Monthly Archives: January 2015

Inmates Running the Asylum

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Yup, a Climate Change Denier Will Oversee NASA. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

This is very worrisome. NASA is one of the key scientific agencies studying global warming and climate change. A good fraction of NASA’s annual budget goes to Earth-observing satellites critical in looking at various factors of climate change (like the recently launched OCO-2, which monitors CO2).

This is as close to the analogy of putting the fox in charge of the hen house that there is. It would be as ludicrous as putting the rabidly anti-science Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) in charge of the committee that oversees the Environmental Protection Agency.

Oh, wait.

Dogpile on Tyson!

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An Open Letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson

I mean, what the hell is that? I’ve been staring at this for a while, and really can’t find an angle from which it doesn’t look insulting to a whole bunch of people who don’t deserve your scorn. Are you trying to say that bad teachers are so common that every good student has had to work around them? That only bad teachers give A’s? That no student is so good that a good teacher would give them all A’s?

My most charitable interpretation is that a poor teacher is an obstacle — perhaps a student would not be as motivated, the student might have the conflict of misinformation from the teacher vs. knowledge gained elsewhere, or things like that, which could trip him/her up. A good teacher might not have so much heavy lifting to do with a talented student. But I’m working here — even considering the character limit of twitter, this seems like a dig at teachers.

As long as I’m piling on, Tyson hit another sour note recently, IMO. There’s also the one about unhackable systems, which is the sort of thing that happens to everyone from time to time, I guess: you aren’t familiar with the gory details, so you assume the hidden part is also the trivial part. It’s almost like saying “let’s build a perpetual motion machine to make some energy” (though I am unsure if they are impossible at the same level — does “unhackable” run into some fundamental problem, or is it just so hard to do that it’s transactionally impossible? I don’t know)

The larger point is that Tyson has a huge audience, and with great power comes great responsibility, as the saying goes. Most of the stuff he does is very good, but the mistakes have a large impact as well.

Should Have Seen it Coming a Mile Away

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Here’s a question for you

Did any futurologists from last century predict online harassment? All I remember is VR, full-body haptic interfaces, video-telephones that would translate as you talked

I think with some future predictions, like flying cars, nobody would be surprised that some drivers would still be dicks, if we ever got flying cars. But as to the point that there are few/no predictions that easier communication would lead to online behavior like we see, I think there are a couple of reasons.

One is that it would be too dark to write about, unless the point of the article/story was a dystopian future, and then it would be filed under that heading. Another is that if the authors were ones who weren’t already on the receiving end of such behavior, they simply wouldn’t project it to the future. I’m guessing that the people who are least surprised by people being (pardon my use of the vernacular) assholes online are the people who tend to already experience it regularly in real life. The internet just made it easier to behave that way, and to find a community of like-minded individuals to insulate one’s self from social feedback.

On a tangent to this, it reminded me of an incident from the days of my second post-doc (a lower-paid version of my current job). We were talking about VR, and fresh in my mind was an incident from my first post-doc at TRIUMF. A colleague needed to do some work in a high-radiation environment, so it had to happen in a short amount of time, lest he exceed the allowable exposure limit. A proper mock-up for practice didn’t exist, but that’s exactly the kind of thing VR would be great at doing. Practice makes perfect, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. That, and other dangerous situations, where you could train for many contingencies. You could use VR for all sorts of training that can’t be done for real, or could do it cheaper than a mechanical system. I posited that such simulation would be an important use for VR.

At that point the others in the conversation smirked a little, and said, “Tom, face it. The primary use of VR will end up being porn.” The (im)moral of the story: the basest behavior will prevail.

Know When to Fold Them

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Don’t bet on the failure of relativity

[T]his isn’t a modest proposal at all, but (to use the unkind phrasing usually attributed to unkind physicist Wolfgang Pauli) it isn’t even wrong. His modification to the laws of physics are too large, with implications he avoids by not dealing with them. Instead, he focuses on a few small aspects of relativity: the loss of simultaneity between moving frames of reference and the time-dilation effect measured by two observers moving rapidly with respect to each other.