Astronomy is supposed to be a relatively safe profession. I suppose observational astronomers may occasionally injure themselves when working on a telescope, but it’s probably rare. For them to become murder victims is even more unlikely.
So why would a Japanese astronomer, working in Chile on the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, be murdered on the street just outside his apartment?
I was having a discussion with a lawyer friend of mine. I was trying to illustrate the difference between the advocating done by lawyers and the scientist’s unbiased (or at least, not intentionally biased) search for the truth. One is about cherry-picking facts and arguments to prove a preconceived notion; the other about trying to understand the world around us.
I told him that anything and the opposite of anything can be proven by cherry-picking facts. Then it occurred to me that it is true even in math. For instance, by cherry-picking facts, I can easily prove that \(2\times 2=5\). Let’s start with three variables, \(a\), \(b\) and \(c\), for which it is true that \(a=b+c\). Then, multiplying by 5 gives
$$5a=5b+5c.$$
Multiplying by 4 and switching the two sides gives
$$4b+4c=4a.$$
Adding these two equations together, we get
$$5a+4b+4c=4a+5b+5c.$$
Subtracting \(9a\) from both sides, we obtain
$$4b+4c-4a=5b+5c-5a,$$
or
$$4(b+c-a)=5(b+c-a).$$
Dividing both sides by \(b+c-a\) gives the final result:
$$4=5.$$
And no, I did not make some simple mistake in my derivation. In fact, I can use computer algebra to obtain the same result, and computers surely don’t lie. Here it is, with Maxima:
(%i1) eq1:5*a=5*b+5*c$ (%i2) eq2:4*b+4*c=4*a$ (%i3) eq3:eq1+eq2$ (%i4) eq4:eq3-9*a$ (%i5) eq5:factor(eq4)$ (%i6) eq6:eq5/(b+c-a); (%o6) 4 = 5
All I had to do to make this happen was to ignore an inconvenient little fact, which is precisely what lawyers (not to mention politicians) do all the time. Surely, if I can prove that \(2\times 2=5\), I can prove anything. So can lawyers and they know it.
Last night, I was watching a documentary about the 1943 Nazi film Titanic, an attempt by Göbbels to twist the tragic story of the sinking for German propaganda purposes (Briefly: Titanic sank because of the greed and hubris of British capitalists and despite the heroic efforts of a German first officer.)
The story behind the movie is fascinating (director was arrested by the Gestapo and hanged himself, film was banned by Göbbels and only shown in occupied territories, never in Nazi Germany), but then they screw it all up with a complete fabrication. The ship that was used for the filming, the luxury ocean liner SS Cap Arcona, was herself sunk in May 1945 with about 5,000 concentration camp prisoners on board. The sinking happened in part because of a shake-up of responsibilities between Bomber Command and Fighter Command in the RAF, in the wake of the firebombing of Dresden. But according to the film I just saw, the sinking was deliberately planned by the Nazis who filled the ship with flammable fuel and intentionally put it out for the RAF to bomb. This is just a boldfaced lie (it’s not like the Germans had any fuel reserves left in April 1945, and they certainly didn’t need to resort to such an elaborate plot to end the lives of a mere 5,000 people; besides, several ships were hit that day, including an unmarked German hospital ship) and I keep wondering why, nearly 70 years after the end of World War 2, we are still being subjected to wartime propaganda.
Incidentally, the Web page I linked to above states that the sinking of the Cap Arcona was the world’s greatest ship disaster. Not so. That sad distinction belongs to the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, another German ship that was torpedoed by the Soviets in January 1945 while carrying over 10,000 evacuees, mostly civilians. More than 9,000 people died.
And while I was debating with myself whether or not to turn this into a blog post, I was listening to the noon newscast on CTV Ottawa. In the context of a sexual attack this morning on Metcalfe street, the reporter told us that “in a single day, nearly 5,300 cases of sexual assault are reported in Canada”. What? That is a humongous number. It is also wrong. What actually happened in a single day (April 19, 2006) was that nearly 5,300 victims of sexual assault and other violent offences requested assistance from victim service agencies across Canada. The number of “incidents involving sexual offences” was 27,094 in 2002; that translates into about 75 sexual assaults in a single day. Not 5,300.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, there are lies; there is history; and then there are statistics.
But perhaps “damn lies” is just a synonym for history?
Now here is a way to use physics more cleverly than Sheldon Cooper to avoid a costly ticket for a moving violation: http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0162.
The brief, two-sentence abstract reads: A way to fight your traffic tickets. The paper was awarded a special prize of $400 that the author did not have to pay to the state of California.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the paper is dated April 1. But the story, it appears, is real nonetheless.
I have been meaning to write about this since last month, when news photographer Damir Sagolj won a World Press award for his photograph of a North Korean building complex with the well lit picture of Kim Il-Sung highlighting a wall:
I think it’s an amazing shot. All those drab buildings with their dark windows, and the single source of light is the portrait of the Great Leader represent North Korean society in a way words cannot. I can almost visualize this image as part of some post-apocalyptic computer game.
Someone sent me this link (https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html).
It’s a talk about the growing prevalence of Internet content providers to present content that they presume you want to see. You go to Google News and the news you find is the kind of news Google thinks you like. You go to Facebook and the comments you see are the kind of comments Facebook believe you like. Comments from friends you were less likely to click on slowly vanish from sight… and you end up in a bubble of like-minded people, increasingly unaware of things that might challenge your thinking.
This is very bad. Indeed, I am beginning to wonder if perhaps the emergence of such information bubbles may be somewhat responsible for the increasing polarization in politics in many Western societies.
When I write about things like precision orbit determination, I often have to discuss the difference between ephemeris time (ET) and coordinated universal time (UTC). ET is a “clean” time scale: it is essentially the time coordinate of an inertial coordinate frame that is attached to the barycenter of the solar system. On the other hand, UTC is “messy”: it is the time kept by noninertial clocks sitting here on the surface of the Earth. But the fact that terrestrial clocks sit inside the Earth’s gravity well and are subject to acceleration is only part of the picture. There are also those blasted leap seconds. It is because of leap seconds that terrestrial atomic time (TAI) and UTC differ.
Leap seconds arise because we insist on using an inherently wobbly planet as our time standard. The Earth wobbles, sometimes unpredictably (for instance, after a major earthquake) and we mess with our clocks. Quite pointlessly, as a matter of fact. And now, we missed another chance to get rid of this abomination: the International Telecommunication Union failed to achieve consensus, and any decision is postponed until 2015.
For the curious, an approximate formula to convert between TAI and ET is given by ET – TAI = 32.184 + 1.657×10–3 sin E, where E = M + 0.01671 sin M, M = 6.239996 + 1.99096871×10–7 t and t is the time in seconds since J2000 (that is, noon, January 1, 2000, TAI). To convert TAI to UTC, additional leap seconds must be added: 10 seconds for all dates prior to 1972, and then additional leap seconds depending on the date. Most inelegant.
Speaking of leap this and that, I think it’s also high time to get rid of daylight savings time. Its benefits are dubious at best, and I find the practice unnecessarily disruptive.
I just wrote a comment, registering my objection to Wikipedia’s decision to protest a proposed US legislation with a total blackout of its English-language site.
In a letter titled “Summary and conclusion”, those behind this decision state that “over 1800 Wikipedians […] is by far the largest level of participation […], which illustrates the level of concern”. I was one of the 1800+. But, my concern was not about SOPA (I am concerned about it, but that’s another matter) but about the proposed radical action and its possible negative consequences for Wikipedia.
I also pointed out that given the way the vote was organized, it is clear that the decision was not a result of a majority (50%+) vote. It was merely the option (one out of many) picked by the most vocal minority. Taking such radical action without a clear majority mandate is a badly misguided step, to say the least.
There were also calls to make the blackout more thorough: block attempts to view cached versions of Wikipedia pages on Google, or attempts to bypass the JavaScript code that redirects the user to the blackout page. This is childish and vindictive, and also kind of pointless: the stated goal (raising awareness of the proposed legislation and its negative consequences) is easily accomplished without such thoroughness.
Lastly, I pointed out that with the legislation effectively dead (in the unlikely event that both houses of Congress pass the legislation, the White House all but promised a veto) proceeding with the blackout makes little sense. It is as if we threatened nuclear war, our opponent backed down, and then we went ahead and nuked the hell out of them anyway, just for good measure.
For me, 2011 was not a particularly good year. In fact, business-wise it has been the worst in, literally, decades. We also lost our oldest cat, and indeed, cats all around us did not fare well: two strays, taken to the shelter on two separate occasions (once by us, once by neighbors of us) were killed by the Humane Society, another cat that belonged to a neighbor, one that we knew since 1997, succumbed to old age, as did the oldest cat of an American friend of mine just a few days ago. Yes, we’ve had happier years than 2011. But then again, we remain healthy, safe and secure, so we do count our blessings still.
What will 2012 bring? The collapse of the Euro? A major war in the Middle East, perhaps over the issue of the Strait of Hormuz? A Chinese economic meltdown, precipitating a worldwide crisis? More wars and suffering?
Or a strengthening of the Eurozone, with new institutions that will prevent similar crises in the future? Peaceful resolution of the issue with Iran, perhaps an end to the ayatollahs’ regime? Finally, full recovery from the economic woes of the past few years?
I remain cautiously hopeful.
Looks like our experience with the Ottawa Humane Society is indeed not an outlier. There appears to be some outrage over the Arizona Humane Society’s decision to euthanize a recovering addict’s 9-month old injured cat, after he was unable to come up with $400 on the spot. (Ironically, the same Humane Society had no trouble finding the money to hire a professional publicist to deal specifically with this case.)
I understand that shelters, especially municipal shelters, must make unpleasant decisions every day about animals that cannot be rescued or are unadoptable. But these decisions should not be made callously and heartlessly. What is appalling is that in all these cases, there were people able and willing to care for the animal that was killed, but the humane society in question never gave them, or the cat, a chance.
In 1968, the crew of Apollo 8, for the first time in the history of humanity, disappeared behind another celestial body. When they re-emerged on the other side and saw the Earth rise over the lunar landscape, on much of the Earth it was Christmas Day.
And this is when they sent us Earthlings a Christmas message, which ended with the words, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”
You don’t need to be religious to find this moment awe-inspiring.
It almost sounds like some crude ethnic joke: how many rabbis fit into the basket of a cherry picker?
Lighting the nation's menorah in Washington
And the answer is, well, one fewer if you also include a photographer (who, presumably, is not himself a rabbi).
Happy Hannukah!
2012 is supposed to be the year when the world comes to an end, courtesy of a stray planet or something. No, this is not something that I worry about, not the least bit.
Yet the world as we know it may still come to an end of sorts. Here are some of the things I do worry about:
Thankfully, there is one item that I can strike out from my list: it seems increasingly unlikely that one of the tea party fundamentalists would win the Republican nomination in the United States and go on to defeat Barack Obama. Obama may end up a one-term president, but if he is defeated by a Gingrich or a Romney, I’d know that at the very least, an adult remains in charge of the White House.
In his delightful collection of robot stories Cyberiad, Polish science-fiction author Stanislaw Lem tells us how to build a computer (a sentient computer, no less): the most important step is to pour a large number of transistors into a vat and stir.
This mental image popped into my mind as I was reading the last few pages of Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain, subtitled Sketches of Another Future.
Beyond presenting a history of (chiefly British) cybernetics (and cyberneticians) the book’s main point is that cybernetics should be resurrected from the dead fringes as a nonmodern (the author’s word) alternative to the hegemony of modern science, and that the cybernetic approach of embracing unknowability is sometimes preferable to the notion that everything can be known and controlled. The author even names specific disasters (global warming, hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq) as examples, consequences of the “high modernist” approach to the world.
Well, this is, I take it, the intended message of the book. But what I read from the book is a feely-goody New Age rant against rational (that is, fact and logic-based) thinking, characterized by phrases like “nonmodern” and “ontological theater”. The “high modernist” attitude that the author (rightfully) criticizes is more characteristic of 19th century science than the late 20th or early 21st centuries. And to be sure, the cyberneticians featuring in the book are just as guilty of arrogance as the worst of the “modernists”: after all, who but a true “mad scientist” would use an unproven philosophy as justification for electroshock therapy, or to build a futuristic control center for an entire national economy?
More importantly, the cyberneticians and Pickering never appear to go beyond the most superficial aspects of complexity. They conceptualize a control system for a cybernetic factory with a set of inputs, a set of outputs, and a nondescript blob in the middle that does the thinking; then, they go off and collect puddle water (!) that is supposed to be trained by, and eventually replace, the factory manager. The thinking goes something like this: the skills and experience of a manager form an “exceedingly complex” system. The set of biological and biochemical reactions in a puddle form another “exceedingly complex” system. So, we replace one with the other, do a bit of training, and presto! Problem solved.
These and similar ideas of course only reveal their proponents’ ignorance. Many systems appear exceedingly complex not because they are, but simply because their performance is governed by simple rules that the mathematician immediately recognizes as higher order differential equations, leading to chaotic behavior. The behavior of the cybernetic tortoise described in Pickering’s book appears complex only because it is unpredictable and chaotic. Its reaction in front of a mirror may superficially resemble the reaction of a cat, say, but that’s where the analogy ends.
In the end, the author laments that cybernetics has been marginalized by the hegemony of modernist science. I say no; I say cybernetics has been marginalized by its own failure to be useful. Much as cyberneticians would have preferred otherwise, you cannot build a sentient computer by pouring puddle water or a bag of transistors into a vat. The sentient machines of the future may be unknowable in the sense that their actions will be unpredictable, but it will be knowledge that builds them, not New Age ignorance.
The world’s population is expected to reach the magic number of 7 billion today. Trick or treat!
Federal government debt in the United States is expected to reach 100% of the country’s GDP today. Trick or treat!
Meanwhile, an almost unheard of October Nor’easter dumped over 30 inches of snow in some places in New England, leaving millions without power, thousands stranded in grounded airplanes or stuck trains, and a few people dead. Trick or treat!
Candy, anyone?
Yesterday, I watched Terminator Salvation, the latest movie in the Terminator franchise.
Today, I am reading in the news about an attempt to reconstruct visual images from MRI brain scans.
I am also reading about US military drones hacked by a virus of unknown origin and purpose.
All of which makes me wonder just how close we are actually to the kind of dystopian future depicted by the Terminator movies.
Back when I was learning the elementary basics of FORTRAN programming in Hungary in the 1970s, I frequently heard an urban legend according to which the sorry state of computer science in the East Bloc was a result of Stalin’s suspicion towards cybernetics, which he considered a kind of intellectual swindlery from the decadent West. It seemed to make sense, neglecting of course the fact that the technological gap between East and West was widening, and that back in the 1950s, Soviet computers compared favorably to Western machines; and that it was only in the 1960s that a slow, painful decline began, as the Soviets began to rely increasingly on stolen Western technology.
Nonetheless, it appears that Stalin was right after all, insofar as cybernetics is concerned. I always thought that cybernetics was more or less synonymous with computer science, although I really have not given it much thought lately, as the term largely fell into disuse anyway. But now, I am reading an intriguing book titled “The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future” by Andrew Pickering, and I am amazed. For instance, until now I never heard of Project Cybersyn, a project conceived by British cyberneticists to create the ultimate centrally planned economy for socialist Chile in the early 1970s, complete with a futuristic control room. No wonder Allende’s regime failed miserably! The only thing I cannot decide is which was greater: the arrogance or dishonesty of those intellectuals who created this project. A project that, incidentally, also carried a considerably potential for misuse, as evidenced by the fact that its creators received invitations from other repressive regimes to implement similar systems.
Stalin may have been one of the most prolific mass murderers in history, but he wasn’t stupid. His suspicions concerning cybernetics may have been right on the money.
I hate to make a political point in the wake of a terrible tragedy but… I wonder if those who advocate profiling based on race, religion, and ethnicity are now in favor of subjecting young, blue-eyed, blond Christian males speaking with a Scandinavian accent to extra scrutiny.
Yelena Bonner is dead. May she rest in peace.
The concept of a modern general staff includes planning for every foreseeable contingency: thus, when something untoward happens, all general staff officers need to do is to take the appropriate planning folder off a shelf, dust it off, quickly check it to make sure it is not unduly dated, and then put the plan into practice.
What I didn’t know is that in the 21st century, such planning extended all the way to include the contingency of a runaway bride.
