Uncertain Principles

November Basketball: SU-Cal, UNC-OSU

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:17:57 -0500

Kate and I went to the two games of the "semifinals" of the 2K Sports Classic Supporting Coaches vs. Cancer, Your Name Here for a Prince pre-season "tournament" last night (the scare quotes are because the four teams playing last night were guaranteed to be playing last night, regardless of what happened in the earlier "rounds"). We were in section 329 of Madison Square Garden, which aren't great seats in an absolute sense, but are pretty darn good for a game-day impulse buy. Not that there was any trouble getting seats-- the lower levels were maybe 3/4 full.

The first game saw Syracuse beat Cal by 22 in a virtual home game for the Orange. At one point, the Cal band came out to do a T-shirt toss, and I have rarely seen a group of people that anxious to get the hell off the court at a major sporting event. One of them appeared to huck his shirt directly at Bob Knight, who was calling the game for ESPN.

The second game saw North Carolina outlast Ohio State, in a game that was sloppy and uninteresting most of the way-- hovering in that frustrating 12-15 point range where the outcome probably isn't in doubt, but it's not enough of a blow-out to write it off and go home early. Carolina made it interesting when we did decide to leave, with about a minute to go, and let Ohio State close to within two, needing some clutch free throws to secure the victory (which we watched from the gate closest to the exit, along with fifty other people who had also decided to leave early, but came back for the final plays).

You cant really take too much from November basketball, but some scatered observations are below the fold.

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I Can Haz Books!

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:52:37 -0500

It's not often that I regret having a cell phone that is just a phone, but this is one of those occasions-- I stopped by my publisher today to talk about marketing and publicity, and record a video for the web, and got a stack of finished copies of the book, hot off the presses. If I had a cell phone camera, I'd post a picture, but I don't, so you'll have to settle for a plain-text "Woo-hoo!"

On an only vaguely related note, our cultural activities in NYC will include some college hoops, as there's a preseason "tournament" taking place at Madison Square garden tonight. Syracuse vs. Cal, and UNC vs. Ohio State. Not a bad double bill for November basketball.

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Thursday Baby Blogging 111909

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:11:55 -0500

Actually, this ought to be "Wednesday Morning Baby Blogging," as that's when the picture was taken. Kate and I are going to New York City for the weekend, though, and SteelyKid is spending the weekend with Grandma and Grandpa in Scenic Whitney Point. So, you get an early picture, posted late:

This was taken just before we bundled her off to day care Wednesday. Kate's playing the "got your red dog" game-- for some reason, when you pop the pacifier out of SteelyKid's mouth, she finds it hilarious. Provided that you give it back pretty quickly, that is...

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Poll: New York State of Mind

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:03:26 -0500

Kate has a court appearance in New York tomorrow, and we're making a long weekend of it. I'm typing this from my parents' house, where I'm dropping SteelyKid off for some quality time with Grandma and Grandpa, and tomorrow, I'm heading down to The City. I've got some meetings scheduled tomorrow afternoon, and Friday at lunch, and then we're going to kick back and enjoy New York.

Of course, one of the paralyzing things about NYC is the sheer variety of cultural options. There's the AMNH, with lots of geeky exhibits, the Met, where you can spend days and not see everything, and MOMA, for a different sort of art experience. I've looked at the web sites for all of them, and none of the current exhibits looked like can't-miss shows to me. And it's too late in the year for the Bronx Zoo or the Cloisters.

So, we'll throw this out to a poll: What should we go see during our free time in The City this weekend?

Please choose only one. We don't promise to abide by the results of the poll, but suggestions are welcome.

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Creepiness Is Contagious

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:41:39 -0500

It's always kind of distressing to find something you agree with being said by people who also espouse views you find nutty, repulsive, or reprehensible. It doesn't make them any less right, but it makes it a little more difficult to be associated with those views.

So, for instance, there's this broadside against ineffective math education, via Arts & Letters Daily. It's got some decent points about the failings of modern math education, which lead to many of our entering students being unable to do algebra. But along the way, you get frothiness like the following:

The educational trends that led to the NCTM's approach to math have a long pedigree. During the 1970s and 1980s, educators in reading, English, and history argued that the traditional curriculum needed to be more "engaging" and "relevant" to an increasingly alienated and unmotivated--or so it was claimed--student body. Some influential educators sought to dismiss the traditional curriculum altogether, viewing it as a white, Christian, heterosexual-male product that unjustly valorized rational, abstract, and categorical thinking over the associative, experience-based, and emotion-laden thinking supposedly more congenial to females and certain minorities.

This veers a little too much in the direction of "we must protect our precious bodily fluids!," and really undercuts the effectiveness of the rest of the argument. This is not to say that there weren't nutty things said by people on the other side of the math-education argument, but any time you start to sound like Jack D. Ripper, you're headed to a Bad Place.

Of course, that's only the lowest-order effect of nuttiness. The next highest order contribution comes when people are able to use the reprehensible views of your associates to construct seemingly devastating counterattacks, such as Malcom Gladwell's response to Steven Pinker (who wrote a fairly devastating review of Gladwell in the New York Times), which consists mostly of pointing out that Pinker's comments about NFL quarterbacks are based on arguments from a creepy racist. Which is superficially very effective-- after all, who wants to be associated with a creepy racist, even twice removed?-- but doesn't really address the substance of the critique. It also neatly dodges the whole "igon value" issue (namely, that Gladwell misuses technical terms in a way that suggests he has no idea what he's talking about), which I'm sure Gladwell is more than happy to pretend never happened, but which is much more central to Pinker's argument than the NFL business.

So, not only do nutty views end up making it difficult for people who generally agree with you to, well, agree with you, but they also provide aid and comfort to those who disagree with you, by giving them an easy rhetorical dodge past people who use your arguments. The moral here is clear: people with creepy political views need to stop agreeing with me about stuff.

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Links for 2009-11-18

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:29:11 -0500

Zeroth Order Approximation: Summary dismissal

"Not every civil court case proceeds to trial. Some are settled "out of court" by the parties involved. Others are settled by the judge in a "summary dismissal" or "summary judgment". The suit is deemed to be unworthy of trial, even without a full hearing. In this way valuable time is saved and litigants are discouraged from bringing frivolous lawsuits. We often do the same thing with ideas. In fact, a great deal of what appears to be debate about ideas actually takes place in a "pre-trial" phase, in which people discuss whether an idea should even be granted a serious hearing. Many - most? - discussions go no further."

(tags: law science politics internet blogs academia culture society)
50 Best Books for Boys and Young Men | The Art of Manliness

"[R]eading experts all agree that boys need to be allowed to pick the books that really interest them. Of course it's okay to make suggestions to your son about things he might like-boys very much value the opinion of other boys and men in making their reading selections. So here are 50 books that many boys and young men will really love. We've included some classics, but we also threw in some more modern and accessible choices-after all, not every boy has the desire or the aptitude to dive into Dickens."

(tags: books education kid-stuff gender society culture)
Csi zoom story « Make My Mood

"See if you can enhance that license plate."

(tags: tv television pictures silly optics)
nanoscale views: Graphene, part I

"Graphene is one of the hottest materials out there right now in condensed matter physics, and I'm trying to figure out what tactic to take in making some blog postings about it. One good place to start is the remarkably fast rise in the popularity of graphene. Why did it catch on so quickly? As far as I can tell, there are several reasons."

(tags: science physics materials graphene blogs natelson condensed-matter)
Men often treat their friends better than women do : Cognitive Daily

"Who's more "sociable," men or women? Common sense says it's women, right? And many research studies back this impression up: Women are more interpersonal, more connected, more interdependent than men. Women are more likely to share intimate information with each other than men. But is that really the whole story? There is also research suggesting that men have larger social networks than women do, and that male-male friendships last longer than female-female ones."

(tags: psychology social-science science society culture gender blogs cog-daily)
Dear Sarah: Keep up the great writing! - Carl Hiaasen - MiamiHerald.com

"Our researchers can find no evidence that Tina Fey belongs to the Taliban. Could you send us the sourcing for that reference?"

(tags: politics stupid books US silly)

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Dorky Poll: How Do You Say That?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:17:06 -0500

As every physics-loving dog knows, the idea that electrons behave like waves was first suggested by Loius Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie (the 7^th duc de Broglie) in 1923. The proper pronunciation of his surname is a mystery even to human physicists, though. So, how would you say it?

Even though Louis was a quantum pioneer, please choose only one of the available options.

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There's No Cloning in Football

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:51:48 -0500

Sunday night, the Patriots lost a heartbreaker to the Colts 35-34. The talk of the sports world yesterday was Bill Belichick's decision to go for it on fouth-and-two on his own 28 yard line when he was up by six with just over two minutes to play. They didn't get the first down, and turned the ball back over to the Colts, who went on to score a touchdown and win the game.

Yesterday's discussion was a low point even by the standards of sports talk radio, with one idiot after another holding forth about how stupid Belichick's decisions was, and how he "disrespected his defense," and various other dumb sports cliches. In actuality, people who know how to do math know that he was playing the odds, and had a higher probability of winning by going for it than he would've had if they had punted.

Belichick's problem is one that's well known to quantum mechanics. His decision to go for it increased his team's chances of winning, but the actual outcome of the game was still probabilistic-- no matter what he did, the result would come down to chance. And there's no way to get information about probability from a single measurement. The only way to determine probabilities is through many repeated measurements on identically prepared systems, but the rules of football do not allow this, no matter how satisfying it would be to stick it to jackass sports radio yappers.

In quantum terms, what Belichick faced was a superposition of winning and losing states, like so:

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Physics Is Going to the Dogs

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:04:16 -0500

There's been an independent rediscovery of the notion of using dogs to explain physics, as you can see in this YouTube video of Golden Retrievers explaining the structure of atoms:

Emmy thinks she should get royalties, in the form of cheese. But then, she thinks that about everything...

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Links for 2009-11-17

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:48:07 -0500

Why Wine Ratings Are Badly Flawed - WSJ.com

"[A] 1996 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that even flavor-trained professionals cannot reliably identify more than three or four components in a mixture, although wine critics regularly report tasting six or more. There are eight in this description, from The Wine News of a Silverado Limited Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2005 that sells for more than $100 a bottle: "Dusty, chalky scents followed by mint, plum, tobacco and leather. Tasty cherry with smoky oak accents..." Another publication, The Wine Advocate, describes a wine as having "promising aromas of lavender, roasted herbs, blueberries, and black currants." What is striking about this pair of descriptions is that, although they are very different, they are descriptions of the same Cabernet. One taster lists eight flavors and scents, the other four, and not one of them coincide."

(tags: books science silly statistics)
Essay - Doomsday Isn't Coming, NASA Says; At Least Not in 2012 - NYTimes.com

"Personally, I have been in love with end-of-the-world stories since I started consuming science fiction as a disaffected child. Scaring the pants off the public has been pretty much the name of the game ever since Orson Welles broadcast "War of the Worlds," a fake newscast about a Martian invasion of New Jersey, in 1938. But the trend has gone too far, suggested David Morrison, an astronomer at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., who made the YouTube video and is one of the agency's point people on the issue of Mayan prophecies of doom. "I get angry at the way people are being manipulated and frightened to make money," Dr. Morrison said. "There is no ethical right to frighten children to make a buck.""

(tags: science stupid movies books culture physics astronomy geology space overbye)
ICv2 - Editor Ariel Schrag on Library Removal

"In terms of foul language, sexual content, and teen smoking in this book, all the authors strove to present the teens and pre-teens in a realistic light. We may not like all of the decisions teenagers make, but if we sanitize their speech and behavior in our stories, our characters won't be authentic. Real teens and pre-teens sometimes use these words and say and do these things. A book like this can present a good opportunity for dialogue between children and parents. Banning the book isn't going to change children's behavior or somehow save them from the hard truths of teenage life--I find it very hard to believe that a child would hear a swear word for the very first time in the book, or that he or she would be made aware that teenagers sometimes have sexual relationships or smoke cigarettes. The only thing that can make an impact in the way children act is communication, and this book provides a platform for that."

(tags: books politics kid-stuff stupid)
Where Palin Fits On The Creation - Evolution Scale - The Atlantic Politics Channel

"The American people are finicky about their creation/evolution debate. Even though a majority of Americans clearly believe at least a thin form of "intelligent design," about a majority staunchly opposes something called "creationism" -- even though it is, in the real world, indistinguishable from creationism in its animating principles and aims. What this means is that Americans accept the chronology of evolution without accepting the science of evolution. Disproving evolution to scientists would mean finding a rabbit fossil in the Burgess Shale. Disproving "intelligent design" to most Americans would mean disproving the existence of God. "

(tags: religion politics biology evolution science blogs)
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Speaking

"Last week I had a chance to speak with some local employers who occasionally hire our graduates. They were gracious and supportive, but when asked about our grads' primary deficiency, the feedback was quick and uniform: speaking skills. They weren't talking about public speaking per se. Entry level jobs generally don't involve a lot of speeches. They were talking about being articulate on the job. As one of them put it, the receptionist is the face of the firm to the new client. When the face of the firm is inarticulate, or scattered, or mumbly, real damage is done. One employer was particularly happy about a recent hire, whom he described as having it all. When pressed, he clarified that she doesn't seem to be any 'smarter' than others he's had, but that she always maintains a professional demeanor, even when things get hectic. I'm not sure how to teach that, but I'm pretty sure that we don't really try."

(tags: academia education jobs class-war society business blogs dean-dad)
Defending Belichick's Fourth-Down Decision - The Fifth Down Blog - NYTimes.com

"New England Coach Bill Belichick is taking a lot of heat for his decision to attempt a 4th-down conversion from his own 28 with a late 6-point lead against the Colts. Indianapolis came back to win in dramatic fashion, 35-34. Was the decision a good one?"

(tags: sports football science statistics math)

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Companions in Zealous Research

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:33:27 -0500

Blogging has been light of late because I was in the Houston area for the weekend, at the annual meeting of Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society (think Phi Beta Kappa, but for science nerds). Every chapter is required to send a representative to the annual meeting at least once every three years, and as I'm the current president of the Union chapter, I got to go this year.

In a lot of ways, the meeting was more Boskone than DAMOP, and I'm not just saying that because there were little ribbons for everybody's badges. This is an obvious consequence of the fact that it was mostly a business meeting with a small research conference attached, rather than a scientific conference with a few business meeting activities that take place when most of the attendees are having dinner. It had a lot of the same vibe as parts of an SF convention-- many of the people there clearly had a deep emotional investment in the operation of the organization, and were there primarily for that aspect of things.

This was, alas, less than completely enthralling for those of us who don't have a similar emotional investment in the whole business. As is the case with most con-running discussions, to be honest-- they're sort of fascinating in an anthropological sort of way, but not interesting enough for me to want to go to the Worldcon business meeting. Because, you know, I won't shed a single tear if I never hear another request for a ruling from the parliamentarian.

I did have a few very enjoyable conversations with students who were there for the student poster competition. In the small world file, one of these students was from Davidson College, and knows Greta Munger a little, and another was working with the same research group at Ohio State that one of our distinguished recent alumni was with (he graduated a year or so ago).

The real highlight, though, was getting to talk to Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters. They were inducted as honorary lifetime members of Sigma Xi, and were great sports about posing for hundreds of pictures, signing lots of autographs, and chatting amiably with random idiots. For the record, they're pretty much exactly the way they seem on tv-- Savage is more excitable, and tells lots of True Lab Stories, Hyneman is more reserved and serious. As Savage pointed out, this makes their lives much easier-- when people come up to them and want pictures taken, they're not expecting them to be playing characters. (Which makes me think that Stephen Colbert's experience of the autograph-seeking public must be a very strange thing indeed...)

Anyway, all in all, it wasn't a bad time. The business meeting parts weren't remotely worth flying halfway across the country for, but the posters were pretty good, and the banquet was a good deal of fun. I also got to visit with an uncle who lives in Houston, who I haven't seen in a few years, so that was a nice bonus. I'll be perfectly happy to let someone else make the trip the next time we need to send a delegate, though.

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Links for 2009-11-16

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:33:04 -0500

Michael Nielsen » The Wikipedia Paradox

"To determine whether any given subject deserves an entry, Wikipedia uses the criterion of notability. This lead to an interesting question: Question 1: What's the most notable subject that's not notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia? Let's assume for now that this question has an answer ("The Answer"), and call the corresponding subject X. Now, we have a second question whose answer is not at all obvious. Question 2: Is subject X notable merely by being The Answer?"

(tags: internet culture michael-nielsen computing silly)
On the Opinion that Authors Should Not Respond to Reviews - Grasping for the Wind

"I totally understand and agree with all these reasons NOT to respond to reviews. BUT, I'm also disappointed that they don't, and wish they would for two reasons:"

(tags: books writing review internet literature humanities)
Report: Yankees Trademarked 'Yankees Suck' Chant In 1996 | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

"Furthermore, financial records indicate that by also owning the rights to the common anti-Yankee epithet "Jeter blows," the team earned much of the money needed to sign Alex Rodriguez in 2004. In addition, by creating and obtaining the trademarks to the phrases "A-Roid," "A-Fraud," and "Jeter sucks, A-Rod swallows," as well as acquiring partial intellectual property rights to the concept that "All the Yankees are overpaid assholes who make it virtually impossible for smaller-market teams to compete," the team has accumulated a fiscal safety net that is estimated to last until 2210."

(tags: sports silly onion)

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Links for 2009-11-15

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 08:36:57 -0500

10 Geeky Laws That Should Exist, But Don't | GeekDad | Wired.com

"1. Munroe's Law: A person in a geeky argument who can quote xkcd to support his position automatically wins the argument. This law supersedes Godwin, so that even if the quote is about Hitler, the quoter still wins."

(tags: science culture books internet silly)
A Rolling Stone Leads to Rome - Schott's Vocab Blog - NYTimes.com

"A little knowledge is a friend indeed. A friend in need is a dangerous thing."

(tags: language silly blogs)

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Links for 2009-11-14

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:40:04 -0500

WTF, Aerosmith? WTF? | Popdose

"Never has there been a band so unbelievably great and so sadly shitty at the same time. That, to me, is the Aerosmith legacy, and it's only bound to get worse. Yet, there is something that still seems sacred about this band, beyond mere nostalgia. I just think they need to go away for good before we'll be able to figure out exactly what that is."

(tags: music culture popdose blogs)
Book Review - 'What the Dog Saw - And Other Adventures,' by Malcolm Gladwell - Review - NYTimes.com

"The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures."

(tags: books review psychology statistics social-science)
Millikan Oil Drop Lab without the oil | Dot Physics

"The basic idea that Lowell McCann and Earl Blodgett from U of Wisconsin propose is to do an experiment similar to the oil drop experiment, but not so squinty (if you have done the oil drop experiment, you know what I mean). Instead of dropping charged oil in an electric field, they drop containers with metal nuts in water. The goal is to find the mass of a nut."

(tags: science physics education experiment blogs dot-physics)
What Are the Most Sucessful Examples of New Media Science Communication? | The Intersection | Discover Magazine

"I'm going to argue that blogging is not the best or most effective form of existing science communication online, for many of the reasons outlined in Unscientific America. But trying to be positive rather than negative, I'm also going to point out what is: Viral YouTube videos that introduce nonscientific audiences, in the millions, to scientific thinking in a very thoughtful and memorable way."

(tags: science youtube video internet media society culture education blogs intersection)

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Links for 2009-11-13

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:36:20 -0500

Physics Buzz: Best physics inventions of 2009

"TIME magazine has announced the 50 best inventions of 2009. NASA's Ares family of rockets was a shoo-in for best invention, given the recent launch of Ares 1-X, the family's test rocket. I'll give them that; NASA could certainly use the cheerleading. But I was surprised to see "Teleportation" sixth on the list. When did I miss this? Has everyone else been teleporting to work while I've been trudging in the rain? How can I get my hands on a teleporter?"

(tags: science physics quantum blogs physics-buzz)
The 10 weirdest physics facts, from relativity to quantum physics - Telegraph

"Physics is weird. There is no denying that. Particles that don't exist except as probabilities; time that changes according to how fast you're moving; cats that are both alive and dead until you open a box. We've put together a collection of 10 of the strangest facts we can find, with the kind help of cosmologist and writer Marcus Chown, author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin, and an assortment of Twitter users."

(tags: science physics quantum astronomy particles nuclear atoms)
The long-term effects of day care : Cognitive Daily

"The definitive child-care study can probably never be done: Families would have to be randomly assigned to day-care centers or parent care for years, and then the impact of the assignments wouldn't be known until the children reached adulthood. Even then, you wouldn't know if the effects were due to particular parenting or day-care practices, or to the day-care versus parent-care assignment. Realistically, the next best thing you can do is to follow children from birth to adulthood, and see if kids who happened to have been placed in day care (or with nannies, or grandparents, or some other arrangement) ended up better- or worse-off than those cared for by their mothers. Indeed, such a study was launched by the National Institute of Child Health and Development in the early 1990s. The results have been gradually trickling in as the children in the study aged. The most recent installment, published in 2007, covers kids through the sixth grade."

(tags: science psychology kid-stuff blogs cog-daily)
Drink at Work: THE BEST "STAR HUSTLER" (now "Star Gazer") PARODY YOU WILL EVER SEE

"This is the unofficial nonsense companion to the successful Jack Horkheimer PBS series of late night interstitials, "The Star Hustler," which both Dan Bialek and I grew up watching."

(tags: science astronomy television silly comedy youtube video)

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