Your senses as sensors for the universe

In response to a friend's post, I wrote the following. Please enjoy the following.

It's an interesting, no, fascinating discovery that blind people can take such pictures. That they know of cracks in the sidewalk, where people’s heads are, and how to photograph, are amazing feats. It is truly wondrous and miraculous.

Or is it?

Is it so hard to believe that the blind can take beautiful pictures? Perhaps. But, may be not. Let’s explore our senses and see what we might find.

There is a current view in physics that the universe is a computer. This view holds that information is conserved and that it cannot be destroyed. What is information? Well, let us posit that information is a description of the universe, or of a part of that universe that we are experiencing at a specific place and time. There may be more to it, but clearly this is part of information of the universe.

We experience the universe through our senses: seeing, hearing, taste, smell, touch. Instead of calling them senses, let’s call them sensors. Our sensors don’t so much sense the universe as they measure the universe. When we drink tea, our mouths measure the temperature, either hot tea or ice tea. Our taste buds measure the sweetness. When we look we measure objects in our view for shape, color, and position relative to other objects in our field of view. Thus, seeing is really an act of measuring. Some of our senses have a higher resolution than others; we can hear a wide range of amplitudes, see an extremely diverse set of colors, but we cannot discern different tastes so well.

From our measurements we derive a sense of our universe. How do we derive that sense? Our brain. Our own internal, massively connected, computer. Our brains take measurements from our sensors and use those measurements to make sense of our universe. Our brains integrate our sight with our hearing, with our smell, with every sensor we have to describe our world.

For example, we can easily recognize smoke in the kitchen from a pot that’s on fire. We see the flames, see the smoke, hear the crackle, and smell the burn and feel the heat. We know where we are and our brains deduce a pot on fire.

Are our senses limited? In a way, yes, they measure one thing such as sound with our hearing. But that is not a true limitation. Consider a bat. Bats, as you know, emit sound, listen for reflections (echoes) and their brains are able to “see” and easily navigate in the dark of night. Thus hearing can be seeing.

Consider next: sonar. Ships send sound waves through the ocean and from these sound waves computers can print maps of the ocean floor. From sounds come pictures. One sensor can be used to produce what another type of sensor would produce. The trick, the key, is the processing.

Or, if you like, consider radar. A plane sends electromagnetic radiation to the ground and with special processing, that radiation is transformed to a picture of the ground complete with buildings, foliage, cars, and other objects present. It’s not sight, it’s radar and it’s call SAR: Synthetic Aperture Radar.

With those ideas in mind, let’s consider this book. The blind taking pictures. Far fetched? I should think not. Inside each of these creative and inventive people is a brain, a processor. This processor can take all sorts of measurements and with the proper program, call it training, give the user (that person) a sense of his surroundings. Hence, the beautiful story of the girl who “sees” cracks in the sidewalk with her stick. Her vision fails her but her brain is undeterred and processes measurements of touch to give her a sense of the ground beneath her feet.

Our bodies are fascinating and marvelous.

What can we learn from this beyond the lovely pictures and, possibly, what more one can do with a camera? I am no great photographer like my bowling buddy. However, I submit we all can learn to use our sensors in new ways that we are not now trained to do. And with that we can draw new beauty, and new visions, from the universe around us.

Michael Crichton's Speeches

Michael Crichton passed away this past week at the age of 66. While I've enjoyed many of his novels and movies, what I didn't know is that he had deep and thoughtful opinions about how science is conducted.

If you go to his site, click on speeches and take a look at any of them. You'll find them insightful, thought provoking, and I think, spot on as to one area that wrong with scientific research today.

A Letter to President Bush

As the second and last term of President Bush comes to a close, I'd like to share with you a letter I sent him. Here it is:

November 9, 2009

Dear President Bush,

I wanted to write you a short note to tell you that I'll miss you at the end of your second term. I voted for you twice and I have been proud to support you. You've kept our country safe after a terrible attack, you've been true to your values (and to values I share with you), and you've let me rest easy these past eight years.

An article by Jim Towey in this weekend's Wall Street Journal struck me and encouraged me to write you to say thank you. (It's entitled "Why I'll Miss President Bush.")

Thank you for being my President. Thank you for your leadership these past eight years. Thank you for protecting our country. Thank you for making difficult decisions. And thank you for devoting yourself to our nation.

I hope that the rest of your life will be filled success and joy. May G-d give you continued strength and guidance.

Sincerely yours,
David S. Mazel

The Large Hadron Collider: Rap Video

This video is not only fun, it's descriptive of the collider program.
Enjoy.

Periodic element videos

Videos for each element of the Periodic Table.

Cool.

Snag Films

Here's a new website for documentary films that you can watch and easily link to in your own site.

I found out about it from Walt Mossberg's Wall Street Journal column.

Enjoy!

Intelligence takes a holidy

Is "black hole" a racially insensitive term?

Apparently to some. From the City Hall Blog at the Dallas Morning News:

A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.

County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.

Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections "has become a black hole" because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud "Excuse me!" He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a "white hole."

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.

Mayfield shot back that it was a figure of speech and a science term.

Judge Jones should be very glad that the central collections office has not become a white hole, a theoretical object that ejects matter from beyond its event horizon, rather than sucking it in. It wouldn't be fun for Dallas to find itself so near a quasar.

The deep level of ignorance is overwhelming.

Global Warming: Yellow Science

This is one the best essays I've read on why we should all worry about global warming. But it's not the idea of global warming, rather it is the "science" such as it is, of the so-called experts.

[O]ver the past several decades an increasing number of scientists have shed the restraints imposed by the scientific method and begun to proclaim the truth of man-made global warming. This is a hypothesis that remains untested, makes no predictions that can be tested in the near future, and cannot offer a numerical explanation for the limited evidence to which it clings. No equations have been shown to explain the relationship between fossil-fuel emission and global temperature. The only predictions that have been made are apocalyptic, so the hypothesis has to be accepted before it can be tested.

The only evidence that can be said to support this so-called scientific consensus is the supposed correlation of historical global temperatures with historical carbon-dioxide content in the atmosphere. Even if we do not question the accuracy of our estimates of global temperatures into previous centuries, and even if we ignore the falling global temperatures over the past decade as fossil-fuel emissions have continued to increase, an honest scientist would still have to admit that the hypothesis of man-made global warming hardly rises to the level of "an assertion of what has been or would be the result of carrying out a specified observational procedure." Global warming may or may not be "the greatest scam in history," as it was recently called by John Coleman, a prominent meteorologist and the founder of the Weather Channel. Certainly, however, under the scientific method it does not rise to the level of an "item of physical knowledge."

Read the whole thing.

The Matrix: Brain Probe

A team at Caltech is working on a MEMS-based robot probe that will be able to slowly creep electrodes into your brain to connect up to specific neurons. Creepy indeed, but with potential uses for advanced control of prosthetic limbs, Luke Skywalker-style. But the idea has greater potential for "state-of-the-art experimental techniques for electrophysiology." according to team-leader Michael Wolf. And that's just got me picturing the neural probes of The Matrix.

The device would sense its way in, using MEMS motors to carefully push in multiple electrodes into the brain and detecting electrical activity at their tips. When the system senses an activity spike, the robotic probe would adjust microscopically, and then either stay put or move on to find a better signal. The micro-mechanical part is still in development, but the team says the software side of the device (that would enable it to find the right neurons and adjust the probes locations if signals faded) is all but complete. It uses an algorithm inspired by one the US military uses to track aircraft.

Seeing Magnetic

Click at the link above for a movie showing magnetic fields. It's worth a look, enjoy.

(Hat tip: Ilachina and thanks very much!)

Quants on Wall Street: Silly Science

“Maybe we need to build a computer simulation that has 50 million people, with complicated rules for each,” Fludzinski says. “It’s very difficult to explain why people behave irrationally.”

Quants, mathematical experts (some are physicists), try to model the stock market and that entails modeling humans. Human are complex systems that defy prediction. Complexity (or, say, cellular automata) are great for explanatory studies but do little for predictive behavior.

Read the article with a smile.

High School Robots Battle it Out!

Cool video of what high school students can do with robotics.

A great idea for students to gain interest in engineering and science.

Human Growth Hormone or Human guinea pigs?

Eliene Augenbraun discusses the trade-offs of being short compared to taking human growth hormones.

When I was a toddler in the early 1960s, my parents were very concerned when I suddenly stopped growing. I seemed healthy enough – my doctor tested everything he knew to test, but he was puzzled. He got me into a study of short stature at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore.

I spent days there being poked and prodded. Using what was cutting edge technology at the time, they found me to be: very short; very anxious (wouldn't you be if you were 4 or 5 years old, caged in a hospital far from your family, and stuck with needles every hour all day and all night for 3 days!?); and making normal amounts of growth hormone. They enrolled me in a long-term study of the effects of growth hormone (hGH) injection. I was in the control group – I got nothin'.

The subjects that got hGH got a little more: Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD).

Read the rest.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

The link is to Prof. Randy Pausch's "Last lecture." It's the whole lecture in one file; I watched it in pieces months ago so having a single link is a convenience.

Wednesday, April 9, 20/20 will have an update on Prof. Pausch, here's the link for a preview:

http://abcnews.go.com/gma/lastlecture

I spent 10-1/2 years in undergraduate and graduate school and I never had, nor met, anyone who comes close this professor.

My speech for a colleague

Last Friday was the last day for a friend of mine at my company. I said a few words about her at a gathering.

-------------------

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Today reminds me of a time not long ago. It was May 14, 1998, and after nine highly successful seasons, one of the greatest television comedy shows of our time came to an end. (The good news is that May 14 is John’s birthday!) When the show finally ended, its star was asked "Why stop now? You're at the top?" His reply: "When would you like me to go? The right time is when you're on top."

So, this week our friend Ann is calling her time at TSC to an end. She's at the top of her game. And unlike the television show, she's had a run of 21-years, or in TV-terms, 12-seasons longer than the show.

I know many of you have worked with her before, and many of you have spent more time with her than I. I envy you for what you must have shared. For me, it was almost 3-seasons ago that I joined the ASDP cast of characters and what a series it's been with Ann.

The ASDP, in my short time, has gone from an installation at Seattle-Tacoma airport, to an in-depth development of SPAN, two installations at JFK International airport, to our current projects at La Guardia and San Francisco, and even to new and evolving improvements at JFK.

Like a good television program, we've had some actors work with us and move on to other shows like Steve Romine and Mark Bond. Still, they never completely left us. Mark has helped us with our current work and Steve makes an occasional cameo appearance. We even had the pleasure of a special guest appearance with Sean Muldoon, who did wonderful work with us on an IRAD project at JFK. I think that's the first time I've ever walked so close to passenger airplanes taking off and landing. It was definitely the first time I've had direct communications between me and the air traffic control tower, that's where John and Sean were stationed!

Speaking of the IRAD, we had a guest director in the person of Lee Moyer. Lee has been a special guest: part engineer, part mentor, and part sage. He’s exceptional and we were fortunate and blessed to have him.

A time of travel we've had, and you may notice that our "home-base" has pretty much been New York. Like the comedy show, we even have a favorite restaurant; only it's not Monk's Cafe, it's a kosher steakhouse in Queens.

Like a good show, we've had our share of writing and ad-libbing, too. With Ann as director, we have presented papers at the past two International Carnahan conferences and we have another one at the IEEE Homeland security conference in May. Each paper has borne the mark of Annie with her crisp use of language, explanatory graphics, and remarkable descriptions of why there is no other system like ASDP available outside of TSC. And if you find something like it, best to keep that to yourself.

Let me introduce you to some of the cast, all of whom I know will miss Ann:

First, our newest actor is Shaudi. For those that missed it, Shaudi was featured in the last TSC newsletter, or you might say "Playbill." I urge everyone to read about her. If you know Shaudi, you won't learn anything you don't already know, but if you don't know her, well, she's a remarkable engineer and you owe it to yourself to find out why.

Our next cast member is John O'Neil. Ann auditioned John before I came to the show and it's easy to see how well Ann works at casting calls. John is everything one could want in an engineer, programmer, systems developer, tester, writer, hardware guy, software guy, camera controller, cabling, and the list goes on and on. If we could give an Oscar for best engineer, John would win it every year.

Let me say a few words about our star, Annie.

Annie has been gracious yet driven, funny yet serious, gentle yet forceful. She is helpful when asked, polite at all times, and caring in her manners and dealings with others.

When I was worried she sought to soothe me. When others were edgy, she calmed them. She has a gift for nurture and it comes through everyday.

Over our shared seasons, I've often started my days with Annie, vicariously (and only vicariously) climbed mountains with her, and oftentimes, I ended my days with her as well. There have been few people I've spent so much time with for so many days at a time. My wife even calls her my "work spouse." I guess there's something to that, in a sense anyway. And in that time, no matter what, she's rarely been upset or, shall we say, changed channels on me.

Ann, thank you for all your work, for your time and for the fun and good times, too. Best of luck to you as you change networks and seek audiences on other stations.

And the comedy show, what was this top rated comedy? Well, it had characters such as George Castanza and Cosmo Kramer. I would have to say that Annie is our Elaine. Elaine gave the show flair and fun, she was interesting, funny, and as we say about Annie, the eye candy.

It's been a great run; thanks for all you've done. Good luck and may God bless you.

The risk of nuclear war

How risky are nuclear weapons?
Amazingly, no one seems to know.

My name is Martin Hellman and I'm a professor at Stanford University. When I started this project, I looked for studies which estimated that risk. I also asked prominent authorities on nuclear weapons, national security, and risk analysis if they knew of any such studies. I found nothing.

Next I did a preliminary analysis of the risk we face and found that it was equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants. So I published a paper which urgently calls for more detailed studies to either confirm or correct that startling conclusion.

Informed, subjective estimates support the need for in-depth studies. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry puts the odds of a nuclear terrorist attack in the next ten years at 50-50. Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar's survey of 85 national security experts reached a similarly alarming conclusion.

Check out the site, it's worth reviewing.

I don't know how you measure the risk of nuclear war given that the U.S. is the only nation to ever employ these weapons but the thinking will open your mind.

Tetris on an Oscilloscope: See it to believe it

Engineer Lars Pontoppidan created Scopetris using an AtMega32 micro-controller to drive the beam of an oscilloscope to mimic the game play of the classic Soviet puzzle game.

Using his significant programming prowess, Pontoppidan programmed the circuit to manage each individual as an independent object, allowing it to behave very similarly to the original arcade classic.

There's a video link on the site, you can see the game in action. It's worth it to marvel at the technical prowess of this engineer.

MCell: Found It!

Ah, here's the site for cellular automata. I found it but it took a trick or two with yahoo.com. Yes, this is it.

MCell program

I ran across this site while looking for code on cellular automata and I thought it was worth a post. I hope to visit the site more later.

World Clock

Mathematics with my son and daughter

For the past few years, I've had the pleasure of helping my children with homework. I think the best times are when we study mathematics. It's not just that I like math but I find that in helping each of them I learn more about math that I didn't learn in high school.

For example, not long ago my son, who's in the eighth grade, was learning about functions. So, in his homework there was a function, say, g(x) = x+5. Pretty simple.

One problem asked him to evaluate g(3). Now, most of us would say g(3) = 8. Simple. He didn't.

He said, well, g is a function, the parentheses without any operator imply multiplication. So, g(3) is not, as we might say "g of 3" but is simply "g times 3." "It's 3g, Dad, that's it."

I had to think about that because on the one hand one response is "No, that's wrong." On the other hand, we do write terms like g(3) to mean "g times 3." It came to me that here is an example of ambiguity within mathematics and how one has to know what the statement means at a level above the statement itself.

Here's another observation. Two nights ago I was helping one of daughters with math; she's in the 11th grade. She had to solve quadratics and one problem involved a term such as sqrt(x-3). So she manipulated the equation, put the square root on one side, with other terms on the other side of the equation. She squared both sides and solved for x. Simple. Not really.

After she determined the answer, I told her, "Let's try these answers in the original problem." As quadratics we found two solutions. So, she substituted her solutions, and lo and behold, with each answer she had two possible paths. For x=12, one of the solutions, the term sqrt(12-3) is 3 but it's also -3. As she explored each possibility, only the solution of 3 worked. Another solution was, I believe, 7. So the term sqrt(7-3) is 4 or -4. Well, x = 4 did not work but when she selected x = -4 this worked!

I told her, you're on to something deep here. You found two solutions but when you substitute them back in the original problem you then have to make choices as to how to use them to get the solution to work.

I asked her to talk with her teacher about this and I haven't heard if she did.

My takeaway message is this: When you have a chance to go back to elementary levels of work, you may find new insights worth your time. I know I have.

Papers: Rejection and publication

Never has there been a better time!

Rejecta Mathematica is a new, open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences. We are currently seeking submissions for our inaugural issue.

About Rejecta Mathematica

At Rejecta Mathematica, we believe that many previously rejected papers can nonetheless have a very real value to the academic community. This value may take many forms:

• "mapping the blind alleys of science": papers containing negative results can warn others against futile directions;
• "reinventing the wheel": papers accidentally rederiving a known result may contain new insight or ideas;
• "squaring the circle": papers discovered to contain a serious technical flaw may nevertheless contain information or ideas of interest;
• "applications of cold fusion": papers based on a controversial premise may contain ideas applicable in more traditional settings;
  
• "misunderstood genius": other papers may simply have no natural home among existing journals.

Edge: An interesting site

Here's an interesting site to peruse at one's leisure. I've bookmarked on my toolbar so I'll see it most days.

Enjoy.
(hat tip: Ilachina)

Brian Hayes on Complexity

Brian Hayes, a columnist for American Scientist magazine, gives a wonderful blog entry about the complexity and its confusing use of strange, often weird, terminology.

My concern here is not with the difficulty of the concepts—there’s not much we can do about that—but with the notation and terminology. Do locutions like P^#P and NISZK and (NP ∩ coNP)/poly roll trillingly off your tongue? How about EXP, EEXP, NEXP, PEXP and SUBEXP? And while we’re on the subject of EXP and friends, I’ve been wondering how to pronounce NEXPTIME. (I’m kind of hoping the “P” is silent, as in Pterodactyl.)

And it gets even better:

The sad truth is, the naming conventions for furniture at Ikea make for a more consistent language than those of complexity theory.

Read it all, just for fun.

Invisible tank

In secret trials last week, the Army said it had made a vehicle completely disappear and predicted that an invisible tank would be ready for service by 2012.

The new technology uses cameras and projectors to beam images of the surrounding landscape onto a tank.

A soldier, who was at the trials, said: "This technology is incredible. If I hadn't been present I wouldn't have believed it. I looked across the fields and just saw grass and trees - but in reality I was staring down the barrel of a tank gun."

I have believed for years that this was possible. Years ago I hypothesized such an invention with fiber optic cables where images from one side of an object would be "transmitted around" the object. That was fanciful and people I told about it where less than impressed. Still the idea nagged at me. But using cameras with projectors, if that's how this is actually, done, makes sense. The technological hurdles must be substantial.

Videos for Science: Journal of Visualized Experiments

Here are two links, here and here, that talk about scientists using video---cheap, easy, do-it-yourself videos---to describe their work and tell others how to do what they do or have done.

This is absolutely wonderful and a great way to communicate one's work.

To begin, a video let's the viewer see and hear what a scientist is thinking and wants to show you. You don't have to be limited to paper and text which are quite good but are static. What's more, videos can be archived and indexed so that you can search through them if you make a library for yourself, or go to a library on-line.

I think this idea is right up there with publishing on-line so that everyone can have access to each other's work. I was reading just a few months ago about how expensive journals are so that many researchers cannot afford them. What's worse, libraries (even university libraries) are starting to limit their subscriptions because of the tremendous cost.

If you go to ArXiv, you'll find a collection of pre-prints that researchers have written and posted there for others to read and for editors to check for publication. In fact, Grigory Perlman, who recently proved The Poincare Conjecture posted his work to that site. Anyone could get it; many did; and each could enjoy his wonderful research. (I looked at his papers and didn't have clue where to even begin. But that's not the point.)

Having these sites, like JOVE (see the link at the top) is a truly wonderful beginning to getting research out to others for review, comments, and general dissemination.

(Hat tip: Ilachina)

P.S. There is always the chance for people to abuse these sites and post junk. It happens but I think that generally others recognize the junk and filter it away.

Mapping the Internet by Function, Not just connnectivitiy

It's the first study to look at how the Internet is organized in terms of function, as well as how it's connected, says Shai Carmi, a physicist who took part in the research at the Bar Ilan University, in Israel. "This gives the most complete picture of the Internet available today," he says.

While efforts have been made previously to plot the topological structure in terms of the connections between Internet nodes--computer networks or Internet Service Providers that act as relay stations for carrying information about the Net--none have taken into account the role that these connections play. "Some nodes may not be as important as other nodes," says Carmi.

The researchers' results depict the Internet as consisting of a dense core of 80 or so critical nodes surrounded by an outer shell of 5,000 sparsely connected, isolated nodes that are very much dependent upon this core. Separating the core from the outer shell are approximately 15,000 peer-connected and self-sufficient nodes.

(Hat tip: Ilachina)

Art of sizes

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. My underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007

When you view these beautifully expressive images note the zooms and how the zoomed out views relate to the zoomed in pieces or pixels, if you will. These are a wonderful example of how you can build images with other images.

Various measures: obscure to unknown

Some examples, from the site:

Attoparsec
Parsecs are used in astronomy to measure enormous interstellar distances. A parsec is approximately 3.26 light-years or about 3.085×10¹⁶ m. Combining it with the "atto-" prefix yields attoparsec, a conveniently human-scaled unit of about 3.085 centimeters (about 1-7/32 inches) that has no obvious practical use but does have a proper SI symbol, apc. Interestingly, 1 attoparsec/microfortnight is nearly 1 inch/second (the actual figure is about 1.0043 inches per second, or approximately 2.55 cm/s).

Siriometer
The siriometer is a rarely used astronomical measure equal to one million astronomical units, i.e., one million times the average distance between the Sun and Earth. This distance is equal to about 15.8 light-years, about twice the distance from Earth to the star Sirius.

Light-nanosecond
The light-nanosecond was popularized as a unit of distance by Grace Hopper as the distance which a photon could travel in one billionth of a second (roughly 30 cm or one foot): "The speed of light is one foot per nanosecond."

Computer agents: Testing theories of social interaction

The complex behaviour of primates can be understood using artificially-intelligent computer 'agents' that mimic their actions, shows new research published in a special edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B and presented at the BA Festival of Science in York.

Scientists using agents programmed with simple instructions to work out why some primate groups are 'despotic' whilst others are 'egalitarian' - overturning previous theories developed by primatologists.

They have also found support for an existing theory of how dominant macaques make it to the safer positions at the middle of their troop without seeming to be pre-occupied with getting there.

Using agents programmed with two rules -- stay in a group for safety and pester subordinates until they move away -- scientists found that their more dominant agents would make their way to the centre of the group.

This is one of the few times I've seen agents being used to test theories. Oftentimes, agents are criticized for not being predictive. That is, you can run agent models, see interesting and thought-provoking patterns, but then ask: How does that help me to set a course of action?

While that question is unanswered, for now, the idea of mimicking social behavior and comparing the agent model to actual creatures, is quite fascinating and a marvelous application of this science.

Quote of the Year

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

Freeman Dyson, Physicist

Making fun of physics

This site pokes fun at theoretical physics and physicists. Frankly, there's a place for physics and place for fun but I think that mocking the serious endeavors of physicists is a childish and shows a degree of disrespect for what is a noble profession.

The Book Site

The link above takes you a lovely site where you can download parts of classic books. I just downloaded Edwin Shrodinger's chapter "What is Life?" and Henri Poincare's "The Future of Mathematics."

Take a look, you'll find something you like. Try this link of authors to see authors and titles easily.

A council has put up a sign warning lorry drivers to ignore their satellite navigation systems after faulty sat-nav directions caused traffic chaos in Wales.
Vale of Glamorgan Council in South Wales is the first in the UK to use visual signs warning drivers not to believe sat-nav advice after once peaceful villages were reduced to bedlam when heavy-goods lorries got stuck in tiny country lanes.

Now a sign aimed largely at foreign drivers has been put up on the outskirts of the village of St Hilary.

"The proliferation of satellite navigation aids used in heavy goods vehicles, and their over-reliance, especially by overseas drivers, has presented itself as a problem within the Vale of Glamorgan," a spokesman for the council's highways department said.

GPS navigation is a wonderful invention and usually, it's quite useful. However, one has to be careful to use it intelligently. Just because the GPS aid says to turn, one should check that there is a road there on which to turn.

GPS: Think when in use.

Math and girls

I had forgotten about this picture and then found it today. Tara C. Smith's blog is about women and science. In this post she talks to actress Danica McKellar about her book Math Doesn't Suck.

The book, as I read about it on Amazon.com, is pretty insignificant and so I won't link to it. What's interesting here is that Ms. Smith promotes women in science yet, if you look at this screen capture and the ad at the top, her advertisers see women as something less than scientific.

If one wants to support women in science, and that's a worthy goal as is supporting men in science, at least have the decency not to objectify them with sexually-based ads. C'mon.

Reading: Just do it

If you read more you exercise your brain and will be less likely to suffer mental impairment.

Workers at lead-smelting plants can suffer substantial neural damage from exposure to the toxic heavy metal. Workers who read well, however, experience comparatively less mental impairment, a new study finds.

It's not that the better readers were smarter, but that they have more "cognitive reserve," explains study leader Margit L. Bleecker, a neurologist at the Center for Occupational and Environmental Neurology in Baltimore. She says that people typically gain cognitive reserve-better or more resilient neural connections in the brain-through reading, puzzle solving, and other mentally challenging activities.

Her team recruited 112 men at a lead smelter to participate in a battery of neural assessments. After measuring the men's reading abilities-a rough gauge of cognitive reserve-the researchers split the volunteers into two groups of equal size, consisting of high or low scorers. In other respects-age, number of years worked, educational background-the two groups were similar. Most important, participants in each group exhibited the same range of blood-lead concentrations.

In the July 31 Neurology, the researchers report that in each group, men with higher blood-lead values scored more poorly on tests of hand-eye coordination. That's typical of lead poisoning. However, men in the better-reading group performed 2.5 times as well on tests of memory, attention, and concentration-tasks not necessarily related to reading.

The brain is like a muscle, Bleecker concludes: Exercising it strengthens it and makes it better able to counter the ravages of disease and poisoning.

To turn a phrase: Reading, just do it!

Out of your body experiences

The study participant sits in a chair wearing a pair of head-mounted video displays. These have two small screens over each eye, which show a live film recorded by two video cameras placed beside each other two metres behind the participant's head. The image from the left video camera is presented on the left-eye display and the image from the right camera on the right-eye display. The participant sees these as one 'stereoscopic' (3D) image, so they see their own back displayed from the perspective of someone sitting behind them. (Credit: Image courtesy of University College London) (Reference: Here.)

The above link is a fascinating article on inducing out of body experiences. The part that caught my attention is this:

A separate set of experiments was carried out by Henrik Ehrsson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Last year, when Dr. Ehrsson was “a bored medical student at University College London,” he wondered, he said, “what would happen if you ‘took’ your eyes and moved them to a different part of a room.”

“Would you see yourself where your eyes were placed?” he said. “Or from where your body was placed?”

To find out, he asked people to sit in a chair and wear goggles connected to two video cameras placed six feet behind them. The left camera projected to the left eye, the right camera to the right eye. As a result, people saw their own backs from the perspective of a virtual person sitting behind them.

Using two sticks, Dr. Ehrsson stroked each person’s chest for two minutes with one stick while moving the second stick just under the camera lenses, as if it were touching the virtual body.

Again, when the stroking was synchronous, people reported the sense of being outside their own bodies, in this case looking at themselves from a distance where their “eyes” were situated.

Then Dr. Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat response as measured by sensors on their skin. They sweated, and their pulses raced. They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get hurt.

Years ago, my friend Andy mentioned just such a experiment. He put as: What would you see if you could take your eyeballs out of your head and the point them at yourself? I think we have an answer here.

Also, here's a thought: If people feel that these experiments are actually happening to them, that is, the threat of a hammer induces feeling of being hit by hammer, then we have a very effective means for torture. If a captive can be led to think wrongly, then torture would be physically harmless (or somewhat, given that one responds physically the effect is not truly harmless) yet highly effective.

Hat tip: Ilachina

Plagiarism in physics

From Ars Mathematica I learned about an article at Ars Technica describing a scandal involving plagiarism of theoretical physics papers by about 20 different people, some of them students at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Many of the papers were refereed and published in well-known journals, and one made it into what is now perhaps the most well-known particle theory journal, the Journal of High Energy Physics.

The rest of the post gives more detail and quotes.

Frankly, I think this just shows the greed in people.

According to Dr. Sarioglu, [faculty member at METU] two of the authors of this paper were graduate students with a prodigious track record of publication: over 40 papers in a 22-month span.

Think about those numbers. That's almost two papers a month. Incredible. To do that kind of work as graduate students, who generally work for themselves without students under them, is too good to be true; and it was, obviously.

My question is: Where was the faculty advisor?

If you go to the link above, check out the comments for more insights.

Teenageres in love, Madly in love

Adolescents who claim they are "madly in love" might not be too far off the mark: a new study suggests that they show almost manic behaviours.

Serge Brand of the Psychiatric University Clinics in Basel, Switzerland, and his colleagues surveyed 113 teenagers at around 17 years of age, asking them to complete questionnaires about their conduct and mood and to keep a log of their sleep patterns. Of those, 65 indicated they had recently fallen in love and experienced intense romantic emotions.

Thelovestruck teenagers showed many behaviours resembling "hypomania" – a less intense form of mania. For example, they required about an hour less sleep each night than teens who didn't have a sweetheart. They were also more likely to report acting compulsively, with 60% saying they spent too much money compared with fewer than 30% of teenagers who were not in love.

Moreover, the lovestruck teens were more than twice as likely to say they had lots of ideas and creative energy. Worryingly, they were also more likely to say they drove fast and took risks on the road.

Yep, that about explains it Speaking from experience, once as a teenager, now father to three teenagers, one who has a boyfriend, I can testify that teenagers do some wacky things. It's nice to see that scientists have confirmed what most parents already know. The article doesn't say how long this behavior will last but, as most parents also know, there's always an end.

Is this real?

My last post was about image editing. So, I went to the Astronomy Picture of the Day for a real image. Alas, it's not, from their caption:

Colors in the gorgeous image were picked to emphasize light emitted by specific elements in the nebula excited by the energetic starlight.

So, what picture does capture reality?

Pictures: From Graphics to outright lies

Here's an image that we start with.

I have a dear friend whose hobby is photography. He doesn't just take photos though because he's an artist. So, he takes pictures, digital pictures, and then he processes them to make beautiful prints. You can see some here. What's interesting is that the pictures you see are not what the scene showed but rather the pictures are what he wants you to see. They are art, and as art, they are gorgeous and well worth having. I proudly display many of these works in my office.

But they are not a capture of reality. (It is interesting to ask just what is a capture of reality and how do you know it. That's a post for another time.)

Now two scientists have devised an automated algorithm that allows you to easily remove, edit, and change your digital pictures to take out what you don't like and replace with something that will fill-in the picture realistically. This is letting a computer effectively edit out reality from your pictures.

Digital photographers could soon be able to erase unwanted elements in photos by using tools that scan for similar images in online libraries.

Research teams have developed an algorithm that uses sites like Flickr to help discover light sources, camera position and composition in a photo.

Using this data the tools then search for objects, such as landscapes or cars, that match the original.

The teams aim to create image libraries that anyone can use to edit snaps.

In the past you could edit pictures, use Photoshop and change what you liked and didn't like. Now, it is automated (well, almost) so that soon you won't have to work at making phony images. Phony images are fine, of course, we are free to change them as we like. But to have the process automated, well, that just seems like making it all the more easy to distort reality.

This is the same image with the roof removed and phony boats inserted. A beautiful graphic but not a photo of the actual scene.

From dust to dust..

The Bible tells us that man goes from dust to dust. How fitting then that we should find the following:

Life on earth is organic. It is composed of organic molecules, which are simply the compounds of carbon, excluding carbonates and carbon dioxide. The idea that particles of inorganic dust may take on a life of their own is nothing short of alien, going beyond the silicon-based life forms favoured by some science fiction stories.

Now, an international team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organised into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.

So, while we think of life as special, we are no more special than dust, or helically-shaped molecules.

Until now, physicists assumed that there could be little organisation in such a cloud of particles. However, Tsytovich and his colleagues demonstrated, using a computer model of molecular dynamics, that particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization as electronic charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized. This effect results in microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into corkscrew shapes, or helical structures. These helical strands are themselves electronically charged and are attracted to each other.

Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.

So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? "These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter," says Tsytovich, "they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve".

Call it in, but the Bible had it first. (Hattip: ilachina)

Google Earth Image: A Plane in Flight

While working this morning with Google Earth, I came across this image. It's just outside of Chicago's O'Hare airport, by the way.

At first glance I thought I was looking an airport, then I realized there weren't any runways nearby. So I asked myself, how did the airplane get there? I then realized that the images are from satellites, of course!, so the plane you see is actually in flight.

Pretty cool, eh?

(The white line is for work; it's not part of the image itself.)

NSF: U.S.A. shows slow growth in technical articles published

The United States is not increasing the number of research articles (science and engineering) it publishes. We still produce more than any other country but our rate of growth is level while other countries are producing papers at an accelerated rate.

A new National Science Foundation (NSF) report finds the number of U.S. science and engineering (S&E) articles in major peer-reviewed journals flattened in the 1990s, after more than two decades of growth, but U.S. influence in world science and technology remains strong.

The report, Changing U.S. Output of Scientific Articles: 1988 - 2003, finds changes occurred despite continued increases in funding and personnel for research and development. Flattening occurred in nearly all U.S. research disciplines and types of institutions.

In contrast, emerging Asian nations had large increases in publication numbers, reflecting their growing expertise in science and technology. European Union totals also went up.

This is not a surprise to anyone who even glances at the literature today. Check out arXiv.org and you'll see more and more preprints from outside the Unites States. True, many of these are from the states but more and more are not.

Still, the NSF finds some positive news:

"In addition to numbers published, one should look at another very important indicator -- article quality," said Derek Hill, senior analyst and a coauthor of the report. "The more often an article is cited by other publications, the higher quality it's believed to have. While citation is not a perfect indicator, U.S. publications are more highly cited than those from other countries."

In raw numbers, the United States continues to publish far more articles than any other country and remains a major force in world S&E. However its overall share of published articles has declined while other nations produce more.

And how are other nations doing in publishing?

Four Asian societies--China, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan--out-distanced all others in the world between 1992 and 2003 with an average annual growth rate of 15.9 percent in publications.

According to the report, Japan's article output rose at an average annual rate of 3.1 percent, five times faster than the United States.

The European Union, which passed the U.S. several years ago in total numbers of articles published, posted an average annual growth rate of 2.8 percent during the same period, more than four times faster than the United States.

It's no secret that the U.S. is ahead now in total numbers but we will not stay there for long. Witness, for example, who is doing basic research in physics ---the Europeans at CERN while our basic research stalls.

The truth is that it's very difficult to get funding for research in industry today. It's tough to get funding at universities, too. And do you know what else? When you get funding there is little support to publish. In fact, the trend is not to publish so as not to tell others (competitors) what you are doing.

I am now writing a paper on some of my work and the one thing that comes out is: tell enough to get the idea across but not so much that others can reproduce what I've done. For a company, that makes sense because, after all, the company is in business to make money. If the company tells others how to do what we now do, well, it won't be long before our market share dwindles to little. However, this trend is now true at universities where professors and administrators seek to patent and sell research. It didn't used to be that way: professors sought to publish whatever they did, sometimes even publishing junk. Today, schools want to profit so publishing is not as important as it used to be.

I fear that in the near future our lack of scholarly discourse, of which publications are central, will mark a steady decline in our scientific progress. (While I'm on this topic, let me state one more indicator. The U.S. is losing promising scientists because we do not seek to employ them when they graduate. So they return to their native countries and contribute there instead of here. In essence we give them an education that they take back and then compete with us. Is that bad? I don't know.)

Interesting physics experiments in the offing

University of Washington physicist (and science-fiction author) John Cramer is moving forward with his experiment in backward causality, thanks in part to tens of thousands of dollars in contributions sent in by his fans. Although Cramer emphasizes that his lab is looking at “nonlocal quantum communication” rather than backward time travel per se, the gadgetry he’s assembling could settle a controversy surrounding a seemingly faster-than-light effect that Albert Einstein thought was downright spooky.

Boiled down to its basics, the experiment involves splitting laser light into two beams, so that characteristics of one beam are reflected in the other beam as well. That's an example of what physicists call quantum entanglement. Specifically, Cramer has been planning to fiddle with one of the entangled laser beams such that it takes on the property of waves or particles. If one beam behaves like particles, the entangled photons of light in the other beam should behave like particles, too.

I can't do better than the author of this link, so go here to read it all.

Sex in your sleep

I stumbled upon this while looking at space.com for when the planet Mars will be visible in August. It's somewhat interesting, though.

If you think it’s impossible to have sex while you sleep, think again, according to a new study.

There are at least 11 different sex-related sleep disorders, collectively referred to as “sexsomnia” or “sleepsex,” that affect people who are otherwise psychologically healthy—causing them to unknowingly engage in various sexual activities during the night.

Carlos Schenck, a psychiatrist at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, and his colleagues have studied a number of behavioral disorders associated with sleep.

“Any basic instinct can come out in the context of sleep,” Schenck told LiveScience. “All sorts of things can happen.”

So, be careful when you're sleeping, as if that's possible. But, if your roommate tells you something weird about yourself, it just may be true.

A WOW video

I got this link from a good friend in an email today. I didn't think much about it, but I started to watch, and I have to say, it's simply fantastic. You'll see a scale model of the B-29 bomber with an X-1 rocket. The B-29 takes off with the X-1 on its belly. The B-29 then flies up and releases the X-1. The rocket flies on its own, and even goes to an accelerated flight. Then the rocket safely lands and you see the B-29 flying. Watch for the flat spin, it's about half-way through, and then you'll see the rest of the flight.

It is truly fun to watch and when you think of the work it took to make these remote control airplanes, and that they work together, well, that's just fantastic. Here's what my friend said:

This aircraft runs on four chainsaw motors. You can just imagine how much time, effort, skill and money these guys have put into this thing.

Here's the link:

http://users.skynet.be/fa926657/files/B29.wmv

Simple yet inexplicable illusions and unknowns

The Astronomy Picture of the Day today is not about astronomy, per se, but rather about illusions. The image above is fairly common. You see the checkerboard pattern but are squares A and B the same color? They look different to me. Then you see the picture below.

The squares are connected so that instead of looking like different colors, they look close to identical. (I still see square A as darker than square B but maybe that's my age showing.)

No one knows why people see the squares as different colors, but we do.

The site also has a link that, with a few clicks, takes you to this picture.


Ever notice that when the moon is near the horizon it looks much bigger than it does high in the sky? I've seen it may times, low to the horizon, and my wife calls that a "harvest moon," although that's not really right. In any case, the moon does seem much larger when it is near the horizon than when it's high. In truth, the moon always has an angular diameter of about 0.5-degree, so it's not any bigger when it is low than when it's high.

No one knows why we see the moon this way, some say we interpret distance objects as wider (so on the horizon we "see" this distance but in high in the sky we don't interpret it as such) or one's eyes focus differently for the different positions of the moon.

So, here are two simple phenomena which no one understands. These pictures reminded me of another phenomena that I thought was a legend. The phenomena is that if you place equal measures of cold water and hot water in a freezer the hot water will freeze first. Sounds crazy, I mean, the hot water has to cool to the temperature of the cold water before it can freeze so we would expect the cold water to freeze first. The cold water has a head-start as each cools to 32-degree Fahrenheit.

Not so. In fact, yesterday I was browsing the (now purchased and its way to me) book The Science of Cooking by Peter Barham and in there I found the following.

In this short excerpt, we see that hot water does freeze faster than cold water and yet the experts, physicists no less, are stumped. They have no idea why.

I think we should revel in these puzzles and see that with all we know, we know very little. Our eyes mislead us in viewing a simple picture, they mislead us in viewing the heavenly skies, and science can't explain (yet!) the nature of water freezing. Simple yet inexplicable.

It makes me wonder: just what can we know and of what can we be certain?

Beautiful graphics: Singles in the U.S. and Viagra emails

On Carl Bialik's Blog (The Numbers Guy for the Wall Street Journal) he has interesting post on single women in New York City. You can find his post at the link above.

What I found interesting was not just the post (if you're married, as I am, finding single women isn't much of a concern) but the graphic he linked to, shown above and a link here. The graphic presents a quick way to see where most single people live, color coded by gender; men are blue, women are orange. At a glance you can see density of singles and make quick comparisons of sizes based on the circle size. Each circle not only tells the number of singles, and the gender, but also location given the placement of the circle on the underlying map of the United States.

Graphics such as these are simply wonderful. They show data in a clear, easy to use manner, that allows the reader to quickly see trends or numbers that a table would obscure.

Here's another beautiful graphic:

This graphic comes from the current issue of American Scientist and it is in Brian Hayes's column How Many Ways Can You Spell V1@gra? His column is very good; I recommend you click the link and read it.

The graphic though, is truly wonderful. He shows you various spellings of Viagra (the article is about the proliferation of spam and Viagra is a common spam email) along the left column. The color bars help organize the different spellings (red for ordinary alphabetic characters; yellow for accented characters; olive for spellings with numbers and other non-alphabetic characters; brown for spellings with spaces or hyphens; and blue for correct spellings. Time is along the bottom, left to right and the number of emails (he uses his received spam for data) is shown by the area of the disks. From this it's easy to see that:

Vertical correlations within the table suggest that many of the mailings were coordinated and may have been conducted by the same individuals or groups.

With a glance you can see patterns in the data, relate pieces of data to each other, and quickly see what the author is trying to show you.

Astronomy Picture of the Day: Can't resist

Explanation: When is the Sun most distant from Earth? It happened again just this past weekend. A common misconception is that the Sun is most distant during the winter, when it's the coldest. In truth, however, the seasonal temperatures are more greatly influenced by the number of daylight hours and how high the Sun rises. For example, during northern winter, the tilt of the Earth causes the Sun to be above the horizon for a shorter time and remain lower in the sky than in northern summer. The picture compares the relative size of the Sun during Earth's closest approach in January (northern winter) on the left, and in July (northern summer) on the right. The angular size of the Sun is noticeably smaller during July, when it is farther away. If the Earth's orbit was perfectly circular, the Sun would always appear to be the same size. These two solar images were taken from Spain during 2006, but the same effect can be seen in any year from any Earth-bound location.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Explanation: Spiral galaxy NGC 2903 is only some 20 million light-years distant in the constellation Leo. One of the brighter galaxies visible from the northern hemisphere, it is surprisingly missing from Charles Messier's famous catalog of celestial sights. This impressively sharp color image shows off the galaxy's beautiful blue spiral arms. Included in the ground-based telescopic view are intriguing details of NGC 2903's central regions -- a remarkable mix of old and young star clusters with immense dust and gas clouds. In fact, NGC 2903 exhibits an exceptional rate of star formation activity near its center, also bright in radio, infrared, ultraviolet, and x-ray bands. Just a little smaller than our own Milky Way, NGC 2903 is about 80,000 light-years across.

I can't get enough of these.

No Way Physics: Thought provoking

Many principles of physics are of the form "If you do this, what will happen is that." Newton's second law, for example, says that the acceleration of a particular mass will be proportional to the force applied to it. Such principles imply that certain effects are practically impossible. A small number of principles, however, belong to a different category. These say, in effect, "That cannot happen." Such principles imply that certain effects are physically impossible.

Notorious examples of the latter include the first two laws of thermodynamics. The first law says that energy cannot be created or destroyed ("You can't win"), while the second can be stated in several forms, such as that heat cannot be transferred from a colder to a warmer body or that the entropy of a closed system always increases ("You can't break even, either"). Other examples include Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the relativity principles regarding the impossibility of recognizing absolute velocity and the prohibition of faster-than-light travel.

Such principles often represent not "new physics" but deductions from other principles. What is different about them is their form. And to say that something is physically impossible tends to make scientists want to rebel.

The article goes on to explain that such laws force scientists to re-think their theories, to try to find ways to make something work that is actually impossible. Such provocations lead us to new theories and new technologies.

While some things are truly impossible, sometimes being told something is impossible is the first step to getting it done.

Mathematics Plus: A truly wonderful zine

A friend of mine sent me an innocent email just a few minutes ago. It read:

Dave,

I like Cambridge U.'s Plus Math-zine.
They came out with their new quarterly
issue this month:
http://plus.maths.org/issue43/

Greg C.

So, I ambled over to this site not knowing what to expect. Was I in for a most pleasant surprise!

Here's a beautiful zine that gives the most beautifully illustrated articles on so many topics. I think anyone who goes through these zines, the current issue or past issues (hit the archives button) will be in for a treat.

I've spent some time just now downloading and printing articles on Euler, special relativity, game theory, Godel, among others.

The articles have links to other sites, animations, videos, code listings, and each article is available as a pdf file so you can easily print them. Some you'll want to read on-line, see the animations, play the videos, and enjoy. Others you can print for later.

Enjoy, I know I will.

Science toys at home

I ran across this site while waiting for a program to run. It's pretty neat.

I love the theme of science-oriented toys you can make at home with everyday things around your house.

Peet to peer Patents

Peer-to-Patent opens the patent examination process to public participation for the first time.

Become part of this historic pilot program. Help the USPTO find the information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications.

Become a community reviewer and improve the quality of patents.

This is an idea whose time has come. There will be kinks to work out, processes to improve, but it's almost impossible to believe that the patent office cannot benefit from this. Kudos to everyone who made this possible.

Here's a good interview on this.

Portraits of Scientists

The Wisconsin Historical Society presents portraits of scientists. It's worth some time to thumb through them.

Computer interface for the future, NOW

Click on the link to see the whole video. You'll see how images and text can move on the screen in front of the person, be manipulated and shared in real-time.

It's worth viewing, maybe even twice.

Google with a Street View

This is utterly fantastic!

At maps.google.com there is now, for San Francisco, a street view of the city. With Adobe Flashplayer you can see video captures of the streets of the city.

Try this and be amazed.

Molten core on the planet Mercury, possibl

"NASA scientists working with high-precision planetary radars in California have discovered strong evidence that the planet Mercury might have a molten core.

"Scientists had not expected to find a magnetic field at Mercury," said Professor Jean-Luc Margot of Cornell University, leader of the research team. "Planetary magnetic fields are associated with molten cores, and the prevailing theory was the planet was too small to have a molten core."

Since then, multiple radar observations have ruled out a solid core, leading to the finding that Mercury's core is molten -- or at least the outer core is molten and not forced to rotate along with its shell."

I'm not sure what this means in the grand scheme of things, but it goes to explaining more of our universe. And that's a good thing.

Fighting rape with co-evolution

The mallard Anas platyrhynchos: a species with high levels of forced copulations. Females have very elaborate vaginas (left) to counter males' phalluses (right). (Image: Patricia Brennan et al.)

"Some female ducks and geese have evolved complex genitalia to thwart unwelcome mating attempts, according to a new study.

Males of some species, such as mallard, have a notorious habit of "raping" females. They and other wildfowl are among the 3% of bird species whose males have phalluses big enough to insert into the vaginas of females, whether or not the female consents.

Now, in the most detailed analysis yet of duck and goose vaginas, researchers have established that females of these species have evolved vaginal features to thwart unwelcome males.

Some vaginas had spiral channels that would impede sex by twisting in the opposite direction to that of the male phallus. Others had as many as eight cul-de-sac pouches en route, that could prevent fertilisation by capturing unwelcome sperm. Moreover, these features were only found in species renowned for forced sex. All other species had simple male and female genitalia.

“These structures are wonderfully devious, sending sperm down the wrong road or impeding penetration,” says Birkhead.

He says that the features demonstrate an evolutionary "arms race" in which control over reproduction alternates between the sexes. If the male develops a longer, more elaborate phallus to force copulation, females wrest back control by developing features to thwart males who rape.

“It shows that females are not passive in averting exploitation by males with large phalluses,” says Birkhead. "

This is a terrific example of co-evolution. The aggressive males evolve to perpertuate their genes, hence the force coupling. The females evolve, almost simultaneously it seems, to counter the evolution of the males.

Fascinating.

Research on Erectile Dysfunction

Here's something truly amazing. Not for it's work, although I have to believe it's good, but for the nature of the research.

"Like a column collapsing under the burden of a heavy roof, erectile dysfunction is a classical mechanical engineering problem, says a US urologist. Using mathematical models of penis geometry and hydrostatic pressure, doctors can predict when penises will fail – and in which vagina – he says.

The most widely investigated parameter of penile rigidity is intracavernosal pressure (ICP) – the fluid pressure achieved by blood build up in the two expandable "caverns" of the penis. For a healthy man, the erect ICP is between 60 and 90 millimetres of mercury (mmHg), but can drop to just 30 mmHg, in men with erectile dysfunction (ED)."

Here's the abstract from the Journal:

"Two major branches of engineering mechanics are fluid mechanics and structural mechanics, with many practical problems involving the effect of the first on the second. An example is the design of an aircraft's wings to bend within reasonable limits without breaking under the action of lift forces exerted by the air flowing over them; another is the maintenance of the structural integrity of a dam designed to hold back a water reservoir which would exert very large forces on it. Similarly, fluid and structural mechanics are involved in the engineering analysis of erectile function: it is the hydraulic action of increased blood flow into the corpora cavernosa that creates the structural rigidity necessary to prevent collapse of the penile column."

If you have a copy of the paper, please email it to me. Thanks.

First it was animals, then people...

OOPS, that's wrong. It's first people then animals, so says the article. Used to be we tried experimental drugs on animals and then prescribed the drugs on people. That's in reverse:

Vets have rejected claims by a British animal welfare charity that giving dogs drugs to treat behavioural problems will create a population of "pill-popping pets".

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals expressed alarm at the news that an antidepressant called Reconcile - containing the same serotonin-reuptake inhibitor used in the human drug Prozac - has been licensed for use in dogs by the US Food and Drug Administration.

"Pet owners have a duty of care towards their animals," says charity scientist Penny Hawkins. "Pharmaceuticals should not be used to help sustain an unsustainable lifestyle by addressing problems that should be dealt with by other means, such as more exercise."

“Pet owners have a duty of care towards their animals. Drugs should not be used to sustain an unsustainable lifestyle”

But vets specialising in treating behavioural problems say medication can be extremely useful in treating anxiety symptoms such as howling and destructiveness.

Dogs with behavioural problems account for about a quarter those that are euthanised by veterinary practices, so by increasing the chances of successfully managing a problem drugs can improve welfare.

It used to be that if you had a dog, and it was a problem, you either gave the dog away, or had it killed. Simple. Dogs are dogs, after all, not people. Now, we're seeing a slide to drugs for dogs (and I'm sure other animals) that will only take us further along to more drugs, more medical treatment, more costs, and, if owners opt not to do these things, there will be societal (read: animal rights activits) pressure to force owners to do them.

Web browsers: Still unsafe

YOU are surfing the net, and stop at a sports site you regularly visit to read the latest headlines. You are always careful to avoid sites that appear suspect, so you feel safe online. Unbeknownst to you, though, and to the innocent owner of the website, a piece of malicious code has been added to the page you are viewing. This uploads software onto your computer via your browser, turning it into a "zombie" PC under the remote control of a malicious user.

While installing firewalls and antivirus software on your computer may keep it safe from conventional threats such as worms and viruses, these security tools do not inspect data downloaded through browsers - a loophole that attackers can exploit. "The firewall is dead," says Google security specialist Niels Provos.

The threat is real, not just a theoretical possibility:

Provos warned that many web users are becoming the victims of "drive-by" downloads of bots from innocent websites corrupted to exploit browser vulnerabilities. As firewalls allow free passage to code or programs downloaded through the browser, the bot is able to install itself on the PC. Anti-virus software kicks in at this point, but some bots avoid detection by immediately disabling it. Once a computer has become infected with the malicious software, the zombie periodically connects to a web server controlled by the botmaster to receive instructions and download more software.

To determine the scale of the problem, Provos's group at Google analysed several billion web pages and selected 4.5 million suspicious pages for more detailed study. To test for malicious software, or malware, they loaded a program designed to simulate a computer with a vulnerable version of Internet Explorer and monitored what happened. They found around 450,000 web pages that launched drive-by downloads of malicious programs. Another 700,000 pages launched downloads of suspicious software. More than two-thirds of the malicious programs identified were those that infected computers with bot software or programs that collected data on banking transactions and emailed it to a temporary email account.

You don't even know it's there. The result: be very careful with the sites you go to. If possible, don't use Internet Explorer; IE is a disaster for security.