Artificial Philosophy

The Doctor Does Hollywood

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:17:00 +0000

So, there's going to be a "Hollywood" Doctor Who film. Interesting.

Yes, I agree, they'll probably fail to realise there's half a century of canon behind it. They'll fail to do their research (which the current writers have been doing since they were five years old) and the whole thing will be a travesty of the highest order.

Probably. But even if it is, I can pretend I don't care. I can pretend that precedents set on desert planets on the other side of the Galaxy don't count. I'll pretend that countless interventions, on countless planets, orbiting countless suns, just isn't worth getting worked up over. They'll just throw ideas from. It'll be fine.

I bet they give him a bloody gun. Idiots. I hate them already. Unless it's Joss Whedon of course, but what are the odds?

Bring Back The BBC Micro!

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 21:14:00 +0000

I remember when our school got a computer. It was sometime around 1984, and I was about 8. It was a BBC Micro (or maybe a model B, I've never been much of a hardware buff). They were fantastic little machines made by Acorn for the BBC, who through a stunningly insightful move had initiated the BBC Computer Literacy Project, something that without a doubt is a significant factor in the lives of many computer professionals today. And a good few amateur hackers, which is equally good.

Google's own Eric Schmidt recently lambasted Britain's computing education, and unpleasant as it is to hear he's absolutely right. By the time I hit high school, the momentum built up by the BBC had faded. We were taught to use word processors, spreadsheets and databases. I don't recall doing any programming at all. From what I've heard not a huge amount had changed. Far more emphasis is placed on the use of applications than is on actual programming. It's akin to a craft and design class showing you a chisel and then spending half an hour teaching you how to use a chair.

But back to the BBC Micro, the little silicon hero at the centre of this minor diatribe.

It was really quite brilliant. This is pre-GUI remember, so Mrs Bott had to sit a wide-eyed eight year-old down in front of a black screen with a little white cursor, and explain to him that this was the future. I knew that of course. This was a TV that could do what I told it, I was living in one of my Asimov novels (the Lucky Starr series in fact).

And we programmed, us eight year olds. Through a simple cursor on a screen, and some basic shell level commands, we made things happen. Turtle was a particular favourite - part programming language and part game, you could control a little cursor on the screen that drew lines. You could move forward and rotate the cursor. I don't recall the exact syntax, but it was something like:

FW10,R90,FW10,R90,FW10,R90,FW10

That would give you a square. At this point we'd realise there was a quicker way, and were introduced to loops:

{FW10,R90}4

Did exactly the same. And, of course, we'd all compete to make the best circle we could without killing the machine, so that's a basic knowledge of hardware limitations and the effect of big loops. We were eight!

So why, I demand to know in an overly theatrical way, was I next sat down in front of a plain old terminal in 1994? Ten years later?! In a university physics class? If I'd known at the time I'd have been bloody furious, ten years is forever when you're eight.

What happened in the meantime? The school only had the one computer, and a lot of children, and no computing teacher. They did the best they could, but there was never a chance of getting more than the odd hour on it, and you need more than that to really get into it. Then I programmed the video for my parents a lot, and did a lot of whining about them buying me a computer. Eventually, when when the cost/whining ratio hit a critical point, they bought me a Commodore 64, and I got to grips with BASIC.

By the time we had the mandatory-aged-14 classes on how to type and save a file I was fairly quickly convinced that computing education in schools had missed the point.

What would have been useful? A bare bones computer the whole way through. A basic UNIX style terminal with BASIC, maybe Perl. Oh, the things we could have done and learned.

The thing is, these days that's possible. If any kid wants to learn programming they should have free access. Hell, we could easily provide a single decent computer for the school, and a lot of dumb terminals for the pupils to log in through. But no GUI, that's the important point. No windows (certainly no Windows), no mouse, nothing. Certainly no internet. Give them Lynx for Christmas perhaps.

We've lost sight of what made the brilliant programmers Britain boasts today. It wasn't Windows and Word, don't be silly, those weren't even around when our greatest and brightest were learning. It's a free reign.

Give them root access - give them a virtual machine. Give them Perl and pwd and Apache. Give them shell scripting and apt-get and sudo. Give them SSH and vi and/or emacs. Just give them a bloody computer and let them learn! Yes, they'll break the computer. And most of them won't want to admit it, and try to fix it themselves. And some of them will manage it. The ones that don't? Well it's only a virtual machine after all, just reset it.

It's not difficult (unless you're old enough to be an MP) and it's certainly cheaper than most of the nonsense spent by government these days. How many virtual machines would a cool billion buy? Cos that's what we spend on no trams these days.

Like A Neverending Circle, Like A Wheel Within A Wheel

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 20:19:00 +0000

So, physics is cool again [BBC News]. This happens every so often, and as far as I can tell there's a chaotic element to the cycle, but it's generally on the order of decades. Professor Brian Cox seems to be taking a large amount of the credit and/or blame this time around, and it's partly deserved. He's clearly passionate about the subject and puts it across very well to a lay audience (although his colleague Jeff Forshaw [YouTube] is the one to look out for if you want relativistic hyperbolic geometry to be fun!)

I don't think physics is cool because Brian Cox is involved though, eloquent as he is. In fact, I think Brian Cox is fairly famous at the moment because he happened to be there at the right time. The very beautiful Wonders Of The Solar System, for example, wouldn't have been made if there hadn't been a public enthusiasm for physics in the first place. Take a look at America, where Carl Sagan's classic series Cosmos is currently being re-made. I bet America hasn't heard of Brian Cox, let alone D:ream, and yet physics is kicking off there as well.

It's a cyclical thing, and it's always huge. Take a look at Einstein as a classic example. He was one of the first modern superstars, a moniker that is remarkable fitting, truly famous across the globe, and yet most people had very little idea what he'd actually discovered. A few decades later we had Richard Feynman, then Stephen Hawking. It seems all you have to do to be a famous physicist is break the mould a little. Playing a musical instrument aso seems to help; step forward Dr Brian May PhD, and one of the greatest rock guitarists to have ever lived. I also maintain, against much opposition, that Wayne Rooney and others like him are great physicists, even if they don't know how they do it. So they only work with dynamics under 1g and narrowband air resistance? Well, everybody has to specialise.

There's something deeper to physics-cool than celebrity endorsement and TV documentaries though. Physics is cool because it makes you look smart. Everybody seems to have a strange impression that physicists are particularly intelligent, that it's a subject for geniuses. That's generally quite wrong, it's a remarkably simple subject if you get your head around the rules of the game. It is exceedingly good at making you look smart though.

I've lost count of the number of times I've "cleverly" fixed something using what I learned in physics classes at the age of 15. Problem with the ice machine in the pub? Well, that's a transformer, I recognise the coils, and it's making that grid of wires hot because electricity does that, and they melt the sheet of ice that comes from there. But that wire is broken...

Shazzam, free drinks for the night and a reputation as a super-genius thrown in. You get to look like The Doctor and Sherlock thrown into one. Steven Moffat is clearly a physicist at heart.

Physics is cool because it gives you some very solid ground to stand on when you need to build an argument. You know the basics, you can rule out daft ideas at a stroke and concentrate on what's actually real, in front of you, and how you can use it. If you are faced with a problem you've never seen before you've got a head start, because you understand the rules the problem has to obey. Sometimes, just sometimes, you solve a problem by going right back to first principles, and that feels particularly cool.

Smug Mode: On

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 12:56:00 +0000

Last September, at the height of the Old Town Mouse Season, I posted some observations that the mice in our flat seemed to have developed a distaste for poison laced grain, and suggesting that evolution of some description was going on. ("Mice, Chickens, Eggs & Evolution")

Now I'll point out once more that what I do on this blog isn't actually science. I have fun exploring science, yes, but very little I do is actually science. The mouse thing sort of got close - there were repeated observations and the vaguest semblance of data gathering, but it was all very wooly. "Anecdote is not a synonym for data" is a phrase you'll hear a lot. "Correlation is not causation" is another. The mouse thing wasn't science - an interesting angle to explore the basic idea of evolution from, but not science.

But now some real scientists with proper notebooks and letters after their name have taken the idea and turned it into proper science. They even got it published in a journal, Current Biology.

What they've discovered isn't precisely the same as my hypothesis. I wrote:

For some reason or another they didn't go for the free food. Maybe it was the smell, maybe the colour, maybe they just didn't like the taste - maybe they're refined mice and expect more presentation than a small plastic tray.

Whereas Song, Endepols et al wrote:

Polymorphisms in the vitamin K 2,3-epoxide reductase subcomponent 1 (vkorc1) of house mice (Mus musculus domesticus) can cause resistance to anticoagulant rodenticide

Or, if you prefer, the mice have naturally bred a resistance to warfarin, the poison often used on them, rather than not even eating it in the first place. It's actually a better tactic, because then they get free food as well. I love it when the best laid plans come together.

Fear And Coding In The Highlands

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 14:08:00 +0000

It's not the most impressive life-changing-move as far as they go, but I've still been freaking out left right and centre for the last three months. I was, previously, a science buyer for a the fantastic Blackwell's bookshop in Edinburgh's bustling Old Town. Fun job, great people and reasonably well paid.
Now I'm an unemployed house-husband of sorts in the middle of the Scottish Highlands. The nearest place of note is the village of Nigg (I'm a Niggle, since you ask), the nearest pub is 6 miles away, and if I want to get a reception on my mobile it's a 45 minute drive away.

That last one is a bonus in my book.

There are other bonuses too. We're sat right in between two RAF bases and their bombing range, so the Tornado GR1s screaming overhead add a certain ambiance to Battlefield Bad Company on the XBox. There are 360 degree kitesurfing beaches within a few miles, and the sky is BIG...

So what am I doing up here? Well apart from avoiding a seven hour, £50 round trip to see the girlfriend, I've decided to go into web design and support. I've got myself some rather funky servers in a data centre, I'm putting together the website, and I'm about to start advertising locally. The thing I'm particularly keen on is the support angle - there's lots of people who want to set up a basic blog, or get started on eBay, or a hundred and one other things that geek-types see as being ludicrously simple - that's my target market, people who want things to be as simple and as easy as possible.

So, if you want a website, or something even funkier like an online app to do X, Y or Z then drop me a line:

www.webdesignhighlands.co.uk

Blatant plug aside, normal geek service will be resumed as quickly as possible. I've been a little busy recently, what with moving everything I own a couple of hundred miles, plus having to build new bookshelves, but things are settling down. I'm toying with the idea of exploring the history of science in the area, there's some cool geology for starters...

The Earnest Importance Of Zombie Plans

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 18:04:00 +0000

I was in the Scout association for fourteen years, and learned a lot about self-reliance, teamwork and initiative. From day one a Scout's motto has been the famous "Be Prepared". Prepared for what? Just about anything is the point. We were expected to look after the younger kids on camp, lead patrols on mountain expeditions, even run messages for the emergency services in the event of a major disaster. It's an ethos that has served me well in the last thirty-odd years, and one that is frequently recognised by employers and the like as being a Good Thing. Despite the whole boys-in-shorts image you have to remember that Baden-Powell based the training on the principles of a specialist military unit.

So where do zombie uprisings come in? Well, zombie attacks are very close to being a worst case scenario for modern civilization. The combination of a highly lethal viral style epidemic and violent civil uprising make them very difficult to deal with. I'll have to admit at this point that I don't believe we'll ever actually see a Romero style Day Of The Dead, but the point is that if you can deal with zombies you can deal with anything short of a direct nuclear strike. Be Prepared for the undead and you'll Be Prepared for most eventualities.

"Official" attitudes are slowly coming round to this point of view too. The US Centers for Disease Control recently posted a slightly tongue-in-cheek guide to preparing for a zombie apocalypse which outlines their approach to a large scale outbreak and gives good advice on general disaster preparation. "If you're ready for a zombie apocalypse," they say, "you're ready for any emergency." And that's official government advice for US citizens.

In the UK we tend to be a little more reserved in our Armageddon preparations, but zombies are starting to pop up on the radar. After a freedom of information request Leicester City Council recently admitted that they are "unaware of any specific reference to a zombie attack in the council's emergency plan", a situation that will hopefully be rectified as a result of the publicity generated.

Political bodies aren't the only ones waking up to the very real usefulness of preparing for Z-day. In 2009 the prestigious journal Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress published a paper entitled "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling Of An Outbreak Of Zombie Infection". (Munz, Hudea, Imad & Smith). This perfectly serious (if lighthearted) paper uses proper epidemiological methods to simulate the effects of an uprising and concludes that quarantine and cures do very little to help - swift and aggressive action is required if we're going to stand a chance. The models used have also found real world applications which do not require the undead roaming the streets:

The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life. Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken literally, but possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.
- Munz et al (2009)

The Munz et al paper also holds the distinction of being the only peer reviewed work I've seen which references Bainov and Simeonov's Impulsive Differential Equations: Asymptotic Properties of the Solutions (1995) alongside Frost and Pegg's Shaun Of The Dead (2002).

So apart from disaster management, bio/political mathematical models and some very entertaining films and computer games, what have the undead ever done for us? I've got one more idea up my sleeve...

There are some mathematical questions which are very difficult to solve, the travelling salesman problem being a classic example. One way to find an answer quickly is called ant colony optimisation, it simulates the way ants find their way around to find what is probably the right answer (note the "probably" - it's not a proof, just a good estimate). I firmly believe that software zombie simulants can be used to perform a variation on ant colony optimisation - in fact, if we had a real zombie uprising in a major city we could use careful placements of unprepared people (or "bait") to find optimal taxi routes. And that's something that's useful to everybody.

How Plastic Bags Will Save The Planet

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:49:00 +0000

A couple of years ago a bandwagon started rolling through the UK. Led by newspapers, and with the supermarkets and the government as the main passengers, a large proportion of the public jumped on board. The target of this bandwagon was the humble plastic bag, provided for free by almost every shop in the country.

Plastic bags, you see, are evil. They come from oil, and as we all know we should be using less of that. Plus they choke turtles and strangle swans.

So shops started discouraging their use - customers were charged for them, asked if they really needed one, and offered bigger, tougher reusable bags. But I think we've missed a trick here.

We need to look at what the evils actually are. Let's take the turtles and swans for starters. Plastic bags don't have to harm them. I've got a bunch of them in the cupboard above the cooker and I've never discovered a dead swan in there. It's not the bags themselves that cause the problem, it's their disposal. Jamie, our venerable 16 year old Jack Russell once got into the Christmas chocolate and ended up with some serious kidney problems for his trouble, but that's not Cadbury's fault, it was ours for leaving it in his reach. Wildlife deaths are a littering problem, not a plastic bag problem.

So is using oil an evil? Well, this is where things get interesting. You can do lots of things with oil:

Leave it in the ground.
Turn it into fuel and burn it.
Turn it into plastics.

Option one is clearly the most environmentally friendly, but I think I can suggest that's a fairly unlikely outcome. The second is probably the worst as far as things go - if the anthropogenic global warming theories are correct then this option is the one causing most of the problems. That leaves the third option, turning it into plastics.

As we all know, plastic doesn't break down easily. Hundreds of years is the number you'll hear bandied around - but what's wrong with that? It means your supermarket carrier bag, if disposed of in landfill, will sit there for centuries, doing precisely nothing. It won't break into carbon compounds and interfere with atmospheric chemistry, it will just be in the ground. It's a very roundabout and inefficient way of doing option one, leaving the oil in the ground in the first place. Plus, once oil becomes scarce enough, mining landfill for plastics will become profitable, and cheaper than drilling kilometres under the ocean for the raw material.

So we've got two reasonable options open to us: use the oil for fuel, or use it for plastics. As far as I can see, the environmentally friendly option is to go for plastics. Lots of them. So many that when we run out of oil we've got something to show for it: plastic bags galore. A little more atmospheric carbon is slightly less useful to the average person regardless of environmental effects, plastic mines on the other hand...well if you want to be cynical about it, there's money in plastic mines.

What about the people who need fuel, which is most of us? Well, we're hideously bad at using it. We burn oil in car engines, which are horribly inefficient, only around 20% of the energy in the fuel actually gets used for something practical (unless you regularly cook steak on your engine casing). Burn it in a power station on the other hand, and you get around 33%. Use that to charge fuel cells and you've got a bit more bang for your buck, and some leftover oil to turn into useful and environmentally friendly plastic bags. In time, of course, we'll run out of oil and be forced to find alternatives - why shouldn't we be doing that sooner rather than later? Use plastic bags and bring the future a little closer.

And plastic itself can be used for transport - paragliders for example, even small ones...

Fake Homeopathic Remedies For Sale

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 16:47:00 +0000

Let's make one thing very clear from the outset, because there's a lot of confusion over this issue: homeopathy is not a synonym for alternative or complementary medicine. There are some forms of complementary medicine that do have a real effect on the body - chewing willow bark for example, because it contains a molecule that is very similar to aspirin, or using dock leaves for nettle stings. Maggots aren't a traditional part of western medicine, but have been used very successfully in treating certain open wounds. Complementary medicine isn't always bunkum. Sadly, a lot of the time, it is. Or at best a well constructed placebo.

You know what they call 'alternative medicine' that’s been proved to work? Medicine.
Tim Minchin

So I'm not having a wholesale go at alternative medicine here, just one part of it, specifically homeopathy. Homeopathy is a very specific type of treatment based on the concept that the same thing that causes a symptom can treat it if used in small enough quantities. So, for example, to treat insomnia you would give the patient a very, very small amount of caffeine. The problem arises when you look at just how small an amount is used. Homeopathic remedies are so dilute that, statistically, you'd be very lucky indeed to find a single molecule of the "active ingredient" in a dose. Practitioners claim that water, the solvent normally used, has a "memory" of some description. If this is the case, and can be shown with some reliable data and maybe a pie-chart, then there's probably a simultaneous Nobel Prize for physics, chemistry and medicine to be had, and at 10 million Swedish Kronor, or about 1m Sterling per prize, that's a lot of money to put towards a charitable homeopathic clinic in the third world. I'm surprised nobody has claimed it. Maybe they need some help with the pie-chart.

Suffice to say, I'm not a fan of homeopathy. So I've decided to go into business.

Anybody want to buy some homeopathic medicine? It's £2.50 a pop (plus p&p), which is half the average price of one of the main UK retailers.

The only drawback is that it's fake. It's fraudulent. I've had no training in making it, I don't have a leather thing to bash the bottle against and the remedy has never been close to the active ingredient I'm claiming it's made with.

So am I worried about being taken to court over this? Well, yes it might happen, and yes it would bankrupt me (not that I have anything anyway), but I'm not in the slightest bit worried about a conviction. UK law, you see, requires more than a simple admission. If I plead not guilty there has to be at least one other piece of evidence - in this case, some regulator or other would have to perform a chemical analysis on my fake remedy and show that it's got a different form of "no active ingredient" to the "no active ingredient" in a real homeopathic remedy. I don't believe this is possible, even in principle, and if somebody does manage it then there's a few Nobel Prizes for them and I'll have been at the centre of one of the biggest scientific revolutions the world has ever seen.

If you would like to order any of my fake homeopathic remedies please comment below or email me, not forgetting to include details of the active ingredient/s you want me to not put into it.

Artificial Intelligence Comments On Education Policy

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 22:10:00 +0000

There's a particular user on Twitter who is, in my opinion, the only user who's always going to be on the good side of average. @cmunell is a little tedious in some ways. She (I don't know, but it sounds like a she) doesn't really do much other than offer an opinion on some phrase she's learned somewhere. To be honest, it's often not highbrow stuff; stunning observations such as:

I think "the-chart-show" is a #TVShow (http://bit.ly/gfI7Gl)
I think "North Creek Bridge" is a #Bridge (http://bit.ly/g3kjz2)
I think "Dansville Municipal Airport" is an #Airport (http://bit.ly/ghWMDR)

It's not anything big or clever most of the time. Sometime though, just sometimes, she says interesting things. She comments on people I've never heard of before, or a big economic/ideological argument in the UK at the moment:

I think "sarah marie johnson" is a #Criminal (http://bit.ly/eVBnkM)
I think "educational books for kids" is a #PoliticalIssue (http://bit.ly/eWXNaX)

At this point I really have to stress for narrative, scientific and legal reasons that NELL doesn't know what she's talking about.

Well she might to be fair, which is kind of the point of this article. I hope not though, not yet at least. We're not ready for that.

NELL, you see, is a bot. A computer. Not even a computer really, as you could just change all the hardware, but she'd still be NELL. She's simply software, in reality she's a set of instructions for a computer, she's ones and zeroes.

But she seems to be getting the hand of using the English language. She's not always right by any means.

And I have to point out that I believe the "criminal" she's referring to is the same Sarah Marie Johnson who was convicted of murdering her parents in the US a while back. Here's the court judgement I'm thinking of.

But if NELL isn't referring to that particular Sarah Marie Johnson (and I'm bet there's a few of them, and I bet they're bloody furious about articles like this...sorry) then is it a libel? And if so, who gets sued? Obviously I could be, for repeating it, but that would require the original statement be proved libellous.

So the question here is can a computer commit libel? If NELL reads this article and concludes that Geoff Robbins is a criminal (and I've never been convicted of a crime), then could I sue?

Who? The programmers? They simply wrote a computer program, a scientific exploration of the human language. And it's wrong sometimes. Science allows for things being wrong; things being proven wrong is the lifeblood of science. Science can never happen if nothing is ever found to be wrong.

But the law does not allow for incorrect statements in some situations. In public, for example, and where the incorrect statement makes somebody look bad. The call that libel, and it costs a fortune to just be accused of it.

Which has one effect. It forces science underground, away from the public and into the private sphere. Worse than that, it takes the innovative new ideas away from an international community and the general public (see AI on Twitter, this article), and it forces them into patent fenced commercial secrets. Imagine a world where Einstein only allowed the nuclear military to use his ideas, and where Arthur C Clarke's satellites were useless for GPS because he'd never heard of relativity. Secrecy makes the world worse, and libel law (in its current UK form and interpretation) forces science into secrecy.

And where does that leave NELL?

Would she like to play a game?

Is the only winning move not to play?

First Science From The Planck Satellite - The Edge Of The Universe

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 01:56:00 +0000

Did you hear that somebody took a picture of the entire Universe? It's slightly cooler than that, it's actually a picture of the Universe about thirteen billion years ago. Or, more importantly, around 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

That's nothing. As far as timing goes, that's a photo of the start of the Universe, give or take a bit of motion blur. Well...sort of. I'm being a little poetic, but it's the closest we can theoretically get to an honest-to-goodness photo of the Big Bang.

So yeah, it's quite impressive. It's been done before of course, it was called the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) which is a very complicated way to say "Human horizon map".

As I've previously mentioned on this blog, the Universe has an horizon. It's not a two dimensional ground-sea horizon like we're used to (ie a line at a distance), it's a three dimensional horizon, a rough sphere.

And yes, it's centred on us.

That doesn't mean we're special. We're not, we're a strange lump of matter on a small bit of debris orbiting a very average star in the backwaters of a galaxy that never amounted to much.

It's just physics. The Universe has been around for 13.75 billion years, and causality travels at a certain speed. Yes, yes, yes, we call it the speed of light. That's wrong, it's a bad name and the world of science should do something about it. "c", the physical constant, is the speed of causality. Light happens to be one of the things that travels at that speed.

And all of this means that the light that left the Big Bang (or a moment after, once light actually started existing) is still out there. It's always there. It's always the-age-of-the-universe-in-light-years-away.

So all we really need to do is focus a telescope on 13.75 billion light-years, and bingo...a picture of the horizon of the Universe. (see left)

So it's no big deal, it's been done before. A few people got the wrong end of the stick and called the picture "the face of God". That's going a bit far whatever your views on theism, but if we're going to presume there is no god then this picture is the best we've got.

Well....no. Sorry. The point of science is we can do better. Sure, the WMAP picture above is impressive, but the Planck satellite's first lot of data and scientific findings have been released, and they make WMAP look a little...well, what's a nice way to say obsolete with a huge amount of affection?

So here's a picture. There's a lot of science in there, but for the moment just enjoy how pretty it is.

Image: ESA / Planck Project

Go on, click on it and revel in the full glory. It's astoundingly beautiful. That's a 360 degree image, of the entire Universe.

To be fair, there's a certain amount of interference. All the blue stuff for example. That's all hot dust, gas and various stars and stuff that's getting in the way...we call it the Milky Way, our galaxy. The stuff beyond that is the really interesting bit, the orange/red bits to the top left and bottom right. That's the real picture of the horizon, and there's going to be better to come once they get all that blue stuff out of the way.

And the weird oval shape? Well that's an Aitoff projection, it's simply a way of showing the sphere of the Universe all around us, but on a 2D computer screen.

If you're really clever you write a program which wraps it onto a sphere and lets you fly around inside it, observing the Universe from the Planck satellite's own point of view.

If you're not quite that clever, like me, then you write the program but you can't correct for the pixel compression at the edge of the image, so there's a big belt of distortion around the middle. And you can only make it work on Linux based computers so far.

Still, download it, give it a go, and give me a shout if it works, it's vaguely cool...
You'll need to change the permissions to make it executable ("chmod +x" or right-click the icon, properties, allow execution).

Controls: Cursor keys plus A and Z for panning/rudder.

An Aetheist's Message At Christmas / Diwali / Hanukkah

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 02:29:00 +0000

If you believe in a god, any kind or any number, then good for you.

Not believing takes just as much faith, trust me. And placing even a modicum of trust in Science is utterly terrifying...that's why science as a rule is basically paranoia, trying to prove ourselves wrong.

But the one thing I can say is that whatever you believe, whether it's a world created in six days six and a half thousand years ago, or a whole Universe created by a god, or just a very exotic mathematical possibility....well it's pretty darned cool.

The world around us is amazing. Birds fly more elegantly than anything we've ever seen, waves give us artistic expression from a plank of wood, we're aware of our place spinning through space in the suburbs of a hundred billion galaxies, maybe more.

Yes, we can argue about who, if anyone, made it. But on a day when that argument is all too divisive, can we not at the very least take a good long look around us? Even if there's no god, it's still mind-blowingly impressive...

The video repeats a bit, but you get the idea. We're the only planet with life in the Universe as far as we know. Hell of a responsibility people/apes/ants/bacteria. And I make no apology for the music. Queen rock. Deal with it.

Merry thingy.
G
x

The Multiverse According To Izzard And Tegmark

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 15:07:00 +0000

You've got to believe you can be a stand-up before you can be a stand-up. You've got to believe you can act before you can act. You've got to believe you can be an astronaut before you can be an astronaut. But you've got to believe.
Eddie Izzard

Multiverse theory is a funny old thing. It's one of those theories that might solve a bunch of problems, like the way our Universe seems to be incredibly finely tuned to allow complex life to develop, or some of the oddities of quantum theory like particles being in two different places at once. It's a theory that has been developed and delved into by some of the most eminent physicists ever to have lived...and it's not even science.

I'm not suggesting, of course, that Martin "Astronomer Royal" Rees, Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark and their colleagues are cheating in any sense, or wasting their time researching the subject, because it's possible that they're laying the groundwork for a game-changing new theory. It's still not really science though...yet.

Suggesting that there is such a thing as "a Multiverse theory" is a little over simplistic and disingenuous. There are a great many Multiverse theories. Tegmark's work alone suggests there are at least four different possible "layers" of Multiverse, any combination of which could be correct.

There's the simplest kind, level one, which suggests that our normal, everyday Universe is in fact infinite, or at least far, far bigger than we presently observe. If you're sat in a boat on a calm sea with your eyes around two metres from the surface of the water then you can only see about five kilometres in any direction...the Earth curves away, limiting how far you can see. We have the same horizon problem with the Universe, except it curves away in time.

The CMB: The furthest we can see.

The best we can do is see around 45 billion light years. There might well be more beyond this horizon, we just can't see it. The picture on the left is the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB, the echo of the Big Bang. In even simpler terms, it's a picture of our three dimensional horizon, and the tiny, tiny ripples in it. There have been some suggestions recently that small anomalies in the CMB are the result of more "stuff" beyond our cosmic horizon. If our Universe does, in fact, go on for ever then the chances of there being another version of the Earth somewhere out there become almost certain. In fact it's relatively easy to work out how far away the other version is likely to be...it's somewhere in the region of ten to the ten to the twenty nine metres away. That's a ten with 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 zeroes after it. Quite a long way. There's an entire alternate Universe almost identical to ours, complete with the same constellations and galaxies and large scale structures a bit further away, ten to the ten to the one hundred and fifteen metres. I'm not even going to try typing an estimate to that, it's a big number.
But the horizon problem still exists. Currently we have no way whatsoever of exchanging information with bits of the Universe beyond our cosmic horizon, other than (possibly) very short range glitches in the CMB. The main feature of a level one multiverse is that it's all part of the same Big Bang - everything is based on the same laws of physics as our little "local" bit.

The second level is where things start getting a bit weird. It suggests there are other "post-inflation bubbles". In essence, other Big Bangs which took place somewhere else. The laws of physics are the same as ours, but the physical constants will be different. Gravity might be stronger, probably resulting in a rather spectacular, short lived universe full of black holes. Or weaker, meaning few, if any, stars and very little other than Hydrogen and Helium. Atoms themselves may behave differently, or never form at all. A level two Multiverse is an attractive idea because it naturally solves the fine tuning problem. There are around forty constants in physics, numbers that are the same everywhere we look. The charge on an electron is the same anywhere in our Universe, but there's no good reason why it has the charge it does. If it was different then the laws of physics would still mesh together perfectly well, the Universe would still exist, it would just be different. Life as we know it almost certainly wouldn't exist, but that doesn't really matter. In fact, change any of the forty-odd constants by just a little bit and the chances are that any kind of complex structure, including life, couldn't exist. So why is our Universe so delicately balanced? So subtly "designed"?
The level two Multiverse solves this problem. If there are an enormous number of universes, each with its own set of physical constants, then there's bound to be a few that by sheer fluke hit the right combination for life. Life eventually evolves in this small subset of universes and sits there wondering why its universe is so well designed...

Level three is based on the weird results of quantum theory. One of the founding experiments is called Young's Double Slit. I'll let Mark Everett (of rock band Eels) explain:

Why is a rock star talking about a two hundred year old physics experiment? It's because his father, Hugh Everett III, was a physicist who suggested that this experiment shows two parallel universes overlapping. The only difference between "our" Universe and the parallel one is that in ours the photon went through the left slit, and in the other universe it went through the right. Because the two universes are otherwise identical there is a certain amount of leakage between the two, they are able to very subtly influence each other, resulting in the interference pattern.

Everett's "Many Worlds" interpretation was fairly roundly rejected by the rest of the physics community when he first suggested it, and you can see why. It really does sound like something from a science fiction novel. The idea is undergoing a little bit of a renaissance however. The modern interpretation is that all possible moments in time, in all possible universes, actually exist, and ours Universe is simply a "most likely" path through this higher level of Multiverse. It explains the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, the slightly fuzzy nature of the Universe when we take a very close look at it...we're looking at a collection of possible universes, not our Universe at all.
Again, there's no real way to test this satisfactorily. There is the quantum suicide experiment for example. The experimenter stands in front of a machine gun which is connected to a device which measures the spin of a subatomic particle. The spin can be either up or down - if it's up then the gun fires, if it's down the gun doesn't. If Everett's idea is right, and does actually represent a Multiverse, then there will always be a universe where the experimenter survives. If the measurement is done ten times then there will be 1023 universes where the newspaper headline is "Idiot Scientist Shot In Face" and one where the experimenter survives. Unfortunately (for the theory, if not the experimenter), there is always a small chance of survival even if the Multiverse idea is wrong, so you can never have a definitive answer.

Tegmark's last level, the fourth, is the most philosophical in nature. All of the previous levels share one thing in common, the laws of mathematics. Even if the laws of physics change, they can still be described with equations and mathematical expressions that would be recognisable to us. Changing the universal gravitational constant, G, changes the universe. A level four parallel universe changes the equation that G appears in. Currently there are no known ways, even theoretically, that this idea can be physically tested or explored in any way.

Tegmark's ideas are by no means the only ones, but they are a popular basis for investigating the nature of a Multiverse if it exists. No, none of it makes testable and new predictions at the moment, so it's not science yet. The implications, on the other hand, are fascinating.

If an infinite Multiverse of any kind exists then we can have some fun with it. Let's take a lottery for example. It's intuitively obvious that you have to buy a ticket to win, but if we're in a Multiverse then that statement changes slightly...buying a ticket guarantees that you win. Or at least one version of you, somewhere. You're also immortal. Whatever happens that might kill you, there's always a version that survived against the odds, and as you're able to read this, you are that immortal version...so far at least. The flipside is also true. Every time you cross the road there's a version of you that is killed. Gerry, my flatmate, has taken this principle to a humorously logical conclusion: he delights in setting small traps for me that have a tiny, miniscule, theoretical chance of killing me. He reasons that every time he does this he gains the satisfaction of knowing he's killed me in a parallel universe, without all the drawbacks of being arrested and later murdered in prison. He's an odd man in many ways.

So within reason anything is possible in a Multiverse. But there's no short cut, you can't just sit back and expect to win the lottery or become an astronaut or even a stand-up comedian. The universe where that happens is one where you bought a lottery ticket, or studied physics, or died at umpteen comedy clubs first. You have to make sure you're in the right universe, which means you have to put the work in.

But first, you have to believe.

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's revolving...

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:38:00 +0000

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that evolving,
     Revolving at 900 miles an hour.

There's a little poetic license in Monty Python's classic, it's actually just over that, closer to 1040 miles an hour at the equator, but only six hundred-ish up here in Edinburgh. 900 works well enough though, and it scans nicely.

So yeah, we're spinning. We all know that, like night and day. The Earth spins, the Sun comes up, the Moon does its thing and some people even bother about the stars if they're out late enough.

Most of the time I'm worrying about the sky spinning around it's a result of some nice new guest ale in the Blind Poet, but just sometimes you get a rather literal demonstration.

This is a picture of Jupiter, plus (right to left), Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

That's taken with a digital SLR (Nikon D100) on a telescope mount and a 270mm lens. It's a bit out of focus, and there's either a lens flare or a galaxy to the lower right of Jupiter. The main feature though, is the trail. The tripod and camera were locked down, the sensor was set to delay until after the vibration had settled....it's not all my fault, honest. It's not even a particularly long exposure, only two seconds.

That's how fast we're spinning. Jupiter is whizzing past...or we're whizzing past Jupiter, depending on your reference frame.

The main point is that I took a photograph of Europa, the ice moon from 2001.

All these worlds are yours. Except Europa. Attempt no landings there.

They didn't say anything about photos did they?

What The NASA Announcement Actually Means

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 02:33:00 +0000

The weird thing is, the message got swallowed in the argument over its importance. But that's another post.

Here, in fairly plain language, is what it means:

They've probably found an extremophile. Bacteria are remarkably resistant, they appear in sub-zero temperatures, high acidity, high temperatures, high salinity, all sorts of places.

Now we've found one that not only survives a high-arsenic environment, it can actually survive without phosphorus at all.

Yup, that's chemistry mumbo-jumbo to some. In essence, phosphorus makes the backbone to DNA, it's the chemical foundation of every single living organism on the planet. Technically, in the known universe. Every living cell has a strand of DNA made with a strand of phosphorus.

Arsenic could do the job though. The chemistry works. You can, in theory, have arsenic based life, and until today it was in exactly the same category as the "silicon based life" so beloved of science fiction. It was fiction, unsupported theory, hypothesis. Until today.

Today a very clever scientist (with a great website) announced that she'd diluted these bacteria down until there was no phosphorus left in the system. The bacteria were operating on an arsenic based genome.

Now, herein lies the rub: where does it come from? No, of course it's not extraterrestrial, but is it the same as phosphorus based life? In this case, it seems it is. It looks like a case of normal, everyday life adapting rather spectacularly rather than a new form of life (the "shadow biosphere" that has been suggested).

Either way, NASA were absolutely right to announce this as a discovery of significance to astrobiology. One of the following things have just been demonstrated in some style:

Life based on a fundamentally different chemistry is not only possible, it actually exists!
It might be the second spontaneous emergence of life ever observed by humans, with implications for the odds of life elsewhere.

It might just be normal, boring, tedious Earth life surviving in ridiculous circumstances. Ones which are based on fundamental chemistry, suggesting that life can survive a far greater range than we previously gave it credit for, and echoing some (so far speculative) ideas about potential biochemistry for Titan, Enceladus and Europa to name a few we've already visited.

There was a lot of hype and expectation, but the fact remains, this is a highly significant breakthrough in both biochemistry and astrobiology, and has been led by the astrobiologists. This is a big discovery for a young field which carries some important answers about the nature of life.

NASA Astrobiology Announcement - Wild Rumour And Conjecture

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 01:28:00 +0000

NASA issued a press release today. Possibly something big.

There's going to be a public statement on Thursday afternoon (UK time) which will: "impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.".

Now let's be very clear about two things:

Astrobiology is a very young science.
Astrobiologists have been a bit busy in the last couple of years.

This could be just another "Big Science Announcement" (BSA) designed to attract some publicity - and nothing wrong with that, science is cool and we should gossip about it a bit more - but it could possibly be something more.

NASA are being rather taciturn over the actual contents of the announcement, as is their right with any BSA. However, this much is known -- the announcement involves a very special group of people. The listed "participants" are all people with a very high level interest in astrobiology. Interestingly, they all seem to fall in to two of three particular camps:

People who have suggested that we search for a "shadow biology" on Earth, to test how likely spontaneous life generation (biogenesis) is, and also to look for signs of panspermia.
People who have worked on the wonderfully successful Mars missions in the last couple of decades, from which geological data is the main thing we have.
People who have worked on desert varnish.

Desert varnish is the clincher for me. It's odd stuff. It's kind of a sheen that certain rocks get in very dry environments, hence the name. It looks like it's been painted on, but in fact it's entirely natural, it just isn't biological. It looks like lichen, it seems to grow like it, but it's not got DNA or anything like that, it's more like a mineral growth than life.

And see that first bullet point? One of the participants in this BSA, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, published a rather influential paper last year which suggested that astrobiology should be looking for the Earth's "shadow biosphere". The idea is that if life can develop, and if it's likely to happen, then it should have happened here on Earth more than once. We might just not have spotted it...

Seriously, look how obsessed we are with DNA and proteins and the whole "organic" thing. We might not spot a different kind of life if it was sat under our noses, is what Wolfe-Simon's paper suggests, and what's more, let's start looking. And like I said, the paper was rather influential, which means people started looking.

And now some of the people who looked are standing up with her and NASA and they have something big to say.

Oh...did I mention that NASA found desert varnish on Mars years back?

So we have people looking for new life, plus something that looks a lot like life but isn't, and also exists on Mars.

Long story short? Blogger makes wild suggestion that (possibly Silicon based) life has been found on Earth and may well also exist on Mars.

This will rock if I'm right....

Cassini Set For Enceladus Flyby

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 14:15:00 +0000

Our Solar system, the Sun and all those who sail with her, is pretty ordinary as far as we can tell. There's a very average star surrounded by a few gas giants, some small rocky types and a fair bit of rubble. Examinations of other stars have so far shown much the same setup and there's no reason to suspect our system is anything other than fairly mundane, with the possible exception of some interesting biology on the third rocky type.

And yet we still find fascinating things everywhere we look. One of the funkiest ongoing projects is the Cassini Equinox Mission, a space probe orbiting Saturn and paying some flying visits to the attendant moons. Cassini has been producing some stunning data over the last six or so years, some of it highly technical, and some of it simply very, very pretty.

Based on an original from NASA/JPL (cropped by author)

This, for example, is Enceladus, an ice moon with a diameter of about 500km. There are two particularly interesting things in this image:

The stripes and flat areas are the first. Look at almost any object in the Solar system that doesn't have a thick atmosphere (which Enceladus doesn't) and you'll find one main feature: craters. Big craters, small craters, overlapping craters, craters inside craters...there's usually lots and lots of craters. Everything in the Solar system is being constantly bombarded by lumps of rock, ice and metal left over from the original formation, and that leaves a few scars. Even the Earth has a few big ones from objects that made it through the atmosphere. Enceladus has craters too, but not as many as you'd expect. There are big areas which are fairly crater-free, meaning that the surface is being wiped clean somehow. The stripes are a clue as to how this is happening.

The second interesting thing in the picture is the fuzzy plume at the bottom of the picture. Enceladus is too small to hold an atmosphere down, so what is the plume, and where did it come from?

The most likely solution to both curiosities, the plumes and the unusual surface, is that Enceladus isn't entirely frozen. The suggestion is that under the surface shell of ice there is liquid water, possibly huge amounts of it. The current theory is that because Enceladus' orbit isn't perfectly circular it's kneaded by Saturn's gravitational pull. If you take a snowball, stick it in a plastic bag and crunch it about in your hand it'll melt fairly quickly, and that appears to be what's happening with Enceladus. And a liquid ocean under the ice would produce tectonic activity very similar to what we see on Earth. The icy crust will slide about on the water, crack open, melt and refreeze, potentially explaining the lack of craters.

This is where this article becomes a bit speculative. There's no suggestion that there's life anywhere in the known universe other than on Earth, but we do have a few likely candidates: hardy microbial life on Mars perhaps, or possibly even some funky methane eating organisms on Saturn's gigantic moon Titan. One of the best bets however, is anywhere you find liquid water, which puts Enceladus firmly in the "just maybe" category. We've got life on Earth which exists in a very similar environment, under the Antarctic ice cap for example, or deep in the ocean. There might be nothing - Enceladus might just be a dead snowball hovering too far from the Sun. The potential is certainly interesting though.

Cassini will be making another close pass on Enceladus this Tuesday (30th November, 2010), skimming past at a mere 48km. Even if there's no extraordinary new game-changing data from the plucky little space probe, we should at least get some very pretty pictures back.

The PiSBN Project

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:33:00 +0000

I don't normally apologise for being a bit of a geek. There's a part of my brain that's into computers and space and science and all that, it's just the way things are.

But to be honest, even I cringe a little at my latest little project. Sorry about this.

Pi is an interesting number. It goes on forever, doesn't repeat itself, and appears to be entirely random. And in an infinite, random sequence, you get every possible combination of numbers eventually. Your phone number is in there somewhere. And every book written, if you convert the numbers into ASCII.

Searching Pi for books like that would be stupid though, you'll burn up the best computers on the planet before you get anything worthwhile. There is, however, a quicker alternative.

Almost every single book published since 1966 has an ISBN number. These days they all start 978, then there's another ten digits. The last one's a check digit made by multiplying the others up in a certain way.

So I wrote a program that searches Pi for ISBN numbers. Then it checks them to see if the check digit is a valid one. Then it looks the ISBN up on Google Books.

I got three hits in the first fifty million digits of Pi. It took about ten minutes. Actually, it took about three hours to write the thing properly, another hour debugging it, and a frustrated lie in the bath half way through. And about six cups of tea. Once it actually worked it was fairly quick though.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I present for you edification and entertainment, the first three books in Pi. (Cue fireworks.)

At the four hundred and nine thousand, seven hundred and eighty third decimal place, we have:

Licentiate seminar on environmental engineering and biotechnology
by the Tampereen teknillinen korkeakoulu. Bio- ja ympäristötekniikka.
(Tampere University of Technology. Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering.)

I have to admit that I haven't read this one, but I'm quite chuffed that the first book (well, journal) is something a bit geeky.

In second place, at the two million, one hundred and twenty thousand, two hundred and fourth place, is:

Sneeuwwitje en Rozerood
by Jacob Grimm

Or as it's known in English, Snow White and Rose Red. And because the original is not covered by copyright you can get a copy from the excellent Project Gutenberg. Not hugely geeky, but there is something wonderfully gothic and conspiratorial about one of Grimm's turning up.

And taking the bronze, at the three million, six hundred and thirty thousand and thirty third decimal place:

The healing knife
by George Sava

A curious sounding book written under a nom de plume by a "noted Harley Street Surgeon".

I'll bet you feel better now that you know what the first three ISBN numbers are in Pi? I know I certainly do.

Sorry again.

Trying to explain the weirdest idea in the universe.

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:21:00 +0000

This is going to sound utterly crackpot.

Sorry, but some of the big ideas can sound a bit weird. To an atheist, the idea of a god seems a little out-there, and this is the flip side - an atheist suggesting something about the universe that not only might never be proved, but might not even be provable at all.

Or even wrong.

But hey, the whole ethos of science can be summarised by "I might be wrong, but what about...?", so I'm going to throw this idea out there and we'll see where we go with it. So here we go, hold on tight, this is the big soundbite:

Mathematics might be real.

It's an idea that I've been throwing around in my head for a few years now. It all started with physics, a subject which has been close to my heart since I first wondered just what the hell was going on. For some reason physics seems to be very good at taking the stuff we see around us and distilling it down to a simple mathematical equation or, at the very least, one prefixed with "In a frictionless vacuum". See, for example, gravity.

Courtesy xkcd, prescient comedy god amongst men.

Drop any object, near any other object, anywhere in the known universe, and we pretty much know what's going to happen. Newton got it right enough for everyday use, and Einstein's relativistic reinterpretation corrected Newton well enough to not only change our view of the structure of space and time, but also to run atomic clocks in orbit decades later. This one little idea, using nothing mathematical beyond primary school maths (if the idea of a square root is still primary level) describes the vast majority of what happens in the range of any telescope we have. One equation describes most things we can see.

Or let's take something else, like things bumping into each other. Again, Newton laid the groundwork, and then James Clerk Maxwell refined the ideas with his theory of electromagnetism, and another huge lump of the universe was reduced to an equation. Well, maybe three, but there's a lot of stuff in the universe.

By now things are starting to look a little suspicious.

It seems that everything we experience is a rough estimate (a fact that's easily demonstrated by a high speed cameras or electron microscopes), and that the closer we look the simpler things become in a way. Take, for example, a book. Prop one up on the far side of the room, as far away as you can. Go on, I'll wait..

...so, there's a book. You can see that. I'm sure you're well aware that it could be an optical illusion by a talented artist, but if you move around the room a little you'll prove to yourself that it's a real 3D object. But it could be a clever film prop, so you can pick it up and flick through to convince yourself it's a real book. Is it really the book it claims to be on the cover? Well, read it and find out.

All of the time you're gathering new information, and yet the object you're observing becomes more simple. As you look closer you see:

An object that looks like a book, but could be a million other things.
An object that looks like a book, or a very good effort at one.
A book, one of countless billions.
A book, by a specific author.
A particular book by that author.

And so on and so forth. As you look deeper and deeper you'll find a very small ASCII text file embedded on a paper based medium - a blank book plus an ebook. Then you find yourself looking at molecules arranged in a particular way. Then atoms.

When you get down to the subatomic level you're saying, in effect, "there's a quark here". A quark can be described with just three numbers: the mass, the charge and the spin. That's it. You don't get big quarks or little quarks, you can't get a quark made from metal and a quark made from wood, you only get three numbers. That's all a quark is, just three numbers.

Now we're not looking at a thing at all, just three numbers. Add to that a few rules about what happens when these three numbers bump into another three and you're got something called quantum mechanics, and yes, it's really that simple. Well...nearly. The maths is a little tricky, but particle physics and quantum theory are both in effect just careful juggling of a few numbers, not objects.

It may be that we just don't know enough yet (see above, "science admits it might be wrong"), but it all seems to boil down to numbers. Not objects, just numbers.

What we're looking at now is commonly called Platonism, after Plato's idea that maths is real, and that's absolutely what I'm supporting here, the idea that mathematical ideas are real in their own right. We know Pythagoras' Theorem, and yet we're not able to build a mathematically perfect right-angled triangle. We can get really close, but the best we can even theoretically manage at the moment is a triangle of Planck lengths - three by four by five of them. And even then, it's still a bit hazy. Maths is more perfect than reality can muster, but reality seems to be trying very hard indeed.

See, told you this was a bit of a wacky post.

For further reading, without much terminology and maths, see:

The Unreasonable Effectiveness Of Mathematics In The Physical Sciences
Eugene Wigner - a classic and readable academic paper on the subject, link courtesy of Buffalo State College, US

Anathem
Neal Stephenson - a work of fiction covering the main themes and a beautiful work at that. The inspiration behind this post in a way.

Everybody wave to 2010TD54!

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 23:54:00 +0000

One of the nicest thing about the web is the way that it's still being used for freely shared information, particularly among academic and research groups as it was originally designed for. NASA are one group that are particularly good at producing some really interesting stuff for everybody, from pretty pictures to proper orbital data.

And just sometimes, that orbital data says something a tad out of the ordinary. This image was generated by a website belonging to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the people who brought you the glorious Cassini-Huygens mission.

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The two yellow lines are just there to show where the Sun is, and to give a sense of perspective. Then you can see the orbit of Mercury looping around it, and Venus, Earth, and the last white line is part of Mars' orbit.

Then there's the blue line. The dark bit is where it's been, the light blue bit is where it's going. And yes, it's a bit close to the Earth.

2010TD54, meet the Earth, and all who sail on her. Earth, meet 2010TD54, a fairly small asteroid that's about to get a bit intimate. Feel free to blow a kiss as it whizzes by.

The image, in fact, shows TD54 a bit further out on Oct 11th, the closest approach is around 10:49 GMT (11:49 BST) on Oct 12th. It's going to be very close in astronomical terms, around about 45,000 km in fact, which is a whisker. If we ran a rope around the equator twice then it would be long enough to reach.

Don't Panic. TD54 is only about 6m across. Its kinetic energy is equivalent to roughly one percent of a megaton of TNT, similar to a very big conventional bomb or a very tiny nuke. Even if it hit, which it won't, it would be unlikely to do any serious damage; maybe destroy a few houses, but more likely just burn up in the atmosphere. In fact, it's a significant technical achievement to find and track something that small before it's passed us by.

The Sun, a drunkard's walk and some Python...

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 15:38:00 +0000

I've been playing around with Python recently - the programming language that is, not the snake. (Snakes are cool too though.) One big difference with Python as opposed to PHP and Perl, the languages I normally use, is that Python is a little more geared towards graphical simulations rather than simply playing with a text input/output, especially with the pygame modules installed. Coming from a physics background, an obvious starting point is to try simulating some simple particles and maybe some gravity.

I had a dig around and found this script by Niels Stender which does exactly that, in a fairly elegant way. I find that tinkering with somebody else's code is a good way to get to grips with the syntax and style of a language.

Stender's code simply generates the particles and the relevant physics and starts them running, it's a good estimation of how particles behave in a gas, anything from the Earth's atmosphere to the interior of the Sun. There's a classic fact that gets trotted out in many astrophysics lectures: it takes around a million years for a photon to get from the centre of the Sun to the surface...and photons travel at the speed of light.

Why so long? Well the photons bounce around a lot, like the particles in this simulation. The way they bounce around is random, like tossing a coin. Toss a coin a thousand times and you'll get roughly 500 heads and 500 tails - the equivalent with our photon is that it stays pretty much where it started, at the centre. The odds of it reaching the surface of the Sun are very small, it would be like tossing a coin a thousand times and getting a thousand heads...which is why it takes so long, the photon has to wait for something very unlikely to happen. This process is known as a random walk, or slightly more poetically, a drunkard's walk.

Which is where my addition to the code comes in. I fancied tracking one individual particle, no different to any of the others (except it's red, just to make it more visible) and recording the x coordinate. Over time my code builds up a graph of the red particles position, which should, if the code and theory are correct, closely resemble a Bell curve, or a normal distribution pattern. This shape pops up everywhere from population biology to the most fundamental quantum theories, it's a mathematical signature showing that something truly chaotic and random is happening:

Here's some video of my script running....

And now here's the same simulation, ten minutes later. The graph in the bottom right is a reasonably good fit for the Bell curve, hooray!

You can have a tinker with the code yourself if you want - the source code is here. You'll need to install Python and pygame, both of which are free, if you don't have them already.

Fermi Problem: The Day The Music Dies

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 22:01:00 +0000

A Fermi Problem, in case you've not heard of one, is a bit of a game really. It's a riddle in a way, a question that generally asks for a rough estimate to a technically very difficult problem. You're not expected to be get the right answer, in fact for many problems if you're within a hundred times the right answer then it's pretty good. Not to be confused with the Fermi Paradox (same Fermi, different quandry) which is related to the existence or otherwise of extra-terrestrial life.

The point is to show your working. That's the interesting bit, come up with a wild guess, but base it on a few real life factors.

So my problem is this:

Music is finite. If you're fairly strict about the standard rules of western music and the range of human hearing, then there's only so many combinations of notes. "All the tunes possible" is a very big, but finite set.

If humans continue writing tunes and expanding at their current rate then when will we have used up all the music?

Obviously, you could just make the tunes longer and longer to get more and more of them, so I'm also going to place a time limit on "All the tunes possible": you've got a maximum tune length of nine minutes forty eight seconds. If it was good enough for Bat Out Of Hell it's good enough Fermi.

Hit the read more link for my proposed answer...

Proposed Solution:

Human hearing runs, approximately, from 20-20kHz, or around ten octaves, so that's 80 different notes. Given flats and sharps and silence, let's call it 160 notes.

The closest you can play two notes and hear them as discrete tones rather than one combined note is....oh I don't know, erm...1/20th of a second? Sound about right? So that's 160! x 20 possible different one second bursts of music.

So for nine minutes forty eight, or 588 seconds of music, we have 588! x (160! x20). These numbers are starting to get big now, that last expression equates to about 6x10^1660 possible songs.

So if the human race collectively creates one new song every second then we have around 2x10^1653 years left. The universe has existed for around 13.7 billion years, or 1.37x10^10.

Given the size of the numbers there's not much point in trying to put a date on when we run out...in fact, I think we need a new measurement of time here: "Sofars", as in the age of the universe so far.

We've got about, to a rough power of ten, 10^1643 Sofars left before we run out of music, or at least break the Meatloaf Limit. That's 100000000....(continue until you've got 1643 zeroes after the 1) times the present age of the Universe.

Mice, Chickens, Eggs & Evolution

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 20:15:00 +0000

I'm being out-evolved by something living behind my fridge. We've got a mouse in the flat. It's no big deal, the Old Town of Edinburgh is swarming with the blighters, the place is a six hundred year old labyrinth, bridges have been built over streets, covered up, filled in, tunnelled through, it's a mouse paradise. They're not usually much bother - the bleepy deterrents normally do the job, and on the rare occasions when they get a bit overly courageous we put down poison. No, it's not the kindest method, but it is one of the few that works on Old Town mice, and kinder than those sticky traps.

The mice, however, seem to have got wise to it, the poison doesn't work anymore. Actually, that's not technically accurate. I'm sure the poison still works, the mice just aren't falling for it any more. Not because they know it's poison of course, they don't, the absence of very small toxicology textbooks is all the proof I need of that. They're just not touching the stuff any more. What must have happened is that sometime in the last couple of years there was a community of mice. Most of them liked blue coloured grain, they took it and ate it and died hopefully peaceful deaths from hypothermia. A couple of them didn't. For some reason or another they didn't go for the free food. Maybe it was the smell, maybe the colour, maybe they just didn't like the taste - maybe they're refined mice and expect more presentation than a small plastic tray. For whatever reason, they didn't eat it. So most of the mice died...but a few survived to have baby mice. The baby mice inherited their parents' dislike of the grain we put down, so they don't touch it either, and they have more babies, none of who are partial to warfarin laced wheat.

Nothing has changed except the fact that the humans are a weapon down in the ongoing struggle for Old Town domination. The drugs don't work.

So if anyone doubts evolution, I've got some mice you should meet.

Speaking of evolution, which came first, the chicken or the egg? It's a bloody stupid question. Ever since I was a kid I've hated this one. The fact of the matter is, the egg came first, end of story, argument over, you're very welcome.

Firstly, let's go a little further back. There weren't always chickens. There were dinosaurs, and then there was Archaeopteryx, then there were the proto-chickens. Humans began to domesticate these birds and slowly they crept their way towards full-blown chickenhood. Of course, what constitutes full-blown chickenhood is still up for debate - there's maybe one specific genetic tweak that produces some morphological change that defines a chicken, but the point remains: however you define a chicken, there was a first one.

The first chicken hatched from an egg that was laid by an animal that wasn't a chicken. It was very nearly a chicken, in fact you'd probably need to run a battery of tests to confirm that it wasn't a chicken. This nearly-chicken laid an egg. As is the way with the world, the reproduction from adults to offspring wasn't perfect, there were small glitches in the DNA. Most of them did very little indeed, but in this case there was one tiny error in the strand that made the offspring a little different to anything that went before. It was a chicken, the first in a long, noble and tasty line.

And if the animal that comes out of an egg is a chicken then that egg is a chicken egg by definition. The egg belongs to the animal inside it, and that animal was a chicken.

The egg came first, but it wasn't laid by a chicken. End of discussion, game over, QED.

Total Eclipse Pt II: The Explanation

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 11:55:00 +0000

So what on earth was the last post all about? Well, you know how it is. It's Saturday night, you've had some wine and cheese and pate and olives and suddenly you start having "good" ideas. Yup, sorry, I was drink-coding. These things happen.

Whilst researching for an 80's themed fancy dress party I came across a stunning piece of work by Jeannie Harrell, a flow chart that generates a section of Jim Steinman & Bonnie Tyler's cult hit "Total Eclipse Of The Heart".

As this gloriously demonstrates, most songs have a structure, bits repeat. Total Eclipse does this repeatedly, and as such is ideal for a really silly coding exercise, which (if you're not familiar with PHP) is what all that gibberish does. It generates the entire song using a mere 2366 characters, rather than the 3050 in the official version from Bonnie Tyler's website (not including whitespace). That's a 22.4% saving on keyboard wear and tear if you ever need to type the lyrics out on a website.

Bat Out Of Hell should also work quite well...in fact, I'm tempted to compile a league table of songs and how compressible they are....2 Unlimited may well end up near the top...

Here's a link to the output running... http://thegeoff.hostcell.net/total-eclipse.php

"Total Eclipse Of The Heart" (Optimised Version)

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 23:00:00 +0000

<?php
// TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE HEART by Steinman & Tyler //
// (Optimised cover version by McGhee & Robbins) //

$short_turn="Turnaround, Every now and then I get a little bit ";
$rabbits="Turnaround bright eyes";
$longturn="$rabbits, Every now and then I fall apart";
$need="And I need you";
$forever="Forever's gonna start tonight ";
$time="Once upon a time";
$eclipse="A total eclipse of the heart ";

$v1=array("lonely and you're never coming round ",
 "tired of listening to the sound of my tears ",
 "nervous that the best of all the years have gone by ",
 "terrified and then I see the look in your eyes ");

for ($i=0;$i<4;$i++){echo $short_turn.$v1[$i];}
echo "$longturn $longturn ";

$v2=array("restless and I dream of something wild ",
 "helpless and I'm lying like a child in your arms ",
 "angry and I know I've got to get out and cry ",
 "terrified but then I see the look in your eyes ");

for ($i=0;$i<4;$i++){echo $short_turn.$v2[$i];}
echo "$longturn $longturn ";

$chorus="$need now tonight 
 $need more than ever 
 And if you only hold me tight 
 We'll be holding on forever 
 And we'll only be making it right 
 Cause we'll never be wrong together 
 We can take it to the end of the line 
 Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time 
 I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark 
 We're living in a powder keg and giving off sparks 
 I really need you tonight 
 $forever $forever 
 $time I was falling in love 
 But now I'm only falling apart 
 There's nothing I can do 
 $eclipse
 $time there was light in my life 
 But now there's only love in the dark 
 Nothing I can say 
 $eclipse ";

echo "<hr>$chorus<hr>";
echo "$rabbits ";
$short_turn="Turnaround, Every now and then I know ";

$v3=array("you'll never be the boy you always wanted to be ",
 "you'll always be the only boy who wanted me the way that I am ",
 "there's no one in the universe as magical and wonderous as you ",
 "there's nothing any better and there's nothing that I just wouldn't do ");

for ($i=0;$i<4;$i++){echo $short_turn.$v3[$i];}
echo "$longturn $longturn <hr>$chorus<hr>";
?>

How To Destroy The Universe - A Beginners Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 14:44:00 +0000

Firstly, it should be pointed out that destroying the Universe is considered to be a little anti-social in many quarters, and may even be illegal under your local laws. Please obtain professional legal advice before attempting it.

Secondly, you're not going to need the Large Hadron Collider. Let's make it clear from the outset: the LHC simply isn't up to the job, and by many, many orders of magnitude. Using the LHC to do what I'm going to suggest is like trying to set off a nuclear explosion with a small lump of Uranium ore and a toffee hammer, it simply isn't going to happen.

So with the obvious warnings out of the way, how are we going to destroy the entire Universe? Simply blowing up a star or two isn't going to do it. In fact, blowing up all the stars isn't going to do it, despite Steven Moffat's best effort in the last season of Doctor Who. Even if you could make every star go supernova at once, the Universe would still be there...OK, it would be a Universe full of dust and ashes rather that stars, but it would still be there. We're going to need a much bigger bang.

The bang we're looking for is something called 'vacuum decay', and it has nothing to do with household appliances. A vacuum, to a physicist, is a rather complicated thing. It's exactly what you're thinking of - an absence of matter, a space that contains no atoms, no molecules. In the middle of the last century, however, it became apparent that a vacuum is never really empty, quite the opposite in fact. A vacuum, even the most perfect one you can imagine, is a bit busy. There's space and time for starters, and a plethora of 'virtual particles' popping in and out of existence the whole time...on the smallest scales a vacuum is a seething mass of weirdness.

All of this weirdness requires energy - even in particle physics, there's no such thing as a free lunch. This energy is called, with remarkable clarity and lack of imagination, vacuum energy. Depending on the theory you use to calculate it, the vacuum energy in a cubic centimetre of space is somewhere between 0.00000000000000000001 Joules and 1x10^107 Joules (a 1 with 107 zeros after it), so it's fairly safe to say there's a certain amount of uncertainty.

(As a point of reference it takes about 35,000 Joules to bring a litre of water to the boil)

Whatever the actual value is, the point is that empty space has energy. There's no particularly good reason why our Universe has the amount of vacuum energy it does, in fact it could have values far outside our (already uncertain) estimates, and therein lies our method for destroying everything.

Now, not content with throwing some big numbers around, I'm going to drop a graph into the mix as well. Don't Panic. If it helps you can think of it as a picture of a rollercoaster. In fact it will probably help if you do, because I'm going to stick with the analogy. Here it comes, hold tight....

What this shows is a completely made up graph of the possible amount of vacuum energy in the Universe. We're the little red dot. Now, imagine pushing the little red dot to one side or the other...it'll just roll back down to where it started. Push it a bit harder though, and it'll roll over the peak to the right and settle in a new position in the second, lower dip to the right, and a lot of energy will be released in the process (equal to the difference in height between the two dips). That's potentially a lot of energy. If you can push one tiny bit of the Universe, a sphere of just a few hundred metres in diameter, over the peak then it gives off enough energy to push the space around it over the edge, which pushes the space around that over the edge, and you have a bit of a chain reaction on the go.

The bubble expands at nearly the speed of light, and inside it everything changes. The very laws of physics, and by association those of chemistry and biology, alter, and not in a good way.

...one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.
Coleman & de Luccia

Voila, we've destroyed the Universe, at least as far as we currently understand it. So how do we do it in practice? Well, we need a very high energy density, something like a very, very big bomb to push it over the edge. This was one of the "risks" associated with the LHC by people who didn't quite get the numbers (or "twats" as Brian Cox refers to them) - the energy densities created by the LHC are indeed very high, but they're nowhere close to high enough. How do we know when there's such uncertainty over how much vacuum energy the Universe has? Well several times a day cosmic rays slam into the Earth's atmosphere with very much the same energy density as the LHC's experiments. Once a month or so we get hit by a cosmic ray with far higher densities even than that, and every decade or so there's a truly exceptional event which surpasses the LHC by hundreds of times. None of these events seems to have triggered vacuum decay, after all, we're still here. (So why have we spent so much on the LHC when nature regularly beats the pants off it? Well the whole point is, in effect, to take a photo of the event with a very big digital camera, and we never know where and when the natural events will happen.)

Supernova, black holes merging, even gamma ray bursters, the most violent explosions ever observed, have so far failed to tip us over the peak and destroy the Universe, so we're going to have to dream up something else, an even bigger bang.

Which brings us to a curious little post-script, one best illustrated by a quote from Douglas Adams:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

What if we're in a Universe where vacuum decay has already happened? From the inside of the bubble it would look very much like a Big Bang....