Science News: Patterns

Kyle

All the stories that caught my eye in this week’s Science News digest had to do with violated patterns.

(1) I was checking out the videos of the big Intel young scientist competition finalists and was pleased to see a few non-biological scientists getting some recognition. It seems like almost all of the elite young science students you hear about are heading toward bio-related fields (and who can blame them?), so I’m glad to see that some de facto traffic and materials engineers made the cut.

(2) This week’s Math Trek discusses the inherent statistical noisiness of individual performance in baseball:

“In fact, according to a new analysis by Lawrence Brown of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, predicting that a player’s batting average will be the same in the second half of the season as the first half is about the worst plausible method out there.”

Fair point, but I think it’s a bit misleading to call baseball a noisy sport, since it’s a mere pin-drop compared to the deafening statistical roar in team sports like football, where the variables are so hard to isolate and control that nobody seems to bother much. (Well, except for these guys, from the looks of it.)

In any event, though you don’t need to be an Ivy League professor to realize that two weeks’ worth of baseball is a minuscule sample size, this story was still a soothing balm as I contemplate the early struggles of several of my very high fantasy picks: Jose Reyes, Russell Martin, and Hunter Pence in particular. C’mon guys, TeamGuido needs you!

One non-violated pattern involving this story: my continuing professional crush on Julie Rehmeyer.

(3) I don’t pay much attention to elements with atomic numbers higher than about 98, but apparently element 114 is giving some physical chemists a little trouble. If their results are correct, ununquadium seems to violate over 100 years of unflappable electro-numeric periodicity. (Man, there’s no way that’s the right term, but I like the sound of it.)

Why? Well, “nuclei with more protons attract electrons more strongly. Those electrons orbit faster, and according to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, time for them stretches out. As a result, some of the electrons’ orbits are tighter than in lighter elements, affecting that element’s chemistry.”

There seems to be some debate about whether such relativistic effects, which have been observed before, should be great enough to significantly alter the-element-that-would-be-Atlantisium‘s chemistry. This work is worth keeping an eye on, to the extent that any artificial material with a half-life on the order of seconds is worth knowing anything about. (Full disclosure: I’m being a little flippant here, but the prospect of 114-298 being stable is pretty exciting, the difficulties of cramming nine more neutrons into 114-289 notwithstanding.)

Well, unlike the subjects of these stories, I don’t tend to violate a lot of patterns. Case in point: I just burned another Saturday morning doing armchair science writing despite boatloads of real work ahead of me (and, also as usual, I didn’t get past the Saturday morning Science New digest in order to get to all the other interesting stuff I’d saved up all week). Ah well. Happy Saturday, everyone.

P.S., I’ve been getting a lot of nice feedback about this blog lately. Thanks very much for reading, everyone! I hope the rest of you are enjoying CSC as well, and I hope you’ll all consider leaving comments, dropping me some email, blogging about interesting posts you find here, etc. I’d love to make this space more of a conversation; if there are ways you think I can better facilitate that goal, please let me know.

Strange Indeed

Kyle

One of the very, very few reasons I regret not having a car is that getting to Madison’s east or west sides for movies hardly seems worth the investment in bus-riding time (we miss you University Square, you of the $4.75 student admission and reasonably priced beer).

This week I’m doubly bummed due to this weird convergence:

“If you are in the mood for a movie about the rejuvenation of an aging, widowed college professor — and don’t pretend you aren’t — then this is a weekend of rare and unexpected abundance. By some miracle of film industry serendipity, two such movies are opening today in limited release. Even more bizarre: each is pretty good.”

Of course, The Visitor isn’t even playing here, and Smart People is at the slightly-easier-to-get-to-(though-astronomically-priced) Sundance Cinemas, so I may very well get a chance to catch it. I miss seeing movies easily, is the general point here. Would someone please open another student-oriented theater downtown?

Thanks, A.O.: Smart People, The Visitor

News Wire: (Mostly) Underwater Edition

Kyle

Three of the four science stories that caught my eye this morning take place under water:

“Case study: Making waves with new power generation technology” (Financial Times)
“What’s Making That Awful Racket? Surprisingly, It May Be Fish” (New York Times)
“Growing Pains for a Deep-See Home Built of Subway Cars” (New York Times)

Not content with those choices? The last story involves the Monty Hall problem applied to psychology experiment:

“And Behind Door No. 1, a Fatal Flaw” (New York Times)

The answer to the MHP is pretty neat, a great example of the kind of reasoning you can do when you’re willing to consider the counterintuitive.

(Full disclosure: the MHP, along with the Birthday problem and the Shake of the Day problem, have all been covered by what we might as well call the Society for Spontaneously Arguing About Math in Taverns. I originally got it wrong.)

Final One

Kyle

Well, the unscientific verdict (“unscientific” because saying anything based on one tournament or especially one game is foolishness) is in: if you’re looking to win some money or whatever, you can do a lot worse than to start from the pure LRMC rankings and go from there to make your bracket picks, at least given this year’s result.

Unfortunately, by the end of the tourney I was rooting against my brackets, partly because I have a friend from Memphis, and partly because I thought maybe we’d stumbled across a Moneyball-style inefficiency (full disclosure: I also have to admit that watching a fast, “exciting” team that you actually kinda like is pretty sweet, my love for Bo Ryan’s teams notwithstanding). Just like speed is overpriced in baseball, at least some of this year’s tourney suggests that maybe free throw shooting is “overpriced”–great if you can get it, but you can win without it if you’re good enough in other areas. That’s a rhetorically unsatisfying conclusion to reach, though, given tonight’s result.

By the way, despite the great race in the West and all the Celtics intrigue, I’d like to put in a request to just cut the NBA season off right here so we can put basketball behind us and get on with the real business of watching baseball. Who’s with me?

I Didn’t Know We Could Do That

Kyle

Two fascinating stories off the morning science wire today:

Paper planes tested for launch into space –What have aerospace engineers got to lose? Everything but a single sheet of spray-coated sugar cane paper, apparently. I mentioned this project a while back, and I just can’t get enough of it. I hope it works.

10 impossibilities conquered by science — I like all the decisions except the one to begin the title with a numeral. “Harnessing nuclear power”comes in at number five.

Funny story about number three (heavier-than-air flight): Apparently whenever one of my professors sits next to someone on an airplane who’s complaining about a delay due to technical problems (you know, the whole “in this day and age” bit), he just looks at the person and says “Well, I’m a professor of engineering physics, and I’m amazed they work at all. Let me tell you about what can go wrong…” I guess that usually shuts the person up.

I’m gone this weekend at a church retreat at Turkey Run State Park in Indiana. Beautiful place, should be a nice weekend.

…What To Leave Out

Kyle

I got a hat tip from the Freakonomics blog today in reference to a recent post about the Wikipedia article for “real life.” The post accepts the premise that fantasy and reality are complements rather than substitutes (a position Contraria Sunt Complementa naturally supports), and it zeros in on Robin Hanson’s pro-complement point that “fiction can suppress irrelevant detail and emphasize important essences, like a math model” (hyperlink added).

Of course, such suppression is a big part of the game for us researchers who write simulation software. In fact, I’d argue that it’s the game. Not because implementation is trivial (it’s not), but because fantasy has to start from scratch, so to speak; without “suppress[ing] irrelevent detail,” even the fastest model builder never has a chance to catch up. There’s just to much detail to try to capture.

I talk a little bit each week here at CSC about editorial judgment, a subject that–despite going-on six years of engineering training–I have much more real-life experience with than its engineering analog. I’ll make an effort to rectify my recent lack of engineering-judgment coverage in the coming weeks, especially as I try to summon some myself in order to finish up my work on GENIUS by the end of the summer.

I admit to occasionally succumbing to the need for a motivational Post-It note above my workstation. “Simplify, simplify” wouldn’t be a bad motto in light of the addition-by-subtraction nature of modeling. But I’m going to go with the titular reference from the Douglas Adams piece that–almost four years ago now–first got me thinking about the importance of teaching engineers how to decide what to leave out:

“What have we got to lose?”

Long Time No Hear, Here

Kyle 1 Comment

Just a quick announcement: Natalia Zukerman is finally coming back to Madison! She’ll be playing at Cafe Montmartre (it’s still gonna be there, right?) on April 23, according to her mailing list. Time, cost, and opening act are all TBA.

Zukerman is one of my favorite artists, despite my general lack of interest in acoustic singer/songwriters. Why? Well, because she’s a great instrumentalist (her dad is Pinchas Zukerman, not that I’d guess he taught her much about slide guitar); her songs are clever, sophisticated, and harmonically interesting; and her genre-mashing choices are right in my sweet spot.

Zukerman is a terrific live performer (funny, warm, great voice), and she recorded her new album at Willie Porter‘s studio (my friend Patrick and I discovered her when she opened for him a while back), so I’m especially pumped about its release as well. Let me know if you’re interested in coming with me.

The Hacker Within VIII

Kyle

Today’s subject: Mozilla Thunderbird Templates

Greg V. Wilson of the University of Toronto has a great talk on nanoHUB called “Software Carpentry: Essential Software Skills for Research Scientists.” In it, he makes the claim that any task that you need to perform more than once is worth automating.

My computing life has improved in direct proportion to my willingness to heed his advice.

A recent example: I’m the chair of the UW-Madison College of Engineering’s New Educators’ Orientation, a series of required workshops for first-time COE TAs. Being the chair is not at all glamorous; it mostly means sending out lots of emails to recruit volunteers to help out. And if they’re not customized, no one replies.

Using Mozilla Thunderbird or a similar email program obviously makes this task quite a bit easier–my de facto algorithm last semester required one New Message and three Copy-Pastes, into three different boxes. This semester, I’ve automated out a few steps to get it down to one New Message (well, an equivalent) and one Copy-Paste with Thunderbird Templates. I know it doesn’t sound like much of an improvement, but this process offers a significant time-savings, is much less error prone, and can keep you more organized.

How do you use Templates? Easy. First, create a new message, with subject line and easy-to-find placeholders in the message. Then click File > Save As > Template. A folder called “Templates” will appear in your folder window. Click the folder, and then right-click on the Template you want to use and select Edit As New… (or, better yet, use Ctrl+E with the Template selected).

A copy of that Template will then pop up, all ready for you to replace the placeholders and enter a recipient email. Not for nothing, you’ll also never have to dig through your Old Sent Mail to find the message you need to resend.

I wish I’d looked into this sooner. Thanks to Heinz Tschabitscher and his About.com entry for being there when I did (though note that, at least with Thunderbird/Ice Dove version 1.5.0.14pre, I couldn’t double-click on the Template to Edit As New as he suggested).

Back To Macro-Blogging

Kyle

Greetings! Sorry for my absence this week; I had a big midterm on Friday, and since I’ve apparently lost my exam-taking mojo, I didn’t want to risk under-studying.

I haven’t been entirely absent from the blogosphere, though. You may have noticed that I’ve begun micro-blogging with Twitter (kmoliver). As with most of my forays into new technological territory, I was motivated by my colleague and Web Ink expert David (dmscott) and my advisor, Paul (gonuke). It is, after all, handy to know what those two are up to. Once I got going, though, I realized that Twitter isn’t just like a webified instant messenger but rather an improvement. Am I the only one who was in the AIM craze mostly for the away messages anyway? There’s a real opportunity for creativity and reflection in trying to sum up large swathes of your day in 140 characters. In any event, feel free to follow along if you’re interested, either by joining up and becoming a “follower” or via the new widget at right in CSC proper. (All kinds of connotations in that word choice, isn’t there? “How many followers do you have?”)

I’ve got a couple of Hacker Within- and Sunday Judgment-related Twitter thoughts to share tomorrow. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here are a few of the stories I’d have shared with you this week had I been macro-blogging. As always, you can find them as I add them in my del.icio.us links under ToBlog, which tag has turned into the FIFO data structure that organizes my news-blogging agenda.

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The Fortune Cookie Chronicles blog and open-source Chinese restaurants — One of David’s recent posts over at Web Ink Now. I agree that the Windows:Linux::McDonald’s:Chinese Restaurants was interesting. I stopped into a McDonald’s on the road over spring break and was delighted to realize that it had been so long since I’d been in one that I couldn’t remember what I used to order. I wish I could say the same about using Windows, but at least Cygwin provides a nice compromise. It’s kinda like having a tasty Chinese food cart located inside your neighborhood McDonald’s for when you absolutely have to go inside one to use the bathroom or view a complexly formatted Word document. By the way, I have it on good authority that Chinese restaurants outnumber McDonald’ses in Opelousas, Louisiana three-to-one. That’s not just a ratio; it’s the actual count. (Godspeed, Rachel.)

Regarding David’s most recent post, I’d just like to add a loud amen to his point about the annoyingness of blogger pitches from PR firms. Even I’m getting them (thanks, no doubt, to David’s kind mention in the new e-book, which has also gotten me one legitimate job offer, though I didn’t take it). The annoying thing is, if these people looked at my blog for two seconds, they’d realize I have very little expertise in the field from which they’re offering to send me review copies of new books and that I worked with David because I’m a freelance editor and not because I know anything about marketing.

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Are We Ready To Track Carbon Footprints? — Mentions a really interesting new book called Nudge. Next time someone preaches to you about how this mysterious, presumably benevolent force we call “the market” is going to save us from self-destruction, you might want to make the point Thaler makes here: “Getting the prices right will not create the right behavior if people do not associate their behavior with the relevant costs…When I turn the thermostat down on my A-C, I only vaguely know how much that costs me. If the thermostat were programmed to tell you immediately how much you are spending, the effect would be much more powerful.”

The market’s only as smart as its actors’ access to information allows them to be.

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5 Cooks, $40, 5 Dishes, 3 Desserts — Worth a read for the first couple of paragraphs alone. And also for the picture of Eric Ripert, who I’ve been intrigued by ever since I read the chapter about him in Kitchen Confidential. He’s kinda goofy looking.

This seems to be a trendy subject right now; I heard a pretty similar story on NPR last weekend.

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A Political Comeback: Supply-Side Economics — Posted here solely as an excuse to also post this:

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An Outsider at the Center of a Musical Universe — Really beautiful article. I think Pareles gets Paul Simon exactly right here. I was afraid for a second that he was veering toward the usual colonialist arguments, but, on the contrary, he says,

“Those arguments can seem quaint now that the world’s music cruises the Internet and countless songs are built by cut-and-paste. The decades proved Mr. Simon’s instincts were right. Just as he had used English folk songs, doo-wop and gospel, he used African music — and later the Brazilian music that fueled “The Rhythm of the Saints” in 1990 — but by no means used it up. The sounds he drew on were far more durable than that. And his African collaborators, like Ladysmith Black Mambazo, found new, eager listeners for their own material worldwide.”

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With Assist From Greed, Money Makes the Man — Another reason to love NYT film reviewer Manohla Dargis: her fearless use of parentheses for efficient asides. It’s the same thing David Foster Wallace does with footnotes, but the Dargis approach is a little more, well, approachable to the average person, I think. Either way, I’ve long contended that there’s an intense intellectual honestly (not to mention an addictive playfulness) in not backing down from making important though tangential connections solely to preserve prose fluidity. You just have to work harder to make such text readable. The fun of writers like DFW, Douglas Adams, Chuck Klosterman, and Dargis is proof that it’s worth it.

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Speaking of connections, my friend Evie posted a link to this hilarious video the other day. I’ll leave you with it:

Amusing Wikipedia Articles: “Real life”

Kyle 1 Comment

I love it when Wikipedia editors thoroughly cross-reference their entries. Although such dutifulness can be a problem, it also helps you find pages you’d never have guessed existed. As a case in point, when reading today about magic cookies (I was passed there by reference), I came across the following sentence, complete with what I thought was a surprising link:

“A magic cookie is analogous to, for example, the token supplied at a coat check (cloakroom) counter in real life.”

Of course, there are all kinds of albums, books, etc. of that name, but the entry you’re taken to is actually about, you know, “life or consensus reality outside of an environment that is generally seen as fiction or fantasy.”

I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who thought of Russell’s Paradox when contemplating the seemingly transfinite size of the set of all Wikipedia articles. Of course, its actual cardinality (right now) is a paltry 2,301,678, at least according to this.

Anybody have favorite humorous articles? Leave a comment.