more superior. I guess if you have no real opinion on Microsoft, this might open your eyes a bit too.

First, we have an analysis of a recent interview with Steve Ballmer, where he made some rather curious and fantastic claims regarding Open Source software, and why Microsoft's business model led to "better" software. It is quite readable and gives some very good counterarguments. The author is clearly an Open Source fan, but I would certainly tend to agree with his arguments. I don't know if universal-plug-and-play is the best example, because isn't that what makes all my hardware "just work" when I plug it into my laptop? Maybe pushing it out to refrigerators is a bust, but there were probably better examples. No harm, though.

The response on Slashdot, where I first read the reference to it, was probably predictable with some venomous attacks in either direction. But one poster did point to another, similar, article here. And here is a "just the facts" version at C|Net. The full transcript from Microsoft is here.

The next Cringely article is called "Why the Richest Company on Earth Feels it Needs to Cheat", and chronicles a court appearance by Microsoft resulting from their alleged stealing of technology from Burst.com. At issue is whether Microsoft deleted 35 days worth of emails surrounding their negotiations with Burst. In a corporate culture that is largely defined by electronic communcation, it is impossible to believe that there were no emails. And it is pretty hard to believe that all the people involved in the case simultaneously decided that all the emails related to Burst that did exist were "not worth keeping" and deleted them, and that backups of their mail servers did not exist. Since it requires a bit of URL-hacking to get to from his archive, here is Cringely's page of related links.

A fun read is a sick way because, like it or not, this is a company on whose technology a staggering number of us depend. If I didn't need to use it on behalf of my customers, I would very seriously consider switching to something else.

This week's Carnival of the Vanities is up, and yours truly made the list! Please help support the smaller bloggers that you may not otherwise visit by giving them a read. I know I will add to my personal read list A Voyage To Arcturus, science geek that I am.

Have you ever wondered where "lorem ipsum" came from?

This past weekend, I read an article published on the Ayn Rand Institute web site that started with such promise:

More and more today, we are inundated with foolishness masquerading as science. Psychic hotlines proliferate, politicians consult astrologers, and people reject their doctor's advice in favor of "alternative healing" dispensed by quacks. In the past, defenders of real science could be relied upon to expose and debunk such nonsense. So where are these defenders today?

Oh boy, this was going to be good. I am always ready to read a good debunking. WRONG! The next sentence set the tone for the rest of the piece:

Unfortunately, they are too busy dreaming up foolishness of their own.

Sigh. The piece goes on to develop the basic premise that modern physics has lost touch with reality and that the research that goes on today is no better than the charlatanism described in the first paragraph. The author cites as “evidence” some of the more bizarre predictions of quantum theory and cosmology (and in the process lumping all of modern physics into one of those two camps):

Today, physicists suppose that a particle can travel many different paths simultaneously, or travel backwards in time, or randomly pop into and out of existence from nothingness. They enjoy treating the entire universe as a "fluctuation of the vacuum," or as an insignificant member of an infinite ensemble of universes, or even as a hologram. The fabric of this strange universe is a non-entity called "spacetime," which expands, curves, attends yoga classes, and may have twenty-six dimensions.

In short, the recent literature on physics makes one nostalgic for anything as reasonable as a witch trial.

The yoga comment aside (how can you take an argument seriously when someone resorts to such silly rhetoric), the notion that results and predictions that are hard to imagine are therefore “foolishness” seems like a singularly Middle Ages viewpoint. Indeed, while a many-dimensional universe is certainly “out there” in terms of common experience, and is a theory that may or may not prove to be demonstrably true, the curving of spacetime has been amply demonstrated experimentally since it was proposed early in the 20th century.

For further evidence that physicists are in a “state of intellectual bankruptcy”, the author cites two French twins who were able to publish a number of papers, and get Ph.D.’s, using research that was purported to be a hoax. This, to my mind, is more an indictment of the journal refereeing process than a proof that all modern physics is indistinguishable from fantasy. Doesn’t the fact that the hoax was discovered mean anything?

The author goes on to state that scientists are free to “dream up any theory that tickles their fancy”, as long as they can demonstrate one prediction that is measurably true, owing to their adherence to the “hypothetico-deductive method”. Well, not quite. Any definition that I can find on HDM (such as this one), state that the hypothesis starting the whole process should be to explain some observed phenomenon. The characterization that scientists are motivated to think up any ridiculous theory and attempt to prove it just for the sake of doing so is absurd. But even if that were true and the original thesis behind a theory were “fantastic”, if measurable results predicted by the theory turned out to be validated, where is the problem? At the end of the day, is the goal not to seek out and understand things that were previously unknown? Clearly, the value of any theory is going to be in the number of predictions it can successfully validate. A “dreamt up” theory that has only a single prediction, even if it were subsequently observed, would not have nearly the same value, and credence, as another that successfully predicted that result and more. But that is hardly an argument to not think about, and propose, theories simply because they are at first blush counterintuitive.

So, where does this all lead? Apparently, according to the author, this “neurotic withdrawal from reality” leads man to an inexorable destiny: to be an animal without the ability to reason. So, because I believe in time dilation (leading to the observable lengthening of the decay time of muons) or gravitational lensing (leading to the observable Einstein’s Cross) I am hastening human culture’s demise.

Don’t they have a phrase for this kind of argument: reductio ad absurdum?

I am critically low on disk space on my laptop. So, I have deleted a ton of archived messages in Outlook that had attachments, and am now compressing the archive file. Fuck, does that ever take a long time.

Why am I blogging this?

Because I have a bunch of time on my hands at the moment. I don't want to leave my computer because it is going to finish any...time...now......now.........now............NOW! Damn.

So, here are some amusing things I came across after starting at this week's "Carnival of the Vanities". Leading off, we have "How to Communicate with a Deaf Hooker" (thanks to Snooze Button Dreams). Here are two of the cleaner samples:

 

Here is an interesting piece on cosmic noise and the shape of the Universe. This blog is edited by Chris Genovese, a prof at CMU, and has some really interesting stuff worth reading. Clearly some overlap/complementary material with what I am trying to do here.

Next, the ever funny Frank J., who still hates Michael Moore.

(...any....time...n...........NOW! Over 200 freakin' megabytes saved. Whoo-hoo! But I am on a roll...)

For Mark, here is a puking cat named John Galt.

And one more from Snooze Button Dreams: "It sounded like somebody poured a bucket of chum into the toilet". Sorry, I can't stop laughing at that.

I came across this article yesterday, and I have to admit that it is a little bit of a mind bender.

Here's the thing. So, there was the Big Bang, right, where the Universe as we know it began. There is quite a lot of experimental data to support this theory, not the least of which is the pervasive "background radiation" that is the echo, if you will, of the original event. As the theory goes, the "bang" was followed by a tremendous expansion of the Universe in all directions, which continues today. But one of the Big Questions is, "will the expansion continue forever"?

In a nutshell, three possible outcomes were proposed. First, the expansion could continue forever because there was nothing to slow it down. Distances between objects in the Universe would become infinite. Second, there would be just enough mass in the Universe to gravitationally slow the expansion until, eventually, the expansion would stop. Or third, there would be enough mass to not only slow and stop the expansion, but to then cause everything to contract and eventually implode.

So, while astronomers were busy trying to count the mass of the Universe and determine which outcome was our destiny, we fast forward to 1998, when some discoveries were made to really upset things. Those discoveries demonstrated that, not only is the Universe expanding, but it is doing so at an accelerating rate. To be more exact, the original expansion was in fact being slowed by gravity, but there came a point in time when the gravitational attraction became so weak that another repulsive force took over and began pushing things out faster. The article above suggests approximately 5 billion years ago as that inflection point.

To really freak lay people out, they are calling the source of this repulsive force "dark energy".

I am trying to get my mind around all of this, and in doing so, I came across this useful site at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Particularly interesting is the brochure, which gives a nice and palatable background to what this is all about. I don't think I can explain it any more clearly, so give it a read. The brochure is part of a proposal to launch a space telescope dedicated to accurately measuring the expansion rate over vast distances and times. Incidentally, one of the really clever things about this proposal (and indeed the 1998 research) was the way in which the data was obtained. Basically, the researchers are using what are called "Type 1a supernovae" to determine intergalactic distances and velocities. The problem is, in any given galaxy, there will only be one of this events every 300 to 500 years, so it is tough to get a lot of data points. What these researchers did was digitally image thousands of galaxies at a time, so that they could reasonably get numerous hits over several years. Smart. The proposed telescope is expected to get around 2000 hits per year, which will result in some pretty good science.

On a related topic, I will also point you to some work I am doing on measuring the Hubble constant using the massive online data set of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. As of this writing, I have not published any results but if you are interested then please bookmark the page. Some of the preliminary data qualitatively demonstrates that the Hubble constant (read, "expansion of the Universe") is not constant over large redshifts (read, "large spans of time"). But, I could just be reading too much into the data because, after all, I am not a professional at this.

Man oh man, is this a wacky universe, or what?

In reviewing the traffic to this blog, I note that a number of people get here by searching on "quantum mechanics latest findings". To those, and others that are interested in getting cutting-edge scientific papers in a number of disciplines, I would refer them to the arXiv.org e-Print archive. This is a wonderful resource that collects papers and abstracts pretty much as they are published, but as noted here, these are without the benefit of peer-review that "journalled" papers receive. This is both good and bad, but from my perspective, the immediate and free availability of scholarly research far outweighs the lack of peer-review; that can come later.

So, to those hard-core quantum mechanics folks, here are the very latest papers in quantum mechanics.

The three important 2003 Nobel prizes, for physics, chemistry, and medicine, were announced this week.

"And the physics prize goes to:" Alexei A. Abrikosov, Vitaly L. Ginzburg, Anthony J. Leggett, "for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids." From the press release:

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to three physicists who have made decisive contributions concerning two phenomena in quantum physics: superconductivity and superfluidity. Superconducting material is used, for example, in magnetic resonance imaging for medical examinations and particle accelerators in physics. Knowledge about superfluid liquids can give us deeper insight into the ways in which matter behaves in its lowest and most ordered state.

"And the chemistry prize goes to:" Peter Agre, Roderick MacKinnon, "for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes." From the press release:

We human beings consist to about 70% of salt water. This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry rewards two scientists whose discoveries have clarified how salts (ions) and water are transported out of and into the cells of the body. The discoveries have afforded us a fundamental molecular understanding of how, for example, the kidneys recover water from primary urine and how the electrical signals in our nerve cells are generated and propagated. This is of great importance for our understanding of many diseases of e.g. the kidneys, heart, muscles and nervous system.

"And the medicine prize goes to:" Paul C Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield, "for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging." From the press release:

Imaging of human internal organs with exact and non-invasive methods is very important for medical diagnosis, treatment and follow-up. This year's Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine have made seminal discoveries concerning the use of magnetic resonance to visualize different structures. These discoveries have led to the development of modern magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, which represents a breakthrough in medical diagnostics and research.

Check out each press release for more details on the research. My favourite has got to be the MRI one, which has clearly made a huge impact on medical diagnostics. Alas, there was no astronomy-related prize. Superfluids, BAH! Give me "pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources" any day.

Congratulations to everyone. As for literature and economics, who cares? The prize for "peace" has not been given out yet, but my bets are on Bush (oops, did I say that?). Or maybe, Condoleezza Rice.

I came across this blog post while perusing the latest entries in the "Carnival of the Vanities". Being a dog owner too, I often find myself trying to glimpse into my dear Malin's brain to figure out just what is going on there (besides never-ending love and devotion).

Having violated a blog "prime directive" by not posting anything for over a week and not letting anybody in on my absence, I must apologize to my loyal reader(s?). I am simply over my head with stuff to do work-wise and personal-wise. Grrr. But I will give you a few tasty morsels just to (hopefully) keep you interested and promise to get something more meaty later this week.

First, an addendum on "Stupid Google Tricks", which I found by searching on "stupid google tricks" (duh). They involve using the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which apparently Google engineers use as an Easter Egg generator when the mood strikes them. Anyhow, try searching on each of the following, and clicking "I'm Feeling Lucky": "weapons of mass destruction", and "french military victories". Thanks to Ozone Asylum and John Hoke.

Next, what I would call "Stupid Microwave Tricks", here is an article on how to measure the speed of light using (a) chocolate chips and (b) a microwave oven. (Sorry, I have had this bookmarked for a while and cannot recall the source.) And no, I have not tried this yet but when I do I will update this post with my results.

Finally, the Hubble Heritage project has released a stunning image of the Sombrero Galaxy in Virgo. This is a beatuful shot with tremendous detail, especially if you look at the large print format image...check out the galaxies behind this galaxy through the galactic halo.