Monthly Archives: February 2012

A Modest Proposal

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Eternal Copyright: a modest proposal

[T]o make it entirely fair, Eternal Copyright should be retroactively applied so that current generations may benefit from their ancestors’ works rather than allowing strangers to rip your inheritance off. Indeed, by what right do Disney and the BBC get to adapt Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and Sherlock without paying the descendants of Lewis Carroll, the Brothers Grimm, and Arthur Conan Doyle?
Of course, there will be some odd effects. For example, the entire Jewish race will do rather well from their eternal copyright in much of the Bible, and Shakespeare’s next of kin will receive quite the windfall from the royalties in the thousands of performances and adaptations of his plays – money well earned, I think we can all agree.

You Will Not Win This Bid

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How Much Would it Cost to build the Death Star?

We began by looking at how big the Death Star is. The first one is reported to be 140km in diameter and it sure looks like it’s made of steel. But how much steel? We decided to model the Death Star as having a similar density in steel as a modern warship. After all, they’re both essentially floating weapons platforms so that seems reasonable.

What? A battleship has to support its own weight and float in the water. That puts an upper an lower bound on its average density. A Death Star is assembled in space. The only thing it has to support itself against is gravitational collapse, and you have sci-fi technologies like tractor beams and force fields and hyperspace travel.

[A]t today’s rate of steel production (1.3 billion tonnes annually), it would take 833,315 years to produce enough steel to begin work. So once someone notices what you’re up to, you have to fend them off for 800 millennia before you have a chance to fight back.

This is the Galactic Republic/Empire, not one planet! I don’t know if there’s a definitive source, but indications are that there are more than a million member worlds with many times that number of colonies.

Oh, and the cost of the steel alone? At 2012 prices, about $852,000,000,000,000,000. Or roughly 13,000 times the world’s GDP

But, as we see, less steel and many, many planets from which to draw resources.

What is This 'Science' of Which You Speak?

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Trials and errors: Why science is failing us

This assumption — that understanding a system’s constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system — is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or even to biology. It defines modern science. In general, we believe that the so-called problem of causation can be cured by more information. Scientists refer to this process as reductionism. By breaking down a process, we can see how everything fits together; the complex mystery is distilled into a list of ingredients.

There’s quite a bit that bothers me about this article. There are elements of truth to some of the critique, but the extrapolation doesn’t work. There’s no denying that reductionism is present and prevalent in science, but science is also pragmatic. You use the approach that works, up to the point that it doesn’t work. Scientists are aware of nonlinear phenomena, of chaos, of complexity in systems with multiple variables and also that correlation and causation aren’t the same thing — you may still have to look for an underlying cause.

The example of the red and blue ball film seems to me to be an example of people applying basic model — we expect things to be causal. We notice deviations from natural motion in animations, and it bother us a bit. We interpret data in the context of the science we know. The discovery here is that the animations are not reflecting reality. You recognize that (or not) and proceed. So it seems to me that this was more of a psychological/cognition test than a critique of science.

Another issue is using medical research as a proxy for all of science; there’s a lot of medical advice that seems to be based on conventional wisdom — a physician finds something that works, and that becomes a treatment, but while there’s plenty of science in medicine, it is not the best example of science in action.

The study concluded that, in most cases, “the discovery of a bulge or protrusion on an MRI scan in a patient with low back pain may frequently be coincidental”.

This is not the way things are supposed to work. We assume that more information will make it easier to find the cause, that seeing the soft tissue of the back will reveal the source of the pain, or at least some useful correlations.

My strong objection here is that this is exactly the way science is supposed to work. You have some data and you formulate a hypothesis and you check it. You have more information, but that new information is finding out that you were wrong. This doesn’t invalidate the method — it vindicates it!

The real story here is that complex science is hard to do. Research is full of false leads and blind alleys (and metaphors for such things) and subtle interactions. There are limitations in looking for correlations, but we are limited to piecing together what we are able to observe in finding out the underlying rules of nature. That’s science. As we learn more, it’s getting harder to push the boundaries. But if it’s failing us, what’s the alternative?

Is There a Sand Shortage?

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Time is running out – literally, says scientist

[I]f time gradually slows “but we naively kept using our equations to derive the changes of the expansion with respect of ‘a standard flow of time’, then the simple models that we have constructed in our paper show that an “effective accelerated rate of the expansion” takes place.”
While the change would be infinitesimally slow from an ordinary human perspective, from the grand perspective of cosmology – in which scientists study ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago – this temporal slowing could be easily measured.

Interesting hypothesis. Though the article mentions this as a “radical suggestion” the headline is much more certain, which has become a peeve of mine. Conjecture is one of the things that scientists do. We play a lot of “what if” games, and most of this gets shot down when we realize a conflict exists with existing observations, or someone points them out when you compare notes with a colleague. This happens a lot in the lab when faced with a novel set of data — what was going on here? Is this a problem with the equipment or some new effect? The former is much, much more likely than the latter, but until you run tests and replicate the results reliably, you are faced with a mystery, and chasing the solution is both frustrating and somewhat intoxicating. (The scariest scenario is when the anomalous signal just disappears and you can’t replicate it). But you can also do it with the models you build. What happens if a particular term in an equation is or isn’t small, when the opposite usually holds? What if there is some additional effect? You play with the equations and see where it goes.

If you don’t get tripped up by these “slain by an ugly fact” obstacles, you can formulate a model that could possibly be tested. Eventually, you present it for others so that they, too can comment on and think about it. Many of these ideas never pan out, at each stage of this evolution and distillation. These authors have an idea that has gotten to this point. It doesn’t appear it has yet been rigorously tested to see of it holds up — one needs to know what specific predictions it makes that distinguish it from the current models. It’s just not obviously wrong after having had some level of scrutiny.

I think that the headline editors and journalists do a disservice when they attach much more certainty to (in this case) as-yet untested ideas that show up in the journals, or any single peculiar experimental result that pops up.

Better Pasta

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Better Pasta

These days, the cooking times on most boxes of dried pasta are in the ballpark, but there are exceptions. Boxed macaroni and cheese and other “children’s” pasta products routinely have cooking times that should be cut in half. But even in the best case, cooking times are just estimates. The actual cooking time will depend on the temperature and humidity of your kitchen, the mass and thermal conductivity of your cookware, the power of your cooktop, and on and on.