What with the U.S. presidential election dominating the news, could you ask for anything more this Friday than more politics blogging? Pain below the fold.
Continue reading “Politics Friday: What a Bore”
Does Anything Bacon Finds Interesting Include Pork?
Look, I’m on physicsworld.com! Sometimes I have a vision that references on the world wide web which form a cycle lead to a runaway internet. You know…looping self-referentially forever and ever and resulting, of course, in a break in the space time continuum. I’m guessing the above link won’t do that. But if it did, I guess this would be the last sentence I’ve ev
More on the Science Funding Disaster
From a letter sent to APS members by Michael S. Lubell the Director of Public Affairs for the American Physical Society some due outrage:
The Omnibus Bill is a disaster for the very sciences that our political leaders have repeatedly proclaimed essential for our national security, economic vitality and environmental stewardship. Several reports have suggested a picture less bleak, but they do not take into account the effects of either earmarks or inflation. In fact, numerous programs will have to be trimmed or canceled.
Hundreds of layoffs, furloughs and project shutdowns at Fermilab, SLAC, LBNL and other national laboratories and research universities seem unavoidable. U.S. funding for the International Linear Collider project will be curtailed for the balance of the fiscal year, placing extraordinary stress on the high-energy physics program. FY08 funding for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) will be zeroed out, abrogating our agreement with our European and Asian partners. User facilities will see reductions in operating time and staff, and university research will contract. The list is long and the damage significant.
No Dice?
From a New York Times article describing the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s production of “No Dice:”
“Poetics,” for example, was choreographed using dice. Each face on the die represented one of six possible gestures, and each appendage — two arms, two legs and the head — got its own roll of the dice. Dice determined where the actors stand and for how long. There are four actors in “Poetics,” but, alas, no such thing as a four-sided die. So, to determine who did what, the directors used a dreidel.
No such thing as a four sided dice? Obviously no one among the choreographers has played Dungeons & Dragons:
Minority Report Like Interface
As we move ever closer to the day where using a computer involves flapping your hands around in the air:
Probability Intuition
Last quarter I taught discrete math. One component of the class was to cover some basic probability theory. On one of the homeworks we asked the following two questions about random five card poker hands:
- Given that the hand contains an ace, what is the probability that the hand contains another ace?
- Given that the hand contains the ace of diamonds, what is the probability that the hand contains another ace?
Without doing any explicit calculations, which of the above probabilities do you think will be larger?
Continue reading “Probability Intuition”
Off the Queue and Into the Neurons
Books conquered during the holiday resting season: “Learning the World” by Ken MacLeod, “The Crack in Space” by Philip K. Dick, and “Washington Wines and Wineries: The Essential Guide” by Paul Gregutt.
Continue reading “Off the Queue and Into the Neurons”
Happy New Year! Welcome 2008!
Happy New Year! Seattle’s fireworks at the space needle had some technical difficulties (and the pyrotechnicians had to light them by hand…yeah I wrote that just to use the word “pyrotechnician”), but were still beautiful as ever:
Welcome 2008! 2008 is the international year of the potato, the international year of planet earth, and the international year of sanitation. Oh, and it is a leap year! And of further note, according to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in “The Mote in God’s Eye” 2008 is the year that faster than light travel was invented. Now that should be exciting.
Is This a Mathematica Bug?
Miguel Pais points to an interesting behavior of Mathematica, where he plots the function which is the square of the square root of x. Now, if the domain of x is taken to be complex numbers, Mathematica’s behavior seems to me to be fine. But can anyone explain this behavior
as anything other than a bug?
Update: Oops. That wasn’t the one I was trying to paste. See what happens when I disconnect from the intertubes for a few days. How about this one:
Foxworthy Material
You know you’re in rural America when…
Reminds me of one of my favorite bumper sticker ideas of a few years ago (less true today): “Buy American: Do Meth!”