This interview with a Stanford professor (of neurobiology) about his experience as a woman in science is an interesting read (via Angry Physics.)
Visa Problems?
John Langford (Caltech class of 97, woot!) has a post about an effort to get information about researchers from outside the US having problems getting visas in order to attend conferences in the US. Anyone who’s had such problems might be interested in contributing their story to this effort.
Dr. Wayne Dyer Makes Me Cry
Watching PBS tonight: “Dr. Wayne Dyer: The Power of Intention.” Holy moly bad stuff. Religion dressed up in authority soaked in pseudoscience. Use the word “energy” enough and people will believe anything you say. “Spirititual energy is the energy of abundance.” What does this even mean? So here is the real question. Why doesn’t the word Hamiltonian achieve as high a standing as energy? Or at least the Lagrangian, for gosh sake! And why no talk of the action. I mean that’s my favorite quantity, the action! No eigenvectors, no eignenvalues, no renormalization group. If you’re going to talk to me, and convince me of your self-help mumbo jumbo, you’d better be talking my launguage!
Tablet Science
Over at Life as a Physicist, Gordon Watts has a post about using his Tablet PC as a log book for his research (Gordon works in experimental particle physics.) I’ve been doing the same thing for about nine months now: using my tablet to take notes and function as a research lab book (I’ve also been attempting to lead a virtually paperless life: i.e. downloading all of the papers I am reading and reading them on the tablet.) So how do I like the tablet as a replacement for research notebooks?
Well, the first thing I have to say is that it is extremely convenient to have all of your notes in one place. If you convert the handwriting of your notes to text, you can search the notes for text phrases. The handwork recognition works very well (amazingly it seems to work better the faster I write. When I slow down and try to be careful it makes more mistakes!) Of course, the ultimate tool for theorists isn’t yet there: a handwriting to LaTeX convertor!
Another feature I really like is the ability to cut and paste sections of a PDF document into my notes. I use this all the time when I am working through a paper. Cut a bit of the paper. Add your own notes. Cut the next section. Add notes, etc. This is actually something which is very nice to have, because previously I would just work through the paper on a separate sheet of paper, so there was no direct connection with the flow of the paper.
Another fine feature of the tablet is using it with Powerpoint. You can write directly on your slides during a presentation (and save those marks on the presentation for latter viewing.) This is very convenient for answering questions and such during a talk. Last term I used the tablet to deliver powerpoint lectures, with mixed success. This can actually work very well if you do it right. The right way, as far as I can tell, is to use the powerpoint for a broad outline of what you are discussing (pictures, charts, etc.) but to use the pen features for most of the lecture. That way you aren’t just giving a powerpoint presentation (which is always too fast and too cursory for teaching), yet on the other hand you can include the nice features that powerpoint allows: clean clear graphs, charts, diagrams, etc. Unfortunately I don’t think I did this properly during most of the class I taught. Doh! (The other strange thing about using the tablet to lecture is that it is very difficult for me to lecture while standing up with the notebook unless the podium is a very high podium. This means that I have to teach sitting down, which is kind of strange!) Here in the CSE department at UW, they have done some very cool research with Tablet software which allows students who all have tablets to interact with the lecturer and give a very cool interactive touch to the lectures (see here for more info.)
Of course, not everything works perfectly with using the Tablet as a research log book. First of all, as Gordon puts it:
The hardware is certainly up to the task. As usual, the software is lagging: the market for lab notebook emulation software is small.
I’ve been particularly frustrated by the poor cut and paste ability of the notebook taking software I’m using, Microsoft’s Onenote software. I’m hopeful that the upcoming Vista version of Onenote will address many of these issues. Another problem is that the Tablet I own (a Toshiba Tecra) is a monster. What is nice about this is that the screen is great for reading papers (no eye strain). What is bad about this is that the thing weighs a bit and has a fan that is, when doing heavy duty computing tasks, rather loud. I think if I did it again I would go one size down (I’m not a fan of the ultralights, really.)
One problem with the tablet I have, which I’ve been trying to remedy lately, is its use in my office. In my office I have a monitor and docking station for the tablet. Right now when I’m in the office I just use the monitor output. What I’d really like to do is set up the multiple displays so that I can use the Tablet in tablet mode and the monitor in normal mode. What is keeping me from doing this? Well the docking station from Toshiba is slanted such that if you use the laptop in Tablet mode (with the screen pivoted down) the tablet isn’t flat. This wouldn’t be so bad except that the way I normally use the tablet is in portrait mode and then the screen is very very awkward. So I’m trying to figure out a way to rig the docking station so that the screen is level (but so far all my attempts have resulted in very awkward and not very robust setups.)
All in all, I’m very pleased with using my tablet as a research notebook. Now if only they could give me more colors and pens for when I’m doodling on my tablet during a talk đ
Praying to Entangled Gods
From the Washington Post, in a fair and balanced (*ahem*) article on the effect of prayer on healing:
But supporters say that much about medicine remains murky or is explained only over time. They say, for example, that it was relatively recently that scientists figured out how aspirin works, although it has been in use for centuries.
“Yesterday’s science fiction often becomes tomorrow’s science,” said John A. Astin of the California Pacific Medical Center.
Proponents often cite a phenomenon from quantum physics, in which distant particles can affect each other’s behavior in mysterious ways.
“When quantum physics was emerging, Einstein wrote about spooky interactions between particles at a distance,” Krucoff said. “That’s at least one very theoretical model that might support notions of distant prayer or distant healing.”
Well yeah, it might support the notions of distant prayer or distant healing, except that it explicitly doesn’t support those notions since entanglement can’t be used to signal and hence can’t be used to influence distant objects in the way distant prayer or distant healing would. Argh!
Math is Hard, Become a Journalist
A good way to get your blood pressure elevated is to read Richard Cohen’s opinion article in the Washington Post where he slams requirements for learning algebra in high school.
What I love about the article, though, is that he admits, right of the top, the following
I confess to be one of those people who hate math. I can do my basic arithmetic all right (although not percentages)…
Um, okay, so we just found out you can’t perform something so simple, fifth graders can do it, and we’re supposed to listen to what you are saying? Uhuh. Brilliant tactic there Mr. Cohen.
(And yes, the title is meant as a joke. Just because the Washington Post has one ignoramus does not imply that all journalists are braindead.)
OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb
Earth sized planet (approximately 5.5 times the mass of the Earth) found and this time not in one of these crazy close to the star orbits.
Similarly sized extrasolar planets have been found before. But the method used to detect them meant we could see smallish planets only when they were very close to their suns, and such bodies are battered by scorching radiation.
Planet OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb looks much more like home. It lies about 390 million kilometres from its star: if it were inside our Solar System, the planet would sit between Mars and Jupiter.
Hm, scortching radiation or -200 Celcius surface temperature. Neither looks like home to me. Now if they detected rain, then…
Oppenheimer's Ghost
Dover
Things that make me happy.
"A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein" by Palle Yourgrau
I have often heard it describe that to be a great philospher, one must grab ahold of a single idea, put on blinders to all opposing thoughts, and then run with it. This is not to accuse all philosophers of such maniacal tunnel vision, but there certainly is at least a grain of truth in this idea. And it is certain the one part of philosophy as practiced by philosophers which drives physicists absolutely nuts!
Why all of the sudden philosophy bashing? Well I just finished reading A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein
Now back to philosophers going overboard in one direction. Here I think that Yourgrau is so zealous in his defense of Gödel as a philosopher that he misinterprets the reason why physicists argue against the relevance of Gödel’s universe. Gödel’s universe is a cosmological solution to the equations of general relativity in which the universe is rotating. Interesting in this solution to the equations of general relativity there exist closed timelike curves. Now I won’t get into the reasons why Gödel is interested in this universe and I don’t object to the use of this universe in philosophical discussions about the nature of time, but I think that Yourgrau’s characterization of physicist’s reaction to solutions to Einstein’s equations with closed timelike curves isn’t quite right. In particular he bluntly dismisses the chronology protection conjecture as totally adhoc. Or, in his words
Just as David Hilbert tried at first to avoid the consequences of the incompleteness theorem by inventing a new rule of logical inference out of whole cloth, so too the relativistic establishment, in the person of Stephen Hawking, tried to get around the embarrassing consequences introduced by the Gödel universe. If the annoying Gödel universe was consistent with the laws of general relativity, why not change the laws? Hawking thus introduced what he called the “chronology protection conjecture” (though a better name would have been the “anti-Gödel amendment”), which proposed a modification of general relativity whose primary goal was to rule out the possibility of world models like Gödel’s, with their awkward chronologies premitting closed temporal loops and causal chains with no beginning. Despite having, as Russell noted in a different context, all the advantages of theft over honest toil, Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture has won few adherents, its ad hoc character betraying iteself.
This characterization of the chronology protection conjecture seems to me very misleading. Why? Because the chronology protection conjecture isn’t just an “add-on” to general relativity: it is the conjecture that general relativity when combined with the other laws of physics does not allow for closed timelike curves. This is different from arguing, as Yourgrau later does, that the objection is simply that Gödel’s universe is not our universe: it is arguing that the more complete laws of physics disallow closed timelike curves. Of course, if your blinders are on, like a good philosoher, then perhaps this distinction is not important. But as a physicist, where there is more than just general relativity to consider, the chronology protection conjecture is a different sort of statement and has considerable evidence in favor of it (and I think most phyisicsts don’t have much of a problem with the chronology protection conjecture, in constrast to Yourgrau who thinks that most people have a problem with it.)
So read “A World Without Time…” with your “physicist” or “scientist” mode shut off and you will be fine. Is it actually possible to turn off these modes? Only if you were a literature major like me đ