Chrononautic Log: science

September 15, 2006

There’s a story that A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard in the 1920’s, wanted to impose a Jew quota because “Jews cheat.” When someone pointed out that non-Jews also cheat, Lowell replied: “You’re changing the subject. We’re talking about Jews.” Likewise, when one asks the strong-AI skeptic how a grayish-white clump of meat can think, the response often boils down to: “You’re changing the subject. We’re talking about computers.”

— Scott Aaronson, “Alan Turing, Moralist”

 

If you want to know why Turing is such a hero of mine (besides his invention of the Turing machine, his role in winning World War II, and so on), the second passage above contains the answer. Let others debate whether a robotic child would have “qualia” or “aboutness” — Turing is worried that the other kids would make fun of it at school.

(Ibid.)

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August 24, 2006

Thankfully the IAU seems to have adopted a proposal that more or less makes sense,* but just in case No Iceball Left Behind should again rear its ugly head:

My View Embraces Moving Classifications, Just Stop Uncovering New Planets Called 2003 UB313

(Via Asymptotia)

Unfortunately, Jackie’s proposal to drop Pluto into the sun was not adopted. The IAU may yet live to regret this.

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* By “more or less makes sense,” I mean it’s fairly simple, can unlike the earlier proposal be applied to new discoveries without the intervention of a committee, and conforms broadly to the way the word is generally used. Also, I’m pleased to see that by limiting its application to our own solar system, it avoids unfair discrimination against bodies like Oph 1622 B.

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Spread it around:

Girls and Science: Call for Proposals

The Feminist Press, in collaboration with The National Science Foundation, is exploring new ways to get girls and young women interested in science. While there are many library resources featuring biographies of women scientists that are suitable for school reports, these are rarely the books that girls seek out themselves to read for pleasure. What would a book, or series of books, about science that girls really want to read look like? That is the question we want to answer.

You’ll find several requests for specific proposals at our website. One calls for scientific detective stories based on the life, research, and discoveries of real women scientists. Another calls for stories featuring real young women—aspiring gymnasts, ice skaters, actors, dancers--using a knowledge of science to help them become really good at what they do. A third recognizes how popular Manga and graphic novels are with girls, and asks for imaginative new collaborations between Manga writers and artists to create adventures about girls who use real science to accomplish their goals. If any of these three book ideas interest you, please check out our website (www.feministpress.org) for more information about deadline and how to submit proposals.

But we do not want to limit our exploration. If you are a writer and have an idea for a book or series of books that is guaranteed to get girls excited about science, we want to hear from you. You may want to create a girl detective series featuring a set of friends—from geeks to sports nuts to mechanical geniuses—each with a knowledge of science that helps in solving crimes. You may want to create a story about a shy girl who goes on field trips with her favorite aunt, a forensic anthropologist, and helps to solve problems as she learns to think like a Dr. Bones. You may want to tell the story of a young science fiction writer who needs to study different fields of science in order to create her adventures. Whatever your vision, if you can write like a dream and can create works that are guaranteed to instill a curiosity about science in girls and young women, send us your proposals. We want to hear from you.

All proposals will be reviewed. Several proposals will be offered standard contracts.

Publisher: The Feminist Press at City University of New York as part of a National Science Foundation grant. (see feministpress.org)

Deadline: October 31, 2006

Format: Proposals should describe the project, the plot, characters, and length. No more than ten pages please.

How to submit: Electronic submission (word doc) to fhowe@gc.cuny.edu with the subject line "Girls and Science." Please include in the body of your email your address, phone number, email address and a short bio. Please also attach a brief sample of your writing (about five pages), and a resume that includes information about publications.

(Via Cocktail Party Physics.)

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July 24, 2006

From the newly discovered Science + Professor + Woman = Me: “Maybe We Need A Phrasebook?”: women’s experiences with being mistaken for non-professors.

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Q: What grade are you in?

A: 21st.

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Q: Will you give this to Professor X?

A1: No . . . (pause for effect) You just gave it to her.

A2: Sure! (Takes it from them, and in an exaggerated fashion, hands it from her left hand to your right.) Done!

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Q: So they had to hire a woman . . ?

A1: Yeah, they needed somebody to make up for the fact that they hired you.

A2: It was inevitable. Eventually they were bound to run out of mediocre men, and now the qualified women are finally getting a chance.

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Q: So you’re doing a Ph.D.? Couldn't you find anyone to marry you?

A1: Nope, they just don’t make wives like they used to.

A2: I’ve already been married 6 times. I'm taking a break.

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July 19, 2006

Q. What’s your response to people who say you rely too much on your own experience and should take scientific hypotheses less personally?

A. They should learn that scientific hypotheses require evidence.

— Stanford neurobiologist Ben (née Barbara), Barres, on the Steven Pinker approach to dealing with sexism in the sciences

(NYT. Via both Cosmic Variance and Kameron, so you know it’s full of feminist sciencey goodness.)

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Update: The comment thread to this follow-up article on Cosmic Variance contains some of the most depressingly stupid and defensive bullshit I’ve read on the web. (And some brave attempts to deal with it. But depressing.)

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July 7, 2006

Viz., this exhibit at the Miraikan, Odaiba, Tokyo. (Big photo here, from Angus Graham, who is also responsible for diagnosing our alarming “tube gap.” Via Boing Boing.)

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May 10, 2006

Okay, that’s not what they say, but the inference is clear to anyone who’s watched Battlestar Galactica season two.

Three years ago, Wake Forest researchers discovered a mouse that could not get cancer no matter how hard they tried to give it the disease.

Now, they said white blood cells from that mouse's descendants were injected into ordinary mice with cancer and their disease was completely wiped out.

(Via Jeremy. I have to confess to a certain chagrin at seeing what I thought was the show’s single hokiest bit of technobabble replicated in the lab. . . .)

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March 13, 2006

From the Wikipedia article on Japan’s Fifth Generation Computer Systems project:

Repeated attempts to make the system work after changing one language feature or another simply moved the point at which the computer suddenly seemed stupid.

I know the feeling.

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March 10, 2006

Brain=computer is so done. (Are you listening, Ray Kurtzweil? No? Well, when some sub-aspect of your uploaded future self is ego-surfing the post-Omega Point simulated blogosphere in the simulated universe, post some simulated comments telling Simulated Me that I’m wrong.) Bruce Sterling nails it, as usual. This is from his speech at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology 2006, but if I tell you to read the whole thing, you probably won’t. So.

When it comes to remote technical eventualities, you don't want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something commercial, governmental, academic or military . . . . Otherwise you are trying to freeze an emergent technology into the shape of today's verbal descriptions. This prejudices people. It is bad attention economics. It limits their ability to find and understand the intrinsic advantages of the technology.

A good example of freezing the language too early is, I think, Artificial Intelligence. We very early got into the lasting bad habit of referring to computers as “thinking machines.” I suspect this verbal metaphor seriously harmed technical development. Even the word “computing” sounds too much like human mathematical thinking. We might have made a much better language choice if we had called computers something like the French called them, ordinateurs, “ordinators.”

Computers are not “smart,” in any useful sense of that term. They don’t “think.” They don't have “intelligence.” Computers don’t “know” things and they don’t have any literal “memories.” They’re not artificially intelligent sci-fi beings like HAL 9000. Computers are boxes of circuitry, with strings, and slots for the strings. They are not alive and mentally active, they are just sitting there, ordinating.

What is “ordinating,” exactly? Well, if we’d invested our attention in figuring that out, instead of awkwardly struggling to make these devices think like a human brain does, then we would have successfully explored the very large set of interesting problems that computers turned out to be really good at.

If you look at today’s potent, influential computer technologies, say, Google, you’ve got something that looks Artificially Intelligent by the visionary standards of the 1960s. Google seems to “know” most everything about you and me, big brother: Google is like Colossus: the Forbin Project. But Google is not designed or presented as a thinking machine. Google is not like Ask Jeeves or Microsoft Bob, which horribly pretend to think, and wouldn't fool a five-year-old child. Google is a search engine. It’s a linking, ranking and sorting machine.

Linking, ranking and sorting don't sound very sexy, glamorous or philosophically crucial. Instead of nostalgically clinging to the words — the neologisms of the past, which are now archaeologisms — we should pay more attention to the facts on the ground. What works? What matters?

When I think about it: do I really want some classical Artificial Intelligence computer that can talk to me just like Alan Turing? Or do I prefer Google? Imagine two start-up companies. One of ’em has got Alan Turing’s disembodied talking head inside a box, but no search engines. In the other company, they have no AI, but they get to use Google.

Which company out-competes the other? One company asks: where do I find a cheap supplier? In response, they get a really genius math lecture by Alan Turing. Alan is really sincere about it, he’s really thinking hard about the problem of supply, there inside his box. The other company has Google, so in about ten seconds they not only find a supplier but all kinds of massively popular links to other suppliers. Which company wins?

I guess you could argue that Alan Turing's super-smart metal head might invent Google, but do you need this roundabout approach? All it takes is a couple of grad-students to invent Google.

After doing that, the folksonomy kicks in, so you get all the linking and ranking and sorting. So, you can keep Alan Turing in the box, and I'll even throw in Richard Feynman. They can artificially think, while the rest of us will be getting on with the revolution.

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Hannah turned up this paper, “Human Hand-Walkers: Five Siblings Who Never Stood Up,” about four Kurdish sisters and their brother who manage to get around just fine even though a genetic condition of the cerebellum keeps them from walking upright. Is it me, or is there something — knowing it’s people they’re talking about — vaguely Ballardian in the paper’s choice of words?

When they are at rest the quadrupeds either sit upright or squat on their haunches. . . . The females splay their back legs apart, the male, however, who is the strongest and most active of the five, plants his feet closely together. . . . [T]he females tend to stay close to the house, but the male sometimes wanders for several kilometres. . . . Figure 2 . . . Subject #11 standing semi-erect, while he scans for objects to pick up and put into his pouch. . . .

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December 20, 2005

The judge in the Dover, PA creationism “intelligent design” case has handed the creationists’ ass to them.

We have now found that both an objective student and an objective adult member of the Dover community would perceive Defendants’ conduct to be a strong endorsement of religion pursuant to the endorsement test. Having so concluded, we find it incumbent upon the Court to further address an additional issue raised by Plaintiffs, which is whether ID is science. To be sure, our answer to this question can likely be predicted based upon the foregoing analysis. While answering this question compels us to revisit evidence that is entirely complex, if not obtuse, after a six week trial that spanned twenty-one days and included countless hours of detailed expert witness presentations, the Court is confident that no other tribunal in the United States is in a better position than are we to traipse into this controversial area. Finally, we will offer our conclusion on whether ID is science not just because it is essential to our holding that an Establishment Clause violation has occurred in this case, but also in the hope that it may prevent the obvious waste of judicial and other resources which would be occasioned by a subsequent trial involving the precise question which is before us.

. . . Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

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November 11, 2005

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No, really. MIT researchers say so.

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We theorize that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

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November 2, 2005

The San Francisco Chronicle recently published this chart showing the frequency of suicides at each point along the Golden Gate bridge, based on Golden Gate Transportation Authority records using the bridge light poles as reference points.

What you immediately notice, looking at the chart, is that the vast majority of jumpers have jumped from the eastern (inward-facing) side of the bridge. What’s up with that? The caption seems to suggest that this is because the east side is the one with a pedestrian walkway, while the west side has a bike lane; but it can’t always have been that way, and anyway I’ve seen pedestrians on both sides. I suppose it could also be that the east side’s easier to get to from the City (south) end of the bridge, that (again from the south end) the east side is on the right and somehow (since we drive on the right) more natural, or something like that. Is that all there is to it, or are there psychological reasons why a jumper would prefer to be facing the City (and by implication, the world) rather than turning his or her back on it? What are the statistics like for other bridges, I wonder?

(I know whenever I’ve contemplated jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, I’ve always visualized a spot somewhere in the neighborhood of the fairly popular Pole 103. You?)

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P.S. Please don’t anyone think I’m less than completely serious about this.

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October 27, 2005

My head, for unrelated reasons, hurts too much for me to formulate a sensible response to Ted’s comments on the Sapir-Whorf post below. In the mean time, though, y’all can read this snarky yet informative review of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, by Cosma Shalzi.

Let me try to sum up. On the one hand, we have a large number of true but commonplace ideas, especially about how simple rules can lead to complex outcomes, and about the virtues of toy models. On the other hand, we have a large mass of dubious speculations (many of them also unoriginal). We have, finally, a single new result of mathematical importance, which is not actually the author’s. Everything is presented as the inspired fruit of a lonely genius, delivering startling insights in isolation from a blinkered and philistine scientific community.

(This time merely via The Valve.)

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October 25, 2005

“If our thinking was determined by language, we’d all be completely batshit.”

(Embedded in a flippant yet thoughtful review by Ray Davis of The Transition to Language, a collection of essays edited by Alison Wray. You’ve got to love an academic review that starts with WARNING: SPOILERS, don’t you?)

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October 17, 2005

Update: Cosmic Variance has more. Sean, over there, does a good job explaining (for layfolks like myself) exactly what they were trying to say, mathematically, and what was fishy about it. It’s not as simple as the “just use GR” story one gets from skimming the paper.

In a paper that somehow got mentioned in the CERN Courier and on Slashdot, authors Cooperstock and Tieu have suggested that nonlinear effects in GR could explain flat rotation curves in spiral galaxies (one of the historically important pieces of evidence for dark matter). And in two papers, Kolb, Matarrese, Notari and Riotto and then just Kolb, Matarrese, and Riotto have suggested that nonlinear effects in GR could explain the acceleration of the universe (a key piece of evidence for dark energy). Are these people making sense? Are they crazy? Is this worth thinking about? Have they actually explained away the entire dark sector? (Answers: occasionally, possibly, yes, no.)

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Our picture of the universe may have just gotten a lot simpler. The major driver behind theories of non-baryonic (that is, not made out of the protons and neutrons that make up you and me and the rest of the observable universe) dark matter was that it seemed impossible to explain the way galaxies rotate without it — the observed motion only made sense if you assumed that the visible galaxy of normal stuff was surrounded by a massive halo of weird stuff.

Now two astrophysicists at the University of Victoria, Fred Cooperstock and Steven Tieu, have published a paper that makes all the weird stuff go away. According to Messrs. C. & T., the Newtonian approximation works well for stuff like the solar system because the planets’ contribution to the overall gravity of the system is so small compared to the sun’s, but it doesn’t work nearly as well for something like a galaxy where all the elements in the system (stars, in this case) contribute more or less equally. For that, they say, you need general relativity — and if you model a galaxy (which they did — ours and three or four others) with general relativity, explaining galactic rotation just with normal matter becomes pretty straightforward.

On the other hand, Mikolaj Korzynski of Warsaw University says that the Cooperstock-Tieu model requires, in addition to stars and dust and whatnot, a giant, infinitely thin disk cutting through the middle of the galaxy like a black hole in the shape of a cookie sheet, and “should therefore be considered unphysical.”

Still, the approach sounds promising. At least, it raises the bar for dark matter — I suspect more than one astrophysicist out there is now feverishly “doing sums” trying to relativistically replicate the Newtonian dark-matter halo model. Good times!

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October 14, 2005

This time: wicked infrared pictures of the Andromeda galaxy, again over at Cosmic Variance, courtesy of the other space telescope.

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Portraits of elementary particles, by Jan-Henrik Andersen. The collections of quarks are a bit dull and educational, but I do like the photon and the up quark and some of the other “solo” portraits. More on Mr. Andersen’s site, too.

Figure 1. Supersymmetrical W boson.

(Via Cosmic Variance, who got it from BoingBoing.)

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October 3, 2005

. . . and into the realm of “So what are they cutting his crack with?” Shorter Eric Lerner, as paraphrased by Ken Macleod:

Lerner’s thesis is that there’s a tight connection between technological devlopment, our understanding of the universe, and the general condition of society. The Big Bang cosmology has an immense ideological appeal in a society without any hopeful vision of the future. The shift from experiment and observation to increasingly arcane theory and the multiplication of epicycles is a further malign twist, digging us deeper into the hole. Fundamental technological developments are slowed down. Apart from biotech, in which great advances in both theory and practice have gone together, the rest of our technology — even the Internet — is an elaboration, refinement and diffusion of developments made half a century or more ago.

Look, there may be good reasons to criticize Big Bang cosmology — though I’d still put my money on either the string theory kids at Cosmic Variance or Malcolm’s Loop Quantum Gravity posse to sort them out. But personal pique at society’s failure to provide you with a fusion-powered rocket car (with big tailfins!) is not one of them.

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September 28, 2005

And it’s in National Geographic, so you know it’s true.

The study team reports that the severed tentacle repeatedly gripped the boat deck and crew after it was hauled aboard.

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And when you’re done with that, read Fafblog on Kurzweil. Wooooooeeeeeeoooooo!

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August 29, 2005

I am now the proud possessor of the Museum of Jurassic Technology’s lovely hardbound Jubilee Catalogue. You, I suspect, are not.

(Thanks to Meghan for tilting the Plane of Existence of my 1996 visit to the Museum, postponing the day on which its Perverse Experience Boundary crosses my Cone of Obliscence.)

(And damn William James and Geoffrey Sonnabend for being born half a century apart, anyway. They so need to go on an adventure together! With Gérard Depardieu as Louis Agassiz.)

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August 23, 2005

Would indexicals still be interesting if you stripped all the example sentences down to something like Chomsky’s deep structure? In other words, is this really an interesting fundamental problem, or is it a historical accident, resulting from Western philosophy doing most of its work over the last two dozen centuries in a handful of Indo-European and Semitic languages?

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August 22, 2005

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling pretty depressed about the ultimate fate of the universe lately. All this damn dark energy accelerating everything —

For w=-3/2, the Milky Way will get stripped roughly 60 million years before the Big Rip. Curiously, when this occurs the horizon will still be ~70 Mpc, so there may still be other observable galaxies that we will also see stripped apart (although given the time delay from distant objects, we will see the Milky Way destroyed first). A few months before the end of time, the Earth will be ripped from the Sun, and ~30 minutes before the end the Earth will fall apart. . . molecules and then atoms will be torn apart roughly 10-19 seconds before the end, and then nuclei and nucleons will get dissociated in the remaining interval. . . . .

The end of structure, from cosmic, macroscopic scales down to the microscopic, leads us to remark that our present epoch is unique from the viewpoint that at no other time are non-linear structures possible. When the phantom energy becomes strong enough, gravitational instability no longer works and the Universe becomes homogeneous. Eventually, individual particles become isolated: points separated by a distance greater than 3δt(1+w)/(1+3w) at a time trip-δt cannot communicate before the Big Rip. Therefore, the dominance of the phantom energy signals the end of our brief era of cosmic structure . . .

(Caldwell, Kamionkowski, and Weinberg, “Phantom Energy and Cosmic Doomsday”)

— it’s like the post-Einstein, post-Hubble version of the last chapter (chronologically speaking) of The Time Machine:

The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives — all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity.

Then a few weeks ago, as part of my ongoing plan to clear my bookshelves by taking boxes full of books in categories J, L, M, and N down to the used book store and trading them in for a much smaller number of more expensive books (it’s kind of a Zeno’s Paradox thing), I picked up Infinite Worlds: An Illustrated Voyage to Planets beyond Our Sun. And what do I find out, in between all the pretty pictures of hot Jupiters and pulsar planets? That most of the stars that will ever exist have already been formed, and that even if the universe’s rate of expansion isn’t accelerating, in another 10 trillion years we’ll have drawn down our whole account in the cosmic hydrogen bank, and Stelliferous Era will be over. That most of the history of the universe, like 1040 years of it, is going to be spent sitting in the dark waiting for protons to decay. (And even when they do, it’s not very exciting.)

So I was pleased to run across this post from Sean Carroll (of the U of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute, and one of the brains in the vat powering Cosmic Variance — which if you’ve read this far without your eyes glazing over, you probably should be reading):

So when we evolve to “empty space,” there is still some energy pushing the universe around; the resulting spacetime is called “de Sitter space.” Along with this energy comes a small nonzero temperature, which keeps all the fields in the universe gently fluctuating. Gentle or not, however, if we wait long enough we will find a really big fluctuation — one that is large enough to make inflation spontaneously begin. In other words, we are suggesting (although it's not original with us) that de Sitter space is unstable; it doesn’t last forever, but eventually starts inflating here and there. These little inflationary patches will ultimately convert into ordinary matter and radiation, leaving behind universes just like our own.

(Yay!)

And here is the fun part: this story can be told either forward or backward in time. In other words, you give me some state of the universe, chosen however you like. (Maybe you calculated the wavefunction of the universe, who knows.) I evolve it using the laws of physics. If Jennie and I are correct, it first empties out into a cold de Sitter space, dominated by a tiny shred of dark energy. But eventually we get lucky, and a small patch of inflating universe is born within this de Sitter background. This will happen at different places and times, give rise to a fractal distribution of spacetime geometry in the far future. And I can do the same thing going backwards in time from the initial state you gave me; the generic evolution is the same. It will empty out, and eventually begin to spontaneously inflate. So in the super-far past of our universe, before our “Big Bang” (which is nothing special in this picture), we will find other Big Bangs for which the arrow of time is running in the opposite direction. On the very largest scales, the entire universe is symmetric with respect to time.

So, you creationists: leave evolution to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Instead, thank God for vacuum fluctuations.

Still: I wish the cosmologists would hurry up and sort this stuff out. Heat death, Big Rip, brane collisions — how am I supposed to write my space opera if I don’t know how the universe is supposed to end?

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Update: Did I say most of the history of the universe is spent sitting in the dark waiting for protons to decay? I meant most of the history of the universe is spent sitting in the dark waiting for black holes to decay. Which takes even longer. Like, somewhere between 1083 and 10131 years, according to the University of Michigan.

And when you’re done with that, you can occupy yourself waiting for nothing.

Forever.

It’s like Sartre’s recipe for tuna casserole.

Except: Vacuum fluctuations! Yay!

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P.S. Justine — does this help? Or still bored?

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August 10, 2005

Could the web be any more useful than this? (Okay, it’s mostly about board breaking, but still.)

Meet Chris, kung fu expert and general, all-round crazy person. Sometimes he breaks concrete blocks just for the hell of it.

Meet Michelle. She’s a physicist working at the Institute of Physics, but recently she’s been learning kung fu. In particular she wants to learn how to break wood with her bare hands, and find out the physics behind the feat.

(Via Cosmic Variance.)

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July 29, 2005

Update (30 July): Dr. Brown warns us: “For those speculating that the name proposed is ‘Lila’ based on the web site name I must warn you that that is really just a sentimental dad’s early morning naming of a web site for his three week old daughter and one should not take it too seriously!”

Me, I’m plumping for “Planet Lizardo.”

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From the NYT:

Astronomers announced today that they have found a lump of rock and ice that is larger than Pluto and the farthest known object in the solar system. . . . The new object — as yet unamed — is currently 9 billion miles away from the Sun, or about three times Pluto’s current distance from the Sun. But its 560-year orbit also brings it as close as 3.3 billion miles. Pluto's elliptical orbit ranges between 2.7 billion and 4.6 billion miles.

The astronomers do not have an exact size for the new planet, but its brightness and distance tell them that it is at least as large as Pluto.

“It is guaranteed bigger than Pluto,” said Michael E. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech, who led the team that made the discovery. “Even if it were 100 percent reflective, it would be larger than Pluto. It can’t be more than 100 percent reflective.”

And it’s even from another dimension. (Not the eighth, though, the third. Its orbit is skewed 44 degrees from the ecliptic.) I suppose they won’t actually call it “Planet Ten,” though. Dr. Brown’s web page says “We have proposed a name to the IAU and will announce it when that name is accepted.” From the page title and URL, I’m guessing that name is “Lila.”

Still — where’s my overthruster?

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July 28, 2005

1. According to Cosmic Variance (citing NPR), “40 percent of Amercians believe they will be in the top one percent of income earners by the time they die.” (Wow, there must be a lot of churn in that top 1 percent . . .)

2. Via John MacGowan:

   I need not discredit philosophy by laborious criticism of its arguments. It will suffice if I show as a matter of history it fails to prove its pretension to be ‘objectively’ convincing. In fact it does so fail. I believe that the logical reason of man operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds arguments for our convictions, for it has to find them. It amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it, and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it; it cannot now secure it.

   — William James, Varieties of Religious Experience

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July 26, 2005

I could stand to listen to a whole CD of “Eerie Sounds of Saturn’s Radio Emissions,” I think. I’m not sure whether speeding up the tape by a factor of 22 and down-shifting the frequency by a factor of 44 is really fair play, but regardless: them planets make some weird-ass noises. (Via Bruce Sterling.)

(Be sure to also check out “Bizarre Sounds of Saturn’s Radio Emissions,” where they play totally different games with the frequency and playback speed. Apparently eerie means Duet for Theremin and Wind Machine, while bizarre means Cantata for Silly Computer Noises.)

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May 11, 2005

Who knew?

A causality violation occurs when a message ordering problem results in one host taking an action based on information that another host has not yet received. In this case P2 is trying to invoke a method on P1, because P2 thinks that P1 has Obj.

In designing systems, we assume that any action a host takes may be affected by any message it has previously received. As a result, we would consider the situation above to be a potential causality violation, even if the message from P2 to P1 turned out to be completely independent of the messages that it received. Colloquially, we don't distinguish between potential causality violations and causality violations that have real consequences. Instead we call them both causality violations — even if the messages turn out to be independent.

(Gregory Kesden, lecture notes for CS 15-612, Distributed Systems, Carnegie-Mellon, Lecture 3.)

It gets funnier:

Student Question: Couldn’t we just make it the responsibility of the invoking process to check with the target process first, before trying to invoke the method on the remote object?

Answer: I’m glad you asked. This is an outstanding opportunity to mention the time-honored distrbuted systems principle, “It is easier to move a problem in a distributed system than it is to actually fix it.”

. . . This is also a good opportunity to mention another famous principle in the design of distributed systems, the ostrich principle. The ostrich is famous for burying its head in the sand. This technique is also frequently used in distributed systems. Sometimes particularly unlikely or obscure problems are allowed to remain in a design. This is particularly true if the cost of the resulting failure is low enough. The bottom line is that implementing a perfect distributed system may involve additional overhead that, in the aggregate, will result in a greater loss in productivity than the rare occurance of an unlikely error state.

There has got to be a way to use those ideas to deal with spacetime causality violation in my gonzo space opera.

[Side note: “Planet of the Amazon Women” (excerpt here), my first published story set in the gonzo space opera’s universe, will be going live on Strange Horizons next week. I like to think of it as: Ammonite and “Biographical Notes to ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum” go out on double-date with Roadside Picnic and “Hinterlands.”]

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May 5, 2005

I don’t know why I’ve never thought of this interface before. Now if only there was one with switchable timezones and parallel Islamic, Jewish, and Mayan calendars . . .

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April 11, 2005

Apparently this is not as easy as it looks.

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Still sick. No takers yet on my offer.

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March 24, 2005

I would totally buy one of these.

Especially if someone cross-bred it with one of Theo Jansen’s strandbeesten. And added seats.

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March 23, 2005

Update: Salon’s running another review of Incompleteness, and the way they tell it is almost the opposite of the way you do, Ben: That if mathematics were just a story we tell (or, in Hilbert’s language, a game we play), then it should be complete and consistent.

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Nice bit about Gödel in Slate.

What is it about Gödel’s theorem that so captures the imagination? Probably that its oversimplified plain-English form — “There are true things which cannot be proved” — is naturally appealing to anyone with a remotely romantic sensibility. Call it “the curse of the slogan”: Any scientific result that can be approximated by an aphorism is ripe for misappropriation. The precise mathematical formulation that is Gödel's theorem doesn’t really say “there are true things which cannot be proved” any more than Einstein’s theory means “everything is relative, dude, it just depends on your point of view.” And it certainly doesn’t say anything directly about the world outside mathematics, though the physicist Roger Penrose does use the incompleteness theorem in making his controversial case for the role of quantum mechanics in human consciousness. Yet, Gödel is routinely deployed by people with antirationalist agendas as a stick to whack any offending piece of science that happens by. A typical recent article, “Why Evolutionary Theories Are Unbelievable,” claims, “Basically, Gödel's theorems prove the Doctrine of Original Sin, the need for the sacrament of penance, and that there is a future eternity.“ If Gödel’s theorems could prove that, he’d be even more important than Einstein and Heisenberg!

Say on, brother! I’m cool with using oversimplified scientific theories as metaphors for human experience — and vice versa. Once you start citing those metaphors as proofs, though, you’re over the madness horizon.

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March 11, 2005

According to the FedEx web site, my new iBook is being drop-shipped to me direct from Suzhou. How 21st-century is that?

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January 13, 2005

So, apparently it wasn’t MRSA after all, but some ordinary infection much less exciting and dangerous, if equally annoying. Oh well.

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January 11, 2005

The Swift telescope is all very well, but I still don’t think enough is being done to protect us from the threat of automated alien warships armed with zero-point-powered gamma-ray lasers.

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January 5, 2005

. . . you’re diagnosed with an antibiotic-resistant staph infection and you haven’t even been in a hospital lately.

Still, at least it’t not necrotizing fascitis. Yet.

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December 17, 2004

French scientists prove that nerdy fruit flies have unhappy childhoods. Well, short childhoods. As in, fewer of them live through it.

Something that any geek who lived through junior high will understand.

(Via Gwenda.)

Comments (2)

December 8, 2004

From the Independent:

As Paul Sieveking, who has spent nearly 30 years with the Fortean Times, sifting and adding to its three-million-item archive of the strange, says: “Phenomena occur much more often than people imagine.“ And so, the world being in a constant state of Just Fancy That, we've developed a sort of Richter Scale of the Remarkable.

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October 22, 2004

As Bruce Sterling said: “Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats.” Here’s what we can do to rats now.

“It’s essentially a dish with 60 electrodes arranged in a grid at the bottom,” (bioengineer Thomas) DeMarse said. “Over that we put the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network — a brain.”

The brain and the simulator establish a two-way connection, similar to how neurons receive and interpret signals from each other to control our bodies. By observing how the nerve cells interact with the simulator, scientists can decode how a neural network establishes connections and begins to compute, DeMarse said.

(Via BoingBoing.)

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August 11, 2004

Aug. 11, 2004 | Shanghai, China — Chinese astronauts are in the final stages of preparing for a manned space mission that will orbit the globe 14 times before returning to Earth, a state-run newspaper reported Thursday. . . .

On Wednesday, state-run television and other media, citing senior officials in China's space program, reported that China would send its first person into space on Oct. 15 [emphasis added] for a single-orbit, 90-minute flight.

Presumably that would be October 15th of last year?

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July 13, 2004

There’s something amusing at having your browser freeze up while trying to load a page on causality violation.

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June 11, 2004

So I’ve finally given in and gotten an instant messaging account. chronodm on AIM. Those of you that are ahead of me on the technology curve, feel free to distract me now.

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May 1, 2004

“The Legend of Jake Einstein.” Deborah Layne. Fortean Bureau. It’s the rootin’-est, tootin’-est tale of high-energy physics since Nils Bohr shot George Gamow. Y’all go read it, now, and y’all better laugh.

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April 7, 2004

Don’t expect medicine to play the role of that imaginary deity who visits torments on the wicked and spares the just. That’s not what medicine or religion are about.

——Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Yes, but if it was, wouldn’t that be a cool premise for a story? Hounded by the Church for a crime he didn’t commit, Martin Luther is . . . The Fugitive!

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(Teresa’s point was originally made as part of a long and elegant rebuttal to the odious argument that AIDS sufferers, “ who engage in risky behavior and get sick should be lower in priority than people who have had nothing to do with their illness.” Being the thoughtless geek that I am, naturally I fastened on the alternate history scenario rather than on the main argument, retaining just enough sense of decorum to post here rather than there.)

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December 9, 2003

Okay, it’s ten years late, and it’s not exactly Discovery, but it does bear Discovery a certain resemblance: the proposed Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, or JIMO.

Figure 1. Artist’s conception of JIMO

Three hundred feet long, nuclear-powered, ion drive. I can’t figure out if that’s cool, or just retro-60s. Where are the starwisps?

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December 4, 2003

Meanwhile, among the invertebrates:

A fossil found in Herefordshire, England, may be the oldest record of an animal that is unarguably male. Scientists report today in the journal Science that the tiny crustacean, only two-tenths of an inch long, had an unmistakable penis.

In the paper published in today's issue, the scientists name the creature Colymbosathon ecplecticos, which they say means swimmer with a large penis.

—— James Gorman, “Fossil Find Hailed as Earliest Recorded Male”, New York Times, 4 December 2003

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Six new species of large prehistoric mammal have turned up (dead, sad to say) in Ethiopia, including enough Proboscidea to firmly establish the African ancestry of the elephant family. With the exception of the SUV-sized Arsinoitherium — the largest yet discovered — and a Deinotherium “halfway between a large pig and a small hippo,” most of these guys seem to have been in about the one-ton range. I can’t help but think that would be just about right for ranching.

(Courtesy of Kathryn Cramer.)

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November 22, 2003

Not only does Megafauna divide extinct mammals into much more useful categories than does your local paleontologist — Woolly and Huge, for instance, vs. Strange and/or Massive — the site provides a handy set of size charts:

Figure 1. Extinct dog, Osteoborus cynoides (“dog-like bone-crusher”). Described as “small.”

Figure 1. Extinct camel, Camelops hesternus.

Figure 1. Indricotherium transsouralicum, the largest mammal ever to walk the Earth.

My fondness for giant extinct mammals dates to the day when, as a small child, I first stood beneath the full-scale model Indricotherium (then known as Baluchitherium) in Lincoln, Nebraska’s Morrill Hall. Next time you need to hold a private function in Lincoln, consider renting their Elephant Hall. It’s worth it.

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November 11, 2003

I don’t know why I need one of these, but I do: a gas-powered one-horsepower home steam engine that works as a combination water heater and electrical generator, from UK power generation company Powergen.

Not like there’s room in my apartment, but still.

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October 15, 2003

Looks like China’s done it.

[Washington Post] China on Wednesday became the third nation to send a man into space, launching a Long March 2F rocket that carried a 38-year-old former fighter pilot on a journey to take him around Earth 14 times, state media reported.

The Chinese space mission, which came 42 years after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and American Alan Shepard became the first men in space, was expected to last 21 hours. The capsule, containing the astronaut, known as a taikonaut or yunhangyuan in Chinese, is scheduled to touch down near the Jiuchuan launch station in the Gobi Desert, 1,000 miles west of Beijing.

Figure 1. Long March 2F rocket carrying Shenzhou 5 space capsule.

State media identified the taikonaut as Lt. Col. Yang Liwei, from Manchuria. Yang was described as an athletic former fighter pilot who has an 8-year-old son, likes swimming and skating, and has not seen his younger brother or elder sister in three years while he prepared to become China's first man in space.

. . . China's media appeared poised to turn the launch into a grand campaign touting China's communist system. "I will not disappoint the motherland," Yang was quoted on China's biggest news Web site www.Sina.com, as saying. "I will complete each movement with total concentration. And I will gain honor for the People's Liberation Army and for the Chinese nation." He added, "See you tomorrow."

The space program, which is believed to have a budget of $2 billion a year, is run by the People's Liberation Army.

Gosh, it’s just like the good old days, only without the depressing nuclear standoff. Makes me want to dig up my Sino-Colombian cold war novel again.

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September 23, 2003

Been doing some research on AI, IA, the Singularity, computronium, Matrioshka Brains, all that good stuff, trying to piece together the MacGuffin for the Planetary Romance.

Man, is it Sturgeon’s Law City out there — and even the stuff written by the people who know what they’re doing seems pretty damned simplistic and old-fashioned. (Some of them even still seem to think Deep Blue’s defeat of Kasparov says something about AI, instead of something about chess. Others are busy turning the Singularity into a religion.)

It all boils down to the ‘simple AI’ scenario, the ‘Mycroft’ scenario (from Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) — that if you could just connect enough transistors together, and maybe kick the box a couple of times in the right place, you’d have something like a human brain. As a professional programmer, this sounds like total fantasyland to me. I’m aware there are plenty of professional programmers and comp-sci types out there who would disagree, but I’m just not seeing any qualitative change over the last ten or twenty years in the sorts of things we’re making computers do. Wherever that 100- or 1000-fold increase in processor power is going, it’s off on some other vector, perpendicular to the one that would point toward conscious, humanoid AI. More transistors just gets you a giant Beowulf cluster. More transistors is boring.

More and more I find myself leaning toward the Roger Penrose (The Emperor’s New Mind) argument that consciousness may rely on non-computable processes, even if I’m not enough of a mathematician to follow his argument or even believe it. (It’s all very well for Penrose to say that his ability to prove new mathematical theorems demonstrates that his consciousness is non-computable, but where does that leave us non-mathematicians?)1

Then there’s the Bruce Sterling (“Swarm”, “Our Neural Chernobyl”) argument, which is that consciousness is highly overrated and probably not a long-term survival characteristic anyway.

The only interesting computer stuff going on is in things like genetic algorithms and cellular automata. Genetic algorithms lead to hardware and software human beings can build and control and use, but that no human being can understand.2 Cellular automata lead to the Greg Egan (Diaspora, etc.) scenario where you have purely mathematical ‘beings’ that ‘exist’ only theoretically, as results that would be produced if some relatively simple function were iterated some arbitrarily large number of times. Either one could certainly lead to systems with behavior sufficiently complex and unpredictable that we might have to take their word that they’re intelligent, but neither of them promises anything like the Mycroft scenario; neither of them promises either humanoid AI or simulation of human consciousness in the foreseeable future. No Wintermute, no Neuromancer.

I’m thinking it’s likely to turn out that Wittgenstein’s Lion isn’t just, like Ben Rosenbaum says, the answer to Fermi’s Paradox, but the answer to the Turing Test as well: if a machine was to become intelligent, we wouldn’t recognize it.

Which leaves me kind of screwed, as far as my MacGuffin’s concerned. But that’s probably a good thing, since if I went with that MacGuffin it would seriously look like I was ripping off Walter Jon Williams’ “Prayers on the Wind.” (Which is a kick-ass story, by the way. You should read it.)

I’ll just have to come up with something else. I’ve promised to have my outline done in a week and a half. Anyone got any good ideas? :)

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1 That doesn’t, note, imply that artificial intelligence is impossible, only that it's impossible to achieve just by making bigger, faster Turing machines.

2 It’s ironic that in A Fire Upon The Deep Vinge cites just such hardware as evidence that his Skroderiders are engineered artifacts of a superhuman intelligence, when it’s likely that in the near future we’ll have such hardware as the result of ‘design’ processes that are exactly the opposite of intelligent. But then Vinge is a pretty clued-in guy, so I’m sure the GA stuff was in his mind when he was writing those scenes. When he gets around to the next book in that sequence I’ll be curious as to whether he addresses the question of whether the Blight was actually intelligent at all, in the conventional sense.

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August 21, 2003

So last night Lara calls me and wakes me up and tells me to go up onto the roof of my apartment building and look at Mars. “It’s the best look you’re going to get for three hundred years,” she says.

I’m skeptical. I have lousy color vision, and planets all look the same to me. But I pull on some clothes and go upstairs and look southeast and MAN-SLAYING ARES; ARES THE SHIELD-PIERCER; ARES, SACKER OF TOWNS; ARES, INSATIABLE IN WAR it’s the brightest thing in the sky and it’s redder than a harvest moon.

Figure 1. Artist’s impression of Mars

Naturally I spent the rest of the night fitfully dreaming that I was a teenage colonist on an imperfectly terraformed Mars, being treated like an untouchable by the aristocractic third- and fourth-generation colonists; and waking up gasping, convinced that my lungs were atrophying like those of Manue in Walter Miller’s “Crucifixus Etiam” / “The Sower Does Not Reap”.

But it was worth it.

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August 14, 2003

And bullets, and grenades, pretty much anything else. I guess the good news is, hafnium-178m2 looks to be just as much of a pain to refine as enriched uranium, so they should stay out of the hands of everyone but the rich countries for a while. And the rich countries don’t have much incentive to make them, since the kind of wars they’re fighting these days are pushing them toward weapons that are more discriminate in who they kill, and not less.

The New Scientist article is a little vague, seeming to blur the line between “energy” and “destructive power” — a gamma-ray burst may deliver the same number of joules as a ton of TNT, but it’s unlikely to leave the same crater. That said, these suckers sound like bad news: comparable to neutron bombs (in that they kill live things but leave buildings standing) but, apparently, cleaner simpler and easier to scale down to “thinkable” size. If someone finds a use case for them they could be very bad news.

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July 23, 2003

Jed recently noted Popular Science having a problem with Levi’s description of their Dockers’ new anti-spill fiber coating as “nanotechnology”. Apparently it’s not just them. Nanotech visionary K. Eric Drexler, the man who invented nanotech as we [science fiction readers] know it — atomic-scale machines, grey goo, utility fogs, Diamond Age and Queen of Angels and Aristoi — is not happy, either.

“‘Nanotechnology’ has now become little more than a marketing term,” said Eric Drexler, founder of the Foresight Institute, the leading nanotech think tank. “Work that scientists have been doing for decades is now being relabeled nanotechnology.”

On the other hand (page 2, same article), the folks he’s criticizing have a point, too.

“Most people think this field is about nanobots. That’s a big myth,” said Chad Mirkin, director of Northwestern University's $80 million Institute for Nanotechnology. “There’s no real credible research in nanobots. Zero.”

He added, “It’s not clear that you could ever make these structures. Most of the [science] in this area is snake oil.”

So what do you think? As a science fiction writer, do I have to plot around a future with cell-sized spybots and shape-changing self-replicating assassination machines, or can I ratchet it down to gecko gloves and smart fabrics?

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July 22, 2003

In several senses.

I can’t remember now how I ran across this — it was four or five hops from Brad deLong’s journal — but it’s interesting: an interview with Jim Gray, head of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Group, on the future of storage. Apparently our ability to cram data onto hard disks is increasing ten times faster than our ability to actually access that data — and that’s only talking about disk hardware, never mind higher-level issues of organization and indexing and whatnot.

Certainly we have to convert from random disk access to sequential [i.e., tape-like, if you remember tape] access patterns. Disks will give you 200 accesses per second, so if you read a few kilobytes in each access, you’re in the megabyte-per-second realm, and it will take a year to read a 20-terabyte disk. . . .

On the [other] hand, these disks offer many opportunities. You can have a file where all the old versions are saved. The unused part of the disk can be used as tape or as archive. That’s already happening with people making snapshots of the disk every night and offering a version of the file system as of yesterday or as of a certain point in time. They can do that by exploiting the disk’s huge capacity.

Okay, that part’s probably only of interest to programmers. But the present is already weird enough: terabyte-scale SneakerNet.

I’ve been working with a bunch of astronomers lately and we need to send around huge databases. I started writing my databases to disk and mailing the disks. . . .

So lately I’m sending complete computers. We're now into the 2-terabyte realm, so we can't actually send a single disk; we need to send a bunch of disks. It’s convenient to send them packaged inside a metal box that just happens to have a processor in it. I know this sounds crazy — but you get an NFS or CIFS server and most people can just plug the thing into the wall and into the network and then copy the data.

I’ll have to work that idea into the space opera. One of the premises of the space opera is that (at least in one of its civilizations) interstellar communication is FTL, but expensive, while interstellar travel is STL and also expensive. Yottabyte-scale SneakerNet might grow the market for space travel, and give my interstellar civilization more of an excuse to exist. (Though it begs the question of why they don’t just send the data by radio. . .  I can come up with socioeconomic reasons for that, but I’d rather have an engineering reason.)

A final note, with some fun possibilities:

Of course, this is the ultimate virus.

In the old days, when people brought floppy disks around, that was the standard way of communicating viruses among computers. Now, here I am mailing a complete computer into your data center. My virus can do wonderful things. This computer is now inside your firewall, on your network.

Of course, the state of the art on that is still (going on two decades later) Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep, with its sentient network packets.

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(Courtesy of BoingBoing.)

“We want to investigate how people react when they first encounter Mo, as we lovingly like to call the robot,” said Prof Warwick. “Through one of Mo's eyes, he can watch people's responses to him following them around.

“It appears this is not deemed acceptable for under 18-year-olds without prior consent from their legal guardian. This presents us with a big problem as we cannot demonstrate Mo in action either to visitors or potential students.”

Maybe, Professor Warwick, you shouldn’t have made Mo look like an evil disembodied demonic skull.

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June 28, 2003

I’ve been annoyed with myself for some time because I still haven’t bothered to read Drexler, let alone do anything to figure out how close we really are to being able to dissolve the world into grey goo.

While trying to find this Economist piece on “Quasam” (an apparently miraculous new material apparently made from unrolled carbon nanotubes and predicted, at least by the people who hold the patents, to be bigger than plastics), I instead ran across this: Trends in Nanotechnology Weekly. A sample:

Climbing the walls again

Yes, it’s the return of the gecko story. We can happily report that a UK-based team at Manchester University has demonstrated a material where each square centimetre contains 100 million hairs. The combined effect of the weak van der Waals forces exerted by each square centimetre is sufficient to support a kilogram. For a slightly more in-depth look and a picture of Spiderman hanging from the ceiling, see here.

TNTW looks like a nice roundup, and hopefully will get me some ways toward catching up with the state of the art myself, instead of making Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson and Linda Nagata and Walter Jon Williams do all my research for me.

Plus, it’s British.

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June 13, 2003

If Gulf War I was the cable television war, Gulf War II is the GPS and satellite phone war.

Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, in a chat on the Post site:

I went to the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility in Tuweitha with a team of genuine nuclear experts. But they were not experts on Iraq’s nuclear history, and they knew very little about the site. The leader found a bunch of radioactive drums and didn’t expect them there. I took my pocket GPS, obtained the lat/long coordinates, called an inspector with long experience at the site, told him what I was seeing and the coordinates, and he said: That’s the permanent nuclear waste storage facility, under IAEA monitoring, Building 55. It’s not the team leader’s fault he didn't know that, but it's somebody’s fault.

Never mind the politics; that’s just a very sweet, very appropriate, very casual use of technology.

It used to be that an easy way for an author (or screenwriter) to get a character into a jam was to get that character lost; GPS is making that harder and harder to justify, not only in science fiction (which already doesn’t have much of an excuse) but in the mainstream as well.

Now combine that with cheap cell and satellite phones — especially if those phones have Internet access — and now your protagonist not only has no excuse to be lost, but no excuse to be ignorant either; at least, not ignorant of anything that’s either public knowledge, or known to some other character your protagonist can call — or who can call your protagonist. (The Matrix is the only recent work I can think of that’s used this to its full extent — though, admittedly, making a call from virtual reality to reality is a bit of a special case.)

I expect to see a rash of idiot plots in which the characters “somehow” manage to leave their GPS receivers, cell phones, and whatnot in their other pairs of pants. But readers and moviegoers are only going to put up with that for so long, and then authors and screenwriters are going to have to start working harder.

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May 9, 2003

Following up on our earlier report on Borges’ Library of Babel, we have a rather more discouraging note from the Dept. of Combinatorics. It is a well-known truism, often attributed to T.H. Huxley (and, for that reason, often attacked by creationists as if it meant something) that a sufficiently large number of monkeys, given sufficient time and sufficient typewriter ribbon, would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

Various probabilistic approaches have been made in an attempt to determine the required quantities of monkeys, time, and ribbon, but a recent small-scale experiment with nine monkeys suggests that the analysis may be less straightforward: the subjects of the experiment did not, in fact, type randomly, and their longest typed “utterances” consisted largely of the letter S. (It is worth noting, however, that the monkeys in question were provided not with a typewriter but with a word processor.)

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April 18, 2003

Finally, a private manned space project I can actually believe in.

“The event is not about dreams, predictions or mockups,” Rutan explained in a pre-debut statement. “We will show actual flight hardware: an aircraft for high-altitude airborne launch, a flight-ready manned spaceship, a new, ground-tested rocket propulsion system and much more. This is not just the development of another research aircraft, but a complete manned space program with all its support elements,” he said.

Rutan makes it clear that the unveiling is not a marketing event.

“We are not seeking funding and are not selling anything. We are in the middle of an important research program…to see if manned space access can be done by other than the expensive government programs,” Rutan explained.

Given Scaled Composites’ record for achieving neat stuff, I have no doubt that if they say they’re going to put people in space, they mean it. Plus, their spaceship looks really cool.

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Update: The Scaled Composites site is no longer Slashdotted. Many more pictures, as well as a FAQ and some other stuff.

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April 2, 2003

My very good friend from high school (the one who prefers not to have his name bandied about anywhere ECHELON might notice it) once said of me that someone should pay me to design user interfaces. After several years of working in the software field I’ve lost much of my enthusiasm for the idea, largely as a result of finding that

1. no one actually gives a damn about good UI design, and
2. no matter how clueless they are, they all think they’re UI experts.

(This is not strictly true. It is, however, true of almost everywhere I’ve had the misfortune to work over the last ten years. I’m sure management at most of those places would deny the accusation, but they’ve never been willing to put their money where their mouths are. [Except Aashima Narula at RealNetworks. Aashima was great.] “Good enough” has always been good enough, even when it clearly wasn’t.)

That said, user interface design is still a minor passion of mine, and one I look forward to indulging when I retire at 35 to my horse ranch in the California wine country. (Why, yes, I did buy the Brooklyn Bridge. Why do you ask?) I still enjoy reading about it and griping about it. And I particularly enjoy articles like this one, from John Siracusa of Ars Technica, on the rise and fall of the Macintosh Finder.

The illusion was so powerful and so like the familiar physical world that the Finder itself disappeared as a separate entity. It has been said that “the interface is the computer”, meaning that the average user makes no distinction between the way he interacts with the computer and the reality of the computer's internal operation. If the interface is hard to use, the computer is hard to use, and so on. The interface is the computer.

In the days of classic Mac OS, the Finder was the interface--and, by extension, was the computer. When people raved about the Mac’s “ease of use” (especially back in the days when the Mac was home to the only mass-market personal computer GUI) what they were really raving about was the Finder. Applications may or may not have had pleasing, usable interfaces, but they were clearly “not the computer.” Applications ran on the computer. You launched applications, and then quit them. The Finder was what you saw when all the applications were closed. There was no closing the Finder. To close the Finder meant to turn off the computer. The Finder was the computer.

And, no, it wasn’t the single-tasking nature of the early Mac operating system that caused this feeling, for it continued long after the introduction of MultiFinder and, later, System 7. It was the meticulously constructed, relentlessly maintained illusion that files and folders were real, physical things existing inside the computer that you could manipulate in familiar, direct, predictable ways. [Emphasis in original]

A lot of people have excused the collapse of this illusion on the grounds that computers, and the way we use them, have “outgrown the desktop metaphor”. These people are wrong. (Or, rather, they’re missing the point. They may be right, but that’s not an excuse for crappy interfaces.) The desktop — the physical desktop — was essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon. The human brain, however, appears to be here for the long haul.

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January 31, 2003

Between work and the highly frustrating argument now going on over at Electrolite, I'm too burnt this morning to finish that mythical post I referred to a couple of days ago. (Or to get up to speed on this comment thread. I'll be over in a minute, really.)

In the mean time, though, here's another, smaller-scale model of traffic congestion — but this one isn't about economics, it's about waves. Or crystals. Or artificial life. Or ice-nine.

So, next time you are commuting and you approach a stoppage, don't think of it as a stupid f@#$% traffic jam. Think of it as a pressure wave which has approached your car and engulfed it. Think of it as a simple living thing which is composed of cars rather than molecules. Stay hopeful that the Crystalline Amoeba poops your car out soon. Take an aerial viewpoint, and visualize the wave which is moving backwards as you move forwards.

Comments (1)

January 23, 2003

I suspect there aren't many schools where you'd find a Professor Emeritus in the English Department saying something like “But the method is worth learning, like calculus.” But the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology is such a school, and Dr. Charles P. Campbell is such a professor.

Obviously, no one could use this sort of full-blown analysis very often. It's not much fun to do, except in the way that solving calculus problems is fun. And it wouldn't exactly be a pleasure to receive such an analysis. But the method is worth learning, like calculus, because it's an active knowledge rather than a passive one.

Passive knowledge is at best semioperational. It requires memorizing rules ("Avoid the passive.") and learning to recognize when to apply them ("Is 'Ed was retired' a passive?"). An active knowledge is always operating in the background, activating itself when it's needed.

——Dr. Charles P. Campbell, “Using Transformational Grammar as an Editing Tool”

Of all the linguistics classes I took in college — with the possible exception of Sandy Chung and Armin Mester's Poetry and Language, which I'm pleased to see they're still teaching — I probably enjoyed Syntax I the most. (Transformational grammar is fun the way calculus is fun. — Yes, calculus is fun. Haven't you seen Stand and Deliver?) But even when I went straight from UCSC to a job editing technical publications for Fujitsu Learning Media (as you can see if you click on the link, they still need the help), it never occurred to me that transformational grammar could be used as an editing tool.

But, as they warned us at FLM, often “know-how are not exposed from project manager's brain.” The knowledge — the internal understanding of grammar that I developed on my own, and the way of thinking about syntax that I learned at UCSC — was still there, “operating in the background,” as Dr. Campbell says.

Which is a damned good thing, because I'd never get any writing done if I had to stop and glue my infinitives back together all the time.

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