Better than Quicksilver, not as good as others...
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I feel like the XKCD comic has somewhat unfairly focused the discussion on the book's invented words. While I find it frustrating in some fantasy novels, half of the charm of Anathem for me was learning the rules of this new society- which is what happens in the first hundred pages.
What frustrated me was that, having set up this immersive, complicated world, focused on scholars and their ideas, Stephenson ended up telling a fairly conventional (if exciting) story for the remainder of the book, essentially forgetting about many of the internal conflicts of the monks about halfway through, rather than letting that drive the action. It's as if he doesn't know whether to make this book look more like Eco's The Name of the Rose or a retread of Snow Crash.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed Anathem immensely, and I couldn't finish the Quicksilver series (dropped out halfway through System of the World). I feel like this book was more of a return to Stephenson's writing in the Diamond Age / Cryptonomicon era. It's not his best, but I'd recommend it over Quicksilver.
It's well-known that he worked for the Stasi, it seems, but he didn't like the claims that he didn't finish his university degree, or that he worked for a porn-related business (I don't know if either of these is true). The reason he's dealing with the forwarding is that wikipedia.de is under German jurisdiction, but de.wikipedia.org is not.
The lesson here is: totalitarian repression is A-OK, but porn is over the line.
Aside from the cover-fire system, this game is nothing new.
I don't understand comments like this, really. When was the last time you saw *one* really new thing in a major game? Portal? Bioshock is System Shock - awesome, but not new. Considering the popularity of three versions of Halo, with zero new things, just smoothing out old problems with the console FPS, I'd say console shooters will take creativity where they get it.
It's not just the mass - it's the other parameters involved. I'm not a particle physicist, but I hang out with them - the results are so freaky that of all the crazy DM papers, only *one* predicted them. That's kind of surprising in its own right.
So it's actually a bigger deal than you think - if the results are right. The theory in question (by Neal Weiner and Nima Arkani-Hamed) was created to explain a *different* experiment - a dark matter observatory, PAMELA (http://arxivblog.com/?p=599).
The "new physics" suggested from a different experiment may also show up in these results - and as far as anyone knows, it's the only theory that does predict deviations like this.
In the past, people didn't have such a huge reference base so they could follow the logic, but now with computers, the Internet, and massive hard drives, papers ought to be much longer and more detailed.
While I agree with most of your post, I think there are real constraints on paper length. Mostly, these are researcher time - longer papers take longer to write, and to edit - and signal-to-noise - I need to know the basic idea of your paper *before* I decide to check your sign errors.
Of course, many papers in a high-profile journal have a more detailed, companion paper in some more specialized journal, which helps the situation - but you need to look for this paper! In some ways, it seems like we could profitably abolish "high-profile" journals and replace them with a combination of specialized journals and high-level overview articles like these for Physics
AC makes an interesting point, though any study that makes that basic an error will be corrected immediately and not cited hundreds of times, as in this paper. I suspect the errors induced are often more subtle - more a case of hopeful thinking than arithmetic ("Never believe a thing simply because you want it to be true" - Stephenson got that one right)
Basic idea: high-profile journals want papers that are new and exciting. This means that scientists have an incentive to 1) rush their work, 2) choose fields that are popular, and 3) claim that their papers solve more than they actually do. This leads to sloppy, dishonest papers.
I'm not going to judge this paper - I haven't read it thoroughly - but to pair a title like "Why most published research findings are false" to a pretty well-known problem seems itself like an example of problem 3!
Okay, that's not a terrible summary, but for more details about this experiment and its importance, you can look at
http://physics.aps.org/articles/v1/4
which also cites the actual article.
The other two replies are correct, but let me give a little more detail - the casimir force is very short-range, and essentially goes to zero over the distance of a micron. The corrugations in the surface are micron-deep trenches, and so the extra surface area is essentially hidden.
The earlier work was completely theoretical - the paper in question here is an experimental result.
Why do we care? A lot of reasons - the casimir effect is deeply rooted in quantum physics, but is observable without having to cool things to quantum temperatures. This sort of research is also potentially very important in nanotechnology - if we want our nanosurfaces to not stick, we should make them corrugated - the opposite of the macroworld!
Many times, people have calculated these casimir forces by assuming that the quantum force between two plates by just adding up the forces between particles (pairwise additivity). This is the first (I believe) research that shows this failing experimentally - there are large-scale geometrical effects. This is exciting, as it means that there may be many ways to tune casimir forces, making them do whatever we want - theoretical predictions on piston-like geometries have forces that are attractive at one distance, and repulsive at another!
And it's going to raise the game for standards compliance!
Look, I don't mean to be getting you down about this, but I'm fairly certain this is the only time such a phrase has been uttered with such enthusiasm. Ever. Congratulations of a sort are in order.
There is a lot of research in both forensics and statistics about fingerprint uniqueness. A classic reference for calculating these numbers is Stoney and Thornton - Stoney, David A., and John I. Thornton. 1986. A critical analysis of quantitative fingerprint individuality models. Journal of Forensic Sciences 31 (4): 1187-1216.
Fingerprint identification is done by comparing the location and orientation of "minutiae," small defects in a fingerprint pattern. Typically, it takes around 12 minutiae to be considered a good match (by the FBI). Now, IF ALL OF THESE MATCH, the probability of misidentification is small (10^-8 or so assuming perfect procedure, I don't remember actual numbers, but it's a small, small chance). However, it's even money that the FBI has two fingerprints that match up to six minutiae.
There have been some high-profile misidentifications (take this case) but these seem to come from a couple of errors:
1) true screwups in the lab (only double-checking and real responsibility will help) 2) people believing that six or fewer minutiae matching is conclusive (education and honesty needed)
Incidentally, a somewhat convincing anecdote is that identical twins have correlated*, but clearly distinct fingerprints!
*i.e. if one has a whorl-pattern, the other is more likely than average to also have a whorl - this doesn't mean the minutiae are correlated, I don't know about that.
Read what the article actually says - "Mr. Parkin puttered for two years in a lab in the early 1990s, trying to find a way to commercialize an odd magnetic effect of quantum mechanics he had observed at supercold temperatures." Though he may have been absolutely critical to making GMR hard drives (I don't know the history) credit for discovery of GMR goes to Peter Grunberg and Albert Fert. You might be able to call Parkin the inventor of GMR hard drives, though.
There was no censored comic - there was, however, a rant that Matt Boyd took down, presumably on the (very sensible) principle that if you're in bullshit up to your head, keep your mouth closed. There wasn't any information in the rant that isn't in the fleen interview.
If I had to pick what game came after Marathon that was worthy, I would have to say Deus Ex. But I don't see that on the list either... the author of this list clearly lacks experience! Just so you know, one of the authors of the list is Warren Spector. I think he knows Deus Ex better than you.
Definitely not physics or chemistry - the section where the author tries to puzzle out the physics of shrinking is just wrong:
... halving the number in each cycle of shrinkage. But molecules are integer quantities; sooner or later, this strategy is going to lead to half a molecule, which won't work.
The "half-molecule" explanation is kinda naive. In a gram of material, there's on the order of 10^23 molecules - or around 2^77 (a lot of halves!). To move from a linear size of micrometers to meters is 10^6 in linear dimension - or 10^18 in number of molecules. Running into half-molecules isn't the problem - it's that you're dealing with many fewer molecules - so new physics scales come into play!
Another way to shrink an object would be to decrease the distance between an atom's nucleus and its electron cloud-atoms are, after all, mostly empty space. I'm not enough of a physicist to have any intuition about what this would do to basic physics and chemistry, but one result of this strategy would be to leave the object's mass unchanged.
... OK, we'll let the fine structure constant of the Incredible Shrinking Man be four. This is fine until all your electromagnetic interactions start to diverge.
First of all academia is about teaching students. It used to be that the students were advanced enough so that teaching a course actually related to the research work, but this is not true anymore.
OK, a couple of notes here:
1) Teaching undergraduate classes has (with a few exceptions due to notable students) essentially *never* directly contributed to original research. (I am speaking here for physics. In psychology, undergrads contribute to research - as lab rats.) Undergraduates do do their own work, but it's generally independent of classes. I don't think this has changed. In fact, I think the fraction of undergraduates involved in thesis-like projects has probably increased. (Ask a physics major of thirty years ago: how many of your graduating class did independent research? With my class, it was nearly 100%)
The benefit of teaching undergrad classes is that it forces you to communicate, and often will make you look at your subject in a different way.
2) Undergraduate classes are very much advanced from where they were - the topics change with the times. Fifty years ago, quantum mechanics was a course for advanced graduate students only (like quantum field theory or string theory is today) but as an undergrad, I took three semesters of QM.
That would be cool! However, it seems a little harder than this - in fact, it may not be possible.
If I understand the article (it's short on details) they're displaying an image by decomposing it into Bessel functions (like the Fourier decomposition in JPEG compression) and then having elements oscillate at different frequencies to recreate the shape. Bessel functions are the natural set of orthogonal functions for cylindrical symmetry - which is what the tank has.
The inverse problem is a little harder - determining the shape based on the observed frequencies. It's kind of like the problem of hearing the shape of a drum. It's possible for different shapes to have the same set of frequencies.
It's around three drinks in quick succession. It should frighten you that this is legal. In fact, many states have a lower threshold, 0.04% or so - "driving while ability impaired."
Damn straight. Gauss-Bonnet connects a topological property (one that doesn't change with deformation) to the surface's curvature - which obviously varies under deformation! That's one of the more beautiful results I've seen in mathematics.
It's also generally handy in differential geometry.
E = mc^2 holds true no matter what units c is expressed in - as long as the units for energy, mass, and c are consistent.
If you say c is expressed in meters/second, and m in kilograms, then energy must have the units of [kg*m^2/s^2] which we also call Newton-meters or Joules.
Just to confuse you further: sometimes we choose our units such that c=1! In this case, E = mc^2 becomes just E = m. Energy is mass.
Numbers in physics are just convenient ways to express a measurement; they are not of numerological significance (well, maybe the fine structure constant...).
The risk of them being illegally distributed, for one. Advertising. Staffing, typing blurbs. These are not non-existant costs... and unfortunately the profits from ebooks are. I don't blame them - we don't have a good hardware device for ebooks, so they're not profitable.
Hm... maybe because the Hugo is not just a science fiction award. You may recall that the Lord of the Rings "trilogy" was nominated for a best series award or something of that nature (incidentally, it was beaten by Asimov's Foundation series).
The lines between SciFi and Fantasy are not always clear, and if LoTR is valid for a Hugo, then it isn't going to dilute the meaning of the Hugo any more if we nominate fantasy. There's always been a division between hard and soft science fiction (or between Science Fiction and SciFi, according to some people).
Just look at the difference between Harlan Ellison and Isaac Asimov. Oh, and guess which one has won more Hugos.
The "Rendezvous" software of Tibco is messaging software. Apple's is networking configuration. There doesn't seem to be any real attempt of Apple to capitalize on Tibco's reputation (because, naturally, Apple is some upstart company trying to leech off of the mighty Tibco...).
After all, wasn't this case sort of settled with the battle of Apple Records versus Apple Computer - there's not likely to be confusion in the products, and the Apple Records name had a hell of a lot more influence than Tibco does now.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel like the XKCD comic has somewhat unfairly focused the discussion on the book's invented words. While I find it frustrating in some fantasy novels, half of the charm of Anathem for me was learning the rules of this new society- which is what happens in the first hundred pages.
What frustrated me was that, having set up this immersive, complicated world, focused on scholars and their ideas, Stephenson ended up telling a fairly conventional (if exciting) story for the remainder of the book, essentially forgetting about many of the internal conflicts of the monks about halfway through, rather than letting that drive the action. It's as if he doesn't know whether to make this book look more like Eco's The Name of the Rose or a retread of Snow Crash.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed Anathem immensely, and I couldn't finish the Quicksilver series (dropped out halfway through System of the World). I feel like this book was more of a return to Stephenson's writing in the Diamond Age / Cryptonomicon era. It's not his best, but I'd recommend it over Quicksilver.
Oops, I mean: German article here
It's well-known that he worked for the Stasi, it seems, but he didn't like the claims that he didn't finish his university degree, or that he worked for a porn-related business (I don't know if either of these is true). The reason he's dealing with the forwarding is that wikipedia.de is under German jurisdiction, but de.wikipedia.org is not.
The lesson here is: totalitarian repression is A-OK, but porn is over the line.
German article here:
Aside from the cover-fire system, this game is nothing new.
I don't understand comments like this, really. When was the last time you saw *one* really new thing in a major game? Portal? Bioshock is System Shock - awesome, but not new. Considering the popularity of three versions of Halo, with zero new things, just smoothing out old problems with the console FPS, I'd say console shooters will take creativity where they get it.
It's not just the mass - it's the other parameters involved. I'm not a particle physicist, but I hang out with them - the results are so freaky that of all the crazy DM papers, only *one* predicted them. That's kind of surprising in its own right.
So it's actually a bigger deal than you think - if the results are right. The theory in question (by Neal Weiner and Nima Arkani-Hamed) was created to explain a *different* experiment - a dark matter observatory, PAMELA (http://arxivblog.com/?p=599).
The "new physics" suggested from a different experiment may also show up in these results - and as far as anyone knows, it's the only theory that does predict deviations like this.
In the past, people didn't have such a huge reference base so they could follow the logic, but now with computers, the Internet, and massive hard drives, papers ought to be much longer and more detailed.
While I agree with most of your post, I think there are real constraints on paper length. Mostly, these are researcher time - longer papers take longer to write, and to edit - and signal-to-noise - I need to know the basic idea of your paper *before* I decide to check your sign errors.
Of course, many papers in a high-profile journal have a more detailed, companion paper in some more specialized journal, which helps the situation - but you need to look for this paper! In some ways, it seems like we could profitably abolish "high-profile" journals and replace them with a combination of specialized journals and high-level overview articles like these for Physics
AC makes an interesting point, though any study that makes that basic an error will be corrected immediately and not cited hundreds of times, as in this paper. I suspect the errors induced are often more subtle - more a case of hopeful thinking than arithmetic ("Never believe a thing simply because you want it to be true" - Stephenson got that one right)
Basic idea: high-profile journals want papers that are new and exciting. This means that scientists have an incentive to 1) rush their work, 2) choose fields that are popular, and 3) claim that their papers solve more than they actually do. This leads to sloppy, dishonest papers.
I'm not going to judge this paper - I haven't read it thoroughly - but to pair a title like "Why most published research findings are false" to a pretty well-known problem seems itself like an example of problem 3!
Okay, that's not a terrible summary, but for more details about this experiment and its importance, you can look at http://physics.aps.org/articles/v1/4 which also cites the actual article.
The other two replies are correct, but let me give a little more detail - the casimir force is very short-range, and essentially goes to zero over the distance of a micron. The corrugations in the surface are micron-deep trenches, and so the extra surface area is essentially hidden.
The earlier work was completely theoretical - the paper in question here is an experimental result.
Why do we care? A lot of reasons - the casimir effect is deeply rooted in quantum physics, but is observable without having to cool things to quantum temperatures. This sort of research is also potentially very important in nanotechnology - if we want our nanosurfaces to not stick, we should make them corrugated - the opposite of the macroworld!
Many times, people have calculated these casimir forces by assuming that the quantum force between two plates by just adding up the forces between particles (pairwise additivity). This is the first (I believe) research that shows this failing experimentally - there are large-scale geometrical effects. This is exciting, as it means that there may be many ways to tune casimir forces, making them do whatever we want - theoretical predictions on piston-like geometries have forces that are attractive at one distance, and repulsive at another!
If anyone's interested, the actual paper is at http://arxiv.org/abs/0805.3776 and better summaries (Moore's law wtf?) are at http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11402849 and http://www.azonano.com/news.asp?newsID=6827
Look, I don't mean to be getting you down about this, but I'm fairly certain this is the only time such a phrase has been uttered with such enthusiasm. Ever. Congratulations of a sort are in order.
There is a lot of research in both forensics and statistics about fingerprint uniqueness. A classic reference for calculating these numbers is Stoney and Thornton - Stoney, David A., and John I. Thornton. 1986. A critical analysis of quantitative fingerprint individuality models. Journal of Forensic Sciences 31 (4): 1187-1216.
Fingerprint identification is done by comparing the location and orientation of "minutiae," small defects in a fingerprint pattern. Typically, it takes around 12 minutiae to be considered a good match (by the FBI). Now, IF ALL OF THESE MATCH, the probability of misidentification is small (10^-8 or so assuming perfect procedure, I don't remember actual numbers, but it's a small, small chance). However, it's even money that the FBI has two fingerprints that match up to six minutiae.
There have been some high-profile misidentifications (take this case) but these seem to come from a couple of errors:
1) true screwups in the lab (only double-checking and real responsibility will help)
2) people believing that six or fewer minutiae matching is conclusive (education and honesty needed)
Incidentally, a somewhat convincing anecdote is that identical twins have correlated*, but clearly distinct fingerprints!
*i.e. if one has a whorl-pattern, the other is more likely than average to also have a whorl - this doesn't mean the minutiae are correlated, I don't know about that.
Read what the article actually says - "Mr. Parkin puttered for two years in a lab in the early 1990s, trying to find a way to commercialize an odd magnetic effect of quantum mechanics he had observed at supercold temperatures." Though he may have been absolutely critical to making GMR hard drives (I don't know the history) credit for discovery of GMR goes to Peter Grunberg and Albert Fert. You might be able to call Parkin the inventor of GMR hard drives, though.
There was no censored comic - there was, however, a rant that Matt Boyd took down, presumably on the (very sensible) principle that if you're in bullshit up to your head, keep your mouth closed. There wasn't any information in the rant that isn't in the fleen interview.
Also, you can turn while falling.
The "half-molecule" explanation is kinda naive. In a gram of material, there's on the order of 10^23 molecules - or around 2^77 (a lot of halves!). To move from a linear size of micrometers to meters is 10^6 in linear dimension - or 10^18 in number of molecules. Running into half-molecules isn't the problem - it's that you're dealing with many fewer molecules - so new physics scales come into play!
OK, a couple of notes here:
1) Teaching undergraduate classes has (with a few exceptions due to notable students) essentially *never* directly contributed to original research. (I am speaking here for physics. In psychology, undergrads contribute to research - as lab rats.) Undergraduates do do their own work, but it's generally independent of classes. I don't think this has changed. In fact, I think the fraction of undergraduates involved in thesis-like projects has probably increased. (Ask a physics major of thirty years ago: how many of your graduating class did independent research? With my class, it was nearly 100%)
The benefit of teaching undergrad classes is that it forces you to communicate, and often will make you look at your subject in a different way.
2) Undergraduate classes are very much advanced from where they were - the topics change with the times. Fifty years ago, quantum mechanics was a course for advanced graduate students only (like quantum field theory or string theory is today) but as an undergrad, I took three semesters of QM.
That would be cool! However, it seems a little harder than this - in fact, it may not be possible.
If I understand the article (it's short on details) they're displaying an image by decomposing it into Bessel functions (like the Fourier decomposition in JPEG compression) and then having elements oscillate at different frequencies to recreate the shape. Bessel functions are the natural set of orthogonal functions for cylindrical symmetry - which is what the tank has.
The inverse problem is a little harder - determining the shape based on the observed frequencies. It's kind of like the problem of hearing the shape of a drum. It's possible for different shapes to have the same set of frequencies.
Nope - you're wrong.
n t)
"A single drink containing one ounce (28.3grams) of alcohol will increase the average person's BAC roughly 0.03%" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_conte
It's around three drinks in quick succession. It should frighten you that this is legal. In fact, many states have a lower threshold, 0.04% or so - "driving while ability impaired."
Damn straight. Gauss-Bonnet connects a topological property (one that doesn't change with deformation) to the surface's curvature - which obviously varies under deformation! That's one of the more beautiful results I've seen in mathematics. It's also generally handy in differential geometry.
Ok, here's a serious answer:
E = mc^2 holds true no matter what units c is expressed in - as long as the units for energy, mass, and c are consistent.
If you say c is expressed in meters/second, and m in kilograms, then energy must have the units of [kg*m^2/s^2] which we also call Newton-meters or Joules.
Just to confuse you further: sometimes we choose our units such that c=1! In this case, E = mc^2 becomes just E = m. Energy is mass.
Numbers in physics are just convenient ways to express a measurement; they are not of numerological significance (well, maybe the fine structure constant...).
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_unit if you have more questions on the units.
The risk of them being illegally distributed, for one. Advertising. Staffing, typing blurbs. These are not non-existant costs... and unfortunately the profits from ebooks are. I don't blame them - we don't have a good hardware device for ebooks, so they're not profitable.
Hm... maybe because the Hugo is not just a science fiction award. You may recall that the Lord of the Rings "trilogy" was nominated for a best series award or something of that nature (incidentally, it was beaten by Asimov's Foundation series).
I'll copy a link given above that's useful in clarifying the award... http://www.torcon3.org/ballots/hugoWSFS.html
The lines between SciFi and Fantasy are not always clear, and if LoTR is valid for a Hugo, then it isn't going to dilute the meaning of the Hugo any more if we nominate fantasy. There's always been a division between hard and soft science fiction (or between Science Fiction and SciFi, according to some people).
Just look at the difference between Harlan Ellison and Isaac Asimov. Oh, and guess which one has won more Hugos.
The "Rendezvous" software of Tibco is messaging software. Apple's is networking configuration. There doesn't seem to be any real attempt of Apple to capitalize on Tibco's reputation (because, naturally, Apple is some upstart company trying to leech off of the mighty Tibco...).
N -20030828-000863-0816
w s/news_story.php?id=46737
After all, wasn't this case sort of settled with the battle of Apple Records versus Apple Computer - there's not likely to be confusion in the products, and the Apple Records name had a hell of a lot more influence than Tibco does now.
A couple more news stories on this, more reputable but not much more information:
http://www.smartmoney.com/bn/ON/index.cfm?story=O
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/?http://www.pcpro.co.uk/ne