21 January 2010 PM

A bit of mathematics

Check out this article about classical chaos versus quantum level physics. Yes, you might have heard about “uncertainty principles”. Well, that is very different than classical chaos:

Working in a cramped MIT laboratory in 1961, meteorologist Edward Lorenz stumbled upon a new science. Wanting a closer look at the data of a weather simulation he was running, Lorenz restarted it in the middle. Within a few minutes, everything changed and the data he had expected to see had morphed into strange new patterns. A stunned Lorenz checked his inputs. He had rounded the starting values by about .0001, which should have been insignificant. And yet it was not.

At the time, scientists thought small changes in starting values should make only a small difference in most systems. But sometimes such tiny shifts will cause a very different outcome, completely out of proportion with the size of the change—this hypersensitivity to initial conditions is what Lorenz dubbed the “butterfly effect” and what we now call chaos. [....]

But at the level of atoms, our definition of chaos has run into a problem.

Chaos is usually defined by a system’s movement: Set a pendulum swinging, track exactly where it goes, and its motion will reveal whether it is chaotic. Atoms, however, are governed by the uncertainty principle, which means that their location cannot be known precisely. What’s more, the laws of quantum mechanics say that hypersensitivity to initial conditions, which is considered the primary characteristic of a chaotic system, is physically impossible for atoms—at least in the way it’s understood at the classical level.
This presents a serious quandary because quantum mechanics is considered the most basic set of universal laws. Chaos must have some connection with the quantum level, but how it manifests itself, or how to quantify it, has thus far eluded physicists. Work published recently in Nature helps shed light on this problem as researchers working with cooled atoms searched for what they call signatures of chaos.

Now THAT sounds like interesting research.

Ok, there were problems with Coakley as a candidate: I probably wouldn’t have liked her either. But I take issue with what Marc Randazza says: what he implies is that he is actually happy that Coakley lost more than he is happy about Brown winning, and he is, of course, wrong about her “melting” when hit by water (“dissolving” is the correct term)

Why am I joking about that? Well, if you read Randazza’s excellent post about a case which has made the news, you’ll see that not paying attention to detail can provoke outrage when, well, the situation isn’t outrageous at all. In this case, journalists accuse a major cooperation of picking on a kid and claiming that a kid is infringing on one of it’s trademarks. The only problem: that isn’t happening.

In this case, the cooperation isn’t saying “you can’t use that name as it is similar to what we use” but rather “we object to YOU taking out a trademark on that because it is similar to what we use for our brand”. To me, it shouldn’t be too hard to distinguish the two different situations, but …well, I’ll just leave it at that.

Anyway, read the post: it is well written; this guy ought to write a book on popular law. I’d buy a copy!

Anyway, back to politics. Yes, stuff like this makes me ill. But Nate Silver says that panicking only makes things worse.

Mind, Religion and all that
I was mildly amused by this article (though I wasn’t surprised):

Of the many viral-video meltdowns pop culture has endured, few are as viscerally disturbing, as painful to watch, as Michael Richards’ racist rant during a 2006 stand-up appearance. As you’ll no doubt remember, the man better known as Kramer lashed out at a heckler in his audience with a shocking string of slurs, including the brutally memorable line, “Fifty years ago, we’d have you upside down with a fork up your ass.” The breakdown so outraged the general public that even today, if you Google “Michael Richards,” it auto-completes to “Michael Richards racist.”

Shankar Vedantam, a science writer with the Washington Post, uses the Michael Richards incident in his new book, “The Hidden Brain,” to illustrate the way he believes our unconscious can betray us — and reveal biases we wouldn’t even acknowledge to ourselves. Vedantam uses a wide array of vivid true stories to make his point: The tragic tale of a woman who is brutally beaten in front of dozens of onlookers illustrates how a crowd’s inaction can trick our brain into ignoring pleas for help; two transsexuals who’ve experienced both sides of the gender divide help illuminate how unconscious sexism can change lives.

Salon spoke with Vedantam over the phone about the role of the unconscious, why we should be gentler to Michael Richards and the connection between racism and a Republican voting record.

(emphasis mine). By the way, I am well aware of the racist “Democrats” in places like Kentucky and West Virginia; there was a time when the Pat Buchananas of the world WERE mostly Democrats.

Religion I am some issues with semantics here:

Many people believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection poses a threat to religion (specifically to Christianity). Dr. Kitcher suggests that, taken on its own, Darwin’s work can be assimilated by many world religions and many versions of Christianity. There is, however, a deeper problem.

The scientific approach that underlies Darwin’s achievements is inimical to all but the most liberal forms of religion. Once this point is appreciated, it is tempting to believe, as the militant Darwinian atheists of our time triumphantly proclaim, that religious practices should simply be eradicated.

Dr. Kitcher argues that this is incorrect, and that a genuinely humane secularism – a real Secular Humanism – should absorb some characteristically religious attitudes. We need to discard the myths offered by supernaturalist doctrines, but we also need what Dewey called “A Common Faith.”

Here is my issue: once we dismiss “supernaturalist doctrines”, we are no longer in the realm of religion, as far as I am concerned. For example, I have no problem with, say, the “7 principles of the Unitarian Universalists”:

We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote
1. The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
2. Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
3. Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
4. A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
5. The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
6. The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
7. Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Truth be told: mostly I gave up going to UU services when it started to conflict with ultra training. Ok, the idea that “ideas” such as homeopathy and dousing are considered worthy of consideration kind of irritates me too.

Yes, most people should be respected, but not all of their ideas should be.

21 January 2010: Personal Edition

Workout notes I decided not to try the icy roads and so worked out at Bradley: weights, then 4 miles on the AMT. I’ll skip swimming today and focus on swimming hard tomorrow and perhaps over the weekend.

Weights: I was able to handle 70 pound dumbbells on the bench press and get 9 quality repetitions; I also did squats on the Smith Machine and those are getting better as well. I am feeling stronger.

Personal: Yeah, I have been very irritable for the past few months; some of it is warranted. I’ve always wondered what the line was between genuine medical depression and just either having to make a lifestyle adjustment and just having to “man up”.

I suppose that getting irritated over ice storms, incompetence at work and irritated by lazy, unmotivated students (a small subset of the students; certainly not most of them) and those who enable them is pretty normal.

But still, I did surf to sites like this one and found that most of the symptoms don’t apply, at least not if I am honest about it. For example, it mentions “low energy or fatigue”. I sure FEEL that way at times, but I felt that way on Sunday morning, in which case I promptly set a PB for the 5K swim. Someone who was fatigued probably wouldn’t have been able to do that.

I suppose that I need to socialize with non-virtual friends a bit more, and to spend less time in front of the computer.

I should also be honest: an injury has kept me from doing my favorite sport (ultra walking) and that has to be having an effect on me and my mood.

21 January 2010 (non-personal edition)

Disasters: we want to help, but sometimes we need to “just give money” and stay the hell out of the way:

No question, the two church-goers from New Jersey had the best intentions in the world when they arrived in Port-au-Prince this week to help victims of Haiti’s killer earthquake.

Trouble was, that was all they had in a land where food, water, shelter and transportation are at a desperate premium, said Laura Blank, a disaster communications manager on the ground for World Vision, a Christian humanitarian aid group with long ties to the country.

“They seemed very eager and very passionate about helping the people of Haiti, but they didn’t have a ride to get out of the airport,” said Blank, who had to direct the pair to assistance. [...]

From volunteer medical teams who show up uninvited, to stateside donors who ship boxes of unusable household goods, misdirected compassion can actually tax scarce resources, costing time, money, energy — and lives, experts say.

“Everyone wants to be a hero. Everyone wants to help,” said Dr. Thomas Kirsch, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Refugee and Disaster Response. “It’s not the way to do it.”

Even a medical crew from his own school — Kirsch declined to identify them — arrived in Haiti so ill-prepared they had to seek sustenance from non-governmental organizations.

“They had no bedding, supplies or food,” he said. “They ended up glomming onto some of the NGOs.” [...]

But hey, everyone is an expert and everyone knows that those who are actually out there doing the job aren’t doing it right!

(for those who don’t know me: I was dripping with sarcasm here)

Yes, I realize that I am, by definition, a non-expert in most things. But that doesn’t stop me from getting very discouraged at times.

One of my areas of discouragement: I feel as if President Obama and the Democrats are failing. No, I am NOT saying that the Republicans are right; far from it. But whereas the Republicans are not doing the country any good, they are winning politically.

For one, they are spreading the lie that President Obama and Congress are acting like wild eyed liberals:

Here’s why it’s hard to see anything positive coming out of this debacle. Stephen Bainbridge, an intelligent man and one of the few conservatives who also found Bush and Cheney appalling, can write this:

Obama and the Congressional Democrats (especially in the House) governed for the last year as though the median voter is a Daily Kos fan.

This must come as some surprise to most Daily Kos fans. But if one had traveled to Mars and back this past year and read this statement, what would you assume had happened? I would assume that the banks had been nationalized, the stimulus was twice as large, that single-payer healthcare had been pushed through on narrow majority votes, that card-check had passed, that an immigration amnesty had been legislated, that prosecutions of Bush and Cheney for war crimes would be underway, that withdrawal from Afghanistan would be commencing, that no troops would be left in Iraq, that Larry Tribe was on the Supreme Court, that DADT and DOMA would be repealed, and so on.

But when even a sane and honest person like Bainbridge has lapsed into believing the FNC mantra, you realize that ideology has simply altered our understanding of reality.

Note: if you are unfamiliar with current liberal thought and want to know what it sounds like, go here or here, or watch this:

So what is generating my frustration with Congress? Well, for one it is the timidity of some:

Here’s what’s really going on. In Massachusetts, in New Jersey, all over the nation, voters are petrified of losing their jobs, their homes, and what’s left of their savings. Nothing counts more than the economy. Rightly or wrongly, presidents and the party in power are blamed when the economy is lousy. Voters fired Jimmy Carter in 1980 because the economy went south. They fired George Bush the first in 1992 because the economy was awful. They fired congressional Democrats in 1994 because the economy was still awful. And they’re in the process of firing Obama and the Democrats — unless or until the economy turns around.

What happens next November depends both on the extent of joblessness and the direction the economy is moving in. The usual political rule is voters pay more attention to the latter. They’ll forgive even relatively high unemployment if they’re confident the economy is improving. But that old rule hasn’t been tested under conditions of extremely high unemployment. If next November one in five Americans is still unemployed or underemployed or working at lower pay than before the Great Recession, voters may not care that the economy is showing signs of improvement. They’ll vote the rascals out.

Yet when it comes to doing more about the jobs crisis, Obama and the Dems are in a box. The only sure-fire way to get jobs back is for them to do more deficit spending. After all, consumers are still in no mood to spend, businesses won’t invest without consumers to buy the fruits of such investments, and exports are still in the tank. Government remains the purchaser of last resort. (And for those of you still unconvinced, focus on the ratio of debt to GDP, and know that it won’t improve until the denominator of that equation — the GDP — starts growing quickly again, which won’t happen until there’s sufficient overall demand.)

But now, especially after the debacle in Massachusetts, there aren’t likely to be enough votes for more deficit spending. Blue-Dog Democrats will use the election results to argue for “fiscal responsibility” and join Republicans in exhuming Herbert Hoover. Which means no big jobs package. Which means, barring a miracle, continued high unemployment and underemployment. The economy will be doing better in November than it is today — consumers have to replace cars and appliances that have worn out, companies have to replace inventories that have worn thin — but not so much better that voters will breathe easier.

On the other hand, other Democrats are letting the “best be the enemy of the good”:

Watching some liberal members of the House explain why they won’t do what’s necessary, and pass the Senate bill, I was wondering what they imagine will happen. Then the answer came to me: it’s the Underpants Gnomes business plan. In its original form this was:

1. Collect underpants.
2. ?????
3. Profit!

The current version is:

1. Reject the only bill that can be enacted any time soon.
2. ?????
3. Universal coverage!

Sigh.

And yet, our President doesn’t appear to be mean enough to make people do what they must do.

Yes, President Obama campaigned on reaching out across the aisle and working with the Republicans. But guess what? That isn’t going to work; the sides are simply too different.

Trying to work with the Republicans is akin to trying to design a science class by working with a creationist. The creationist may be sincere and honestly want to do what is best, but the creationist is still a misinformed, delusional idiot.

Frankly, my warning bells sounded back in 2004 when then State Senator Obama gave his “there isn’t a red America or a blue America but rather a United States of America.” I thought: “I don’t think so, but let’s give it a shot”. Well, it is failing. I am not the only one who thinks so.

Don’t get me wrong: I still think that President Obama is a moral man and a brilliant man. He is well intentioned and wants to think the best about people. And yes, he is keeping his campaign promise to try to work together. But I’m afraid that “working together” just won’t work here and nothing is going to get done.

And so I should say what I admire about the Republicans: yes, much of their base consists of ignorant, anti-intellectual bigots. When it comes to policy, evidence means nothing do them; if an idea fits in their world view, it is “true” for them, by definition.

But give them credit: when they are in power, they just do what they think is right and they don’t give a rat’s @ss what people like I think. How I wish that my side was more like that!

Too True

This was supposed to be sarcastic:

But it is true. The Donkey should be replaced by a trembling rabbit.

Wardrobe Fail

Spandex Fail!

more about "Wardrobe Fail", posted with vodpod

So many times I wished this would happen in our yoga class or to a tri-babe who was right in front of me!

(ok, not really…unless we were alone so she wouldn’t be too embarrassed)