tell me about it

Science marches on...

Funny cause it's true*: How to publish a scientific comment.

As Prof. Trebino points out therein, the scientific review system is broken on several intersecting levels. Not to say that the whole, messy, squalorous pile doesn't still slowly slide down an entropy gradient towards the inevitable Better and Brighter; Nor does this imply that there are still things which are well-known established "facts" and other things which are widelt known not to be such - that we're trapped in some post-modernist goo of mushy personal "truths." Mostly**. But, all that caveat in place, Moms - don't let your kids grow up to be research professors.

I'd like to note that Prof. Trebino is well-respected in the field of ultrafast pulse measurement, and that if this can happen to one of the big dogs, so to speak, imagine what it's like if you're a graduate student or a post-doc? Fun! Fun fun fun! That's what.

It's also worth noting that, as far as I infer, he's talking about ultrafast pulse measurement, which even the non-expert may surmise isn't exactly the most contentious or politicized topic ever. A couple of such topics spring to mind, but they're neither here nor there. What is here is that you should keep Trebino's tragicomic transcript in mind when someone talks about scientific consensus and points to published papers. This is how those bits of sausage get made.

*Also, I laughed till I cried! You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps! Etc., etc.

** I liked bubblegum pop music - is that wrong?

Look on Wolfram Alpha's works, ye mighty, and despair

The problem with "smart" tools: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces.

There's a long dissertation on the fatal flaw of Alpha, which is its wildly unpredictable natural language control, but the lesson which has always resonated with me is this:

At a more mundane level, however, we may ask: how do these obvious disasters come about? Man is flawed and hubris is eternal, of course. But really. Why, year after year, does the software industry piss away zillions of dollars, and repeatedly infuriate whatever gods there be, butting its head against this wall like a salmon trying to climb Boulder Dam? Why on earth do these mistakes continue to be designed, implemented, and shipped? By smart, smart people?

The simple answer is that both academia and the industry are, to a substantial extent, driven by hype. Hype gets press, and hype also gets funding. The press (Inquirer and Register excepted) is not a critical audience. The NSF is an even less critical audience - at least, for projects it is already pursuing. Again, if abject failure were an obstacle to continued funding, most of "computer science" would have ceased to exist sometime in the '90s. Instead, Professor Hearst will no doubt be able to pursue her ambitious goals until a comfortable retirement in the 2030s. Long live science!

Science is supposed to be rational, but people are limitedly so, and so much of "science" isn't. Nota Bene, I might be too cynical here, see the post below.

Them's the breaks

Metacool: 13: Do everything right, and you'll still fail.

Working in optics offered a good perspective on the differences between physics and engineering, since it contains both. On one hand you have people working on very basic problems, like trying to develop quantum computers using quantum optics, and they'll be thrilled if they can get their very jury-rigged experiment to work 1% of the time (if that...). If you can do that, that's easily a couple of papers (depending on how you dribble the results out...) and you'll have a shot at getting grant money, etc. On the other hand, you have people in lens design and optical fabrication, and the challenge there is the business world six nines deal, where you are trying to take something that works 99.9% to 99.999% of the time, or some such improvement. Basically these tasks lie on opposite ends of the "S-curve", and so the mentalities of the two groups are different.

If you take a group of bright people, you'll find they sort themselves into the two camps. The physicists are more arrogant and less concerned with precision, e.g., throw in a factor of pi, get an order-of-magnitude agreement, and if you can do that over a wide range of scales, it shows you understand the underlying mechanism. If you discover that, the rest is scribbling and accounting. The engineers are more pedantic and worry about machine unit errors. They'll take a points off your homework because you're off in the fourth decimal place, but it's also easier to hide weak thinking in an empirical approach. Just scatter-plot everything against everything, and look for correlation without too much concern about causation, because the former is all that matters on an assembly line (sometimes).

It was odd to take classes in both, because you notice that the physicists prefer simple units (energy, time, etc), with complicated functions to fit a data set. The engineer would transform the units into something complicated, but the curves would all be lines... Not unlike where you stick the time-dependence in quantum mechanics with either the Schrodinger picture (in the state vector) or Heisenberg picture (in the operators).

What does this all have to do with the rule above?? Well, when you are trying to innovate, there is always a tension between "pure" and "applied" innovation, and having worked a lot more on the pure side, where things never work, I'm curious about the other side. I suspect that the grass is not greener, and it's just as hard to innovate there - this is the classic "knee in the curve" breakthrough in Moore's law curves, e.g., time keeping with atomic clocks. I can't find the plot right now, but historically atomic clock precision improved at some gradual logarithmic rate until the mid-1990's, when they invented broad-band laser frequency combs, which allowed them to dramatically improve and simplify the clock. Suddenly the clock's precision improved rapidly, and a new slope appeared in the curve, which is the result from the engineering refinement of the new technique.

Of course the way to win fame and awards and get things named after you is to invent the new technique, even though much, if not most, of the benefit comes from subsequent refinement and mass production, which is often just as hard, but a lot more anonymous. I guess the upside would be that engineers are less inclined to believe demonstrably wrong theories, in a Kuhnian paradigm shift sort of way, because they don't pretend to understand things deeply in the first place. The physicists are the ones who walk around with no clothes...

That bit of science/engineering sociology aside, either sort of improvement is still difficult, and coming up with a new idea is no guarantee of its success. In fact, in either camp, the coming up with the napkin sketch for the new idea is the easy part. Which also reminded me of this post by Megan McArdle on investment banker salaries, the upshot of which was:

The real problem with investment bankers goes deeper, and is the problem of the entire upper middle class: we have come to believe that complying with the rules produces excellent results as by some natural law. In school, if you do your work, teacher gives you an A. It comes to seem like a sort of a natural law: if you have a good education and work hard, the universe is supposed to reward you. After school, the upper middle class gravitates towards careers with very well defined advancement hierarchies: medicine, law, finance, consulting, where this subtle belief is constantly reinforced.

True, a lot of people fall by the wayside in the up-or-out structures of most of the top firms. But that was always true--the whole idea that you deserve to be rewarded for your hard work always involved ignoring the entirely undeserved natural endowment of intelligence and social capital that most upper-middle-class kids are given by their parents. The people who stay in the system and make it to the upper levels do not see it as mostly the product of luck; they view it as the just reward for all their hard work and sacrifices.

If you look at the tenured folks in academia, you'll see completely different politics, but the same attitude, except that instead of salary they look for reputation and prestige. Which IMHO won't make them any happier than the banker's phone number salary, but that's on them.

The point isn't just that there isn't an infallible set of rules which will ensure success - just guidelines which work out more often than the alternatives; the point is that you should look deeper to understand what you're really after in the first place. Why do you want to innovate or make a lot of money? Fame, prestige, money etc, should not be the goals of your existence, and it's ironic if you can't even appreciate them because your pursuit of them is so all-consuming. There is a lot of the Theory of Moral Sentiments at work though, because Steve Jobs may be a miserable (evidently) egotist, as are most research professors and from the looks of things, bankers, but their self-interested pursuit broadly benefits everyone around them... I just wouldn't want to be in their family.

So allow me to interject a bit of maudlin I think this is fine if you understand that it's not the end-all, be-all of your life, and in a hyper-competitive environment, stop and smell the daisies, etc. Like Churchill said, move cheerfully from one failure to the next...

From the Deptarment of Ignore What Mike Says

Previously: I thought that the chances of a space collision were pretty small.

Today: US and Russian satellites collide.

For some reason, the first thousand names in the Boston phone book come to mind

Interesting musings on the academic insult "I've never heard of you."

FWIW, I think that many of the comments are funny or true or funny and true, although there is a "back in the day whipersnappers respected their elders," which I kinda doubt. Did nickels have pictures of bees on them? Did you get five bees for a quarter?

The basic gist of all of this, is that in the university research program administration business, where much of the effort is very front-loaded, respect and recognition feel hard to come by. To which I say, the punishment fits the crime. Namely, stop worrying if other people think you're smart.

All swans are grey in the dark

Lots of interesting ideas and some odd ones too: Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom, by Bryan Appleyard, From The Sunday Times, June 1, 2008

I liked this one:

Every year he puts a few thousand dollars aside for contingencies – parking tickets, tea spills – and at the end of the year he gives what’s left to charity. The money is gone from day one, so unexpected losses cause no pain.

But a little less this:

He was educated at a French school. Three traditions formed him: Greek Orthodox, French Catholic and Arab. They also taught him to disbelieve conventional wisdom. Each tradition had a different history of the crusades, utterly different. This led him to disbelieve historians almost as much as he does bankers.

But, crucially, he also learnt from a very early age that grown-ups have a dodgy grasp of probability. It was in the midst of the Lebanese civil war and, hiding from the guns and bombs, he heard adults repeatedly say the war would soon be over. It lasted 15 years. He became obsessed with probability and, after a degree in management from the Wharton business school at Pennsylvania University, he focused on probability for his PhD at the University of Paris.

For the non-mathematician, probability is an indecipherably complex field. But Taleb makes it easy by proving all the mathematics wrong. Let me introduce you to Brooklyn-born Fat Tony and academically inclined Dr John, two of Taleb’s creations. You toss a coin 40 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of it coming up heads the 41st time? Dr John gives the answer drummed into the heads of every statistic student: 50/50. Fat Tony shakes his head and says the chances are no more than 1%. “You are either full of crap,” he says, “or a pure sucker to buy that 50% business. The coin gotta be loaded.”

The chances of a coin coming up heads 41 times are so small as to be effectively impossible in this universe. It is far, far more likely that somebody is cheating. Fat Tony wins. Dr John is the sucker. And the one thing that drives Taleb more than anything else is the determination not to be a sucker. Dr John is the economist or banker who thinks he can manage risk through mathematics. Fat Tony relies only on what happens in the real world.

I think this is less profound than it appears. It's the hidden variable theory of smartness. Exactly what's the recipe to become Fat Tony and not Dr John? By being cynical? Going around pointing out that the emperor has no clothes isn't of much use in a nudist colony. That's Socrates gig, anyway. As to not getting fooled or taken as a sucker, well, don't bet on coin tosses - hard to cheat an honest man, etc, etc.

I have charts and graphs to prove that you should love me

At last, it is scientifically quantified: Chart Tells When to Marry. Aristotle had a theory that the perfect marriage was between a 37 year old man and an 18 year old woman. Do I need to mention that he married at 37 to an 18 year old woman? (She died relatively soon, and he left Athens and never got married again).

The Agony and the ?

Much, maybe all, of academia is engaged in the pursuit of attention and recognition, which leads to a lot of bitter fights over credit. Albert Schatz had a pretty legitimate complaint:

1943: A biochemistry grad student discovers streptomycin, a synthetic antibiotic used to treat tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

Sole credit for the discovery initially went to Selman Waksman -- he would, in fact, receive a Nobel Prize in 1952 -- who ran the laboratory at Rutgers University where the research was performed. But it was Albert Schatz, a 23-year-old graduate student under Waksman, who actually isolated the antibiotic after several months of feverish work.

For what it's worth, Waksman's wikipedia entry is a little more ambivalent about the story:

Although Waksman had been studying the Streptomycin family of organism since his college student days, the details and credit for the discovery of its use as the antibiotic streptomycin were strongly contested by one of Waksman's graduate students, Albert Schatz, and resulted in litigation. The litigation ended with a substantial settlement for Schatz and the official decision that Waksman and Schatz would be considered co-discoverers of streptomycin. Schatz made the discovery, but he was working in Waksman's lab, using Waksman's equipment, and he was under the direction of Waksman using Waksman's techniques. He examined about 10,000 cultures, and only 1,000 would kill bacteria in preliminary tests. Of those only 100 looked promising in later tests, and only ten were isolated and described. One of those ten was streptomycin.[4]

I suspect that both of them would have been happier if their Promethean experiments hadn't worked out, but then TB would have killed millions. (See also, The Agony of Winning)

Playing Chicken with the MetroRail

I agree, the Wagner is an inspired choice on this bit of stupid driving youtube ha ha. And speaking of: You call that Wagner?

Nerds

Point: Nerds are "hyperwhite."

Counter-point: Linguists are pseudo-intellectuals who use jargon to mask inanity, but hey, it's nice work if you can get it.

PS, "blood"?

"Tool"

Via Cool Tool, the Trikke - for those special few for whom a recumbent bicycle isn't socially awkward enough...

So Unfair, But True

Research Finds Firstborns Gain the Higher IQ. In related news, they tend to die first.

It turns out they meow

Foreign Policy on non-barking dogs.

The Pit and The Pendulum

The Literary Tenor of the Times, by Mark Helprin.

One seldom encounters pure nihilism, for just as anarchists are usually very well-organized, most of what passes for nihilism is a compromise with advocacy. Present literary forms may spurn the individual, emotion, beauty, sacrifice, love, and truth, but they energetically embrace the collective, coldness of feeling, ugliness, self-assertion, contempt, and disbelief. And why? Simply because the acolytes of modernism are terribly and justly afraid. They fear that if they do not display their cynicism they will be taken for fools. They fear that if they commit to and uphold something outside the puppet channels of orthodoxy they will be mocked, that if they are open they will be attacked, that if they appreciate that which is simple and good they will foolishly have overlooked its occult corruptions, that if they stand they will be struck down, that if they love they will lose, and that if they live they will die.

Take any art history class and you will see the classicism-romanticism-baroque cycle occur again and again. It's only self-aggrandizement that we think that self-referential culture counts as something new and that the cycle will terminate.

[h/t Peter Burnet]

Bad Predictions

Easterbrook on bad expert predictions - including his own. I would like to think this is evidence that you should invest in no-load index mutual funds, which is totally a hobby-horse of mine, but:

The "wisdom of crowds" theory also took a beating this season. Last year, the consensus of Yahoo! users finished ahead of all Yahoo! sports experts. This year the consensus of users pulled up third. If you wanted a reasonable guide, unanimous picks by ESPN experts went 80-37 on the season -- in the future, predict only games that all ESPN experts are in agreement on. Though that's no guarantee either. As noted by reader Bryan Beske of Madison, Wis., before Week 9, the tout box on ESPN.com's NFL page proclaimed, "Our experts don't agree very often, so when they unanimously select five games on the Week 9 schedule, consider those picks as good as Ws." Three of the five ESPN unanimous projections turned out wrong. The NFL sportswriters at USA Today finished 80-22 on their "lock of the week." That is, when they were certain something would happen, they were right 78 percent of the time. The year's worst forecasting performance: the staff of Pro Football Weekly went 31-34-2 on "best bets." Their best predictions finished behind flipping a coin!

I predict you'll enjoy reading it.

Chuck Klosterman Can't Lose

I read Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Coco-Puffs yesterday. He's sort of a P. J. O'Rourke crossed with Nick Hornby. Or maybe it's Gregg Easterbrook crossed with Camille Paglia. Bill Simmons vs Tom Wolf? Whatever conveys the appropriate sense of Gen-X gonzo journalism. Complete with the, pardon my French, "fuck-patois" that is the bane my generation. Just a side note, but vulgarity is our free-love and polyester leisure suits of Gen X - a manifestation of our self-absorption whose shame will bloom in the fullness of time. At least in those who remain capable of shame.

ANYWAY, as the title indicates*, Klosterman is obsessed with sex, drugs, and coco-puffs, or to state the subtext directly: Death, boredom, and authenticity. I know this is the subtext not because I am clever, but because he writes that it so several times. He also calls nearly everything post-modern and ironic, and at the same time, I get the feeling he thinks those labels are ridiculous intellectual posturing. He's hipsterdom eating itself. He's fallen and he can't get up. Perhaps the saving grace, here, is his sense of perspective, which leads to humor. The book is eminently quotable:

I know nobody uses the term Generation X anymore, and I know all the people it supposedly describes supposedly hate the supposed designation. But I like it. It's simply the easiest way to categorize a genre of people who were born between 1965 and 1977 and therefore share a similar cultural experience. It's not pejorative or complimentary; it's factual. I'm a "Gen Xer," okay? And I buy shit marketed to "Gen Xers." And I use air quotes when I talk, and I sigh a lot, and I own a Human League cassette. Get over it.

So, what's the final score? Should you invest time in this gen-x navel gazing by some wildcat music reviewer? Chuck Klosterman Is His Own Worst Metaphor is a review of a subsequent book, but the same message applies:

Younger generations of Americans urgently need to learn to refuse their culture at face value, lest the stories sold by media conglomerates and advertising firms come to define them individually (more than they already do). I’m not arguing that a North Dakotan with a stack of KISS albums and a bong is going to single-handedly change the country. But he might be an enzyme for some sort of progression. And I assert as much knowing that Klosterman analyzes the significance of Morrissey’s Hispanic fan base, Val Kilmer’s uncanny politeness, and the reasons Goths annually coagulate in Disneyland (bingo players “gather”; Goths “coagulate”).

One interesting twist to all this may be Klosterman’s own melee with celebrity. Chuck Klosterman IV will serve as a benchmark on Klosterman’s own celebrity arc – he’s that much closer to the falling action on this ride to success. What personal crisis must follow? What could becoming a celebrity mean to someone whose purpose is to decipher the spaces inhabited by celebrities and their metaphors? According to his own measures, he’ll soon become a signal describing some cultural message. He’ll eventually come to exist as a living opposition, some breathing contradiction between his outward, abstract meaning and the guy who ties his own shoes every morning – a man antagonized by his own shadow.

His fate necessarily leads in one of two directions. Either: He successfully breaks from the abstraction (i.e., dies a fiery death in a Chevy Vega that swan dives from a Cuban bridge at sunset; Klosterman IV is reissued by Penguin Classics). Or: He successfully reconciles with his contradictory condition (i.e., becomes a conservative radio host; procreates with the urgent fury of Britney Spears’ secret garden).

However, I don't think that "young Americanss urgently need to learn to refuse their culture at face value, lest the stories sold by media conglomerates and advertising firms come to define them individually..." It's not like post-modern intellectual culture (the high-culture to the coco-puffs low) has anything better to offer other than nihilism and cynicism.

In another interview, Chuck Klosterman: Articulating the Unintelligible, the author begins by saying:

It is uniquely fitting that the man who is being called the voice of Generation X uses cultural debris the way a flasher uses a trench coat. Eloquence suddenly emerges from his deceptively chatty prose, imparting momentous meaning from sources that can usually be called humble. Chuck Klosterman's voice is compelling to the extent that he writes convincingly about the significance of cereal commercials. It isn't a case of making something out of nothing, the conclusions he arrives at are frighteningly substantial, somehow managing to be funny at the same time.

What fascinates me about Chuck is that every time he speaks it's like he's tossing out new material. The Klosterman process is operating constantly: A casual mixture of hedonic mirth and profundity that veers to the edge of neurosis and pulls back triumphantly. This is how he has managed , I assume, to write for Spin, Esquire, and ESPN while churning out a steady stream of book titles. I suspect that it would be hard for him to turn it off.

The tossing out new material description is apt. Klosterman is very much like a stand-up comedian trying out new material to see what sticks, which results in an uneven book. But still, even when he's off, there's still usually something there to chew on.

---
* "You can't judge a book by its cover" is misleading. Maybe you shouldn't reach a definitive conclusion, but it's a good place to start.

Modern Art and Speed-Metal vs Everything That Is Good

Spengler on Modern Art and Dr. David Thorpe on Metal.

Meta Andy Rooney

Since I'm complaining about people complaining about the internet, let me add that I hate bitchy grammar-cop comments. Down on the comments for that Pad Thai recipe I linked to, someone wrote:

In English we do not say "shrimps". It is always "shrimp", just like "fruit". Please remember this.

Thanks.
Joanna

Argh! Nothing in that post justifies this tone. I don't know the Pad Thai blogger, and she probably doesn't need me sticking up for her, but still!

Anyway, I was happy that someone did:

Dear Joanna,

In civilized society we do not leave curt, nitpicking comments (in English or any other language) on someone else's blog without even thanking them for the recipe they have just shared in generous detail. I'm sure your Thai grammar is absolutely perfect, but that is still no reason to be so persnickety about Pim's English grammar.

Nell

P.S. Also, Joanna, there are circumstances under which "fruits" is the correct word, not "fruit." Look it up.

Or, recently, in response to an irreverent blog entry about Paris on the Economist:

Each time I read an article on FreeExchange, I come across a typo or two. Or maybe a missing auxiliary verb. Or the word "mile" repeated twice. Given the quality of the print edition of the Economist, it is really quite regrettable that the editors should not take extra care to ensure that the same high standard of quality is maintained throughout the newspaper's website. I find it hard to believe that proofreading the posts a few more times would be too much of a burden for the online editors.
Posted by emeraldwhite at January 31, 2007 9:44 PM

Now, I'm all for typo-extermination and brain-fart eradication, but I find it hard to believe that after emeraldwhite carefully proof-read their comment several times to ensure they weren't zinged with the rather common "you made an error in your comment about an error" parry -- that they didn't conclude that they are a complete douchebag. What a weird blind spot. Also, they forgot to add "Harrumph!" at the end.

Harrumph!

Worst Episode Ever

Blogger flaked out on me today, and probably for most people who use it. I whiled the time away by reading a very rare Mary Heart in which she advised a close personal friend to commit suicide, but some people needed to vent their frustrations.

However, while I'm not sure that Bloggers problems today had anything to do with the recent Google account update - the old service went down sans Google accounts - maybe they have grown into a big uncaring corporation (the devil!).

On the other hand, it's free, people. I don't see how an unintentional interruption of their service is worth getting upset over. And if it is - because who can do without the lifeblood that is the blogosphere for more than a few hours - perhaps you should invest (>$0) in a more reliable alternative.