Let’s Read the Internet! week 8

Wind-Powered Perpetual Motion
and
Why the Directly-Downwind Faster Than the Wind Car Works”
Mark Chu-Carroll on Good Math, Bad Math

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

Socrates would have to be a fan of the scientific method. We frequently acclaim the shift towards naturalism in Western thought, as a turning point in our intellectual maturity, but that shift brought with it the less-recognized roots of an even higher goal – the eradication of hubris in the search for understanding. Naturalism, the philosophical position that empirical observation holds the final word in debates on truth, essentially kills the argument of “because I say so.” Truth comes from no one in particular, so there’s at least the faint possibility that people trying to understand the way things work will some day no longer jockey and battle to be “the one who got it right.” That’s a far-out ideal, and maybe if nobody thought they were going to be credited with brilliance, nobody would have the incentive to try to do something brilliant in the first place. But at the very least, when two naturalists have an argument, they can frequently appeal to a common, impartial, higher source – nature – as arbiter.

That’s what’s happened here on Mark Chu-Carroll’s widely-read blog. He initially, and incorrectly, believed a certain device that drives overland into the wind and faster than the wind was a fraud. After long, long debates, he changed his mind, and carefully explained the mistakes in his own reasoning and what he had learned in the process of investigating his own error. Which is pretty much awesome, because such things hardly ever occur in arguments on less savory topics, like abortion. (Oh my God, was that an eating-dead-babies joke?)

I also appreciated the sort of emergent didactic property of the hundred-some post comment thread on Chu-Carroll’s original post. After watching the youtube video of the device (linked from the original post), I wasn’t completely sure whether the treadmill test was fair. It seemed reasonable enough, but I certainly wouldn’t have been prepared to defend it against someone eager to argue the opposite way.

As I read the thread, commenters raised most of the points I was considering. Other people answered those points, and then even more people chimed in with takes that I hadn’t considered at all. The overall effect was for a large amount of white noise and repetition, but also for a strikingly-diverse set of mindsets converging on the same problem. By the time I was done reading what everyone had to say, I felt that I had appreciated more intricacies in the problem than I would ever have discovered thinking about it alone, and I probably understood it better than I would have even if a single skilled author had written a long exposition. The challenge of interpreting each new voice’s arguments, incorporating them with the previous knowledge, and then parsing all of it for myself over and over, trying to find holes in everyone’s logic and patch together a firm understanding piece by piece, was absorbing because it’s so much more interactive than simply reading one single person’s explanation, no matter how clear, detailed, or precise.

It makes me want to argue about physics more often, but only in the good way where your ego doesn’t get too involved.

A Russian Teacher In America
Andre Toom, linked from God Plays Dice

A long essay that’s a borderline sob story about the woes of the American educational system. As a private tutor, I see exactly the sort of problems Toom is discussing on a daily basis – students, even (or perhaps especially) the “good” students, are so maniacally focused on their grade that learning becomes completely lost amidst a sea of test-cramming, and question-memorizing. Students are so wrapped up in the concrete performance markers visible to the world, that they don’t care at all for their true progress, visible chiefly to themselves.

That, at least, is the picture. I only partially buy it. It’s true, to varying degrees, for many students. But it’s not as if this entire nation has no one left interested in math. The sad part is that over two hundred or so students I’ve had, there have been a handful who are truly interested in math and physics, but they seldom have much guidance. Because these kids can gets A’s in math class, no one in public school is very concerned with pushing their limits when there are too many problem kids to worry about first. So I’m more interested in people with plans on how to reach interested young students with extra-curricular math opportunities than I am with people deriding a broken system.

Not everyone is going to love math. In fact, I doubt there’s ever been a society where a majority of people are interested. But the vast majority of our society has to take it in school. So yeah, it’s inevitable that there are lots of people taking math who don’t care about math. But I’ve done the same thing in a literature class before. Ultimately, math is cool enough that some people are going to discover it no matter what the educational system is like, so I’m not all that worried about the alarm bells being rung here.

Blow to Vitamins as Antidote to Ageing
James Randerson at The Guardian

We thought we understood, like, everything. Turns out not. But the next study that comes out will surely reveal the secrets to perfect health once and for all…

Swiss Approve Heroin Scheme but Vote Down Marijuana Law

Sounds like a pretty good plan to me. Administer heroin to addicts in a safe, controlled environment, thereby reducing health risks and driving down the general nastiness associated with black market activity. I can also understand why you wouldn’t want to legalize marijuana in just one small portion of Europe, since everyone would then go there just to smoke. The same argument doesn’t hold as much water for the US with its block-like geography, but I live in California, where marijuana is as good as legal anyway.

Nebulous
Tara Donovan

from Three Quarks Daily

The Not-So-Presidential Debate

The Not So Presidential Debate from aaron sedlak on Vimeo.
also from Three Quarks Daily

Why Punishment Is Worth It In The End
Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science

Read this article or else! Nah, honestly I would never be able to go through life as someone who tried to understand human interactions by designing toy experiments like this. But It’s nice to get little sixty-second summaries of their months of hard labor.

Over-budget Mars rover mission delayed until 2011
Rachel Courtland at New Scientist

Bad news, since I work at the place where they’re building this thing, and they owe me two months’ back pay already.

15 of the World’s Most Creative Papercraft Artists

You get to feeling a little bit sleazy when you realize all the exposure you’ve had to art in the last two years has come in the form of internet lists with titles like “The Top Ten Totally Badass Avant-Garde Experimental Playdoh Exhibitions of 2008!!” But on the other hand, some of this stuff actually is pretty badass, for being a paper sculpture of a cat.

A Happy/Unhappy New Pair of Studies
Stephen Black at Improbable Research

Among the headlines of news feeds I scanned through this week, there must have been at least ten stories referencing a recent paper purporting to show that happiness is “contagious”, that is, if I were to reach down and magically make your friends happy, you would become happy as well. When I first heard about this, I was intrigued, because I was wondering how you would establish this is a “contagious” effect, and not just correlation. It turns out: you don’t. The researchers, from what I can tell, simply found a correlation and announced that happiness is contagious. News stories are apparently contagious, too, because once word of this paper got out, most of the major science news outlets published something on the story.

But as the link describes, another study found that height was also “contagious”. That is, if your friends are tall, it’s likely you’re tall, too. Just as with happiness.

Sine of an Inscribed Angle
Brent Yorgey on The Math Less Traveled

A cute visualization of the law of sines.

Let’s Read The Internet! Week 1

Earth From Above

Sensory overload.  Thirty photographs of socially-relevant scenes from around the world, each of which could easily launch me on a few hours of reading and comparing.  Taken together, they present an overwhelming mosaic of a vibrant, living, interconnected, diverse, and changing planet.

But, damn, I just noticed that the story has gone from displaying 30 photographs to just ten, and the impact is nowhere near as great.  It seems hypocritical that the coordinator of the exhibit (not the artist) should ask the website to take photographs down, when the whole point of the exhibit, as expressed by the artist, is that it be completely free and displayed out on the streets in cities across the world to reach as broad and diverse an audience as possible.

Not the end of evolution again!

  John Wilkins at “Evolving Thoughts”

You might have heard about some guy telling the media that human evolution is over because we now care for our sick.  Wilkins presents a brief, irate counterargument.

I’ve done some reading on evolution from time to time.  What I’ve learned is that’s it’s deceptively difficult to understand.  Although the basic idea that heritable variation and selection pressure combined lead to evolution is straightforward, there are an awful lot of intricacies you find when you begin to look more closely.

There are some things you can do – such as study genomes to see how closely-related two species are, or study fossil records to document the evolutionary history of a species.  But there are a lot of things you can’t do, such as say, “Dinosaurs evolved to be really big because they were in an arms race.  Prey got bigger, so predators were forced to get bigger, and then prey got bigger again and off they went.”  That is not a falsifiable hypothesis, because you can’t go back and test it.

You can study evolution mathematically, and you can make falsifiable predictions, and then compare those predictions to observation.  But statements like, “human evolution is over because we care for our sick” are basically pseudoscience.

Extremely simplistic thinking about evolution leads to paradoxes.  For example, now that we first-world men don’t have to worry much about dying in our mothers’ arms during infancy, getting killed in battle at age 16, or starving to death when the buffalo find a new migration route at age 27, shouldn’t the biggest factor left in our reproductive success be how good we are at attracting women?  And therefore, shouldn’t every man spend all his effort spreading his seed far and wide?  Shouldn’t guys just be thinking about sex all the time…  Oh, never mind.

How We Evolve

Benjamin Phelan at Seed Magazine

A lengthy article about the sort of thing I referenced above – collecting data from genomes to study evolution.  Here, the scientists took genomes from humans of varying ethnic background and looked for characteristic differences in their DNA as evidence of evolution.  Bottom line: Yes, people are still evolving.  For example, as a white man, I am a highly-evolved lactase-producing being, unlike the those primitve, dairy-bloated Asians.

In Defense of Difference

Maywa Montenegro and Terry Glavin at Seed Magazine

In a companion article to the one above, the authors discuss why we might want to save the rainforest, anyway (because we like rain?).  Not just because we like toucans or want to display a World Wildlife Fund bumper sticker on our Prius.  Because it has economic, social, medical, and scientific value to humans.

The idea is that biology is a huge information-gathering system.  From a protein to an organism to an ecosystem, evolution allows biology to record information about how to live in the world, and also provides a ready-made task force 10^30 cells strong that will do its best to find out how to live in a changing world.  The more stuff we destroy, the more Earth loses the ability to adapt to hard times.  Clear the rainforest to raise crops, and disease or natural disaster or pollution find it much easier to brutally rape the new, homogenized biosphere.

The argument is then extended to such things as preserving human languages, which record the results of thousands of experiments in creating human culture.  So nature is basically a billion billion whatever tiny lab books full of experiments, and instead of reading them, we’re throwing them out.

Nobel Sur-prize

Peter Coles at “In The Dark”

Particles are everywhere.  While you read this, particles are in your home, in your infant child’s crib.  In her anus.

I don’t understand them.  But here’s a fairly simple explanation of the work that won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics.  Basically, the uproar is that this guy Cabibbo had a big idea about physics that helped explain a mystery about particles.  Later, Kobayashi and Maskawa solved a mathematical problem that expanded on Cabibbo’s idea.  Both were important – the original idea and the difficult mathematical extension to it – but only one was awarded the prize.

Also check out a more basic article from Mark Chu-Carroll at “Good Math, Bad Math”

What positive psychology can help you become

Martin Seligman on TED

A talk interesting enough that I watched it twice.  The second time while smiling. Seligman decided to break happiness, or life satisfaction, into three categories.  (To me this is rather arbitrary.  It’s not like the categories of happiness are just sitting out there, waiting to be discovered.  But it’s a persistent plague among people who study such things to break them down into categories they believe are fundamental. i.e. “four personality types”, “two political ideologies” (left/right), or even “four kingdoms of life” (some people now say up to 13.  others 2))

The categories are: surface pleasures like active social life, good love life, and sensual pleasure; “flow”, or the state of intense focus and concentration associated with, say, rock climbing or physics sets; and “meaning”, or finding something greater than yourself to dedicate your life to.

Seligman describes the beginnings of a movement to apply a scientific approach to the study of happiness, as opposed to the traditional psychological model of simply curing mental illness and depression.  He claims that it is possible for people to increase the fulfillment they feel in life by a concentrated effort in the right direction.  It’s a summary of the beginning of a quest to understand people in a new way, and apply that understanding to make life better.

Worldmapper

A site you may have seen before.  They use maps of the world to visualize data.  For example, compare a map where each country’s size represents the number of personal computers in that country, to a map showing how many people died of “often preventable deaths”.

There are a lot of technically-interesting things about this project.  How did they get the countries to fit together, when their land area needs to be fixed at some arbitrary size?  What sort of properties of the standard world map’s topology were they trying to preserve?

But more interesting are the social, economic, and political insight you can get.  Compare this project to the Gapminder.

Small samples, and the margin of error

Terry Tao at “What’s New”

Terry Tao tones it down a notch to present something even I can understand.  He discusses how a random sampling of just 1000 people can give an accurate picture of the opinions of a nation of 200,000,000 voters.  He also gives a short proof of the accuracy of the sample, without resorting to the binomial distribution.