I’m about halfway through Quicksilver, Neil Stephenson’s new novel. This book is going to appeal to a lot less people than Cryptonomicon, mostly because you have to be a real hard core geek to love what he’s doing in this novel, not just some half-ass computer nerd who built his last computer. That being said, and unhumbly labeling myself as a member of the former class, so far the book has me hooked.
But what I’m really writing this entry about is not to give a review of the book (see the New York Times review or Lundblad’s review.) …especially considering I haven’t finished it yet! What really struck me in reading Stephenson is how his books remind me of the best conversations I’ve had. You know one of those conversations at a party where the ideas flow like spittle from a rabid dogs mouth (hee hee!) Where you lose track of time and how cold it is standing outside on the back porch in the middle of winter but wouldn’t give up your company or the conversation for anything. In fact, when I think about all of the authors that I consider my favorites, all of them, Philip Dick, Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, etc. give me this same feeling.
Well in honor of Stephenson, I don’t know how to end this entry.
Bumper Sticker
Bumper sticker idea for the day:
Philip K. Dick for Pope
Physics Will Save Us!
Much hubub is made about how uncomfortable everyone feels with quantum theory. So much hubub that there are now a plethora of different “interpretations” which are all supposed to make you feel less uncomfortable with quantum theory. There are basically two things which make quantum theory interesting: contextuality and nonlocality. The first of these is really not to disturbing. Sure, philosophically, having a realistic theory with really hidden variables (meaning you’ll never get access to them) is disturbing (why the extra structure?) but its not something which is completely incompatable with our everyday conception of reality. We operate fine when we interact with our PC’s without knowing the exact details of the currents and voltages inside of these machines (this being an analogy and not a precise comparison: of course we could go in an measure the currents and voltages and therefore understand why the hell the blue screen of death just popped up on the monitor.) Nonlocality is disturbing in a different way. It says that there is no way we can have realistic descriptions which are always local (but will be hidden, of course, as a consequence of the contextuality of quantum theory.)
OK, so here is my point. The issue of nonlocality arises due to the combination of relativity and quantum theory. It is perfectly reasonable to consider all sorts of notions of locality and then do quantum theory on them. Our notions of locality arise due to a physical theory: relativity. So perhaps the way out of the nonlocality mess is not via some hand-wavy philosophical smoothing over of emotions, but instead is due to actual real hard core physics. What physical theories can we derive which produce quantum theory? Can physics save us from the quantum quagmire?
The Equation
Today while shopping for books at Borders I notice that “The God Equation” was shelved right next one of Feynman’s books. Of course, I had to correct this and moved the God book a few spaces to the right (I hope no librarians are reading this.) Of course the irony of this is that Feynman is the place where I first saw how you could right a single equation to represent a theory of everything (assuming that such a theory can be written down in terms of our algebraic notation…something which I feel shows quite a bit of hubris!) To do this, first notice that all equations can be written as A=0 where A is some probably nasty equation. A theory of everything, i.e. a set of equations describing all physics, will just be a collection of such equations, say A_1=0, A_2=0, … A_n=0: it’s important to make sure all of these equations are over real numbers, but this is easy to do. Now we can combine all of these equations into one by specifying
A_1^2+A_2^2+…+A_n^2=0
which is true iff all of the A_i=0! I’m not sure if Feynman was the first to pull this little slight of hand, but it was the first place I saw this trick.
Job Hunt, Second Season
Today I officially started the hunt for my next job. After much procastination, I finally sat down and tried to formulate a strategy for landing my next job. Of course this failed miserably. I am totally clueless when it comes to applying for jobs/fellowships/positions scrubbing the floor. Last year’s job hunt (season one) was such an abysmal failure that it doesn’t really give me anything to build on (I would have like to at least gotten a foot in the door for one of the positions I applied to, but my foot was so far out of the door, you’d need a good pair of binoculars to even if I had shoes on.)
All of this reminds me of an idea for a new reality television show: “Survivor: Academia Island” Twenty overqualified Ph.D.’s stranded on a presitigious university campus all competing for a single tenure-track position. A no holds barred fight for one faculty position. Who will survive the first round and get an interview? Will anyone backstab and trash their fellow contestants? Whose shmoozing will increase their chances beyond their academic qualifications? And of course, we need to add a twist: when one of the contestants finally wins, it turns out the position has been canceled due to lack of funding!
European Christian Union?
Currently there is a debate in the EU about whether to include in the new EU constitution a statement as to the common christian heritage of the continent:
Josep Borrell Fontelles, a Spanish Socialist, appeared more doubtful about the inclusion of a Christian-heritage clause, commenting…”Many of our values were forged against the Church,” he said. “And when it comes to democracy, the rights of man and equality, God is only a recent convert.”
Paul, Paul, Paul
No Paul, you’ve got it wrong. What this downtown property is good for is not a biotech center, but a new research university, a.k.a. the Washington Institute of Technology
Searching for Bobby Fisher
One of the cool results of computer science which I recently learned is Levin’s universal search. Suppose you have a function f from a set X to a set Y. Many problems in computer science ask for you to invert this problem, i.e. given a y in Y, find x such that f(x)=y (there may be multiple such x’s but let’s not worry too much about that let’s just say you want to find an x such that f(x)=y.) Further lets assume that we have an efficient method for evaulating f(x). Thus, we may efficiently test whether a possible solution, x, satisfies the desired f(x)=y. OK, so that’s the problem. How do you solve it?
Well here is what Levin proposed. Consider running all possible programs which can solve this problem. We will do this serial, but with the time spent running each program which is proportional to 2^(-l(p)) where l(p) is the length of the program p. So we will be running shorter programs more often than we are running longer programs. There is a program q, which is the fastest program for solving our problem. This program runs in time T(q). Eventually our program will execute this program and get the correct result. How long does this take? A quick calculation shows that this time is at works 2^(l(q)) (T(q)+Tv) where Tv is the time to verify that the answer is correct (not included in T(q)). Thus, up to 2^(l(q)) the program is the fastest possible. Think about a class of programs now: notice that we will have produced an algorithm for this inversion problem which is, up to this huge multiplicative constant optimal. If we were to use big-O notation, this constant would be hidden and we would say assymptotically we have the most efficient algorithm!
Needless to say, the multiplicative constant DOES matter and in most cases is ridiculously large. But the story doesn’t end here. Recently Marcus Hutter has shown how to make this multiplicative constant 5 (Hutter’s work also solves a broad classes than the one described above.) What’s the catch this time? The catch this time is that there is an additive constant which is huge!
Party Affiliation Versus Education Level
For ages I have searched the net for charts of party affiliation versus education level (highest degree attained.) Well, thanks to Berkeley’s SDA I was able to produce this chart myself! Click below to see tha table
Continue reading “Party Affiliation Versus Education Level”
A Strange Candidate
In today’s LA Times there is a strange write in candidate, Gerald Busch.
REPORT FROM THE FRONT:
OSAMA SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT
WHAT HE WILL DO:
HE WILL CALL FOR A STAND-DOWN IN ALL JIHAD. (NO GUARANTEE OF SUCCESS) ON OR BEFORE 10/05/03 OSMA (sic) WILL TRAVEL W/PLANS TO NEW YORK ON 10/07 FOR TRIAL (UNDER USA LAWS) FOR ACCACK ON 9/11.
WHAT HE WANTS
1. ALL USA TROOPS OUT OF AFGHANISTAN AND TALIBAN BACK, IF THAT IS WHAT THE AFGHAN PEOPLE WANT.
2. ALL USA TROOPS OUT OF IRAQ AND SADDAM BACK, IF THAT IS WHAT THE IRAQI PEOPLE WANT.
3. USA ASSISTANCE TO ANY ISLAMIC COUNTRIES BE ONLY WATER AND SEWER PROJECTS FUNDED INTO ISLAMIC BANKS (NO MILITARY OR WEAPONS).
4. SHARIA BANKS BE RECOGNIZED AND ACCEPTED AND SUPPORTED BY BANKING SYSTEM IN THE USA.
(LOANS THROUGH ISLAMIC BANKS=NO INTEREST)
DURING MY MEETING WITH THE OTHER SIDE I DISCOVERED THE SUBLIMINAL SURVIVAL NEED OF THE VAST MAJORITY OF ALL CLASSES OF PEOPLE LIVING IN ISLAMIC 3RD WORLD WANT THE GOD DIRECTED AND DECISIVE DISCIPLINE OF SHARIA LAW, AS AMENDED W/ IMPROVING ECONOMIC CIRCUMSTANCES OF LIVE IN/BY COUNTRY. FREEDOM AS DEFINED IN THE WEST IS NOT WANTED BY THE MAJORITY OF ISLAM AT THIS TIME.
WHAT SAY – GRAY? ARNOLD? GEORGE?
CAN WE END THIS WAR?
CALIFORNIA ELECTION PROMISE:
IF YOU ELECT GERALD BUSCH FOR GOVERNOR I WILL SHARE POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY W/GREAT STATESMAN GRAY DAVIS AND THE EXCEPTIONAL HUMAN BEING ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER…EQUALLY
My favorite part is where he has to clarify that Arnold is indeed a human being.