Simple Country Physicist

There is an interesting article in the Register feed this morning.[Link] Seems this young chap was sent to Barrow in Furrow by his employers, a Chocolate retailer, to open a shop in the town of about 70K.[Link] The young man, aged 20, was evidently rather upset when he had to reside in a motel and when the shop he was opening was burgled by the locals. He responded by blogging his dislike for the general situation.

Based on the reportage, the fellow seems to have few positive features. He is obscene, dipsomaniacal, and has little self-discipline, at least based on his blog. One would like to suspect he has some good traits given he was selected to open a new branch store at such a youthful age. Perhaps it is even harder to find dependable people in Britain than it is in the United States?

As much as we support the right of bloggers to write in a reasonably open and direct manner, gratuitous profanity and licentious behavior is never acceptable. Since we also support the continuance of the species, such unintelligent behavior as displayed here deserves censure. Given such, perhaps the young fellow can get a job driving a truck while talking on a cellular phone, an activity he would seem qualified for.

On a more pleasant note, it seems that mathematics mafia has indeed decided that Grigory Perelman has solved Poincaré’s Conjecture:[Link]

“Every simply connected compact 3-manifold (without boundary) is homeomorphic to a 3-sphere.”[Link]

In terms more appropriate for those of us who are not mathematicians, but appreciate the value of maths as tools,

“The Poincare Conjecture says that a three-dimensional sphere is the only enclosed three-dimensional space with no holes.”[Link]

This of course, leaves us with the interesting fact that from a topological standpoint, there are no differences among the Euclidean solids. This is not the case in the world of biology, as proven by the joyful experience of bowel movements.

In addition to being a genius, Perelman is also noted for his integrity.

Also of mathematical joy, if not commercial, is the news that

“PC sales growth in the U.S. sputtered to a halt in the third quarter of 2006, showing zero increase compared to last year”[Link]

In terms more appropriate for those of us who are not capitalist economists, but appreciate the value of maths as tools, this means that the second time derivative of the number of PCs in the United States is (approximately) zero. Alternately, the first time derivative of the number of PCs in the United States is (approximately) a constant.

If the diffusion of PCs in the United States is basically logistic with an exponential decay (for old machines wearing out or becoming unfashionable and unacceptable,) then the number of PCs should (approximately) be described by the differential equation,

Since the derivative is constant, it is then trivial to determine the Number of PCs in the United States. (OK, Virginia, it takes a bit of wit to figure out which root is the correct one.)Among other effects, this should move the PC industry to look even more like the automobile industry.

It has long been recognized that many of the prescriptions in the Bible (whichever version you may or may not use) are biological in operation. For example, many of the dietary admonitions have to do with avoiding parasites (many unique to the Middle East) or diet related degenerative diseases. Others have direct genetic connections.

Now the phrase

“I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.” (Acts 20:35 KJV – Of course!)[Link]

has been demonstrated by researchers at The National Institute of Health to also be basic biology.[Link] Evidently intense gratification from giving is hard wired into homo sapiens. So does this contribute to the idea that Judaeo-Christianity has a inherent hedonistic component? Maybe the next thing will be unhereticizing Pelagius?[Link]So to make yourself feel better, by neural resonance, and if you;re so inclined, inject a bit of religious flavor to this capitalistically appropriated holiday (and I’m gonna stop with the appropriations trail here!) there is an interesting list of e-gifts in the Chicago Tribune.[Link] These include an iPod accessory to steam milk for cappuccino, blogging clothes made of fleece (so much for global warming – but I’ll stick to cotton,) real (glass) windows from Megahard (diversification, you know – we expect Bob Villa to start a new series named “This Old PC” in the new year,) and a fake WiFi receiver stick that is actually a special memory stick with zillions of pages stored so you can have “more” money to spend on the cappuccino (and has a price greater than a real WiFi stick?)

As for me, I’m gonna stick to giving the three indispensable fluids of life: Whisky, Coffee, and Fountain Pen Ink. And yes, all three have a positive (maybe) biological impact on both giver and receiver.

Astronomers have a special thing about Christ Mass. Something to do with a control of latency that has whelming implications for the whole free will – predetermination thing.  This season, there are a couple of interesting sites on pictures of stars. The biggie is Hubble oriented [Link] offering a neat picture of LH 95 in the Greater Magellanic Cloud:

I recommend you go to the Hubble site [Link] and down load a reasonably high resolution file. Makes a great wall paper or background.

The other is the home site of Russell Croman [Link] which permits personal use. While not directly scientific, they are inspiring.

Finally, do you have problems expressing you appreciation for those folks who drive fast and weave between lanes, never using their blinkers, or who cannot drive without the assistance of a cellular phone? Are you deterred from giving them presents by knowing only their tag numbers, or the threat of prison time? Now there is a legal way for you to share your friendship of the road with these people. This web site [Link] lets you share, probably indirectly, with these folks what you think of their driving proclivities, and even wish them well to the rest of humanity. Truly a site in the best spirit of the season!

I received an e-mail the morning announcing the inauguration of PLOSone (Public Library of Science).[Link] This site is a portal to open access, Creative Commons licensing/copyright, peer reviewed journals.  It is potentially the most impulsive interaction in science and technical research administrivia in decades, if not centuries.

What makes this so disruptive of the status quo? To see this we have to go back to the Public Access to Science Act [Link] that reestablished that  publication of research supported to whatever degree by Yankee government funds is outside copyright. This is not new but it does have an impact, the greater impact however is that this research has to be “freely available to, every person in the United States.”

Almost all research publication occurs in journals, conference proceedings, and/or reports. In common instance, except for some few of these published by agencies of the Yankee Government,  access to this publication information requires payment of a fee. Journals must either be subscribed to, conference proceedings must be purchased, and reports are usually only available, after initial distribution, for a reprint fee, when they are available at all. In addition, since much of this publication is performed by commercial organizations, a transfer of copyright is a prerequisite for publication.

Now, there is law changing this, both in terms of the copyright restrictions, and the fee for access. And, significantly, the first journals that provide free access. And apparently, a rare instance of the Yankee government taking action on behalf of the citizenry rather than the fake citizenry – the corporate interests, although on the scale of the GDP, the amounts of money are trifling.

This presents a quandary to both publishers and researchers. The publisher has a choice between refusing to accept any publications with any Yankee government support and continuing to charge for the publication, or accepting the publications and giving open access. This quandary is fairly fundamental because while the researchers usually have to pay some fees for publication, the bulk of the cash flow is made by selling subscriptions.

A minimal survey of Yankee government agencies indicates that policies are fairly clear – except when the research is under some national security restriction it has to be published in an open access, peer reviewed form that is accessible to all U. S. citizens for an indefinite period. In effect, the message is that unless a regular professional journal agrees up front to eternal open access, the researcher may not publish in the journal. Given an annual research budget of ~ $4.5E+10, a conservative estimate is that half of all research performed in the United States has some Yankee government support.

Now, given that both professional societies like the American Physical Society and commercial publishing houses like John Wiley publish journals and reap big cash flow from them, this is a serious matter. I personally know of several professional societies whose major source of cash is journal publication, and a couple of commercial publishing houses whose scientific and technical divisions have a similar situation. Bottom line, the economics of these organizations is going to change.

That change will not be immediate. Right now the only PLOS journals available are medical and biological, which is the area that prompted the legislation – Joe Consumer doesn’t care very much about Astrophysics or Metallurgy but he does his life expectancy or fat reduction, Nonetheless, the journals in in other disciplines will come as it becomes easier and cheaper for researchers to comply with the law via this route than some tortuous amended means of traditional journals.

If we now add in that most libraries in the United States are financially strapped, in large part due to continuing price increases over the last twenty years or so by commercial publishers. Conservatively, about half of this increase arises from the cost of the paper side of the business – raw materials, printing, binding, and shipment. A regular ritual at most libraries is determination of which book purchases will not be made and which journal subscriptions will be canceled. As more and more research is published in this open-access form, the content of for-pay journals will decrease, placing them in the bind of being both force to reduce cost by reduced content, and reduced interest level by reduced content. This won’t make the libraries healthy but it will help.

The interesting question revolves around peer reviewing. There is a push here to publish, to make the research accessible to the public, but there is a speed bump of the research having to satisfy the reviewers and editor of the journal. A gaping question to be answered is what happens to those research papers that must be published but are are not accepted by the journal. Will the Yankee government force the journals to lower their standards or will they let the mediocre publications fall through a crack?

In the wake of the shul bus crash in Huntsville recently, the Alibam governor has appointed a task force to make recommendation on whether seat belts should be required on state buses.[Link] The problem that leaps immediately to hand is:
“There are many different opinions on the issue, but the man’s whose opinion may end up mattering the most is..”

Contrary to the reportage and possibly even the statement of government, this is too serious a matter to be left to opinion, especially political. This is a place for some reasonably straightforward analysis, not the guesswork of the appointees of a politician.

It should be a very simple matter to arrive at a categorized distribution of shul bus accidents. Then each category of accident can be simulated to determine whether damage to the students will be less with or without t belts. Given enough resources, the task force can even widen this effort to investigate other risk factors beyond this knee jerk singularity. Having then a measure or estimate of with/versus without seat belts, and a probability of occurrence of category of mishap, an expected damage with and without seat belts can be made and a quantitative, non-opinionated determination made.

And then the final decision can be made in the usual political manner – trading off votes versus money.

The National Public Radio feed contains an article in the economic problems associated with Christmas Eve being on Sunday this year.[Link] (Interestingly, National Public Radio is neither national nor public in the sense that it is no longer supported by the national government and it carries advertising which hardly seems public unless the term refers to access.)

There seems to be both a bit of contradiction and a bit of confusion here. Has South Carolina seceded from the Union again? Does separation of Church and State not apply in South Carolina? Why are South Carolina governments preventing merchants from operating their businesses on Sunday?

One is tempted to consider all of this a hold over from South Carolina’s days as a British colony. In those days, the British still practiced strict state control of religion, requiring everyone, regardless of belief, to attend Church of England services on Sunday. Seems to me that this is one of the reasons folks came to this ground, one of the reasons we invited the British to leave our ground, and one of the reasons we are engaged in fighting the Global War on Terrorism to insure that our freedom from involuntary religious coercion is preserved. Since these Sunday restrictions apply in other parts of the United States, not just the original colonies, such a hold over cannot be the reason. Could it be that the vaunted claim of separation is nothing more than a Yankee government prevarication?

It seems to me that we also have a Yankee government law against discriminating against a person based on “race”, “gender”, or “creed”. Since the South Carolina (and other) government(s) are getting away with this, can we take creed to only apply to theists who observe Sabbath on Sunday? If that’s the case, then why did the Yankee government keep bugging me about my work force not having enough of certain “minorities” who happen to observe Sabbath on other days of the week? And why did they impose a national rather than a regional or local demographic on this?

The question then remains of why government must be coercive in regards to religion. A subquestion is not just why, but what is their objective? It is tempting to speculate that this is a means of incentivizing merchants to ignore the religious practices of non-Sunday Sabbath theists. Given government’s long history of befuddled social engineering, it seems more likely that this is simple protectionism, a tariff of sorts levied against merchants to protect organized religion.  Obviously the sale of threat of Hellfire and Damnation in the afterlife cannot be quite as persuasive as the offer of sale of food, clothing, and even real entertainment. Clearly, if it were not for this temporal monopoly granted churches, they would soon fail as commercial enterprises.

But in the interest of American tradition, this monopoly should be applied evenhandedly. Instead of forbidding commerce just on Sunday, the curfew should be extended from sundown on Friday to sundown on Sunday. Perhaps we should even extend the blackout to include any hours when any house of religion is open in the community? And while we’re at it, how about resurrecting the Inquisition, or its Protestant or Jewish equivalent, for those merchants who conspire to avoid such prohibition. Hospitals, Fire and Police departments, and some other so-called service organizations are notorious for their disregard of religious doctrine and convention.

Of course, none of this addresses the core matter of the South Carolina matter. The issue there is whether merchants selling stuff that may be celebratory of the holiday, which is inherently religious, is constructive or destructive of the purpose of the holiday. If the holiday is indeed purely Christian, then either the merchants are providing an activity analogous to those of the churches or in opposition to. In the first case, the law is clearly prejudicial; in the second, the merchants’ activities are seditious, if not treasonous, and should be dealt accordingly. If, as claimed by Yankee government, the holiday is a day of national rest and recuperation, then the activities of  the merchants would seem directly positive and contributory while those of the churches could be seen as obstructionary and negative since they detract from the actions of the merchants.

Isn’t entropy wonderful?

I was watching a television program on one of the pseudo-educational networks this weekend – Discovery/ Nature/ History/ … channels – on the history of various almost contemporary technologies. One comment that stuck in my mind was about the universality of the blinking “12:00″ on video recorders. Then in this morning’s feeds there were some articles that struck a resonance with that stuck comment.

The first article is a guest piece on CNET by the CEO of Phillips Electronics, Paul Zeven.[Link] This article propounds the idea that (a) people buy the latest e-gizmo out of what we might scientifically call “Keep Up With The Joneses” but (b) don’t use them to their intended potential because the e-gizmo is too complicated.

I usually enjoy reading these guest articles because they make me wonder how humanity continues to exist with clueless accountants like these running major corporations – definitely Type 3 organization management. I have also suspected that CNET relishes having these folks write for them, giving them free publicity as it were, since it makes the folks CNET pays to think and write seem SO much more knowledgeable and smarter.

Upon reading the comments about too complicated e-gizmo’s, I thought of the blinking “12:00″. Based on this and some of my “Outside the Haggis” thinking, I would advance that people don’t use all the features on an e-gizmo because only some of the features contribute enough to their lives to make it worth the effort to learn how to use them.

Case in point, the video recorder – if all you want to do is start the recorder two hours from now and have it stop four hours from now, then you don;t have to have a fixed reference – at least if you have enough intelligence to tell time anyway. Also, if all you use the video recorder for was to play other folks’ tapes – I won’t comment on content – then again, that fixed reference is irrelevant.

Case in point, e-watch – I have a very useful e-watch, a digital in fact, that shows 24 hour base time in LARGE letters that I can read without my glasses, and has a light and shows day of week and day of month. It does other things but those are what I need, not the stopwatch or other embellishment. Nonetheless, it is controlled by different pressings of three buttons that are different from any other watch I have ever had. So when I have to have a new battery put in, or the Yankee government coercively inflicts/deflicts Daylight Savings Time on us, I go to my manual file, dig out the manual for this watch, and adjust it accordingly to correspond to reality. I would prefer a digital atomic watch but no one makes one with big numbers that SCP can read without his glasses,…

Case in point, programmable calculator – I can recall when first HP, then other calculator manufacturers added programming to their calculators. Each calculator used a different programming technique and after the novelty of learning the first – an HP-55? – I didn’t bother for the simple reason that it wasn’t worth the effort. I could go to my desktop, starting in 1975 with an HP 9830 and then an HP 9845, and then an IBM PC, …. and program what I needed to with a STANDARD (or nearly so, given HP) programming language.

Case in point, PDA – the first PDA I had was made my HP (I’ll comment on that in some other blot, thank you.) and it did what I wanted: it worked with a calendar program on my PC that I and my management assistant could work with, I could add appointments away from the office and they would synch, and it made a useful and not too obnoxious noise when I was supposed to pay attention to it. Then the IT folks came in and made me give it up for an improved model that worked well with WINDOWS OUTLOOK, which the UNiverse was standardizing on, … It made sixteen different kinds of noises, all with different meanings (so one for the complexity thing,) but it never worked right with the PC and after a couple of weeks it grew dust in a bottom drawer next to a stack of 3×5 cards I could run through my printer to print out my schedule.

I could go on about this but I think the point has been made. And if it hasn’t, well, in your next incarnation get a brain that works instead of sinuses that drain.

I will however, concede to the lack of communication also being a factor. Otherwise why the proliferation of “Dummy” books?[Link] Apparently, there are people who buy these e-gizmo’s without any idea of what they are supposed to do. I will concede that the manuals that come with the e-gizmo’s are usually nearly unintelligible, almost as if they were written by someone in one language and then translated across three other languages, all from different families, to get the version for the consumer. I found one manual that was originally written in Cantonese, which was translated into Dine’, and thence into English.

Despite this if you have an idea of what the e-gizmo is supposed to do, a reasonably intelligent person can decipher the manual enough to make it work enough. Evidently however, there are people who aren’t this intelligent buying this stuff – probably the same people who have raucous ring tones on the cell phone and can’t drive an automobile without using the cell phone (remember the ’60’s science fiction story “The Ear Friend”?) These are the folks you hope kill themselves before they reproduce and without taking anyone else, not similarly afflicted, with them.

The relevant question here is “can the ‘Dummy’ book be made simple enough for these folks?” The answer is apparently not, based on the competitors, all outstriving each other to be ever simpler.

Case in point, Megahard Office – several years ago I wanted to know how to export a graph from EXCEL (R) to a file. The first advice I got was that you couldn’t but you could make a screen shot of it. Sadly, this reduced the resolution of the graph to ~ 150 dpi and hence in most cases, useless. The next attempt was to to take a 40 hour class on EXCEL at a local IT training vendor. I sat though class for five days, fighting to stay awake at mind numbing detail on obvious key sequences, and asked the question. The answer was to take six more courses to the SUPER LARGE ADVANCED course and maybe my question would get answered then. At a cost of $1E+03 per course, I gave up on this route.

My next stop was the bookstore where I reviewed, over a LONG lunch break, a dozen “Dummy” books (via the Index) and a dozen “Real” computer books and came up dry. Finally I got pointed to an on-line Megahard resource for IT professionals and found out !!!!!!! that you can’t export graphs from EXCEL!!!!! (You have to cut and paste the graph into PowerPoint (R) and export from there!)

Thus my experience with “Dummy” books. Nevermore, as Poe wrote. But evidently they are selling well since now the software manufacturers don;t even bother with manuals.

Son can anyone tell me where there is a “Dummy” book on Turbo Delphi?

One can imagine Sumerian readers disparaging the idea that papyrus sheets and rolls would ever displace clay tablets. Obviously human beings are more comfortable reading little inscribed lumps of clay that fit comfortably in the hand and are easily modified while wet but once fired are “permanent” . Why working with large flimsy sheets that cannot be corrected easily, must be written on with “ink”, which smears easily and irreparably, and is destroyed by firing, is absurd and unnatural.

The New Scientist feed this morning has another one of those articles on “The Paperless Office”, this one bemoaning how the promise has not been realized.[Link] Sadly it lacks any analysis, only a blatant plug for some “efficient” printing preprocessor software which, since it comes from the Pacific Northwest, must be environmentally beneficial.

While such ideas have some utility in large companies that consume large amounts of paper, it seems most likely to be a source of frustration for the workerate while reducing their productivity. I recall hearing a presentation at a conference about ten years ago about the experiences of a large company who implemented the recommendation of a Gartner-like adviser to switch to network printers to save money.

Corporate Gestapo went through seizing all local and desktop printers and installing centralized high speed printers. Luckily the company had implemented some good metric programs a few years before to support a bid for a Baldridge award so they could measure their increased productivity and cost savings. Seems their productivity increased by a negative 25% because of people having to leave their desks, go down the hall, and wait about for their output – when it didn’t get lost in some big job and require a repeat printing. And the costs of operation went up about 15% as they not only had to hire serfs to haul paper and feed the printers, but they found out that when the printers went down, lots of folks couldn’t get work done and there were NO work-arounds to get printing done. Incidentally, the author of the presentation had left the company in disgust to start his own printing solutions company, so perhaps a cum grano would be appropriate – the question is only which one?

The primary reasons we have to print things out are pretty old hat: the low resolution of monitors versus print (150 dpi vs > 600 dpi) and the so-called Gulledge’s Law (named after and by Professor Tom Gulledge of George Mason U) that you need to be able to read off something that you can take to the entropy cellar. Thus, paper, papyrus, or clay tablets work but not monitors or chunky PDAs. Maybe if e-paper ever comes along, and its done right, the impasse will be broken although its not at all clear that the ability to compare two pieces of paper side by side isn’t also crucial.

So long as organizations continue to be more interested in petty efficiency and economy that sabotages their performance, I suspect things like printing will be around for a while, regardless of what the latest Edsel-like gadget is.

Over the weekend one of the troopies of the 666th (Greater Metropolitan Arab) Regiment of Motorized Dragoons brought in a book by Garth Sundem entitled Geek Logik. Not only does Mr. Sundem think imitating Spiro Agnew is clever, but he writes that way as well. The book is a collection of equations, with neither definitions nor references, so as a work of technical merit it is surpassed by used toilet paper. Nonetheless, it is a tad amusing, especially after a few examples of God’s love for mankind – bottled, sadly, thanks to the religious pseudo-fervor of the thieves and blackguards in Montgum.

The book does raise anew the question of what is the difference between a geek and a nerd and following our training sessions on developing campaign plans for defending Arab from politician-terrorists, foreign and domestic, we adjourned to the mess and held discourse on the matter. The result was not so much a difference as a distinction:

• A Geek is someone who can use an equation;
• A Nerd is someone who can derive the equation.

This then led to a further discourse on the qualifying nature of a derivation. The consensus was that the “so what” test for what counted as a valid or qualifying derivation was at least partly subjective. As such, the recommendation was that while geekdom should be self evident, nerddom should be adjudged by a panel of at least three hooded nerds holding either Ph.D. or H.Ph (Hen Peck husband) degrees from accredited institutions of higher education that had not started as either religious shuls or the playthings of robber barons.

A survey of the assembled qualified thusly, all but a few junior Coronets and Ensigns who have yet to matriculate or be elevated by matrimony, was that the minimum derivation acceptable would be that of the equation for the roots of a quadratic equation given the general form of said quadratic equation. In the interest of rigor and fairness to nerddom, SCP invites earnest input of any derivation that would be simpler than this one. Fully expounded and expanded derivation should be provided as either pdf or TeX files to be considered. Acceptable entries passing a subjective “So What” evaluation may be discussed in a blot.